Spoilers for The Witcher season four to follow.
Anyone who finishes watching the latest season of The Witcher may be surprised by Netflix’s suggestion for what to watch next: a stand-alone spinoff movie, The Rats: A Witcher Tale, which arrived on Netflix at the same time as The Witcher’s fourth season — but with none of the fanfare or even a trailer or release date.
Wait, you might ask. Aren’t the Rats, uh … dead? And you would be right! Apart from Ciri, who assumed the fake name Falka and spent the season with the group, the Rats are extremely dead — not just slaughtered by Leo Bonhart but decapitated with each of their heads sawed off and dumped into a barrel for preservation.
So what is The Rats: A Witcher Tale? Why is it set before the fourth season of The Witcher? Why is Netflix basically pretending it doesn’t exist? And is it actually worth watching? Read on.
Where did The Rats come from?
To answer that question, you’ll need to cast your mind back to 2021 when Netflix’s appetite for all things The Witcher was bottomless. Drunk on the success of The Witcher’s first two seasons — and hopeful that The Witcher franchise might actually be “the next Game of Thrones” at a time when TV was in an arms race to find “the next Game of Thrones” — the streamer bet big on expanding the Witcher franchise beyond the original series.
Netflix had already tested the waters with Nightmare of the Wolf, a pretty good animated prequel movie designed to keep audiences interested in The Witcher during the two-year gap between seasons one and two. In rapid succession, work had begun on a second animated movie, a prequel series titled The Witcher: Blood Origin, and, according to showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, an animated Witcher series aimed at children (though that last one never materialized). By November 2022, with The Witcher: Blood Origin’s premiere just a month away, authoritative Witcher site Redanian Intelligence reported that another live-action spinoff was in development — this one focused on the Rats, the group of thieves Ciri joins during an especially grim chapter in her character arc.
Why the Rats?
Longtime Witcher fans had the same question. The Rats are some of the most widely disliked characters in Andrzej Sapkowski’s original novels. Even as Redanian Intelligence revealed the Rats spinoff, the outlet cast doubt on the concept: “The intention of the production team to explore The Rats’ characters before season four arrives is rather understandable, as Ciri will be spending quite a bit of time with them. Nevertheless, the Rats as characters are not very well loved in the Witcher fandom, and dedicating an entire spinoff to them would require no small effort to make them more interesting and appealing.”
Great effort was, at least initially, expended. The Rats began production under the code name Riff Raff in Cape Town, South Africa, with longtime Witcher writer Haily Hall as showrunner. The plan, at the time, was for The Rats to run for either six or eight episodes.
What happened?
Here, again, we’ll turn to Redanian. According to its reporting, a shoot that began in May 2023 and was intended to span as many as six months was wrapped after two. Why? Netflix executives took a look at the footage that had already been shot and concluded that The Rats didn’t deserve a full season. Two years later, Redanian managed to secure a few telling quotes about The Rats from an unnamed Netflix insider. “Behind the scenes was a disaster,” they said. “Everything went wrong.”
Like The Witcher: Blood Origin — announced as a six-episode series but later slashed down to four — The Rats bears all the telltale signs of a project that was chopped to ribbons in postproduction. There is voice-over used to info-dump about plot points that would otherwise be unclear, a lengthy montage that skims multiple days of the story, and an opening framing device that was clearly hastily crafted to try to justify why The Rats now comes after The Witcher season four, not before.
What’s the framing device?
The Rats: A Witcher Tale opens shortly after Ciri’s final scene in season four, as she awakens on a cart being driven by the villainous Leo Bonhart. When Ciri asks why Leo is doing this, he says he’ll tell her the story. After a title card that reads “six months earlier,” the show flashes back to a heist in which the Rats infiltrate a fighting ring and make off with some bags of gold.
Here’s the problem: If you spend even a few seconds thinking about this framing device, it completely falls apart. How is Leo Bonhart telling Ciri this story? He was around for almost none of what happens in The Rats, appearing for what’s essentially a glorified cameo in the third act. If we’re supposed to believe Leo is telling this story, he’s somehow able to describe intimate conversations between the Rats at their private hideout.
The only explanation that makes sense is that the frame story was created to justify why The Rats should be watched before The Witcher’s fourth season, not after. If the frame didn’t exist, spoiling the deaths of the Rats, it would make much more sense to watch The Rats before season four (and would add context to the numerous awkward season-four scenes in which characters describe the events of The Rats as if the audience is already familiar with them).
What actually happens in the movie?
I’ll go ahead and recap the events of The Rats for you, so if you’d rather watch it for yourself, you can stop reading now.
After yet another underwhelming score, the Rats follow a lead to a big Ocean’s Eleven–style heist: a new fighting arena run by a depraved war criminal named Bert Brigden. For Mistle — later to be Ciri’s girlfriend and by far the best developed of the Rats — this job is also personal. She explains that in her pre-Rat life, she was a highborn young lady betrothed to the leader of a valiant rebellion against Nilfgaard but deeply in love with her personal servant, Juniper. On the eve of her wedding, Brigden led an especially brutal group of Nilfgaardian soldiers in an attack that resulted in the deaths of Mistle’s entire family and — apparently — Juniper.
Apparently?
We’ll get to it. The rest of the movie is mostly bog-standard heist stuff — scouting the location, assuming secret identities and disguises, and working out the little details that will enable them to run off with the purse at the end of a wild night of gambling. There’s just one problem: They’ll also need to get past a monster.
So they hire a witcher. Not the Witcher, as we’ve come to know Geralt of Rivia, but a disgraced drunk named Brehen, played by Dolph Lundgren, who takes the job in exchange for a fat payday. Much of the “plot” of The Rats — or at least as much of it that survived the aggressive trimming of the limited series into a stand-alone movie — concerns Brehen getting sober, mentoring the Rats, and eventually becoming initiated into the gang himself.
I don’t remember him in season four.
That’s because he doesn’t make it. When they confront the monster, Mistle realizes it’s Juniper, whom Brigden cursed in an experiment to create horrifying creatures he can sell to Nilfgaard as weapons of war. Mistle mercy-kills the thing that used to be Juniper. But before they can escape, the group is confronted by Leo, who is a cousin of the guy who runs the fighting arena. As the Rats flee, Brehen stays behind to slow Leo down. They get away with the money, but Brehen dies and Leo takes his witcher medallion (retroactively explaining the long, apparently meaningful shot it gets when Leo is introduced in The Witcher season four).
So that’s The Rats. After all that, is it worth watching?
Maybe …? Honestly, I’m sympathetic to Netflix’s problem here and why it took so long for everybody to figure out what to do with this. The Rats is not so bad that it should be buried, but it’s not nearly good enough that I’d want to watch eight episodes of it. A stand-alone movie was probably the right answer all along, but at just 92 minutes, The Rats feels far too rushed. And while I do understand and like the Rats a little more after watching it — enough that I’m a little sadder about their horrible deaths after the finale — I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that since they’re already dead.
I guess, in the end, there are two reasons to watch The Rats. If you love The Witcher so much that you can’t wait for more, you might as well throw this bonus episode on. And if you’re the kind of person who cares about how the sausage is made in Hollywood, you’re rarely going to see a more fascinating example of a production gone wrong than this.