The Witcher: Blood Origin spoilers follow.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that Blood Origin's ending would be quite obvious. This is a prequel, after all, and the Conjunction of Spheres that this show builds up to is perhaps the most important thing to ever happen in The Witcherverse.
But said Conjunction isn't really explained thoroughly anywhere, not in the books or the games or even the main show for that matter either. And given that the events of Blood Origin take place 1200 years before Geralt's bathtub addiction began, there is plenty to unravel here, including a surprise mid-credits scene that changes the Witcherverse as you know it...
The Witcher: Blood Origin ending explained
The fourth and final chapter of Blood Origin starts with some evil hijinks from Merwyn, who sends her guards through the portal into danger, and also Chief Druid Balor, who casually kills his assistant after telling her how close they are. Evil-doers gonna evil!
Lenny Henry's villain isn't just your standard moustache-twirler though. After being looked down on for years, he's on a mission to level things in his favour: "I’m going to take what I’ve always deserved — everything." And the power that lies through the portal between words is key to that.
Meanwhile, that annoying amateur mage named Avallac'h claims to have found a spell that will help him travel through time. That's going to be key later on, especially for fans of the games and books, so keep that tricky-to-pronounce name at the back of your mind.
Right now though, we're more concerned with Scian's plan to infiltrate the palace with the help of her prisoner, Fjall, who's not really a prisoner at all. As the first prototype Witcher, his barely-contained rage is going to turn the tide in their favour, but only if they can get inside before Fjall loses it.
Éile, The Lark, inspires an uprising outside the palace to ensure they're hitting the enemy from all sides, but what we're most interested in is what happens once Fjall comes face to face with the Empress.
Merwyn claims that she's leading everyone to a new "Golden Age", and then foolishly asks Fjall to join her, despite everything she's done. Fjall laughs at her with his new, gruff, Witcher voice and says "You truly are demented... You honestly think I’d forgive you after what you did?"
It turns out Fjall isn't the biggest fan of betrayal, and so, in a fit of rage, he powers up Witcher-style with blackened eyes. "You’re a monster! I should know..." and then boom! The monster inside of him is unleashed, killing guards left and right as he escapes his shackles.
And that's when the giant alien monster thing that has a face only a mother could love finally enters.
As Fjall faces off against it, essentially setting the tone for all Witchers to follow, Scian lets the others in so they can hunt down the Monolith together. Without the Monolith, all those evil, multiversal shenanigans can finally be put to a stop.
And it's during this mission that The Lark finally encounters The Empress, one-on-one, in her bedroom. "You’re just another spoiled princess," says Éile. "You are a child given the reigns of a war horse." Ouch!
Merwyn's rebuttal is pretty lame, as one might expect from a spoiled princess like her: "You don't speak for Elf-kind!" she says. To which The Lark replies, "No. They speak for themselves now."
And with that, Éile stabs the Empress in her stomach. To be fair though, The Lark doesn't just kill her outright. Instead, Merwyn's given the option of either pulling the knife out herself, dying instantly, or leaving it in a while longer, slowly dying as she considers all the wrong choices she made. It's a real Sophie's Choice kind of moment, except there's no kids and the Empress dies regardless.
Merwyn, being the spoiled princess she is, staggers all the way to the throne room and waits for her rioting subjects to break into the palace before dramatically pulling the knife out in front of them, robbing everyone of their chance to kill her for themselves. If it wasn't for all the evil stuff, we'd be stanning her extra hard by this point.
Oh, and don't think we've forgotten about Fjall. He's been fighting that uuugerly bitch this whole time, but its still fighting back, even with a dagger in its eye. It's not until Fjall's body mutates into something more beastly that he's finally able to defeat the creature once and for all. We're not out of the woods yet though.
Just as Dylan Moran's character arrives to celebrate, monstrous hands suddenly rip him apart from behind before injuring Callan as well. And no, the monster hasn't Michael Myer'ed us with a return from the dead. It's actually Fjall who's out of control now, overwhelmed by the monstrous blood and magics that course through his veins.
No one's going to miss Dylan Moran though as he was barely in this show, and Éile is quick to calm Fjall through song before any other friends of theirs get murdered. Instead, it's Fjall who ends up dying as stabby Éile kills him just like she did The Empress. This one's an act of love though, freeing the prototype Witcher from the horror of life as a monster.
That's a lot right? Well brace yourselves, because there's more. While that's been going on, National Treasure Lenny Henry has been fighting Syndril and Zacaré for control of the Monolith as chaos energy seeps in from the other world.
The good guys inadvertently create an energy feedback loop that shatters the Monolith, which in turn releases enough magical energy to "shatter space and time itself", as our narrator describes it. And with that, different planes of existence begin to cross, setting the infamous Conjunction of the Spheres into motion.
"Every living thing fell silent," says Seanchai, and then monsters from other worlds suddenly appear on The Continent, including the worst creatures of all... man! As the narrator puts it, "Mankind now walked among Elves," essentially creating the mixed culture we've come to see as normal in The Witcher. Yet still, "nothing would ever be the same again..."
As our faves mourn the dead and what they've lost, we see Nathaniel Curtis' character cry over Eredin, his secret gay lover. But Eredin is actually alive still, trapped on another plane of existence. Watch out for him in future Witcher stories onscreen...
Six moons later, we catch up with The Lark singing at a bar, and she's pregnant! This isn't just any ordinary child either. They're "carrying blood like no other, marked with beast and magic." So yep, when Fjall and Éile banged earlier on in this season, they were actually conceiving the very first Witcher. And that's a pretty big deal. It's the name of the show, after all.
The girl whose prophecy came to pass touches the Lark's pregnant stomach this time around and sees another vision, one which ends with the ominous phrase "One of her blood shall sing the last..."
We then cut to a frightened Jaskier, the person who's been listening to this story the whole time in the present Witcher timeline. "Which one of her blood?" he asks, fearing Geralt may be the one who falls. Seanchai can neither confirm nor deny his suspicions, but she does warn him that they must "be ready for the great change to come..."
The Witcher: Blood Origin mid credits scene explained
The Witcher: Blood Origin packs more into these four episodes than Henry Cavill packs into those tight Witcher pants of his, but still, there's more!
After the credits roll, we're treated to a small, yet pivotal scene that brings back Ciri, one of the key characters from the regular Witcher show.
But if you're thinking that this scene looks familiar, you'd be right. In fact, this entire scene of a younger Ciri staring into the distance is actually lifted from a moment in season one, except there's one big difference this time around.
Before, the doorway Ciri stared into was empty, but now we see Avallac’h, that pesky mage from earlier who found the key to time travel. Ciri can't see him, but it looks like she can sense someone watching her, and that's exactly what he's doing here.
To find out more about what this scene really means, Digital Spy asked co-showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich for extra info during our exclusive chat where she described meeting Eredin and Avallac’h earlier on here than in the book, during "their nascent stage."
"They have a different sense of the world than the characters that we meet later in the books," Lauren continued. "And we talked about that end-piece a lot, because we learn, of course, that Avallac’h has been tracking Ciri through her whole life, through these worlds, through the spheres. We learn that later in The Witcher."
"We thought it would be a really nice nod to fans if we took this moment that everyone knows from season one, where she turns and looks in a doorway, and we put Avallac’h there instead. And I think it’s just this great sort of Easter egg. It’s like: if you know, you know. And you know that it will come back up later. And if you don’t, it’s just a great, little mystery."
Meanwhile, Lauren's co-showrunner Declan de Barra spoke with Collider about the scene and explained why it was the "obvious" direction for them to go in after initially deciding to include Avallac'h in the series.
"Once we discussed Avallac'h going forward, that was the obvious because in the books he's so concerned and obsessed with Ciri – dark Avallac'h, shall we call him dark Avallac'h – once he [is] no longer innocent and wide-eyed," he said. "So it seemed the obvious place for that to go as a connection for the fans. So it sets up where it goes in the books and in the TV show."
Avallac'h originally debuted in the novel, The Tower of the Swallow before going on to play a big role in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt video game. However, it's not until later in Andrzej Sapkowski's novel The Lady of the Lake that we learn Avallac'h knows a great deal about Elder Blood, and Ciri in particular, and that's because he's been following her across time and worlds.
Given how this scene has been not-so-casually inserted here at the end of Blood Origin, expect to see more of Avallac'h in The Witcher season three and beyond as his fate becomes further intertwined with Ciri's.
The Witcher seasons 1-2 are now streaming on Netflix. Season 3 is in production, and spin-off The Witcher: Blood Origin premiered on December 25, also on Netflix.
