Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Time books, and they’re bringing that knowledge to bear as they recap each episode of Amazon’s new WoT TV series. These recaps won’t cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. If you want to stay unspoiled and haven’t read the books, these recaps aren’t for you.
New episodes of The Wheel of Time will be posted to Amazon Prime subscribers every Friday.
A friend gifted me a paperback copy of The Eye of the World in what must have been mid-2003, which I have pinpointed so precisely because I know that Crossroads of Twilight had come out but that it hadn’t yet come out in paperback. So I burned through them all once or twice in high school, and then re-read the whole series again sometime in the mid-Sanderson era, and then did my last full-series re-read in 2019 after I talked about EotW on my book podcast.
All of that being said! When these books are good they are still really engaging. Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones comparisons are going to be inevitable throughout this project, so I will just break that seal now—those books and that series sort of revel in their blood-soaked nihilism, but Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson loved all their characters and very, very rarely deployed “surprise major character death” or “gratuitous sexual assault” as a driver of narrative.
(Speaking of characters whose names sound like “Tom,” Thom Merrilin has an absolutely electrifying introduction—though, sadly, the character lacks giant, white twirly mustaches. We’ll probably have more to say about Thom in a future piece.)
You’re an excellent book reviewer—folks, check out Andrew’s podcast!—and I’d love to hear your take. What is the right way for a monstrous book-to-TV adaptation to slim down? How do you balance the need to tell that story with the need to be a coherent, functional, standalone adaptation?
And that’s sort of what you need to do, right? TV shows especially rely on this kind of shorthand, the ability to tell us what we need to know about a person or a group of people with a combination of visual cues and one or two characters. Obviously, some of a book’s depth and complexity can be introduced later, once audiences have gotten a bit more comfortable. But in the early going in a show like this it’s all about combining performances and visuals to create memorable first impressions. The Whitecloak sequences are great at this. The scenes where Moiraine or Lan stand and monologue at the rest of the characters for multiple minutes, less so.
Moiraine is hunting, as we’re told, for the Dragon Reborn—the reincarnation of the man who, thousands of years ago, “broke the world” and ushered in an age of chaos and darkness. Though the first Dragon was a man, the current Dragon Reborn could be anyone of a certain age. There are long-term plot implications here, and a bunch of the first season is concerned with leading the audience on about precisely who this Dragon is. All Moiraine knows is that it’s almost certainly one of our five main characters—the rougue-ish Mat, red-haired Rand, brooding Perrin, pensive Egwene, or Nynaeve, the village Wisdom (think half doctor, half person who punches you in the face for disturbing the peace).
On the other hand, the split between the male and female halves of the One Power is foundational to pretty much everything in the entire series (gender is strictly binary in Randland, though the show seems open to experimenting with this, and I hope that it does). The Dragon Reborn is in danger, and Moiraine needs to find him, specifically because he is a man who will channel the corrupted male half of the One Power, dooming him to eventual madness. The last time the Dragon Reborn went mad, he snapped the world in half like a fresh Oreo. Even among people who believe he will save the world, there’s a belief that he must be tightly controlled. This is, again, pretty foundational stuff. And I’m still not sure how the decision to mess with that is going to play out long-term.
Discussing this without trying to race through it to look at the narrative consequences is difficult—almost as difficult as adapting this series in the first place. And without spoiling things for non-book readers, Perrin’s choice about whether to “take up the axe” or “take up the hammer” makes up the majority of his character arc, and this is a difficult thing to see the consequences of. At first, I thought I was going to hate it—but the more I think about it, the more interesting it becomes. It’s fascinating to see these characters I’ve lived with in my head for 20+ years suddenly doing something new. I think I like it.
Zooming in a bit: what characters are working for you in these first three episodes? Who seems to have a handle on the character and who doesn’t? I have thoughts, but I want to hear yours first.
How about you?
The characters who have changed more are the ones who struggle more. Madeleine Madden, who plays Egwene, isn’t doing anything wrong, but she hasn’t left much of an impression yet. And Harris is just coming across as flat and unlikable as Mat. Some of that might be the show’s fault! Because, as you mentioned, show-Mat is substantially more unsavory and less Han Solo-ian than book-Mat. But I do wonder if the onscreen struggles contributed at all to his recasting for season two.
I’d always imagined the weaves as being different colors for each element, too—though at least so far, we haven’t really gotten a solid Aes Sedai-to-Novice-level explanation of the different facets of the power and how the elements work. But I do like the way they’re shown on screen—and I’m also glad that the production has chosen to go with “subtle hand movements” for weaving, instead of crazy flailing. Robert Jordan’s prose is, to my recollection, a little ambiguous on exactly what kinds of motions are employed, and I was a little worried that we’d get Aes Sedai looking like they were going all Flashdance as they did their thing.
I have one big reservation about what we see of the One Power—but I’ll hold that reservation until after we get a little more Logain screen time under our belts. I might be misreading things, but the show might be going to swerve in a very different direction here from the books when it comes to how gender and channeling works. Maybe. (Now you have to imagine me giving you my very best Aes Sedai cool, knowing stare.)
We’re getting pretty long here, and I don’t think we’ve either of us really said if we enjoy it so far. I mean, I’m going to keep watching no matter what, because I’m a hopelessly devoted WoT sucker and also because I signed up to go on this journey with you for work, so I’m getting paid, but I actually am enjoying it—in spite of the changes, which the neckbeard in me wants to keep calling out. The show is definitely taking a bold tack with how things are moving, striking out in a direction that is aslant from the books. And that’s okay!
Jeff Bezos allegedly summoned this (and the upcoming LotR series, which I assume one or both of us will also be writing up) with a demand for his own Game of Thrones (I imagine him screaming and stomping his feet like Veruca Salt demanding a goose that lays golden eggs). So far, I don’t think this is that. I find it hard to put myself in the head of a non-book-reader for this, but so far it’s a bit lore-dumpy, and too many of the characters have yet to come into focus.
But! I think there is a lot of potential here. And I’m really glad that, at a bare minimum, it has been given the runway of a second season to find its feet.
May you always find water and shade, Andrew!