The Witcher season 3 changes Ciri’s book plot and takes away her best moment

polygon.com:

Ciri goes through the wringer in The Witcher season 3. She’s chased by the Wild Hunt, trapped by Vilgefortz, and fights a giant sea monster. But even after all of that, the Lion Cub of Cintra’s greatest test comes in the deserts of Korath, where she finds herself alone in the season’s seventh episode. It’s supposed to be a crowning moment for the character, a chance for her to come into her own and for all her hard work to culminate in some kind of self-realization. But the show still lets her down and whiffs her biggest moment.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for The Witcher season 3 and the Time of Contempt novel.]

The Witcher season 3’s seventh episode, “Out of the Fire, Into the Frying Pan,” finds Ciri alone in a desert. For fans who forgot what happened in the previous episode, Ciri arrives in the desert because during the coup at Aretuza, Ciri escapes Vilgefortz by lunging through the portal at the top of the tower Tor Lara, which suddenly transports her to this unknown land. In this desert, Ciri finds a unicorn (a rare sight anywhere in this world) and monsters she’s never seen or even heard of before. She also struggles to find water and food and survive in the harsh sandy wastes.

Watching Ciri claw her way to survival makes for a grueling stretch of 20 or 30 minutes, but there’s the promise that it’s building toward something, some grander moment of realization from Ciri about how to best harness her magical talent or what it means to wield power. Unfortunately, that’s not really what happens.

Instead, following an attack from one of the desert’s many terrible inhabitants, Ciri finds that her unicorn companion, who she names Little Horse, is wounded and suffering from poison. She can’t seem to find a