The Wheel of Time

This is actually one of my more timely reviews as of late, setting aside Dune and, uh... 

That's it.

Suffice it to say, then, that I will be spoiling the last few episodes of season 1 of Amazon's Wheel of Time series in this post, and heck, the first few episodes as well if you haven't started it yet. So beware of spoilers. And if you're thinking to yourself "hey, I've read the books, there's nothing he can spoil for me," I'm just gonna fire back with a quick, mainly innocuous fact from the first episode that Perrin is married.

The point is if you want to watch the show with fresh eyes this is not the post for you. You have been warned.

Now that warning aside, it's mainly to people who have read the books that I want to talk. The Wheel of Time franchise by Robert Jordan (and Brandon Sanderson, but let's be fair I'll never criticize those last three books) is a classic of epic fantasy that was surprisingly progressive for its time but certainly not without issues. Going into the TV show I was optimistic that they would be able to resolve some of those issues, but I was also concerned that they might sacrifice some of the things that made the books great on the way.

It turns out that I was right. So that's two points for me.

There's no denying that the Wheel of Time books were very empowering for women in fantasy. At the time basically everything else in the genre written by men cast women as secondary characters who were a) concerned only with matters of hearth and home, and b) pretty much always in need of rescuing. Strong female leads in prior male-written fantasy were characters like Eilonwy, from the Prydain Chronicles, or Eowyn, from Lord of the Rings, who stood out simply because they were willing to whine about the gender stereotypes they were forced to follow.

But then Robert Jordan introduced a world in which the single most powerful organization was composed of and led by entirely women. The men were their bonded servants, basically glorified bodyguards, and the Aes Sedai were respected physically, mentally, emotionally, and politically even among their enemies. And the men who could match their power? At best they were misguided where they weren't outright evil, and all were doomed to insanity and death from the power they hoped to wield. This was such an insane paradigm shift for a massively popular work produced by a man that it's almost too easy to overlook the fact that in the Eye of the World, the first book of the series, Moiraine Damodred is basically the only woman this applies to.

I mean, sure, the status of the Aes Sedai is established from the beginning and Moiraine is their representative. But every POV woman in that book is boy-crazy to an absurd degree, and they all talk like personified estrogen stereotypes. So yes, the Wheel of Time was very progressive for its time, but that doesn't mean that there weren't some aspects in need of... improvement, to put it mildly.

And to my great joy, the show did in fact make efforts to improve on those points! The most obvious improvement is Nynaeve. In the books she becomes one of the most powerful magic users in recorded history, matching the strength of the famously over-powered Dragon Reborn. But throughout the first book she mostly just tags along and whines at Moiraine and Lan. The show gives her more agency for herself, as well as styling her as one of the Emond's Field folk that Moiraine is interested in instead of simply the stubborn village wisdom who followed along. It also gives us hints of her true capability with the One Power, and manages to characterize her emotions in ways beyond how hard she's pulling at her braid.

Egwene is similarly improved, especially as her friendship relates to Nynaeve, Matt, and Perrin. They also spend more time exploring the other Aes Sedai such that Moiraine isn't the only example we get of them, which helps cement their position in the world. All this, along with the omission or reduction of characters like Min and Elayne helps the strong representation of women from the later books become present right from the beginning.

So that's the main area where the show does better than the Eye of the World, the book from which most of the story is taken. Now you might be wondering how well it executed on the things Eye of the World did well? Honestly, they did all right. Some of the sets were very impressive, like the building interiors of Tar Valon and the village of Emond's Field. The casting was generally excellent aside from Moiraine simply being too tall, and the presentation of Shadar Logoth was genuinely perfect. Some of the fight choreography was stellar, particularly the scene with Rand's mother on Dragonmount, and some of the effects for channeling were excellent, especially with the green sisters guarding Logain. There was a lot of high quality stuff going on.

Which isn't to say it was all high quality. Excellent wide shots of beautifully scouted landscapes are sometimes bracketed or otherwise marred by poorly rendered or designed CG cities. For every excellent instance of clearly rendered and exciting channeling there were at least two lackluster moments that felt disturbingly like the bending sequences from Shyamalan's The Last Airbender. And I'm not personally sold on the way they chose to visualize the channeling anyway, even when it was working. None of that is debilitating, but it's worth knowing. Rumor is that season 2 will have a much larger budget, which will hopefully help improve some of these issues.

And then there were the creative decisions made while adapting the book to the show. These all fall outside the scope of the production itself, and if you haven't read the books you may not notice any of these. But while there were some good or even great changes, like we discussed above, there were also plenty of neutral or potentially worrying changes, which heck, let's talk about right here.

First off; yes, Perrin is married in the first episode. As soon as I found that out I figured his wife's purpose was to die in the initial Trolloc attack. That became even more apparent when it was revealed she was pregnant. What I did not expect was her to die inadvertently at Perrin's hand, but once that happened the change made sense; they were just trying to quickly characterize Perrin's future hesitation to fight and his future relationship fears. Makes sense, very effective.

Another change was the essentially colorblind casting of the Two Rivers. The world of The Wheel of Time books is quite ethnically diverse as described by Robert Jordan, with most of the nations being largely ethnically homogeneous internally. This is a source of conflict in later books, but not really in the first. The choice to cast the White Tower, the Whitecloaks, and Tar Valon at large without regard to ethnicity makes perfect sense. All three of those were melting-pots of various nations in the books. But the Two Rivers wasn't. That said, if it hadn't been cast that way a large part of the first season of the show would have been basically just white folks; that was how Jordan wrote it. So I get why they went with a colorblind casting. And given that the only real physical trait that ever matters to the plot is that the Aeil generally speaking have red hair, it'll probably be fine if they continue that casting trend.

Then there were a few seemingly innocuous changes that become more worrying the more I think about them. Skipping Caemlyn seems to make sense given the shortness of the season, but it's also a lot of setting cut from the story. The decision to push Egwene and Rand's relationship to be physical even before they left Emond's Field seems non-consequential, but has me worried. Likewise the decision to front-load Lan and Nynaeve's relationship into the first book. And the choice to make Moiraine and Siuan an item. And the choice to still Moiraine right at the end. And the drastic reduction in the importance of characters like Thom and Loial. The fact that the man Rand fought at the Eye was never specifically identified as not Shai-tan. The fact that the Forsaken are never really addressed. All of these individually don't seem problematic, but taken together they paint a picture that worries me.

It looks an awful lot like they might be planning a show that is four or five seasons long and focuses heavily on character stories and not much else.

Which might be fine, but my own personal relationship with the series leans heavily on the epic scale of the story and the incredible depth of the world it takes place in. So while nothing about these changes made the first season bad for me (really it was pretty good and I largely enjoyed it), they do give me pause regarding how much I'll actually like the later seasons.

And then there were the changes that outright baffled me. Thankfully this list is short, but that doesn't mean I'm letting them off the hook for it. The lesser evil was having Rand go off on his own at the end. If he doesn't return to Fal Dara, and he doesn't train with Lan on the sword, how the crap is he going to earn that heron-marked blade? And how are we supposed to know that the heron marks a blade-master? How is that supposed to become meaningful when he gets branded with it later? Or when Tam Al'Thor picks up another sword later on? You can't just have Rand magically learn how to use a sword, show. You've got to show it.

The other issue was the way-gates. You know, those mysterious Ogier-built magical gateways that seemed to be carved from living vines that stood in the heart of ancient wooded groves (where they hadn't been torn down or paved over by cities)? Turns out now they're blank, boring, stupid looking generic Minecraft portals that, get this, you open with the One Power.

Uh-huh. Not by using the leaf-stone-key thing that opens and closes the gate based on how it's placed, and which you can use to lock the gate by removing it entirely and taking it away or destroying it, and which will regrow over time to automatically make the gate passable again, and which is the secret sauce to the functionality of the Ways that makes them useful to the Dark One at all. In the show you channel at it and it opens. Which if you've read the book you know causes literally dozens of plot holes throughout the course of the series, but even better than that, it causes plot holes right within the continuity of the first season of this TV show!

Because they enter the Ways and find Trollocs in there. How'd the Trollocs get in there? They can't channel. Fades can't channel. As far as the show is concerned, nobody serving the Dark One can channel. So what gives? And even better than that, at the end of the episode during which they traverse the Ways we see Padan Fain exiting a way-gate. By himself. Padan Fain can't channel; how'd he get in there? How'd he get out?? And that's to say nothing of how the Ways were constructed by the Ogier, a race who can't channel, who live in Steddings specifically because the One Power is blocked there...

So yeah, the show is largely pretty good, with some bits that might be concerning to me in the future, all of which pales when compared to how they dropped a flying fart on their own continuity in the third-and-second-to-last episodes with that trip through the Ways.

Who wrote that? We need to have words.