The Witcher season 4 brims with sweeping battles, sorcery, and brutal swordplay. Yet its most affecting installment is an unexpectedly intimate detour: episode five, titled “The Joy of Cooking,” which centers on Geralt (Liam Hemsworth) and his disparate band of allies as they mend wounds, swap stories, and prepare a communal meal.
Showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich described the episode as a welcome pause in the chaos — a moment the writers fondly call “the soup episode,” where characters get to rest and connect rather than rush into the next conflict.
Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for The Witcher season 4, episode 5.
The sequence was devised to introduce and deepen several new companions — including the dwarf smith Zoltan Chivay (Danny Woodburn) and the archer Milva (Meng’er Zhang) — and to make clearer why each has joined Geralt’s journey. The production faced a particular challenge with Regis (Laurence Fishburne): his history as a barber-surgeon and ancient vampire is sprawling and difficult to stage straightforwardly. The creative solution was to render each backstory in a distinct register, ranging from animation to full musical pastiche, alongside more conventional flashbacks.
Hissrich explained that Regis’ flashback in particular demanded an approach the production couldn’t realize with conventional live-action: the team instead leaned into animation. Writer Matt D’Ambrosio proposed the sequence, and the creative team then pushed the concept further — ultimately incorporating a musical segment that allowed each character’s personality to be expressed in its own tonal style.
The musical vignette belongs to the bard Jaskier (Joey Batey), who recounts how he clashed with Valdo Marx (Nathan Laryea), a rival performer introduced in season 3. What begins as a bright, technicolor courtship between two performers collapses into betrayal when Valdo steals Jaskier’s songbook, leaving the bard humiliated and soaked in the rain. Batey has said the scene’s polished, upbeat final form belies how gruelling the shoot actually was — long days, heavy rain effects, and a brief injury made filming intense despite the sequence’s jubilant appearance.
The Witcher season 4 is streaming now on Netflix.
Source: Polygon
