After “The Witcher” season 3, part 1, it’s clear: Vilgefortz is the big string puller in the background. But he is not the only adversary for Geralt, Yennefer and Ciri. The latter will apparently soon have to deal with Leo Bonhart…
It’s a scene that at first glance seems relatively unremarkable and only seems to pay into the central theme of “The Witcher” season 3 – namely actions and their consequences: Ciri (Freya Allan) and Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) encounter a bounty hunter in the shop of the sorceress Keira Metz (Safiyya Ingar), who wants to bring a dwarf child to a place called Claremont. Ciri intervenes, saves the child and Yennefer is forced to kill the man. But there is a deeper meaning behind this:
When Yennefer and Ciri talk about the consequences of this deed a few scenes later, two other names come up besides the already mentioned Claremont, which make “The Witcher” fans prick up their ears: Dominik Houvenaghel – and above all Leo Bonhart.
DOMINIK HOUVENAGHEL AND LEO BONHART
Houvenaghel is mentioned earlier by Keira Metz, who identifies the slain bounty hunter as one of his henchmen and quickly flees in response. So you quickly realise: Houvenaghel is obviously someone not to be messed with – and a powerful gangster boss.
In Andrzej Sapkowski’s books, Houvenaghel is described as a very fat man who runs an arena in the aforementioned town of Claremont. This is where Ciri eventually ends up – after being captured by Houvenaghel’s cousin Leo Bonhart, she is forced to fight there as a kind of gladiator.
HEXER-KILLER HUNTS DOWN CIRI
Leo Bonhart, on the other hand, is also a bounty hunter, but a much more dangerous one than the nameless henchman in episode 2 of “The Witcher” season 3 that Yennefer kills. In the books, he boasts that he has already killed three sorcerers and carries their amulets around with him. And even though sorcerers are known to be superhumanly good fighters, Bonhart proves time and again in the book that he is quite capable of doing so.
For example, he single-handedly defeats all members of the so-called Rat Gang, which gets its own Netflix series and which Ciri will join in “The Witcher” season 4, and also proves to be a superior opponent for Ciri herself several times, who is also a good fighter by now.
In the books, Leo Bonhart is not hired by his cousin Houvenaghel to hunt Ciri, as it seems to be the case in the series, but by the Emperor of Nilfgaard, Emhyr, or his secret agent Stefan Skellen. It is possible, however, that this character will be dropped for the sake of simplicity (there are already too many characters in “The Witcher” anyway), and Ciri and Bonhart will clash for other reasons instead.
What seems certain from the mention of Claremont, Houvenaghel and Leo Bonhart is that all of them will play an important role in the future of “The Witcher”, i.e. in season 4 and beyond. Perhaps there will already be more hints about Leo Bonhart in the remaining three episodes of “The Witcher” Season 3. Season 3.2 will be released on 27 July 2023 on Netflix.
