The Witcher Season 3's Biggest Moment Called For A Different Kind Of TV Set
This post contains spoilers for "The Witcher" season 3 volume 1.
The latest season of "The Witcher" ends its first half with a cliffhanger, as Geralt (Henry Cavill) and Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) spend episode 5 doing everything they can to keep tabs on the many schemers gathered at the ball at Aretuza. Of course, the episode ends with a knife at Geralt's throat, so the pair's hard work obviously didn't quite help them foresee every possible outcome of the gathering. It's no wonder something slipped through the cracks, though, because as "The Art of Illusion" reveals, the magical school Aretuza isn't just big — it's seemingly endless.
Throughout the episode, the pair stroll arm in arm through a party that's chock full of both allies and enemies, while tricky perspective shifts reveal new details as the hour goes on. At one point, we see Geralt get into a fight with Istredd (Royce Pierreson), but a few scenes later the plot rewinds to show us that he and Geralt planned the argument as a distraction. The impression we're meant to be left with, it seems, is that there are multiple angles from which this story can be looked at, each one revealing new bits of intel about the gathered assortment of power players. The episode's set bears that sense of disorientation out, too, as the action sprawls across multiple locations within the seemingly vast Thanedd Island academy that Yen once called home.
The Aretuza set is bigger than a football field
That disorienting, never-ending maze feeling was apparently achieved on purpose, and required the construction of a set that's much larger than most TV sets. In a recent Digital Spy piece, head of franchise design Andrew Laws called the Aretuza set, which the outlet says has been called a "super-set," "completely interactive."
"You're able to move in and out of these spaces, and through corridors, the idea being that the architecture of Aretuza is continuous," he explained. While typical set architecture involves pieces of rooms that end just off-screen or doorways that lead nowhere, the supersized Aretuza set apparently just keeps going and going. "You create kind of infinite loops where you can keep going through things, and turning corners, and never stop," Laws told the outlet, noting that the set for the witchers' keep Kaer Morhen is similarly interactive.
At this point, Digital Spy reports that the Aretuza set is the size of a rugby pitch — for American fans, that's bigger than a football field — and is set to keep growing in future seasons. Executive producer Steve Gaub told the outlet that the set is pretty outsized, regardless of whether it's meant for the big or small screen. "It's a massive set," he says. "Even from a feature film perspective, it's a massive set. It's an engineering feat for one, because you don't build a lot of sets that big on television."
The show films on a blockbuster scale
A separate piece by Digital Spy reveals that the set is located in Surrey in the UK, though parts of the new season were also filmed in Morocco, Wales, Croatia, Italy, and even Slovenia. In Morocco, the cast and crew faced a scorching heat wave, and moving the massive crew from one location to another was an endeavor in itself. Series creator Lauren Schmidt Hissrich explained that they "move hundreds of people and monsters and costumes and huge stunt teams" while making the series. Simply put: "It's big." The showrunner notes that she always references the scale of the show during the hiring process for new team members, saying, "I think what I always ask for — when we're hiring new crew people, and the conversations that we have every year — is like: 'I need you to be excited about this. We're the leaders. So we have to show up.'"
The crew certainly showed up this season, as the show is full of richly designed and beautifully presented details, especially in the Aretuza ball episode. From the costume design and styling of the actors to the trippy, endless feeling of the set, the show has a production value that goes way beyond that of most TV shows. Still, I can't help but wonder if there are other new parts of the Aretuza set we haven't even seen yet, bits that might end up explored when the next batch of episodes likely leans full-tilt into the coup plot of Andrzej Sapkowski's book series. We'll find out when the show returns for Volume 2 on July 27, 2023.