Spoilers for the first three episodes ahead.
The time has come, the wheel has turned, the first three episodes of The Wheel of Time are available to stream on Amazon Prime. I sat down on Thursday night to watch all of them in one go and I thought it was often pretty good, sometimes great, and sometimes not so good!
The first episode makes it clear that this show is going to plunge you into the action first, and explain things later, which is a good approach for this sort of story. Robert Jordan is an excellent writer, but he has a reputation for being long-winded and for spilling a lot of ink in the name of world building and historical background for his books, but that doesn’t translate well to screen most of the time. I appreciate just how menacing they made the Aes Sedai feel in this intro as well. That’s something these first few episodes really nail: the feeling that even one of the “good guys” (Moiraine) is a member of a morally grey organization that can often be pretty brutal in pursuing their goals.
When we’re introduced to the Emond’s Field five, the main characters of the story, is when I start to have some complaints. Namely the surprising choice to give one of the characters a wife when he was unmarried in the book, and the unsurprising choice to kill off said wife in the very first episode. This left a bad taste in my mouth even as I can understand why the writers chose to keep it in. It raises the stakes, gives the character emotional resonance that wasn’t there before, but at the expense of a lazy trope that I could see coming from the first second she was introduced.
The first episode also contains our first battles scene, and I was mostly happy with it. The books can be fairly intense at times and I’m glad the show runners decided to not pull any punches in terms of the action they show on screen. I was genuinely sitting on the edge of my seat and actually a little shocked at just how nasty some of the fighting got. It helped sell the idea that this is a dangerous world that could come for our characters at any moment.
Speaking of characters, I’m quite fond already of a number of the figures populating the show. I think Pike does a pitch perfect job as Moiraine and I’m especially a fan of Barney Harris’ turn as Mat Cauthon, which is all the more of a letdown seeing as he won’t be returning for season 2. Josha Stradowski does his best as Rand, but it’s always been my opinion that Rand was the most boring of the five despite his prominence as the main character. That rings true on the show as well. He’s fine, but not nearly as much fun as his counterparts, though he does have his moments.
The next two episodes bring us to nearly the middle of the first book. I was surprised at how much ground they covered, and it left me wondering just where this season would end. The show runners have been cagey about exactly what they’re covering in season one, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they go beyond the first book and in to the second.
There are some great moments in these two episodes, as well as some things that didn’t quite land for me. I loved Moiraine’s speech on the road about Manetheren and the ancient battles they fought in the place where our main characters grew up. I thought the design of Shadar Logoth was great, nearly identical to how I pictured it when I read it in the book. The first “dream” that Rand has of the dark lord is also genuinely weird and frightening in a way that these scenes just aren’t in the book. It’s a shame that later “nightmares” fall back into some pretty cheesy territory, especially seeing just how horrifying the show runners were willing to get.
While I loved the design of Shadar Logoth, I didn’t especially like what they did with the sequence of events that take place there. All in all it was quite short, and Mat finding the cursed dagger was a little anticlimactic. Having generic black fog come after our protagonists was a let down after seeing how much work they put in to the look and feel of the place.
We also get to see the White Cloaks in these two episodes, and I’m quite pleased with their depiction. They’re one of my favorite kinds of antagonists in a story: ones who fervently believe they are doing the right thing. Sure, the questioner is a little cartoonishly sadistic, but it’s true to the book’s themes. Namely: how so many different groups, nations, political interests, and religions can all exist at the same time and all claim they are the sole bearers of truth and virtue.
Episode three has some pretty major changes from the book, but I didn’t mind them too much. We’ll see how loyal the show is as it continues, but it doesn’t have to recreate the story page for page in order for it to be good. The opposite is true, actually, and it seems like for the most part the show runners have been thoughtful about what they are changing, and what they are keeping the same.
One theory I’ve seen floating around that has given me some thought has to do with the way the show has been handling the identity of the “dragon” versus how it looks in the book. In the books, it’s apparent right from the start that Rand is the dragon and the story revolves around him. In the show, they haven’t come out and said it yet, in fact they’ve turned up the dial on the mystery, making it seem like any of the Emond’s Field five could be the dragon. All of them are sensitive to the One Power to some degree or another, Egwene most of all. Could they be aiming for a massive change in making Egwene or someone else the dragon? I’m not sure, but it could be interesting!
All in all, I was quite happy with these first three episodes despite some minor complaints. I think the production design is top notch despite the odd low quality CG moments, the show looks and sounds beautiful, the action scenes rip, and the characters are endearing and mostly likable.
Overall I’d give the first three episodes a 6/10. Above average and promising, but with some flaws holding it back from being truly great yet. Looking forward to a new episode this Friday.
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