The Witcher season 4 is packed with large-scale battles featuring magic, monsters, and sword fighting. But the season’s best and most ambitious episode, “The Joy of Cooking,” is actually a break in the action. It focuses on Geralt (Liam Hemsworth) and his ragtag group of companions swapping stories while recovering from their injuries and prepping a meal.
“Episode five is one of my favorites we’ve ever done, and it comes straight from a story in the books,” showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich said in a Zoom roundtable attended by Polygon. “We call it the soup episode. It’s really this moment of respite for the characters where they get to sit down and rest for a moment.”
[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for The Witcher season 4, episode 5]
The episode was inspired by the need to find creative ways to share the backstories of the show’s new characters, including the dwarf smith Zoltan Chivay (Danny Woodburn) and the archer Milva (Meng’er Zhang), and explain why they’d each found themselves traveling with Geralt. That was going to be particularly difficult for Regis (Laurence Fishburne), a barber surgeon who is also an ancient vampire with a blood-soaked past. Each story is portrayed in a different, creative way, ranging from animation to musical numbers, along with some more traditional flashbacks.
“It really started when we were talking about Regis’ flashback because we knew it wasn’t something we had the time or resources to put on film in the right way,” Hissrich said. “So immediately, Matt D’Ambrosio, the writer, pitched doing an animated sequence. I remember taking that to Netflix, and I was like, If you think the animated sequence is crazy, just wait till you hear the musical sequence. But it really was leaning into every character’s tone.”
The musical segment, of course, belongs to the bard Jaskier (Joey Batey), who tells the story of how he became rivals with Valdo Marx (Nathan Laryea), the bard who performed at the gathering of sorcerers in The Witcher season 3. The sequence starts as a joyous technicolor musical as Jaskier courts Valdo as a partner. But when Valdo steals his songbook, Jaskier is left singing in the rain. Unsurprisingly, the sequence was grueling to shoot.
“If you’re performing a musical on stage, it takes three hours at most. I was doing 12 hours of that every day for a week,” Batey said. “I actually suffered an injury about three days before that sequence and about three days before I couldn’t walk, so it was a bit of a fraught time, but we managed to get through it. There was a tremendous amount of rain and rain machines and things like that. It was not nearly as fun to shoot as it looks like on the screen.”
The Witcher season 4 is streaming now on Netflix.