I finished episode 5 last night and I'm really enjoying it. Again, as I've said before, playing the games helps so much. Some people may be wondering what's going on with the owl, for example. I'm not.
As for female characters, in this instance, I don't give a crap, because outside of Geralt all the most powerful supporting characters ARE women. Yennifer could pretty much instantly kill Geralt or anybody else if she wanted to, and Ciri's powers exceed Yen's exponentially.
It's not like they made Vesimer a woman or Lambert queer or some bullshit like that.