The long awaited second season of The Witcher has finally arrived on Netflix and with it comes, one hopes, all the things we loved about season one. There will be more fantasy action, more interesting monsters, more earworm tunes played on a lute, and maybe some cool twists that take an entire season to play out. What there will not be, I am sorry to report, is a lot of scenes where Henry Cavill washes himself, something we got a significant amount of in the first season.
It turns out, in a move that is sure to disappoint many, Henry Cavill doesn’t spend much time focusing on his hygiene is Season 2. Showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich recently explained to Uproxx, that, while she is very much “pro-bath” in a general sense, because of the story being told, there simply wasn’t a reason to spend much time in the bath this season. According to Schmidt Hissrich …
And I do think that The Witcher benefits from baths, so I will rectify that in the future. My stance on sexiness, not just nudity but in general, sort of the sexuality of our show, is to only use it when it benefits the story. This is not something that I think is done in all television. Certainly not all fantasy shows where it kind of becomes a thing that’s there to shock audiences. I just don’t think our audience needs to be shocked by people having sex all the time or women or men being naked all the time.
Sex and nudity is a difficult subject in film. It is, based on the frequency with which mature shows and movies use it, something audiences do enjoy seeing. At the same time, if it’s too exploitative or superfluous, it can turn off a portion of the audience. Sex and nudity are ok as long as they make sense and don’t exist for no purpose beyond putting naked people on screen.
And a lot of Season 1 was about Geralt of Rivia’s romantic life. His relationship with Yennifer is dealt with again and again, and so it makes sense that we’d get some sexiness in the show, since these two characters clearly wanted to have sex. And a bath, a place where people are naked anyway, would be the perfect place for some of these scenes to take place. You don’t need to justify why nobody has any clothes on.
However, it seems that Season 2 of The Witcher simply isn’t about romance, and so there wasn’t any need for scenes taking place with naked people in baths. The relationships being focused on in the new Season are much more chaste. As Lauren Schmidt Hissrich explains…
This season is about familial relationships. It’s about people exploring new sides of themselves in terms of being a mother or father. There’s not a lot about romance this season because it just didn’t fit into our story. But I happen to know where things are going. I think that people will be pleased by some romance in the future. But yeah, this season was a bath-free zone.
So if you only watch The Witcher for the bath scenes (you know who you are), I guess you can wait for Season 3. It sounds like they almost certainly will return, but only when they make sense.
