Dara’s return in The Witcher season 2 highlights the delay between its two installments. The first season of Netflix’s adaptation of the popular game and book series was a massive success, quickly becoming one of the platform’s most lucrative projects to date. But the demands of such a high-profile project paired with the complications of a global pandemic resulted in a significant delay between the show’s two installments, which was felt by both fans of the series and the characters that comprise it.
The timeline of The Witcher season 1 was scattered, with different amounts of time passing in each character's story. But season 2’s story is far more linear, with each story moving at relatively the same pace barring a handful of flashbacks. The show picks up immediately after the Battle of Sodden, with the majority of the first episode taking place only three days afterward. The show’s new pacing is beneficial to viewers, making the events of the story easier to comprehend, but it also makes the real-world time that has passed more difficult to explain.
The Witcher season 1 wrapped filming in May of 2019, meaning there was a nearly two-year gap between the completion of the two installments. Although this is a particularly long break for a show to take, the bulk of the series was unimpacted. The majority of The Witcher’s characters are age-old warlocks and warriors, so they were largely unaffected by the delay in filming. But as the youngest members of the principal cast, Dara and Ciri were more noticeably impacted by the real-world time that has passed.
Ciri’s aging is most noticeable in the first scenes of season 2. The show opens on the aftermath of the Battle of Sodden followed by a scene in the present, making Ciri’s age immediately noticeable by juxtaposing her against her younger self. But Dara’s changes were certainly the most noticeable. Actor Wilson Mbomio was born in 2002, meaning he came into adulthood between the two installments. The young and scrawny Dara from The Witcher season 1 is replaced with a much larger and more mature version of himself in season 2, embodying the delayed filming schedule far more apparently than any of his cast-mates.
The Witcher’s overwhelming success all but guarantees that there will be more seasons to come, which will hopefully be produced more expediently than The Witcher season 2. There is ample remaining source material for the Netflix show to draw from, but the prominence of its younger characters necessitates a degree of urgency that the show has not yet exhibited. The show is rumored to have intentions to release seven seasons, and if the production team doesn’t pick up the pace, Ciri and Dara will be in their mid-30s before the story’s end.