S03.E05: The Art of Illusion

[AnimeMania]

Yennefer and Geralt step out arm in arm and dressed to kill at a lavish ball, but all is not as it seems during a night of revelry and revelations.

Original Airdate: June 29, 2023     Netflix   

[shrewd.buddha]

This episode put me to sleep.  Actually.  Literally. 
By the third , or fourth? , 'revisiting' of the events of the party,  I was done. 

They should change the name of this show from 'The Witcher'  to  'The Convoluted Pursuit of Ciri'. 

Edited July 2, 2023 by shrewd.buddha

[Affogato]

I'm beginning to suspect that the new show is going to start over completely. Which might be a good thing. The books have gone on for a long time, maybe there is some other place to start, with fresh characters? No spoiler, just this feels as if it is working towards a conclusion.

[Hanahope]

Yeah the constant retelling of the ball was not done that well imo.  But not surprised at the twist. 
 

[Taryn74]

WTF, show? I'm not going to remember who any of these people are in three weeks. I barely remember who they are watching from one night to the next. 😑

[MissLucas]

I kinda liked it - but maybe that was because it felt as if everybody was having fun during these scenes 🤷‍♂️ Sure, it's not Ocean's Eleven or any of the many movies/shows that pulled off this stunt before but it was a nice change of pace. 

[thuganomics85]

In isolation, it probably wasn't that bad of an episode, but it feels like a disappointing way to end the initial first half of this season.  I guess Vilgefortz being the true villain (I think?) instead of Stregobor was a decent enough of a twist, but the episode didn't end with me hyped up for what's to come.  The final scene didn't help (sure, Geralt is "totally" going to get killed by Dijkstra of all people!)  The Rashomon style approach to the party was amusing at first, but got boring at the end.

Wish we got more of Geralt just reacting to everyone and everything at the party, because that was definitely my favorite parts.  Especially his "You expect me to remember any of these names?" after Yen's massive exposition dump.

Henry Cavill and Anya Chaltora work well enough together, but I don't think they quite have the chemistry yet to buy this epic love story.  Honestly, I don't have much of a horse in this race, but I thought Cavill popped more with his exchanges with Anna Shaffer during the Geralt/Triss segment.  Of course, both of them tend to work best with their non-romantic screen partners like Joey Batey and MyAnna Buring.

I guess we'll see if the second half fares better.

[Tuggy]

I got genuinely angry watching this episode 😡 It is so poorly done, replaying many times exactly the same scenes only to ad a few more details in between. If someone is motivated enough to make a linear cut of the episode, I would be very curious to see if we miss anything compared to the choice the made...

Also agree that the love story is completely botched, I felt absolutely nothing at their scenes in the bedroom except boredom. 

And the plot twist is so contrived it made me wince. These people are definitely not as smart as they are supposed to be, probably because the writers are not doing a good enough job.

On 7/3/2023 at 12:36 AM, Affogato said:

I'm beginning to suspect that the new show is going to start over completely. Which might be a good thing. The books have gone on for a long time, maybe there is some other place to start, with fresh characters? No spoiler, just this feels as if it is working towards a conclusion.

That would make sense, as I do not see how recasting this version of Geralt would work.

54 minutes ago, thuganomics85 said:

The final scene didn't help (sure, Geralt is "totally" going to get killed by Dijkstra of all people!)

Yeah, that was the straw that broke the camel's back, to me. How on earth did they think it would make a good cliffhanger for this half season ?!

Edited July 5, 2023 by Tuggy

[PurpleTentacle]

On 7/3/2023 at 6:15 AM, Hanahope said:

Yeah the constant retelling of the ball was not done that well imo.  But not surprised at the twist. 

Agreed. This was so horribly done. And I'm usually a sucker for narrative devices like this. I'm even one of the few people who loved season 1 not despite, but because of the three timelines.

Here it was just boring and didn't add anything. Probably because there were no surprises. Everything was pretty predictable from the first telling and then we went back to it another 5 times.

[PurpleTentacle]

9 hours ago, thuganomics85 said:

Henry Cavill and Anya Chaltora work well enough together, but I don't think they quite have the chemistry yet to buy this epic love story.  Honestly, I don't have much of a horse in this race, but I thought Cavill popped more with his exchanges with Anna Shaffer during the Geralt/Triss segment.  Of course, both of them tend to work best with their non-romantic screen partners like Joey Batey and MyAnna Buring.

See, I just wanted to say that Cavill has the most chemistry with Batey and then you come and say it's non-romantic. 😜 I guess it is true that that is the writers intention, but I can't really buy Cavill with a woman. To me that is pretty clearly a Rock Hudson situation.

Maybe one should be able to seperate the actor from the character, but it's often not that easy.

[iMonrey]

I found this episode tedious and frustrating. The Groundhog Day narrative device of playing the same scenes over and over again was really annoying. It was just a whole hour of dancing, plotting and conversations. It's not much of a "reveal" that Vilgefortz is a bad guy, we've known since the end of Season 1 that he's a traitor who was secretly working for Nilfgaard in the big battle.

I don't understand why the season is spending so much time on Redania. It doesn't seem particularly relevant to anything so far. The season as a whole has been very unfocused. What exactly does Geralt have in mind as end-game for Ciri? It's like he's just playing it by ear on a day to day basis.

It seems to me there ought to be a plan to raise an army and take Cintra back from Nilfgaard, but instead all we hear is an awful lot of chatter about "the northern kingdoms" of which we know nothing, with the growing exception of Redania. Where is this story going? What was the alleged purpose of this big conclave? What's Yen's plan for the mages? And what about the elves? That subplot is going nowhere fast.

Stupid cliffhanger to end on too. Just really frustrating overall.

[silverstream]

I seem to be in the minority here, but I for one really liked the Groundhog device. Though, with all the talk of time travel, I was wondering halfway through if it would turn out that whoever has the monolith book is influencing time to repeat the gala until things go in their favour. In general, I was a bit disappointed how little magic is going on at this mage's gala - would have been a nice opportunity for some fun visuals.

I didn't even realise right away what the twist at the end was supposed to be - I knew with the music and cut-to-black that they were going for some kind of shocking reveal there, but Stregebor not being the (only) bad guy was so unsurprising to me I had to watch the scene twice to make sure that there wasn't something else I was missing. And as others have pointed out, unless there's way more we don't know Geralt isn't exactly in danger here.

I wish they'd had a scene with Jaskier or Ciri, I've been worried since last week that the prince distracting Jaskier away from the cabin is a ploy to get at Ciri, but otoh, since nothing happpened in that regard I guess not, since if that were the case it would make a good cliffhanger, at least a much better cliffhanger than the one we got.

[Taryn74]

On 7/5/2023 at 2:26 AM, thuganomics85 said:

Henry Cavill and Anya Chaltora work well enough together, but I don't think they quite have the chemistry yet to buy this epic love story.

To be fair, they have at least as much romantic chemistry as a couple of sock puppets making out. 

IMO Geralt has the most chemistry with Ciri. And yes, I realize that's somewhat disturbing. LOL. At least it doesn't seem like the show is trying to portray that. I think it's just natural chemistry between the actors.

[TaurusRose]

I think HC and AC have great chemistry. I'm sold on the Geralt/Yennifer romance. I'm not looking forward to Liam Hemsworth stepping in. 

[Kasienka]

Ehhhhhhh it was so booooring. The writers are not even half as clever as they think they are. What's the point of cutting away from a scene to show us it later, when nothing is some big revelation. It was so frustrating. They really think they created some great political intrigues? It's laughable. And to think Thanedd is one of my favourite parts in the book.

At least the teaser for the second part looks better, but it's such a strange point to cut a season in two. We didn't even see Jaskier and Ciri in this episode. Jaskier didn't even have a big song scene in all of those episodes!

Also on a shallow note while Istredd and Vilgefortz look absolutely amazing, what on earth are Filippa and Yen wearing? Those have to be some of the ugliest outfits I've seen, which is a shame, cause I always enjoyed Yennefer's wardrobe.

[tennisgurl]

At first I liked the Groundhog Day device (plus their version of I've got you babe was pretty catchy) plus it was nice seeing characters actually having fun, but it got old really fast. Beyond the gimmick it was just more of the same, a bunch of characters I hardly know or care about talking about boring political things that I can hardly follow. Who are the "northern kingdoms" anyway? What does it mean for everyone to unite? We are constantly being fed exposition but I'm still confused. 

I liked some aspects of the episode, like Geralt's slightly bemused/annoyed reactions to dealing with all of this ballroom politics and having a lot of characters all interacting, like Geralt and Tress, so its at least a little bit better than some previous episodes, but it was mostly more of the same. My kingdom for a monster battle!

[Silver-hyren]

This episode was tedious.  If you're going to use the gimmick of repeating a sequence with different perspective then piece it together to get the full story, something has to be different each time!  Instead it was the same sequences, with a lot of the same blocking and exact same dialogue.  Plus we always only had Geralt and Yennifer's perspective so what was the point?  Would have been more effective to bounce from the POVs of all the pairings they'd set up the previous episode.  They were already switching from past to present.

Also I swear I've seen that bracelet in an old Coldwater Creek catalogue.  The costuming this season has been very meh.

[Ottis]

On 7/3/2023 at 12:15 AM, Hanahope said:

Yeah the constant retelling of the ball was not done that well imo.  But not surprised at the twist. 
 

I was so bored I started doing other things, and didn’t notice the ball was being retold. Just kept hearing Dandelion singing, “All is nooooooot….  as it seeeeeeemmmmmss.”