Season 2 of The Witcher is going to be a huge departure from season 1. In a Reddit AMA earlier this month, showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich promised a whole host of changes, from a “much more linear” storyline to “more witchers” to a more complex exploration of the Nilfgaardians beyond their roles as villains. Speaking to Vulture, Hissrich revealed that the show will be doing a deep dive into sorceress Fringilla Vigo’s backstory.
“You will absolutely get more Fringilla,” the showrunner said in the interview. “…Fringilla is one of those characters that we’re going to delve into even more. One of the things that I did hear is that she seems like a fanatic or a zealot, which is interesting. I’ve never seen her that way, perhaps because, even by the time that we were putting it on the air, I knew where we were going with season two. We’re digging deeper into her past and how she ended up at Nilfgaard, who she is as a person, and how she and Yennefer ended up on such different paths. She gets to do a lot more. I’m so excited. Mimi Ndiweni did such a fantastic job portraying her.”
It looks like most of Fringilla’s season 2 backstory will be original work by The Witcher’s writers’ room. Although the character does feature in the books—playing a rather prominent role involving both Geralt and Yennefer in The Lady of the Lake—we meet her as a fully fledged sorceress, rather than the Aretuza initiate introduced in season 1. The little bit of backstory we do get about Andrzej Sapkowski’s Fringilla is very different from that of Netflix!Fringilla, so any continuation of that storyline will likely be a departure from the books as well.
The Witcher season 2 will land on Netflix some time in 2021. Meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled for a standalone Witcher anime movie from Hissrich, The Witcher writer Beau DeMayo, and Studio Mir (the company behind The Legend of Korra).
