I've never read The Wheel of Time books. While I consider myself a fantasy fan, to be honest, I've not really read most of the classics of the genre. I read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings in high school, and fell in love with the beautiful mess that is Stephen King's Dark Tower series my senior year (the final book, not counting The Wind through the Keyhole, came out when I was a freshman in college). I've read the two existing volumes of Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles, and I read The Magicians (and didn't really like it.)
I've engaged with the fantasy genre more through games, I think, than literature, to be honest - indeed, I think fantasy probably makes up the majority of the video games I play.
Anyway, I don't know much of the Wheel of Time, despite the series being around about since I was born. So the Amazon Prime show is my main connection to it.
Today saw the conclusion of the first season. A battle was fought, destinies revealed. It's all well and good.
I think these days, Game of Thrones is remembered more for its profoundly disappointing final season, but it's worth noting that it was only disappointing because it had been quite good before that point (well, maybe the last two seasons were where things went off the rails). One thing that I think is quite remarkable is that the showrunners were able to make battles feel epic despite being on the small screen. The battle of the Blackwater at the end of season two and the battle at Castle Black at the end of season four both felt exciting, dangerous, and huge in scope.
The battle in this episode doesn't really hit that. There's a mass of trollocs charging toward a big wall known as The Gap, and we get basically one scene in which the ruler of the city (whose name I don't even remember) is shooting crossbow bolts at the trollocs climbing the walls until he's overrun and one of them thrusts a javelin through his chest. Then, once the trollocs are past the wall, the ruler's sister uses the life energy of a few other women to call down lightning and obliterate the trollocs - the energy-drain killing all of them by Egwene, who is nevertheless able to bring back Nynaeve.
Establishing stakes in fantasy is a tricky business - the very things that make the genre exciting, such as massive, diverse worlds and mysterious and enormous powers, require a lot of exposition, but also a lot of effort to make the significance of a place come across.
I'm honestly all the more impressed with what Peter Jackson pulled off in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In a three (or four, if you have the extended editions) hour movie, he makes the battle of Helm's Deep feel like the absolute most crucially important fight in the world. This fortress, which we don't even really see until right before the battle, feels important.
Budget issues are obviously part of this - even with the massive amount of cash that Amazon is throwing at a project like this, it might be less an issue of financial budget than one of time management.
The Wheel of Time casts a wide net. There are five "main characters," which doesn't include other important characters like Moiraine and Lan. Rand's story is clearly meant to be the centerpiece, but he suffers from what I like to call "protagonist syndrome." This often has him going off on his own special journey that doesn't involve the other characters, which means he's got way more to carry on his own. The problem is that, by teasing out this question of who the dragon reborn was, the time given to all the other characters meant that we didn't really even get to know him much this season.
Indeed, I think one of the traps that these stories get into is that, when a main character is some kind of chosen one, that winds up being their primary personality trait. Fate has something in store for them, so they wind up being kind of this blank figure for the audience to just write themselves into, while the other characters get more detail because, well, they have to. The result, though, is that protagonists in this kind of story wind up feeling bland. You could almost just guess at who the Dragon Reborn is simply by the fact that if he weren't, Rand wouldn't really serve much of a purpose in the story.
It's funny - watching through Carnival Row the past few days, I found myself wishing that there was more careful worldbuilding for that setting. That show is not an adaptation, though it feels like it could be, if not for the fact that there's some clumsy worldbuilding (like how a maid tells Vignette that they aren't to use the "finest china," in a world where there is no China to be famous for its fine porcelain). I am, actually, interested in the world of Wheel of Time, but it feels very thinly sketched.
Naturally, another comparison comes up, which is The Witcher (the second season of which I blew through in a single day). Not only does that series improve greatly over its first season, but that's a world where I think I actually have enough to feel situated - I understand the vibe of Nilfgaard versus the Northern Kingdoms, and the place that elves have in the society. Ironically, the Witcher is a story with more personal stakes - though it does involve a "chosen one," it concerns itself largely with living a human life despite being so magically different.
There were parts of the show that I liked, including this episode. I love the fact that the previous Dragon Reborn lived in a futuristic era with flying cars and such - I love when fantasy acknowledges that magic doesn't only work in a medieval world. I just think the show needs to be better about prioritizing certain story elements to make sure they land. Adapting novels into television seasons rather than movies does free up more space to keep more of the story, but you still need to do some judicious editing to distill it into something that fits in the hours you have on the screen.
Anyway, I'm sure I'll watch the second season when it comes out. But I'm hoping the show steps up.
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