Willow Wraith Press

The Wheel of Time based on Robert Jordan’s classic fantasy series on Amazon Prime

Synopsis: (per Amazon)

The Wheel of Time follows Moiraine, a member of the Aes Sedai, a powerful organization of women who can channel the One Power. With her Warder, Lan, she seeks a group of five young villagers from the secluded Two Rivers, believing one of them is the reincarnation of the Dragon, an extremely powerful channeller who broke the world. The Dragon Reborn is prophesied to either save the world from a primordial evil known as the Dark One, or break it once more

Review:

For this review, I’m going to be posting some minor spoilers for the entire book series to help clarify my thoughts on this show. Full transparency, I’m a massive fan of this book series. It’s a classic for a reason, especially to this particular fantasy nerd. I’ve been waiting for this show for many years and eagerly following all news from the beginning of this show’s birth. I’m not a book purist (or Bookcloak as the Twitters likes to call them), and understand the need for changes from medium to medium for 14 books to make sense to old fans and to bring in non-reader fans.

All this to say, I’m torn on this show and the main reason is because of the execution of the adaptation.

Listen, I enjoyed many of the changes made to the source material and will mention those further down in this nearly epic review, but my biggest gripe about the series as a whole falls upon the doorstep of execution of one particular question: Who is the Dragon Reborn?

For me, this is where the show fails miserably. And I have two main reasons for it. 1. Not fulfilling the promise of the DR importance, and 2. focusing on Moiraine instead of the potential DR candidates.

I get it, having this ongoing mystery is great for TV drama, especially for non-book readers. And don’t we all love and tune in for the drama! But with only 8 episodes to tell this first season (7 before the DR is finally revealed), then the storyline better be tight and meet this promise. And the show didn’t do this.

When the show begins, we have Moiraine essentially doing an 80s “gearing up” montage with a voiceover telling the audience about her mission to find the DR. Cool, we see this amazing actress (Rosamund Pike is top drawer as Moiraine, love her casting) throwing on a sweet-ass fantasy get-up and slow-mo walking from a baller fantasy building all while explaining what the hell is going on. This is fine exposition using a traditional trope in TV and Film. I can live with this trope. Ok and onward, I’m ready to get into some excellent fantasy epicness.

But then comes the first cold open…oof…

A couple of dudes running away from some Aes Sedai in hyper-clean red outfits on horseback. Those dastardly Red Ajah chases these guys down, then the audience finds out the one dude is by actually by himself and mad. i.e. a male channeller. Moiraine looks on and says to stolid Lan that our dude isn’t the DR. Uhhhhh. Sure?

Major problems right off the bat for me.

Yes, Amazon gave the show lots of cash to make this show and I understand the showrunner couldn’t just throw all this lore and history from 14 books at the viewer, especially those who know nothing about said books. But there was an opportunity here to really hammer home what this show (and book series) is all about: the Dragon being reborn to fight the Dark One because this world is a wheel and shit happens over and over again. Instead, we get an oddly dressed dude running from some other oddly dressed women. Bit on the odd side to use as our hook.

As much as I adore the book’s prologue with Lews Therin Telamon killing his family due to his madness which causes the Breaking of the World, I get not starting with it. Too much lore, too much for a casual viewer to take in all at once. Don’t want to overwhelm. But the Breaking of the World is so engrained into the concept of the DR, the fear of his rebirth, that to not even show snippets of the Breaking during her voiceover, we don’t get that true sense of the importance of the DR. We don’t need a full ten minute Galadriel voiceover ala The Fellowship of the Ring, but, damn, show me a shadowed dude drawing the One Power to destroy the world, setting up this new age.

Oh, and in the opening of episode 8, when they finally do introduce LTT, my word what a loss that scene should have been. Where was the desperation, the ego, the realization the war against the shadow was being lost badly??? They could have been discussing the latest cricket match with how calm and bland that convo was. The ENTIRE REASON LTT did what he did to cause the Breaking was because he was desperate and the Dark One was WINNING! Wow, what a letdown.

All through the season we are told as an audience that being the DR is important, but for what? Why? Oooooh but the Dark One, a battle. Oooooh scary. I get it, TV tropes. Hell, even the first book is essentially just this setup for this good v evil fight. But what rubbed me wrong was that we don’t get the sense of WHY the DR is important to this fight. Info dumping is usually a no-no for authors and even in film, but I think a huge misstep is not showing or telling us audience why the DR is so feared and revered. I know why, I read the books, but trying to put myself in a non-booker reader’s shoes, I wouldn’t have a single clue as to what’s so great/bad about being the DR. The last one (LTT) broke the world, but that’s all we know. There should’ve been soooooo much more time spent banging our heads with details about the DR and his function.

And I say his for a reason.

The second gripe I have with the DR is the change to suggest women can also be the Dragon Reborn. It doesn’t make narrative sense to have this change. I’m all for changes that bring narrative sense to an adaptation (I’m thinking of the cut of beloved LotR character Tom Bombadil as a prime example), but just to make changes to make changes, I’m not behind. Again, I get that for non-book readers, it would make sense that it could be anyone being reborn as the Dragon, but unless the show was going to change who the DR was, there really was no narrative reason to make this change.

Again, back to that cold open to help explain why.

We are shown that men who channel go mad and that women of the Aes Sedai are essentially the “lead power” in this world. Men channelling = bad news bears. That is at the core of the Dragon Reborn fear I mentioned above, not to mention one of the main sources of conflict in the entire book series. Lews Therin’s fight against the Dark One tainted the male half of the One Power, thus causing this madness. That fear has permeated down through the three thousand years post Breaking that all men who can channel are viewed negatively. Huge implications for the DR return.

But women don’t go mad. They can channel the One Power. And as my non-book reader wife said upon viewing: “Then why would it matter if a woman is the DR if she wouldn’t destroy the world via madness?” I didn’t tell her about the Black Ajah nor all the Forsaken female characters such as Lanfear, but her point is solid. For the sake of this first season, if the DR is a woman, the fear of being the DR wouldn’t be as drastic. The Black Ajah and the Forsaken aren’t introduced in this first season, thus not important narratively here. Again, I ask, what was the point?

Also, thinking narratively, we have the false Dragon Logain introduced and other false Dragons mentioned, not a single woman, always male. Thus makes the point that having the DR being a male using the tainted One Power all that more dangerous to our world. We see it played out in that bland cold open, but also to perfection in the scenes with Logain. Logain and episode 4 (my fave of the season) was amazing, his intro, the taint of the male half, the “reveal” of Nynaeve’s strength in the OP, the gentling of the false Dragon. Those are changes that were so necessary and really added to the story. Absolute perfection on this fan’s part.

But those are additions to the lore that happened off page in the book series, and all those have implications relating to the male half of the OP. Nothing to do with women’s power, only giving more mystery to “oh, maybe the DR is Nynaeve….”

And this change doesn’t make sense to me because the DR was still revealed to be Rand and knowing what Egwene and Nynaeve story arcs are, there really wasn’t a point to that change. There were far too many scenes that just felt like bait-and-switch just to maintain that mystery. Like every time Moiraine mentioned the DR, the camera would focus on Egwene.

That said, I could still understand adding that change to bring on viewers and if it will pan out in future seasons, but it was the continued execution that failed miserably for me as a viewer. By trying to maintain the “who is the DR” mystery, we never truly got to know Rand. So when it is finally revealed he is the DR, we don’t care a damn wit about him as a character. Around episode 5, my wife said that if it was Rand, she was going to be mad because he was the “whitebread background character that was just there”. And that’s not what you want for the DR as a character if that is the entire hook of the show!

And that’s another one of my issues with the show. By shifting the main focus to be on Moiraine, we lose the opportunity to connect to the Emond’s Field five. It makes narrative sense to have a main focus for the audience to follow before you branch off into other characters. That was Ned Stark in GoT, Frodo Baggins in LotR, etc. Good filmmaking concept. Howeva, we had 8 episodes for this season, and in those 2 episodes (5 & 6) where we spend all this time learning the lore about the Aes Sedai and Warders through extreme side characters seen in the prequel novel New Spring, we barely see the EF5 and really that was focused on Egwene once again. It doesn’t follow up on the promise of what this show is about, instead it expands the world for future seasons (important details no doubt). I know I’m not this famous writer (yet! gotta still believe) but the concept introduced as the inciting incident for this show is all about the Dragon Reborn, and by not spending anytime with the potential 5 DR candidates, especially Rand, we are led astray and when we finally get to the endpoint and the reveal, it’s all somewhat diluted.

Again, I get it, you don’t want to show too much from Rand’s POV that it becomes blatantly obvious that he is the DR. In the first book Eye of the World, it is all in Rand’s point of view so it’s clear he is the DR, if it was going to be Mat or Perrin, it would’ve been really odd choice by RJ to tell the story from someone else’s POV. But there are ways the show could have subtly introduced some of the “connections” Rand puts together in episode 7 where he realizes it’s him so that it’s not just a mad dash revelation out of nowhere. Tam’s fever revelations about Rand’s mother don’t have to be shown on screen early on, but if there were some additional scenes of him and Mat traveling to Tar Valon, they could’ve hinted at him thinking about things that happened during the Bel Tine attack. Hell, after they meet Thom Merrilin (another disappointment by this fan, should’ve been a bigger role!) there was only that single scene with Rand and Thom at the Grinwell farm when Thom talks about his nephew. I would have loved to have seen more reaction by Rand piecing things together. I mean he broke through that massive door in ep3 to escape the Darkfriend, where’s the bloody reaction to that????

For me, adding the possibility of Egwene and Nynaeve to being the DR, the spread of time building their characters as potential DR candidates took away from giving Rand more depth. And yes, season 2 will have much more time to fix this issue, but it was severely lacking in this season and was a letdown. I know that lots of book readers have issues with the ending of EotW (I’m not one of them, I liked that ending), but I actually thought the changes with Ishamael at the Eye were excellent choices, but watching with my non-reading wife, she truly didn’t care that much about Rand to feel that the ending was earned. I will add that Josha Stradowski played Rand very soundly, made him a petulant child when needed and then played the torn DR really well. There should’ve been farrrrrrrr more character building for Rand and the other EF5 instead of spending so much time on Moiraine and the tower. My opinion.

Now, Nynaeve is my favorite character in the entire series and I absolutely adore everything about her in the show. Zoe Robins is Nynaeve, she just bleeds that character. I love that they built her up and gave her more growth in this season than in the first book, that’s the type of changes I fully get behind. Loved loved loved her scene escaping the Trolloc and then her growing relationship with Lan. I truly enjoyed her braid tugging, it wasn’t as over-the-top as in the book, but still there to appease us fans. I also really enjoyed how her dress was yellow under a green jacket, totally played to the book fans right there! Perfect.

Mat was excellent. Yes, I know that the actor Barney Harris left production before the final two episodes were filmed, thus causing major changes to be made by the showrunner (obvi, the Padan Fain monologue was meant to be with Mat in the scene not Perrin), but I thought Mat was so well done in the show, I couldn’t have been happier. Changes to his backstory were excellent, although NOT a fan of making Abell Cauthon a lecherous drunk! But he was given a reason to be a scoundrel, it made sense. I loved it.

Egwene was fine. I never really enjoyed her character too much from the books so she was just fine, not great, not bad. Fine.

But Perrin, woof (pun not necessarily intended).

I was sooooo disappointed by the changes made to Perrin. My word. Him having a wife and then fridging her, no thank you. I’m glad Brandon Sanderson also agreed that was a horrible change. I mean, Perrin is a hard character to translate because he is so introspective, but having him killing his wife (whom he seemed to not love when he loved Egwene…also another stupid TV trope that was expanded from minor mention in the books to this thing in the show…hated) really altered him for me. And not in a good way. BUT THEN TO TAKE AWAY HIS AXE????? Perrin’s entire internal conflict throughout the vast majority of the series is his hatred of the axe but his refusal to get rid of it. That axe was so crucial to Perrin’s character growth, to not have it was par on course to abomination for me. I just don’t see how they marry his inner conflict AND killing his wife into the future Perrin at the end of the series. And how will that work with Faile?

Then there is the wolfbrother stuff that is soooooo underbaked in the show. I get cutting Elyas to streamline the show and not having to introduce another character that just disappears from the books for books on end. I get it. But what in the actual hell is he supposed to be in the show? My wife was sooooo perplexed by his weird eye color change and werewolf-like busting of ropes in Valda’s tent. Ok, fine, there is time in season two to expand on this and maybe even introduce Elyas, but this is just “huh?” Without more scenes of Perrin actively trying to figure out what he is going through, just solitary scenes, we lose all sense of character growth. I almost wish they would have introduced the concept of Tel’aran’rhiod earlier to link Perrin’s gift. They could’ve done some hinting here for the dreamworld, would’ve helped some. Instead, everything becomes lipstick and not true connection to these characters. Also, with Mat being cut from the final episodes and replaced with Perrin, what, praytell, was his role in the finale????

And, let’s not forget the biggest disappointment of all: the single namedrop of Bela! Bela was the hero of the entire series, fight me!!!

I know this review has been stupid long, but I also want to shout out some great things that made this fan stupid giddy with joy:

• Holy hell the Blood Snow fight with Tigraine and those soldiers. Wow. That was so amazing and probably my favorite scene in the entire series. So badass!
• Logain’s opening scene in Ghaldea was really cool and I actually liked how the show is visualizing the taint and the madness.
• Ishamael at the Eye was really well done, like the actor and his smirk at the end.
• Loial in general. Sure he looks different than I wish but hearing him speak all slow and snarky on human behavior is really awesome. He should’ve been given more time but I get it, time constraints.
• The little man sa’angreal statue. The Three-Fold land. The Stone of Tear. Birgitte nod by Else Grinwell. Bloody goat-kissing flaming Uno! I love all these little nods to the books.

Some other things I absolutely hated as a book fan:

• Egwene cry healing a burned out Nynaeve. Oy vey. That’s not how things work…The linking I liked, but everything else about that scene I hated quite a lot.
• Moiraine being stilled. I saw the interview with the showrunner and get his reasoning, but how will this work? When someone gets stilled and then their power returned, they are significantly reduced in strength. And Moiraine is essentially the introduction to one of the series most powerful uses of the OP: balefire. I just don’t see how this will work out.
• The lack of the importance of the heron-marked blade. Sure Ishy mentions it in the finale, but will they actually utilize the prophecy and have Rand be branded?
• Also, Rand leaving the group at the end? I didn’t care for it because it seems like he is going to the Aiel Waste, so book 4, how will they do Falme and the Stone of Tear now?
• Hated how the Tinkers looked like Deadheads on tour. Thought the Whitecloaks all having mustaches and undercuts were odd choices. Also, a Whitecloak would never ever tell anyone to seek out an Aes Sedai! Not a huge fan of having the Horn of Valere under the throne in Fal Dara, nor not including the Dragon banner or the pool of saidin at the Eye. The chunky dialogue in some scenes, the terrible acting (really disliked the actor for Perrin whether that was due to him getting massively short shifted or if that’s the actor’s true ability).

Whew, that was long. I had so many more thoughts while watching, I have to find an end somewhere. Like I said at the beginning, I’m torn on this adaptation. I’m beyond happy that we actually have a Wheel of Time show, but there were a lot of things that struck me as wrong. Many things I was able to get over after watching episodes multiple times, but some things like listed above, I have a really hard time with. I’ll still tune in to season 2, but I’m going to have to use this time between releases to truly separate my ideas of the books and what this show is giving me…

Rating: 2.5 out of 5