How The Wheel of Time season 2 improved on the books (and how it failed them)

The second season of The Wheel of Time has finished on Amazon Prime Video, and the consensus seems to be that it was an improvement over season 1 in pretty much every way. The show is more confident, the special effects are better, the cast gelled, the story is really getting going…if this trend continues into season 3 and beyond, we could be in for a once-in-a-generation TV experience. After all, the series hasn’t even adapted a fourth of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books yet.

So the show improved on itself, but did it improve on its source material? As usual, the answer is mixed. In some cases, The Wheel of Time season 2 one-upped Jordan’s books. In others, it could have stood to stick closer to the text. Let’s separate the improvements from the deteriorations, starting with how The Wheel of Time improved on our cast of villains…

Improvement: Putting the spotlight on the Forsaken

The Wheel of Time season 2 adapted the second and third books from Jordan’s series, The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn, more or less. In these books, Rand and co face off against members of the Forsaken, including Ishamael and Lanfear. But these don’t much resemble the characters we met on the show, at least not yet.

Lanfear is introduced in The Great Hunt, but we don’t learn that she’s Lanfear until the very end. For the whole of the book, Rand is under the impression that she’s a woman named Selene. She doesn’t get up to any of the destructive antics she undertakes on the show, nor does she wear any of the crazy outfits.

Ishamael, meanwhile, is going by the name Ba’alzamon. At this point, Rand and friends believe him to the Dark One himself. We don’t really learn anything about Ishamael’s motivations; he’s an amorphous, smarmy evil presence.

Eventually, in the books, Ishamael and Lanfear start to look like the characters we know from the show: Ishamael is melancholic, determined to break the cycle of reincarnation; and Lanfear is a bit of a selfish vamp. The TV show has the advantage of looking ahead and introducing these characters as fully formed people rather than discovering their personalities as the story goes on, like Jordan did. The result is that we get a pair of entertaining villains right off the bat. Lanfear especially stole the show in season 2.

And the show ended the season by introducing another member of the Foksaken, Moghedien, who looks like she’ll come back ready to play in season 3. Honestly, I’m a little afraid that The Wheel of Time will become one of those shows where the villains are more fun than the heroes, but that’s better than having no fun at all.