The Witcher season 2 is removing one its most controversial aspects – the multiple timelines

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You can put your pen and paper away. The Witcher season 2 (opens in new tab) won’t have multiple timelines for its characters, something that has been officially confirmed by showrunner Lauren S. Hissrich.

The multiple timelines – which saw The Witcher’s first season flick back and forth between Yennefer’s origin, Ciri leaving Cintra, and Geralt’s many, many monster-hunting adventures across several decades – was a storytelling device that came without warning and didn’t quite land. Season 2 will do things differently.

“Obviously, it was one of the most controversial parts of Season 1 and I didn’t expect it to be as controversial as it was,” Hissrich told The Wrap (opens in new tab). “What’s great though is they have intersected now. So what we’ll see in Season 2 is that all of our characters are existing on the same timeline.”

That doesn’t mean The Witcher is done messing around with time just yet, though. “We get to do flashbacks, we get to do flash-forwards, we get to actually integrate time in a completely different way that we weren’t able to do in Season 1,” Hissrich teases.

While we’re unlikely to see any Lost-style “We have to go back, Geralt!” plot twists, it’s reassuring to know that events on The Continent will at least be a little easier to follow next time around.

Hissrich’s words are echoed in our interview with the showrunner (opens in new tab) back in December. There, Hissrich said, “What’s great about season two, I can tell you, is that, in what we’ve written, the story becomes much more focused. There’s a stronger drive in the story, because all of the relationships that we’ve been setting up in season one, actually start to come into fruition in season two.”

So, it seems streamlined stories are the way forward in general in The Witcher season 2. Toss a coin to whoever decided to ditch the timelines.

• Everything new on Netflix (opens in new tab) this month
• The Witcher Netflix timeline explained (opens in new tab): How the season 1 storylines fit together
• What to expect from the new characters in The Witcher season 2 (opens in new tab)