The Wheel of Time Thread (Books, TV Show, Comics, etc.)

[Going Commando]

The Wheel of Time is a high fantasy book series written by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, that has recently been adapted into a television  series by Amazon Studios.

 

Let this be the discussion thread for all forms of Wheel of Time media.

[Going Commando]

I'm responding here to a question asked by @Momma There Goes That Man about the WoT TV show in the general TV thread because I didn't want to bog that thread down any more with in depth discussion of a single show: 

 

9 hours ago, Momma There Goes That Man said:

I finished it and did enjoy it. Looking forward to seeing where it all goes. Have tons of questions though 
 

what didn’t you like about the finale? Was it the way the encounter with the dark one was depicted?  

 

This post is going to contain significant book spoilers, but the thing is from 1990 so oh well.

 

I understand and actually liked some of the changes the book series made to the ending of the first book as well as that encounter you mention, but there were other changes I felt were mis-steps.  But first here is some background info from the books that will clarify the discussion:

 

That wasn't the Dark One that Rand encountered at the Eye of the world.  That was a super powerful evil ancient Aes Sedai from the Age of Legends who calls himself Ishamael.  He is the leader of a group of 13 evil Age of Legends Aes Sedai that the good guys call The Forsaken.  They are basically the Big Bads for most of the book series, and they are like high priests of the Dark One and the primary instruments of his will in the world.  The Dark One is an entity named Shai'tan that is basically like a god of evil trying to break out of his prison and unmake reality and break the turning of the Wheel.  Most of the Forsaken don't really know this is what the Dark One is trying to do, they think helping him bust out will allow them to rule the world as all powerful tyrants.  But Ishamael is the wisest and most powerful of them and he figures it out and he is a nihilst who wants the cycle of time and history to end.  If the Dark One had been free and Rand had truly encountered him at the end of the book, he would have been mincemeat at that tender stage of his development.

 

Anyway, the show leaves Ishamael's identity intentionally vague, which mirrors how it was in the books.  I think Robert Jordan wrote it vague so that it could plausibly tie off the story with this one book in case he wasn't able to sell the series.  Or maybe he did so on advice from Tor Books in case they had to cancel his series if the first book didn't sell.  He later retcons in an explanation via point of view chapters from the Forsaken where they talk about how Ishamael had gone so crazy that he'd started posing himself as the Dark One, but that they were way too afraid of him to call him out on his blasphemy.  In the first book, Rand/Mat/Perrin explicitly think that the Dark One is the one talking to them in their dreams and they have no awareness of it being Ishamael.

 

In the books, the Age of Legends was a time of advanced technological, magical, and cultural civilization that was basically a Utopia.  They didn't even know the Dark One existed yet because he had been successfully locked away in his prison for so long.  And that Utopia ended when cutting edge Aes Sedai scientific researchers found the Dark One's prison via the One Power, didn't know what it was, and bored a hole into it, thus releasing evil back into the world and triggering their age's version of the Dragon cycle.  This led to those traitor Aes Sedai joining the Dark One and becoming the Forsaken and it caused a horribly cataclysmic conflict called the War of the Power that almost destroyed civilization.  Basically a magical nuclear holocaust.  The good guys, led by Lews Therin, are losing the war.  So he makes a desperate attempt to save everyone by striking at the source of the evil--the original bore in the Dark One's prison.  He is successful in that he puts a patch on that bore via these special seven magical seals.  They are made of an unbreakable magical material called cuendillar, which is what that crystally looking stuff in the show was.  And they basically serve as the physical manifestation of the patch on that hole in the prison.  And as a fortunate bonus to Lews Therin's triumph, all 13 of the Forsaken just so happened to be having a meeting inside the Dark One's prison when he resealed the bore, so they got physically trapped in there with the Dark One.  But there were two big drawbacks to Lews Therin's victory.  First, Ishamael had been close to the edge of the seal when he was trapped inside so he's able to still magically dream out his consciousness into the world and influence it that way, which is why he contacts Rand/Mat/Perrin in their dreams.  Second, and more importantly, Lews Therin and his companions used the male half of the One Power (Saidin) to create that seal on the prison and it got touched by the Dark One in the process, and this put the taint on Saidin.  And that was a disaster because it caused all of the male channelers still left in the Age of Legends to go insane and they caused further cataclysmic environmental destruction that finished off what was left of their civilization. 

 

It serves the plot of the show to leave that confusion over Ishamael's identity in, because the encounter at the Eye is an elaborate trap for Rand and Moiraine where Ishamael tricks Rand into breaking one of the seals.  That ying-yang looking crest that Rand was standing on was one of the seven seals, and if Rand and Moiraine had known they weren't going to fight the Dark One and that he was actually still sealed away, they obviously wouldn't have gone to the Eye and fallen into the trap.

 

I can tell that the show is going to use the breaking of that seal to explain how the Forsaken get free from the prison and can now go out and start enacting their schemes that form most of the conflict of the book series.  RJ never made it clear how the first ones got free in the books, and the seals broke mysteriously and passively and often "off-screen."  The show presents a much cleaner and more direct narrative for that process, and it gives Rand and Moiraine some interesting internal conflict to work through as the enormity of the mistake they made unfolds.  So I think this was a good change.

 

I have also come to appreciate the different way they portrayed the Eye, but it was a jarring change that threw me at first.  In the show, it's an Ancient Aes Sedai temple ruin in the middle of the Blight that is built around one of the seals.  The seal is big and impressive looking.  In the books, the Eye was much more Arthurian and mythic.  It was a moving oasis in The Blight with no fixed location that only appeared to people in a desperate time of need.  The power of the Blight was held back from consuming the eye because it was tended by a friendly magical gardener entity called the Green Man, who was basically a Tolkien Ent.  And inside this little oasis was a cave with a massive underground reservoir of the One Power that took the physical form of a magical lake.  Rand is a novice who can barely channel at this point, but he is occasionally inhabited by the mind of Lews Therin and becomes the avatar of the Dragon, and in the books he uses up that lake of One Power to defeat Ishamael in his confrontation at the Eye and then teleport to Tarwin's Gap to destroy the Trolloc Army there before teleporting back to the Eye and helping his friends.  In doing so, he drains the lake, and at the bottom of the lake was a treasure chest containing three key McGuffins:

 

1- the battle banner of the Dragon, which Rand is supposed to raise to signal to the world that the Dragon has returned

2 - one of the seven seals of the prison (which is not very impressive in the book, it's more like a dinner plate sized ying-yang looking Taeguk object)

3 - the Horn of Valere.  This is a mythical artifact of extreme power that is basically an analogy to the Arthurian Holy Grail in RJ's world.  Questing heroes have been looking for it for thousands of years, and the person who blows the Horn is able to summon all of the mythic heroes who are bound to the Wheel in an endless cycle of reincarnation.  So they basically get like a ghost army of Valhallans to fight for them for a bit--a key part of winning the last battle.

 

The show's portrayal of the Eye is vastly simplified, and I think that was necessary.  But what I don't like about it is that they no longer had a significant place to introduce the Horn of Valere, so they just kind of stuck it under Aglemar's throne.  They needed to come up with a better idea than that.  Put it at the Eye in some other way.  The Horn is a tremendously powerful and sought after weapon that needed to be out of reach/temptation for everyone.

 

Another big change that the show made was to turn the identity of the Dragon Reborn into a mystery with a twist reveal.  The book is mostly from Rand's perspective and it's pretty clear to the reader that he's the Dragon and he's hiding this from everyone else in the company because he is afraid of his fate.  I like the way the showed made this a twist, but I think doing so forced them to sacrifice a lot of Rand's character development in order to preserve the mystery.  And when you combine this with the show making it Nynaeve, Egwene, and three other random characters who defeat the Trolloc army at Tarwin's Gap instead of Rand, it makes the Dragon and the stakes of the conflict he is a central part of confused and insignificant.  The Dragon is the main character of the story, he is a double-edged messiah.  He is absolutely necessary to the salvation of the world because he's the only one who can fix the hole in the Dark One's prison, but he also has a doomed fate as a male channeler and people think he will go crazy afterwards and break the world again.  None of these stakes are present in the first season, and I think that lack of context is a real weakness of the show.  It makes it seem like Moiraine is a fool for bringing Rand to the Eye when we don't clearly understand that the Dragon is the only one who can win the Last Battle.  If the real threat was him being tempted into becoming a servant of the Shadow and he's not necessary for winning these big fights, then Moiraine should have just killed him when she found him.

 

Also, if the characters were convinced that they were fighting the Last Battle in episode 8, then the show needed to do a better job contextualizing the Last Battle earlier in the series to give a sense of narrative stakes/consequence to this climax.  And the battle itself needed more organization and a better presentation.  Having the Shienarans be taken by surprise and essentially mount a hapless defense was disappointing to me.  This is a militant nation of elite warriors being led by one of the greatest soldiers in their world, who conduct a campaign into the Blight at Tarwin's Gap every year.  They made Fal Dara look visually amazing, suggesting hat this is a great people and culture we're dealing with, and yet the people of this place are ineffectual and idiotic?  They needed to conduct themselves better in this fight.

 

 And then you have the greatest warrior of the group in Lan leave for the entirety of the battle when that is both inconsistent with his character (he's a borderland king who is the ultimate warrior and would never leave his friends and the Shienarans high and dry during their greatest hour of need) and bad visual storytelling.  He should have gotten some kind of spectacular Aragorn moment in the episode instead of just wordlessly wandering around that Blight set.  The rest of the main characters also just kind of stumble into a disorganized defense during the siege.  Perrin and Loial do nothing when you have an epic moment perfectly teed up for a fight between them and the Shienaran elite honor guard versus Padin Fain and his Fades?  Come on, you have got to give the audience something there, you can't have that conflict resolved off camera like it was.  They gave a spectacular, 10 minute cold open fight where they got a bajillion dollar state of the art camera to film a completely made up fight sequence between Rand's mom and some soldiers in the snow on Dragonmount.  I thought that was fantastic.  But if you give us that kind of spectacle for something you made up whole cloth in the middle of the series, then you have got to at least match that level of spectacle in the heroic moments of our main characters in the climax of the story, or else you've created anti-climax.

 

And then the worst moment of the finale came about as a direct consequence of their decision to cut Rand's big moment where he destroys the Trolloc army.  Because of that, they had to figure out a different way to beat that Trolloc army, and the best idea they could come up with was for Egwene and Nyneave and three randoms to link up and wipe them out.  But to try and put a limit on this spectacular use of power, they have Nynaeve get burned out and die in the process.  Except Nynaeve is a crucial main character who can not be killed in the first season without ruining the series, so they have her magically brought back to life and regain her ability to channel for no apparent reason.  That was awful.  They really needed to come up with a better idea than that.  That is writing yourself into a corner.

 

I understand that production of the first season almost got ruined by Covid shut downs and by the actor who plays Mat Cauthon dipping out on them.  And I read that Amazon had hard deadlines for the show's release that prevented them getting a delay that would have probably helped them make a better adaptation of the climax of the book.  That really sucks and it's why I'm not going to write the show off despite the weak season finale.  But they need to get better at giving context and stakes in their adaptation, and they need to get better at handling the story-breaking consequences of the big changes they make in their adaptation.  And I think they just need to do a better job adapting their male protagonists.  They don't really exist yet outside of Egwaine or Moiraine.  Thom Merrilin's adaptation was a huge missed opportunity.  He's Moiraine's ultimate love interest in the books, a crucial avuncular figure to Elayne Trakand (a main character who was totally cut from the first season), and basically Mat's best friend and mentor throughout the series.  He also is a kind of a sage with vast knowledge of the world's history, politics, and lore, and thus is a useful vehicle for exposition that the show could have used to address it's contextualization weaknesses.

 

Sorry for the extremely long response, but this five million word book series and hundred million dollar TV series are worth in depth discussion.

[bearrock]

It is absolutely one of my favorite book series of all time.  I am glad they made an adaptation, but it's a really really tall task.  Good luck to them.