5 ways The Wheel of Time improved the books (and 5 ways it failed them)

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.