Please note that this article will have spoilers for The Witcher up to Season 1 Episode 7: Before a Fall.

The penultimate episode of The Witcher's first season finally brings everyone together in roughly the same timeline. While this is certainly an exciting development, it's not necessarily executed in the best way, and despite this episode being the shortest of the season so far, it actually re-uses a lot of scenes that were from the first episode. Even so, at least the overarching plot in The Witcher is the focal point again and it's clearer how the three main characters' stories are all connected to each other.

The episode mostly takes place right before Nilfgaard's invasion of Cintra. Geralt happens to be in the neighborhood and spies the Nilfgaardian armies marching to Cintra, so he decides to invoke the Law of Surprise that he received in The Witcher Episode 4 to protect Princess Ciri. There is an attempt on Geralt's life early in the episode, but he is still able to get an audience with Queen Calanthe and invoke his Law of Surprise.

Queen Calanthe, whose daughter and her hedgehog-headed husband died in a shipwreck years ago, tries to give Geralt a fake Ciri instead. Geralt realizes the supposed Ciri that he's been given isn't the real one after he sees her playing games with poor children (ironically, the real Ciri is one of the "poor" children), and he's then betrayed and imprisoned after confronting the Queen about it. Considering how serious the king was about the Law of Surprise in the previous episode, it's weird that he makes no effort to uphold it in this episode. He literally started murdering people at a betrothal feast over the Law of Surprise a few years ago, but now he's not interested in it at all or the potential deadly consequences that come about from betraying it.

Yennefer, meanwhile, returns to Aretuza, which remains one of the most impressive sets in The Witcher Netflix adaptation. She also meets with her old lover from a few episodes back, though that scene really amounted to nothing and was just in place for her to meet someone else and be convinced to return to Aretuza. The mages at Aretuza are concerned about Nilfgaard's growing conquests, which are being helped along by one of the mages that they themselves sent to advise the kingdom. Some of the mages agree to fight against Nilfgaard, whereas others decide to remain neutral or join them.

Yennefer is clearly not all that welcome at Aretuza, as she has forged her own path in life and is resistant to the mages' traditions. She even shows some of the mages in training that some of them will wind up transformed into eels and shoveled into a pool to help power Aretuza's magic, but that doesn't sway them. It's interesting to see how far Yennefer has come since The Witcher Episode 2 in terms of power, and it's rewarding to see her return to Aretuza as a powerful, confident mage instead of the terrified girl she once was.

It appears as though Yennefer has some resentment for Aretuza and her transformation, as it required her to sacrifice her reproductive organs and give up ever having a family of her own. This is apparently common practice when it comes to mages, but her anger over it was brought up in the previous episode as well. However, Yennefer agreed to go through with the transformation and was so anxious to do so that she didn't even bother getting put to sleep to do it, so her newfound desire for children is a little difficult to fully buy. Then again, literal decades have passed in Yennefer's life, so maybe it would have landed better had we dealt with it more on an episode to episode basis.

Princess Ciri is still just wandering around looking for Geralt, with the irony being that Geralt was at Cintra during the invasion. Geralt was even going to be taken directly to Ciri before he escaped from his cell, which would have saved everyone a lot of time. It's unclear exactly where he is now in comparison to Ciri, though Ciri is busy being accosted in the wilderness by the poor children that she used to play games with.

Unfortunately for Ciri's attackers, the stress they cause her triggers her special abilities. With only one episode of The Witcher Season 1 left to go, let's hope that Geralt and Ciri finally meet up and the second season can hopefully have a more coherent, linear story. That being said, it would be interesting to see a re-cut version of The Witcher Season 1 that presents everything more linearly, similar to what Netflix did with Arrested Development.

As far as this episode goes, it was a significant improvement over the last couple, largely thanks to the return to the season's main storyline and some payoffs in terms of Yennefer's character development. Scenes from the first episode were used a little too much and so the episode was a bit more boring than usual, but boring is preferable to the camp that The Witcher Episodes 5 and 6 struggled with. The ingredients are here for something great, but whether or not The Witcher can capitalize on them in the future remains to be seen.

The Witcher is available to stream now, exclusively on Netflix.