Late last year, Amazon Prime Video finally answered the calls of fantasy fans everywhere and began adapting Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time books for TV. The first season roughly covered the first book in the series, The Eye of the World. But there are 13 more to go (14 if you count the prequel) so the series could be running for awhile.
The first season had its ups and downs, although personally I liked it overall and am looking forward to more. Still, many fans weren’t happy with the changes the show made to the source material, and there were a lot of them. Some I think were fairly inevitable. For instance, I wasn’t too upset that the show skipped the section in Caemlyn given that they still covered most of the plot points there, just in a different location. But others left me scratching my head.
And there were others I thought worked really well! So in this article, I wanted to outline what changes I thought were great for the TV show, as well as which ones didn’t work as planned. Let’s start with something positive:
Improvement: Lan and Nynaeve’s relationship makes more sense
Robert Jordan had many gifts as a writer: dense worldbuilding, meticulous planning, impressive patience…but one of things he was less good at was writing convincing romances.
To wit, in The Eye of the World, Lan and Nynaeve get off to an inauspicious start when the resourceful Nynaeve tracks Lan and Moiraine after they leave Emond’s Field with Rand, Perrin, Mat and Egwene. There’s a bit of antagonism between the pair, but I didn’t notice much more than that.
Then, towards the end of the book, they suddenly declare their affection for each other, and I thought I might have missed a couple of chapters. Where did that come from? I dunno if Jordan thought he was building romantic tension, but it didn’t work for me at all.
The show does a much better job of building the relationship between these characters, and at interpersonal relationships in general. On the show, Lan and Nynaeve get to know each other a bit during the incident with Logain in “The Dragon Reborn,” and by the time they got to Fal Dara at season’s end, I was ready to buy them getting together.
Failure: Perrin kills his wife
One of the early controversies surrounding the show came right in the first episode: Perrin Aybara, one of the main characters, has a wife named Laila, a blacksmith like himself. Already, this is a big departure from the books, where Perrin was unattached before he left Emond’s Field. And then, in the climax of the pilot, Perrin accidentally kills Laila during the heat of a Trolloc attack.
Right off the bat, this choice is…weird. Like…why would you make such a drastic change to a major character right at the beginning? Showrunner Rafe Judkins explained that it was done so audiences would have an idea of what Perrin is going through earlier in the series:
"For this character that’s extremely internal — you really never get to hear his internal monologue that out loud in the book — we give him a moment at the beginning of the series where you understand why he, across the course of the series, has such a struggle with violence."
And okay, it’s true that Perrin is a very internal character not given to vocalizing his feelings, which could be a problem for a screen adaptation where we don’t have access to his thoughts. And whenever someone on the show mentions death and they cut to his face, I do know what he’s thinking even if he’s not saying anything.
So I get what they were trying to do, but there had to be a more elegant way to get inside Perrin’s head than to create a whole new character and immediately fridge her. It changes something fundamental about the character right at the top of the tale and peddles in a hackneyed trope where a girl is killed to inspire a guy’s character development. I’m not sure what, if anything, they should have done instead, but I know they needed to think about it harder.
Improvement: Pretty much everything involving Moiraine
The Wheel of Time show puts Moiraine Damodred front and center. She reads the opening narration, she watches the Red Ajah gentle a man in the first full scene, and she’s the only character to get an episode completely to herself: the remarkable “The Flame of Tar Valon,” which for my money was far and away the best episode of the season. The Wheel of Time is an ensemble piece — we spend time with all the characters — but if it can be said to have a lead, Moiraine is it.
Casting Rosamund Pike has a lot to do with the character’s success. She holds herself very still, but gives the impression of great inner strength and authority. She’s as compelling wrecking a horde of Trollocs with fireballs as she is sitting on the back of a horse recounting the battle of Manetheren. “The Flame of Tar Valon” pulls back the curtain on Moiraine even further, showing us how she can callously manipulate Egwene in one scene and be playfully vulnerable with Siuan Sanche in the next. The script gives Moiraine layers and Pike delights in peeling back each one.
However, there is a down side to giving Moiraine this much attention…
Failure: Every character who isn’t Moiraine pales a bit beside her
While The Wheel of Time gives a lot of attention to developing Moiraine right at the top, the other key characters — namely Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene and Nynaeve — don’t shine quite as brightly, especially at the beginning. There’s a genericness to the Emond’s Field five that is partly carried over from the books, but is partly a result of the show’s decision to focus so much on Moiraine in this early stretch of story.
Moiraine is an important character in the books, but she’s not that important. Another consequence of giving her the spotlight is that the show is stuck following her even when the books are focused elsewhere. The first season ends with her losing her powers, something that doesn’t happen in The Eye of the World. Judkins has admitted that this was done because Moiraine doesn’t have much to do in the second book and they need something for Pike to do in season 2. Hopefully it’ll work out, but that could result in the other characters having screen time taken away from them when they should be stepping up to carry the story forward.
Happily, the rest of the cast gets more interesting as the season goes on. Nynaeve might do the best job of finding her own groove, particularly during the incident with Logain. The character who might suffer the most is Rand, which brings us to our next topic:
Improvement: Keeping the identity of the Dragon Reborn a mystery
For most of The Wheel of Time season 1, we’re wondering after the identity of the Dragon Reborn, a messianic figure destined to either save the world from the threat of the Dark One or doom it to a new age of misery. Moiraine comes to the Two Rivers in the first place to find this person and mold them before the Dark One either kills or — worse — converts them.
In the books as in the show, Moiraine knows that the Dragon Reborn is in the Two Rivers but she doesn’t know exactly who it is, so she takes a bunch of these precocious village kids on a tour around the world. The difference is that, in the books, we know who the Dragon is even if no one else does: it’s obviously Rand, because so much of the book is told from his point of view.
It’s a strange reading experience, because we have to wait for the characters to solve a mystery we’ve already figured out. The show, on the other hand, has a more omniscient point of view, or else it sticks close to Moiraine’s; on the series, the Dragon could be any of the Emond’s Field Five, which adds some tension.
I imagine some readers found this tiresome, but I saw plenty of folks who hadn’t read the books earnestly wondering who the Dragon was; Nynaeve healing a roomful of people hurt by Logain added a nice bit of ambiguity. If anything, I thought they revealed that Rand was the Dragon a bit early; I would have brought the whole group to the Eye of the World and solved the mystery as part of the climax, but overall I liked how this choice added layers to the adventure.
Failure: Too many death fake-outs
I just mentioned Nynaeve healing all those people in Episode 4, “The Dragon Reborn;” she even brought some, like Lan, back from death. That was a really cool moment. But by the time Egwene brought Nynaeve back to life after they helped decimate a Trolloc army in the season finale, it was old hat.
Resurrections are a tricky thing. You don’t want to have too many or it starts feeling like death has no consequence. Why should we ever feel scared for the characters if someone can just wave their arms and bring them back? Egwene’s resurrection of Nynaeve went too far.
And it looks like we’re going to have another death fake-out at the top of season 2. In the season 1 finale, Padan Fain stabbed Loial the Ogier and seemingly left him for dead…only he isn’t dead; Judkins himself confirmed that he’ll be back for season 2, which is lame. Why make it look like Loial was in danger if the show didn’t plan to follow through?
Hopefully the series breaks this habit before things gets anymore out of hand. You’re on watch, show.
Improvement: Logain makes a great impression
Besides Moiraine, the other character who gets the biggest upgrade in Amazon’s The Wheel of Time show is Logain, a False Dragon who causes trouble at the beginning of the story. In the books, we hear that Logain is stirring up stuff far away, but we only meet him after he’s been gentled by the Aes Sedai and is being paraded through the streets of Caemlyn. We still get something like that scene in the show, only it happens in Tar Valon.
What we don’t get in the books are the events of “The Dragon Reborn,” where Moiraine and several other Aes Sedai — including the villainous Liandrin — go up against Logain and what remains of his army. The show gets a lot of mileage out of this episode. We get to know key characters like Liandrin ahead of schedule, we learn about the madness affecting male channelers, we lay track for the Nynaeve-Lan romance, and Logain emerges as a real threat whereas in the books he mostly hangs around the margins of the story appearing powerless and lost, at least for the first several books.
But now, with actor Álvaro Morte in the role and having seen what he can do (and what he’s lost), I’m looking forward to seeing him again, rather than sort of wondering why he’s here at all.
Failure: Thom Merrilin gets shortchanged
On the flip side we have Thom Merrilin, a character with a lot of presence in The Eye of the World who just kind of passes through The Wheel of Time season 1.
The show gets the outline more or less correct. Rand and Mat run into Tom, a gleeman (basically a traveling bard), after getting separated from the rest of the group in Shadar Logoth. He accompanies them on their journey, they grow closer, and then he sacrifices himself for the boys in a key moment.
All of that technically happens on the show, but it just doesn’t have much impact, probably because Thom is introduced in one episode and quickly written off in the next. We don’t have enough time to appreciate what he means to Rand and Mat, or to the story.
That said, actor Alexandre Willaume does a solid job as the world-weary Thom — I liked his gravely singing voice — and without spoiling too much, he’ll probably get a second chance to make a first impression.
Improvement: Mat’s backstory makes him more sympathetic
Okay, it’s time for me to admit something: I do not like Mat Cauthon very much in the books, particularly in the early going. He’s always asking what’s in it for him, or being irresponsible, or cursing his supposed friends for daring to ask him to help with a valuable mission. After the Aes Sedai heal him of the demonic infection he picked up after stealing a cursed dagger he was told not to take, he has the gall to act like he doesn’t owe them anything and that they’re all out to get him.
I mean…he’s just a little sh*t. I don’t know how else to put it. I feel like Robert Jordan was aiming for “devil-may-care Han Solo-esque scoundrel” but landed on “entitled manic pixie dream boy.”
On the show, Mat is still an entitled maladjust, but this time there may be a reason for it. In the premiere, we see that Mat has a rough home life; his father is an alcoholic and his mother emotionally abusive, and it falls to him to look after his sisters. This is a change from the early books, where we didn’t hear much about his family at all.
I know a lot of fans didn’t like this change, but for me, it made Mat snap into place. I can understand why this Mat might act so poorly, why he might resent Moiraine for taking him away from his sisters who need him, why he has a hard time trusting people and prefers to look out for himself. Without this setup, Mat’s just acting like a turd because he’s a turd, which is one way to go, I guess, but this is better.
Failure: Loial is lame now
On the other hand, the show takes a lot of personality away from Loial, the lovable Ogier (a non-human race that built a lot of the impressive structures in this world) who encounters Rand in Tar Valon (Caemlyn in the books). The show gets the outline right: Loial (played by Hammed Animashaun) is tall, and calm, and they need him to get through the Ways, but it’s just…
To start, Loial doesn’t look right. Yes, he’s taller than the rest of the cast, but in the books he towers over them, and has big pointy ears that droop and peak with his moods. I don’t blame the show for losing that stuff — I’m sure it’s about the budget and not a lack of will — but I can blame it for not getting across Loial’s dorky personality, his genuine fascination with all things human, his endearing vulnerability when things go sideways. Loial is a highlight of the books for me, but in the show he feels like an afterthought.
At least so far; hopefully they do a better job with Loial in season 2 and beyond…after they bring him back from the edge of death, I mean, which is another thing that didn’t work.
I expect the show will have to make even more changes the further they get into the story. Bring on season 2.
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