The Wheel Of Time Season One

I don’t mention this often here, On The Blog, but I resent Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time series of fantasy bricks on a subatomic level. I resent it for its overstuffed storytelling and non-existant pacing, for its constant horniness and weird gender politics. But mostly I resent it for the irreplaceable hours it’s stolen from my life. When I think back on my attempt to read the series in my late teens, I feel oblivion rushing towards me like the event horizon of a black hole, approaching ever closer with every passing second.

…But that’s largely only true of the series from the second book onwards! The first installment, The Eye Of The World, is a perfectly entertaining Tolkien knock-off. So I was curious to see how Jeff Bezos and his bank vault were going to adapt it for their streaming service Amazon TV: The Internet TV Station. A while ago I heartily roasted the first trailer, and so I went into this viewing experience with the firm expectation that the whole thing was going to be an embarrassing failure.

So imagine my surprise to learn that it’s…actually…pretty good? Even a lot of the things I hated about the trailer aren’t nearly as big an issue in the series itself! It turns out that judging eight hours of TV on a ninety-second marketing video isn’t always going to yield accurate results, who could possibly have guessed?

Season one of the series is a relatively faithful adaptation of The Eye Of The World, at least in the broad strokes: Rand Al-Thor and his buddies have their bucolic lives in the Shire Two Rivers shattered when Trollocs attack their village, they depart with an Aes Sedai named Moraine who believes one of them may be the reincarnation of the legendary Dragon, things proceed broadly how you think they’re going to if you’re familiar with the source material. All of the important plot beats and characters are here. They even manage to work in two absolutely vital, but often overlooked, elements of the novels: a bit where Aes Sedai have an important conversation while naked for vaguely spurious reasons, and some patented Robert Jordan kinky power-play, although the latter is presented as mutually-consentual sexy funtimes instead of the characters playing infuriating mind games with each other in lieu of just communicating like normal god damn people, like in the books.

But for dedicated Wheel Of Time haters, this is a version of the story with a lot of the annoying edges sanded off. Moraine only says “The wheel wills as the wheel weaves” or whatever once instead of on every second page, Rand and Egwene bone in the first episode and make their feelings for each other explicitly clear so we’re not treated to years of adolescent gosh-do-you-think-he/she-likes-me pussyfooting, none of the women go on about how men are wool-headed fools who can’t be trusted to hold a potato, none of the men shake their heads in befuddlement and complain that they can’t understand women. It’s like a breath of fresh spring air compared to the books.

One thing that is heavily altered is the story’s gendered magic system. For those not familiar with the novels, in the books the One Power is divided into male and female halves, with the male side having been tainted by the Dark One so that men who channel it go mad. Having men and women use different kinds of magic is the sort of thing that used to be fairly common in fantasy but which feels distinctly antiquated now, and potentially uncomfortable when they start getting into how men have to sweatily wrestle their half of the power into submission, while women must daintily surrender to it like a stray ovary cast adrift into a raging river. It was always safe to say that that level of gender essentialism wasn’t going to be present in the adaptation, but I had assumed that the division of the One Power was too central to the story and the worldbuilding to be outright done away with.

But it turns out I was wrong–the series appears to have completely ditched the concept, and apart from slightly tweaking the explanation for why male channelers go insane, it really doesn’t alter the story at all. I suspect there may have ultimately been pragmatic reasons for doing this–the series has to explain a lot of concepts and introduce a lot of fantasy vocabulary in a short amount of time already without also getting into what saidin and saidar are–but the effect is also to strip away some of the books’ more dated elements.

They probably could have done with cutting back even more, because one place where the series falls down is its heavy-handed delivery of mythology, worldbuilding and backstory. The series has an admirable tendency to take things slow and let scenes of character interaction or mood-setting breathe, but this does make some of the more nuts and bolts storytelling feel cramped. Several important concepts are conveyed to the audience in a literally breathless rush, which I feel like must be nigh-incomprehensible if you go into them without already being familiar with the material.

The one major casualty of the adaptational process is Thom Merillin. The showrunners clearly thought he was too important to cut, being a fan favourite character, but at the same time they obviously had a lot of trouble incorporating him into the series: he’s introduced much later than he is in the book, very shortly before he exits the story with his apparent “death”, the reversal of which probably isn’t going to be nearly as impactful given that only two of the characters have met him, and they were in his company for maybe half an episode in total. This might be for the best though, since the show’s gravelly-voiced country rock star version of the character is a bit hard to take seriously.

Shrinking Thom’s role does give the show room to expand the core cast, giving the Two Rivers heroes deeper backstories and more of a reason to behave and develop the way they do (in the books they’re all kind of blank slates with one-note personality types). I like the fact that it’s established that the Dragon could come back as a woman as well, and thus Nynaeve and Egwene get to be special destiny teens along with the boys.

Of course this doesn’t end up mattering, because Rand is still the Dragon Reborn, and he’s the one character in the series who’s every bit as boring as his book counterpart, if not moreso. The fact that he’s de-emphasized so much in the series in favour of having more of an ensemble cast (if anything, Moiraine feels the protagonist now) means that the revelation that he’s the Dragon falls flat; whereas in the books it was “oh the main POV character is the Dragon, that’s surprising” now it’s “oh it’s the boring one, okay I guess”.

The show’s production values are a bit of a mix. The costumes, sets and CGI swooshy effects are all much better and more cohesive than they looked in the trailer (I suspect the trailer had incomplete magic effects), but at the same time it’s still often a little too obvious that the characters are traipsing through a random forest park with a big fantasy tower superimposed over the treeline. The design of the Dark One/Ishamael (something like Slenderman crossed with Sauron) also utterly fell flat for me, which is a bit of an issue since he’s meant to be the scary villain.

Speaking of villains, I appreciated the fact that the forces of Darkness have been given some deeper motivations. In the book the human henchmen are motivated solely by promises of enormous wealth and power, which they’re foolish enough to believe that the Dark One and the Forsaken will actually make good on once the Last Battle goes down. Here, they’ve been given a much more nuanced and understandable reason for doing what they’re doing; it’s almost certainly going to turn out to be a lie on the part of the villains, but you can understand why people would believe it given the backstory of the setting.

Overall I found myself pleasantly surprised by the first season of The Wheel Of Time, and I don’t think that’s entirely due to my expectations being so low going into it. It’s not sophisticated or deep, but it’s a fun fantasy romp that’s adapting the source material in smart, sometimes bold ways. That said I’m very curious to see what season two is like, given how quickly the quality of the books plummet as early as the second volume.