How many episodes is The Witcher: Blood Origin?

The Witcher: Blood Origin was supposed to be the far-reaching story of some of the most important moments of the universe’s world, including the Conjunction of the Spheres and the creation of the first witcher. And while it certainly is a little bit about that, mostly it isn’t. But what may shock fans more than the series’ quality is that such a massive-seeming prequel was attempted in just four total episodes, the final count for the Netflix miniseries.

That isn’t too surprising, given that the series was originally announced as having a total of six episodes. In fact, that’s how many were written and possibly how many were shot. But while they were putting the series together in editing, showrunners Declan de Barra and Lauren S. Hissrich decided that they didn’t need all six to make the story.

“We could do anything we wanted,” said Barra, talking to Polygon about the show’s broad prequel premise. “We wanted to write sort of [a] two-movie(ish) kind of feeling story that was self-contained.

“So because we could do anything we wanted, we shot everything that we wanted. And then in the edit room, we went, ‘OK, what’s the best version of this sandwich we can make?’ The tastiest sandwich you can make that would make you just go, ‘That was not too much, it was not too little. The sauce was just right.’ And that’s what we tried to do.”

Unfortunately, despite the team aiming for “the tastiest sandwich,” the show still largely fails to get into the most interesting parts of the story element or universe’s origins it was supposed to be about. But with so much meat left on the bone, it’s always possible that the Witcher universe could return to this time period, and maybe spend a little more than four episodes there next time.

As for when “next time” might be, Netflix has been a little less clear about that. From everything we know, Blood Origin is just a miniseries, so we shouldn’t expect to see a second season. So any returns to these characters and the time immediately after the Conjunction of the Spheres would likely have to come from an entirely new Witcher spinoff.