‘The Witcher’ showrunners reveal if Avallac’h will return

• Samuel Blenkin’s character Avallac’h plays a significant role in The Witcher: Blood Origin.
• His connection to Ciri (Freya Allan) was revealed after the credits.
• Showrunners knew time travel would play a part in the main series.

There were a lot of surprises among the characters we might have expected to see in The Witcher: Blood Origin, but none was bigger than that. Avallac’h plays a significant role in Ciri’s journey, as anyone who is familiar with the The Witcher books and the lore surrounding the world Andrzej Sapkowski created would know.

Showrunners Declan de Barra and Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, who is also the showrunner of The Witcher series, recently spoke with Collider’s own Steve Weintraub about Avallac’h and how they incorporated the concept of time travel with his character.

Avallac’h (Samuel Blenkin) and his connection to Ciri (Freya Allan) were revealed after the credits, when we were taken back to the beginning of Ciri’s story, when she was just a princess sneaking out of the castle to play in the streets with the common people.

Blood Origin Episode 2 “Of Dreams, Defiance, and Desperate Deeds” introduces Avallac’h as Crevan Espane aep Caomhan Macha, a timid elf and trainee magician.

After saving her from an attempted assassination, the Empress Merwyn (Mirren Mack) names him as her protector and asks him to spy on Balor (Lenny Henry) and Eredin (Jacob Collins-Levy) as well as teach her how to open portals to other worlds.

Hissrich gave an explanation for not only the inclusion of Avallac’h but also the choice to emphasise the monoliths in this Blood Origin, explaining that he made these choices knowing that time travel would play a significant role in the main series, especially with Ciri’s powers involving travel through time and space.

She uttered:

“I mean we always knew that, obviously, time travel was going to be part of the main series because Avallac’h is part of the main series and, of course, that’s one of Ciri’s main powers, is traveling through time and space.

And this does connect to the model. We know that Tor Lara is the basis of a lot of power, that there is a portal that is held in Tor Lara, and we as the writer’s room, even probably Declan [de Barra], even before Blood Origin was even a thought in our minds, we started talking about, what is within Tor Lara that makes it special? What could be in there? And since we’d already planted the idea of these Monoliths in our story, it was like, “Well, what if that’s a Monolith? What if that is sort of the power? That’s the thing that is special in this place,” which is why we then backfilled it into Caingorn where we see Ciri travel through time and space for the very first time in our series.”

Hissrich continued, “What I enjoy is being able to have these, sort of, two independent shows that can thread back and forth into one another.”

De Barra was able to include the monoliths’ story into Blood Origin because they had planned the plot in this way, according to Hissrich.

In the end, Hissrich disclosed that the addition of Avallac’h resulted through idea-generating. with no “Declan would text me frantically asking, “Will this work?,” the “ideal template,” she said, “for the plot.”

Yes, but now we need to twist it this way, I say. Can you spread this concept? And that’s kind of where the concept for Avallac’h appearing in Blood Origin originated.”

The name Avallac’h will undoubtedly be instantly recognised to aficionados of the book and the video game, but for viewers who have just watched the Netflix series, the reveal in the post-credits scene following Episode 4 provides a significant connection to the main series. De Barra commented on Avallac’h’s unexpected entrance in front of Ciri.

“Once we discussed Avallac’h going forward, that was the obvious because in the books he’s so concerned and obsessed with Ciri – dark Avallac’h, shall we call him dark Avallac’h – once he [is] no longer innocent and wide-eyed. So it seemed the obvious place for that to go as a connection for the fans. So it sets up where it goes in the books and in the TV show.”

Unfortunately, this revelation does not indicate that we will soon be able to watch Samuel Blenkin’s Avallac’h. The figure will debut “far further down the line for us,” according to Hissrich. We won’t meet the enigmatic elf at all in Season 3 because he appears later in the books and in The Tower of Swallows, the fourth book in The Witcher story.

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