Why Does This Prequel Exist?

When The Witcher proved massively successful, during the heydays of its first and second seasons, NetflixOriginally started as a disc-by-mail service, Netflix has grown to be one of the largest media companies in the world (and one of the most valued internet companies as well). With a constant slate of new internet streaming-based programming that updates all the time, Netflix has redefined what it means to watch TV and films (as well as how to do it). went all in, brainstorming all the ways they could expand and monetize this burgeoning franchise. Not just animated films (the first of which, Nightmare of the Wolf, was released after the second season) but also a prequel, Blood Origin, and several spin-offs, like a kid-focused show all about Witchers-in-training. They even had a whole plan for a group of characters known as the Rats who would tie into the main series before wandering off to have their own adventures. It was a big, The Witcher cinematic universe.

Several of these projects have come to fruition, although they were generally met not with rave reviews but shrugs from the audience. Blood Origin especially had such a tepid reception that any plans to continue it were quickly and firmly dropped. Netflix even acted like it was planned to always be a mini-series, and no, don’t look at that whole extensive road map they had for all these spin-offs and sequels and prequels. Just a mini-series. Nothing more. Meanwhile that kid-friendly spin-off disappeared, never to be mentioned again. And as for the Rats… well…

Assuming you’ve already seen the fourth season, which dropped at the same time as The Rats: A Witcher Tale, then you already know what happens to the characters. I want to call it a spoiler except those events are immediately referenced at the start of this movie, so if you watch even the first scene it’s spoiled for you. I’ll rip the band-aid off here: the Rats die. They’re introduced as Ciri’s band of compatriots for her (frankly incredibly boring) plotline during the main season, and then in the last episode of the season they all get killed. This film picks up after those events, but then jumps back to the start of their adventures, filling us in on who those characters are and why we should care. You know, after it no longer matters.

Not that fleshing out these characters is a bad idea, per se. They’re major players in Ciri’s story and learning more about this is a good idea. And these characters are given much needed character details and backstory that helps to make them compelling to the audience. I think all of this is good. The issue is that all of this comes after they’ve had their full run in The Witcher where, on that show, they were one-note players and not very interesting. All of this should have come in the main series, or at least been hinted at, so that we could care about this band of ruffians. We don’t get any of that, and don’t care about them there, making this one movie feel both too little and too late to make any difference.

The story picks up six months before the Rats meet their ignoble end. We find the crew of six – Christelle Elwin as Mistle, Ben Radcliffe as Giselher, Fabian McCallum as Kayleigh, Aggy K. Adams as Iskra, Connor Crawford as Asse, and Juliette Alexandra as Reef – at the tail end of a job, robbing a fixed fighting match. They end up stealing not just the money from the match offices but also the coin purse from one of the fighters, the disgraced Witcher Brehen (Dolph Lundgren), before fleeing. Feeling a lot of heat, they head out for newer, less likely to prosecute them, pastures.

Settled into a new town, they catch wind of a big score. The biggest, in fact, they’d ever seen. There’s tell of a party, one with wine, and drink, and fighting, all put together by Bert Brigden (Ben Robson), and there will be so much money coming in for the fights that the score would be incredible. As it turns out, though, Mistle has her own reason to want to screw over Brigden: years before, when she was actually a princess, Brigden and his men attacked her kingdom, killed her family, killed her girlfriend, Juniper (Deoudoné Pretorius), and sold the girls into sex slavery. Mistle escaped, but has wanted her revenge ever since. So this is personal, not just professional, and mixing the two could lead to big problems if the Rats are going to get their score.

The Rats: A Witcher Tale was originally conceived as a mini-series, one set to take place before the events of The Witcher’s fourth season. It’s unknown whether the plan was to continue the series past that point, if it connected with audiences, but certainly there’s no way to continue it now. Even if people watched this special, and liked the characters here, all these characters are dead. Whatever adventures they could have had, or were planned to have, were cut short because this series was turned into a single movie, and all the characters were then snuffed out in season four of The Witcher.

Which is tragic because, unlike in the main series, the Rats are enjoyable to watch here. This film finds a way to flesh each of them out, giving them solid scenes that let them shine. The main character of the film would be Mistle, who has a personal storyline that connects into the caper they pull, but we do still learn a little more about each character here that makes us care about them. Asse was Mistle’s servant back when she was a princess, and he’s always had her back ever since. Reef is a trained soldier, highly skilled in special weapons and tactics. Iskra is psychic and actually has visions of their deaths. These details matter, and if they had been included in the main series we likely would have cared more about these characters as they marched to their inevitable doom.

I do think the standout of the series, though, is Lundgren. Playing the disgraced Witcher here, Lundgren brings a lot of pathos and heart to the role of Brehen. Brought into the caper when the Rats discover that Brigden has a monster guarding his treasury, the team needs a Witcher, even if all they have is a drunken one that no one likes. Brehen gets a full character redemption arc, and Lundgren plays it so well. You feel his character grow and evolve and it’s a credit to Lundgren that he takes a character that is on a fairly bog standard path, zero to hero, and is able to imbue the heart in that it needs to make it worth watching.

You get the feeling there could have been all kinds of adventures for these characters if the series hadn’t been cut short, cut down, and repurposed as a prequel before their deaths. A team of skilled criminals going around and pulling heists has a simple but effective energy to it. It would be caper of the week storytelling, not unlike how the first season of The Witcher was monster of the week storytelling, and it could have worked. These characters, in the right context, actually do work. But whatever the Netflix execs saw caused them to get cold feet and they axed the show while it was actively being produced. What was left was made into this movie, and then the characters were killed off so we never have to think about them again.

I don’t know if the plan all along was to kill the characters off, but if so that feels like a real waste of their potential. In the main series they’re awful, there’s no doubt, but here they are charming and interesting. There’s depth to them that The Witcher never found, and going into this film I felt like I was doing homework just to get through one more piece of The Witcher media. But I was pleasantly surprised: this film isn’t bad. It’s light hearted and fun and manages to take a bunch of previously unlikable characters and make them into a group I wouldn’t have minded watching again.

The biggest knock against it is that it’s wholly unnecessary. In the grand scheme, with how it ties into the series, it adds nothing to the main series, especially when none of the lingering plot threads left open here are explored in The Witcher before all these characters die. Worse, because of the framing device in this film, where we see the time after their deaths before we flash to their lives before, you can’t even watch this before watching the fourth season. All the good work it does introducing us to these characters comes when it’s already too late.

If The Rats: A Witcher Tale had been put out before the fourth season dropped I think it would have helped the audience engage with these characters when they showed up in the main series. Instead it’s likely very few will ever watch this film since, in the main show, the Rats suck and already no one misses them. The potential of this team was wasted rendering this film a completely pointless experience, no matter how much fun it is on its own.