Netflix has done mostly well with its The Witcher television series. Faith in the future of the show has been shaken after Henry Cavill announced he was no longer going to be Geralt of Rivia after the third season. At the end of last year, they released The Witcher: Blood Origin, a prequel miniseries.

The show actually starts after the end of the last season of The Witcher technically. As Jaskier is saved in a battle from a mysterious being called Seanchai. She finds it important that he knows the story of how the world was thousands of years ago.

The world that they know used to be occupied mainly by elves and dwarves, but elves definitely had the supremacy. But the elves are never an united front until a dark plan forces that with fear and blood.

With a dictator now ruling the continent, not all of her enemies are defeated. Each faction of the elves had a clan that protected the ruling class. And three survivors among those clans reluctantly team up to overthrow the fresh empire.

I was honestly impressed the most by Sophia Brown, who plays the lark, Éile. Her inclusion to the series sparked controversy among some fans of saying that Netflix was forcing diversity, but her and her elf clan do make sense of existing in the world.

I also kind of figured that the dwarf warrior Meldof was created mainly to be Blood Origin’s Tyrion Lannister, but they definitely didn’t give her enough screen time to rival Peter Dinklage’s character from Game of Thrones.

I really wanted to love Blood Origin, but Netflix really dropped the ball with it. It has a decent cast and fairly good special effects, but the story can be very confusing and there just isn’t enough time in four episodes to do what they needed to do. I didn’t realize it was only four episodes long and the finale seems very anticlimactic. The story was all about telling everyone how the very first witcher was created, but like many prequels, it falls very short of its potential.