Wheel of Time season 1 episode 8 "The Eye of the World" season finale

[Alvana]

I actually loved that LTT was called the Dragon Reborn. He's not the first and only incarnation of the champion of the light.

About 20% of that episode was in the books. Not book 1, just... The books

[Kordin]

Given that the response from non book readers is almost universally very positive, I would say that it's safe to say that the problem is us, not the show.

I think our minds kept telling us that we should lower expectations while our hearts said "firetruck you I love this series and expect the moon."

I disagree. Problem is definitely within showrunners like these. No one expect every scene from the books, the lowest expectations are, and always should be - do not change the core, the foundations of the word, characters, whatever magic there is etc.

This isn't about lowering expectations, it's about burying them 60 feet under. It's like the showrunners had to take a dump, wanted reading material, grabbed nearest book, which happened to be EotW, read it on the can, realized there's no paper, started ripping the pages, wiped, turned and looked at the dung stained pages and went "now thats a great adaptation!"

As for non book fans loving it - People loved twilight, love watching kardashians... Point is, People love crap and the universal bar is low af.

[Kordin]

It's still season one only. A lot of shows have atrocious first seasons and go onto hit their stride (TNG star trek).

I think Aes Sedai are hard to pitch correctly. Same with production issues. Same with trying to get really cool scenes for the male characters while depicting a matriarchal world.

I see a lot of people here pissed off with the woke stuff but maybe compare with how many shows and films have had zero good scenes for women - if there's a rebalancing at work it can take a little time to come about because this is still very new.

GoT is also another example of a show that got many things right but an entire season really wrong. I wouldn't write a show off based on one season, especially not the first one when they're doing something so new (and with who knows what production issues - mat recasting etc).

With the attention ti detail RJ had, that would drive us insane while reading, i fail to see how naything would be hard to pitch. Not for someone who truly knows the books, world and characters. And not with the budget they have.

GoT majorly started fing up when they had no more books to go off, before that it wasn't as atrocious as this. From first 10 min of ep 1 so1 it was one "WoTheF" after another.

Witcher Season 1 was slow but they did it to built the world for nonbook readers and/or gamers. And it worked. Slow but great. And they had the same budget and production issues for Season 2 as did WOT.

[Thore]

What came first on Witcher, books or game? Didn't even realize there were books. Been enjoying the show though for the most part. Some cringey parts and characters though.

[Kordin]

What came first on Witcher, books or game? Didn't even realize there were books. Been enjoying the show though for the most part. Some cringey parts and characters though.

Books (early 90') then games then show.

[Aira]

I will say that I do appreciate the use of the Old Tongue in the opening sequence of the finale, but I dont appreciate the fact that closed caption had to be turned on in order to see the translation. That's not what CC subtitles are supposed to be used for. If the show was standards compliant, the subtitles should've been exactly the Old Tongue words they were speaking, so if you were deaf or partially deaf, too bad for you, because there was no way to know that they were speaking in Old Tongue short of lip reading and wondering what kind of gibberish was being said. So in a season finale, I had to stop the show, rewind, turn on captions and re-watch an entire scene. Thanks Amazon.

Oh, that's weird. I was trying to take a still and I couldn't get rid of the English subtitles even by switching subtitles off. I didn't have to turn anything on to see the translation, it was more that I couldn't get rid of it, at all. Wonder if it's an app/ device thing. Or even a US vs non-US thing for the app/ site.

[Jestin]

I think she was saying that if you're deaf you wouldn't know that they were speaking the Old Tongue, they could have just been speaking English.

[isabel]

Interview with the director where he explains some of the plot changes:

https://collider.com/wheel-of-time-seas ... -season-2/

Interview with Rosamund Pike about the Siuan-focused earlier episode, too too funny at about 27 mins left

https://open.spotify.com/episode/01u4vZWYD1trTOa2HWCTUg

[langois]

Wow that was bad.

I’ll give season 2 one or two episodes and if it doesn’t get way better I’ll just give up on it

[halfhand]

My thoughts on Season 1 in general.

First of all, I will acknowledge the challenges that they had. Wheel of Time is a large text that need to be boiled down the a TV serialization format and there is some complex concepts and deep woven lore that is typical of High Fantasy. Covid-19 was a major challenge for the logistics and adding all addition overhead costs. Mat's departure resulted in last minute editting and rewrites. The TV series could have benefit from longer run time and more episodes per Raife's request. With that said, the final product is the final product, and I will judge it based on that.

As a TV show, it gets a B.
Characters. The characterization for the most part was designed for Moiraine and Lan and they got the lion share of development. I think their relationship and those associated with them work out well, and everything else suffered. Egwene and Nynaeve got the second tier, and the boys were the last. Perrin essentially had flat development after episode 1 and Matt literally dissapeared. Rand got some later development, but it was rushed and sacrificed due to the show's attempted mystery. There was many secondary and tertiary characters that shown with their brief time, but many of them dissapeared at various times (Loail).

Camera work and editing. The editing was not polished. At this tier (Prestige TV), there should be a much more experienced editing crew. There was confusing and choppy areas that result in confusion. Examples including abrupt cut when Loail shows up with Nynaeve in Tar Valon out of nowhere, Lan teleporting out of his house in Fal Dara behind Nynaeve, or even the last scene teaser where the Seanchan appear to be tsunaming an empty beach. Characters often appear from off screen from odd locations in the stage. Many of the shots and blocking made rooms appear small. There was a lack of any sweep shot of placed like the White Tower, giving it a small claustrophobic apartment feel.

Writing and plot. The Mystery of the Dragon I think was an interesting hook if they actually made it work. In the first few episodes, it seemed like it was fairly interesting take, but it ended up with really on payoff and became quite predictable. It resulted in a lack of focus on Rand's development, which made it more obvious it was him, but resulted in less satisfying reveal.
The way they simplify many of the concepts just makes a very deep world quite flat and one dimensional. It is almost written in a way that makes it predictable, generic fantasy, and lacking in flavor.
The pacing was unsteady from lack of time available, there is no need to harp on this more.

CGI. Looks expected for the level of costs. There are times when it clearly needed more polish and work.

Costuming. I think it was interesting to see their take on different nation's clothing and their attempt to be consistent. I know there's complaints that people weren't dirty enough, but honestly that level of costuming is like next level polish when they have struggled with some basic level of polish. I don't about care about being too clean ,I just would like a visual spectale that is interesting and consistent. The Aes Sedai ring is emblematic of a lot of issues, taking a elegent visually prop and turning into a gaudy monstrosity. The reasoning that it doesn't show up on screen well is a stupid argument when there is something called Lord of the Rings with famous rings that anyone can recognize and didn't have this problem at all.


Now, as a Wheel of Time Show, I will have to say it is C+. There is some level of faithfulness to general plot lines. However, when I think about what I would want from a Wheel of Time in visual medium, I think about seeing some of the scenes in the books brought to live. And when I think of the EOTW book and my favorite scenes (Matt and Rand meeting creepy Ordeith, Rand confronting the CoL and one of them says "Heron-marked, Bornhald...", Perrin learning about wolves with Elyas, Rand in the Andor Throneroom, the final Rand at the Gap) and realizing none of them made the cut, and knowing that in the same pattern, all of the interesting scenes in the future will be inevitably cut as well (matt and the quarterstaff fight, Lan teaching Rand how to impress Moiraine and Siuan, Dark Prophiecies or any of the prophecies, "Five will ride forth", Rand's battle over Falme mirroring the fight on the ground and sheathing the sword, "I win again Lews Therin", Dumai's Well, "Kneel or be knelt", "Let the Lord of Chaos Reign"). None of those will make the final TV draft. I didn't expect one-to-one remake, but I would expect at least a scene to make it.
And that is probably the biggest challenge as a book reader. All those well written great scenes with such emotional payoff aren't going to make it. And a TV show doesn't need them to be successful, but when you can see the potential of something, a B-grade show it probably going to seem very stale.


My hopes for Season 2 and further.
Some fidelity to at least the lore of the Wheel of Time. Cat's out of the bag with Moiraine "stilled", Rand wndering around by himself. Changes and cuts are obviously necessary. Characters can change, merge, be different. Settings and some plot points can be different sure. But, when you start actively changing basic lore and foundation, it's like changing physics of a world, you have a lot of downstream issues that you can either ignore, or attempt to fix resulting in more and more problems. And unless you have writers that are on the level of RJ, they probably are going to slowly dissolve into an incoherent mess.
Changing things just for the sake of change does not make things better.

Give the audience some credit or intelligence. Data has shown that WoT viewing crew is actually older than the normal streaming crowd. It's entirely possible to present complex history to the audience without dumbing it so much it is generic water down fantasy.

Sometimes a little fanservice will give you a lot of credit with the more hardcore audience (bookreader) that will serve as brand ambassadors.