After bingeing through the entire second season of the Witcher yesterday (something I don't think I've ever quite done) I finished things off for the evening with the penultimate episode of The Wheel of Time.
The episode was a subdued one - very much a calm before the storm. The exception being its cold-open, in which we see a super-badass pregnant woman fighting off numerous armored soldiers as she's going into labor.
The last of these soldiers (well, the last she fights) manages to jab a dagger into her side, missing the soon-to-be-born baby, but leaving a fatal wound. Then, as she collapses by a boulder, needing to finally push the little tyke out of her, another soldier from this enemy army arrives - but this one plants his sword (with a familiar Heron symbol in it) into the snow and help deliver the baby. Once the kid is out there and crying, his mother lets go and dies, and the soldier takes off his helmet to reveal that he is Tam al'Thor - Rand's (apparently adoptive) father.
It's a curious scene - our sympathies are obviously with the pregnant woman, though the soldiers don't have obvious "bad guy" colors, their armor being green and gold. And, of course, Tam has appeared to be a pretty nice guy in our earlier scenes with him.
I guess I've been trying to place the tone of the Wheel of Time for a while. It certainly does not seem to be on the gritty, cynical level of the Witcher or Game of Thrones, leaning more into classic good versus evil fantasy of the Tolkienesque variety. Still, the show has shown a penchant for brutal violence, even as its story tends toward a more YA focus (to be fair, I think the YA genre has gotten gorier since I was the target demographic. Harry Potter was the real dominant franchise of such things when I was growing up, while I think Hunger Games, which came later, seemed to really amp up the deadly and gruesome violence).
The episode itself gives us a bit of classic YA drama by introducing the notion that Perrin is also in love with Egwene, though the choice to have had Perrin be married at the beginning of the story (which is apparently not in the books) remains a really intense choice - somehow, the story of a blacksmith who accidentally killed his wife in the heat of battle feels like it should be the story of a character who's pushing 40, not in his early 20s.
Meanwhile we learn more about Lan - that he actually should practically be a king, if not for the fact that his kingdom was swallowed up by "The Blight." We actually see the Blight by the end of the episode - a kind of twisted, semi-tree-like growth that seems inert but for the fact that there are also skeletons of people who must have been trapped within it.
The episode also sort of stumbles into a reveal - mainly by just having Rand think about things - that he, in fact, is the Dragon Reborn (something I'd gleaned from just reading anything about the book series). We got a little hint of this earlier, when he smashed the door that had trapped him and Mat back several episodes earlier, and we find out that earlier in this episode, when Egwene seemingly channels magic to knock a stray trolloc into the void while they're crossing The Ways, it's actual Rand who does this.
So, I've got to be honest - I like this show, and enjoy watching it, but the fantasy elements are tossed around kind of haphazardly. I still don't know how, precisely, Moiraine figured out that the Dragon Reborn was going to be in Two Rivers, and why it had to be one of these five people. I don't know if the books do it much better, but there is a bit of a magnetic poetry feel to the fantasy tropes involved here. There's so much that is so very vague - like what the Dragon Reborn is meant to do at the Eye of the World to defeat the Dark One. Maybe the speed with which they are going through the story here is part of the issue.
Also, there's Mat: apparently the show re-cast the character for the second season, and they must have fired the original Mat while filming, because that kind of "huh" look as a reaction while Mat decides not to go into the portal to the Ways is not... precisely seamless. I mean, logistical issues come up, and maybe they had a very good reason to fire him, or he had a very good reason to quit. But it does come off as kind of botched.
Of course, a similar thing happened in The Expanse (another Amazon show) when a longrunning central cast member turned out to be a toxic creep, and his character's removal from the show was also abrupt and clearly accomplished with preexisting footage. These things happen.
Inevitably, I find myself comparing this show with the one that I binged all 8 episodes of earlier yesterday. It's not really a fair comparison, but I do think if we're talking fantasy TV, I find that The Witcher manages to feel a bit more like a lived-in world. There is something about the production design in The Wheel of Time that kind of calls attention to its artifice (I remember thinking Shadar Logoth looked really cool until it became very clear to me that they just used the same sets for Tar Valon but without any of the merchant stalls or hanging plants or extras to make it look like a living city). The show also suffers a bit from having a primary cast of young characters who haven't yet developed enough personality to make them interesting. I don't want to blame the actors for this - it's an issue with the writing (and possibly the source material.) As with many reviewers, I think that Rosamund Pike is doing some profoundly heavy lifting to imbue the show with gravitas, but if she is meant to be the mentor figure that supports the protagonists, she outshines them so much that I kind of just want her to be the main character.
Still, this is all nitpicking. You know, before Game of Thrones, the idea of getting epic fantasy on television was unthinkable. While it took a while for other studios to catch up to the idea, I'm really enjoying the efforts put into production design and sweeping scope that we're getting with shows these days. I'm hoping that, if the Wheel of Time is a hit, we'll see a stronger effort in a second season. The Witcher, as I said in my write-up yesterday, improved tremendously by shaking off its first-season nerves (and also being able to get into the meat of the story). There's a lot to buy into with the fantasy genre, and in fact, a lot of these series start to get better only after the author and the audience has had the chance to steep in the world for a bit. It could be the same with TV adaptations.
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