When a 15-book epic meets the harsh realities of television

There will be spoilers for season 1 and the first book in the series

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the First Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the misty peaks of Jeff Bezos’s secret mountain lair. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

And yes - a very long series like the Wheel of Time behooves an equally long review, even if it is just for a single season. But the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills. So take a hint from Loial and be patient, human.

That out of the way, let us pose the question: how can we fit Robert Jordan’s 15 door-stopping tomes into a television series? Is that even possible? The showrunner says he wants to make 8 seasons, and if season 1 is anything to go by, with its 8 episodes, we’re looking at 64 episodes in total, give or take. Is this enough to cover it all? No, of course not. But is it enough to cover the things that really matter?

Season 1 adapts the first book, The Eye of the World, released back in 1990. It is a direct adaptation for the most part, in that most of the story beats are present and are played in the right order. However, the series contains a fair share of original or pseudo-original material: the character of Logain is expanded, and we are getting into Aes Sedai politics much earlier than we did in the books. We also get quite some references to the prequel book, New Spring. In summary, the biggest change of the season was to bring our characters to Tar Valon, rather than Caemlyn, and to revamp the ending of the book. This is really smart: not only it helps kickstart the political drama that permeated the series during its best and highest moments, but it was also clever as a filmmaking decision. It avoids casting important characters that are introduced in the first book, but only really important later down the line.

My first criticism of the season concerns its pacing. Every new episode seems to introduce a new concept, that is then sort of forgotten by the next. The haunted city of Shadar Logoth; the Darkfriends; the Tinkers; The Ways; the Ogier; the whole character of Thom Merrilin, who had scant little screentime; Lews Therin Telamon and the Age of Legends. The show keeps throwing up stuff at you, most of which feeling random and maybe even self indulgent. Now, I’ll let you in on a little secret: the book is worse. The Eye of the World feels like an ADHD acid trip when it comes to exposition and dumping new and quirky concepts at every turn of the page, and the show couldn’t really stay away from that. In a way, all of this is part of what makes the Wheel of Time the Wheel of Time - characters like Loial, while ultimately not very relevant, are the heart and soul of the series, and part of the reason why it is so charming even after 30 years. So it’s hard to ignore the rough pacing and exposition, but I also don’t see how they could have done better.

Keeping ourselves grounded, once again, to the tough realities of filmmaking, we can point out two major story decisions that are directly related to that. First of all, Perrin’s story arc (that of pursuing a peaceful existence while dealing with a primal tendency towards violence) is kickstarted in a rather shocking way, with him killing his wife. Of course, he had no wife in the books, so this is a major departure. The jury is still out to whether this change will pay off or not - we’ll only be able to tell a few seasons down the line. But it is surely contorversial, as at this moment it boils down to the true and tried “fridging” trope that we’re all so tired of at this point. It also doesn’t help that Perrin gets the short end of the stick when it comes to screentime and character development. We really needed to delve deeper into his character, rather than having him brood in the distance all along. And when he did get to speak, it was for a love triangle of dubious intent - something innocuous meant to create drama, as these series are always wont to, but ultimately a waste of the already limited runtime.

The second major story decision happened towards the end of the season, with Mat being left behind while entering the Ways. The composition of that scene was weird, for sure, and that’s probably due to the fact that they no longer had the actor to play around with. Barney Harris left the series after this season, and Mat has been recast for season 2. I am left feeling that the producers had to haphazardly mend the last two episodes in order to exclude him, and while I think they did a decent job given the circumstances, it is still rather sad to see a major character being recast. Here’s hoping that the transition will make sense - Mat does undergo some severe mental and physical distortions due to the influence of the dagger, so they tying in his new look as a consequence of the dagger wouldn’t be out of reach. Major props if they’re bold enough to pull that off, rather than flat out not acknowledging the recast. His role in the final episode seems to have been given to Perrin, which makes me wonder what they would have done with Perrin if Mat had been around. Surely they wouldn’t give him even less things to do, right?

Finally, I need to talk about the last episode, which is probably my least favourite. It is known that the ending of The Eye of the World is not very good - even Robert Jordan agreed that he didn’t quite pull it off. The show needed to improve the ending, and while it was successful at that, it still is very far from perfect. In the book, Rand does everything - he battles Ishamael, teleports to Tarwin’s Gap and destroys the army of Trollocs, and gets the Horn of Valere. In the show, though, they split these responsibilities across multiple characters. Rand still fights Ishamael, although this time it happens through the Dream World. The Horn of Valere is, instead, hidden in Fal Dara, and it’s up to Perrin and Loial to retrieve it (only for it to be stolen by Padan Fain, which is actually how Book 2 starts). And, of course, we had the big woman’s channeling circle to put an end to the Trollocs. None of these are bad, individually, but they don’t really feel earned. Egwene healing isn’t particularly remarkable, and Perrin having a moment of hesitation as he picks up the axe falls flat. We really needed more time with the characters in this season to better flesh out their arcs and motivations. This is, again, some baggage from the books, as Rand was the main POV character of The Eye of the World. The series only really becomes a multi-plotline, multi-POV series from Book 2 onwards. Still, what brings down the last episode for me isn’t really the story - they did an acceptable job with what they were given - but the CGI and color grading were truly awful at times. I’d blame both the relatively low budget and Covid, and I expect season 2 will improve on that by a decent margin.

Still, I can’t help but praise the smaller details, such as the costume design. Robert Jordan was particularly pedantic when it came to developing cultures, and clothes always got extensive descriptions. Little things, like small bells on a character’s hair, really help bring forth the notion that this series was made by people who really, really love the source material. This extends to things like geography - Tar Valon is depicted exactly as in the in-book maps - and the lore sections in Prime Video are truly spectacular. The highest praise I’ll give for the series so far, though, is the following: despite introducing some entirely new scenes and plotlines not present in the book, these manage to feel more like the Wheel of Time than some of the scenes that were directly adapted. This shows that they absolutely nailed the emotional and thematic core of the series, and I am so, so thoroughly impressed by that.

I could go on and on about these book/show differences, but this is already getting way too long. I’ll just say that even the most innocuous lines in the show so far manage to carry with them some sort of foreshadowing or hidden meaning. Without getting into spoilers, I’ll reveal one that I find to be particularly amusing: when Min tells Rand that she has a vision of him surrounded by three beautiful women, she’s actually one of those women! This adds some extra characterization to Min, but also reflects, once again, the harsh reality of filmmaking. In the book, you get to see who the three women are, but here you obviously don’t get to see it because they haven’t been cast yet (even though one of them would have shown up in Caemlyn if they hadn’t cut that - decisions!).

The show is also playing really hard with the in-world prophecies, which seem to be even more misinterpreted here than they were in the book. The series has, hands down, the most intricate and mind-bendingly convoluted prophecy in fantasy, and it’s good to see them play around with that. Some book readers were even confused for a while!

I’ll now be discussing around to the more technical side of things, in particular the cast and the production values. I wasn’t lying when I said this was going to be long.

The cast is, for the most part, perfect. Nynaeve and Logain, in particular, deliver some truly outstanding performances. It’s actually scary how good they are. Álvaro Morte, the only good Spanish actor in existence, elevates what was the ultimate background character of the series onto a character that we will be talking about for years to come. He has some of the most quotable lines in the series, and imagining him deliver those lines some seasons down the line already fills me with childlike joy. Zoë Robins’ Nynaeve is also brilliant. The role of a blunt and obtuse village Wisdom is played to perfection, all the way down to her mannerisms, such as tugging her braid and folding her arms below her breasts (yes, this is a meme in the community). I don’t think anyone is miscast or underperforming their role, although I am still not connecting with Rosamund’s Pike Moiraine as much as I probably should. This is a little worrying, since she is the one big name actor in the show, and also a producer, but this is more of a personal gripe than anything.

As for the production values, as I previously mentioned, you can really tell this was hit hard by Covid. The CGI is spotty at times, and the color grading on 4K televisions is truly abysmal. Still, this is something that I expect to see improved in the next season. As for the art direction, I think it’s mostly a success. I’ve already mentioned the attention to detail, but in general, I don’t really have any major gripe. I would like to see just a bit more color, and definitely some bigger sets. But otherwise, it looks just as I think it should. I just have a small gripe with how small Tarwin’s Gap is, as the version we got looked suspiciously like the Black Gates of Mordor. Not a good look for a show based on a book that drew heavily from the Tolkienesque side of fantasy (a deliberate decision to make the first book more publisher friendly, but one that was quickly dropped in the rest of the series).

All in all, I consider the Wheel of Time season 1 to be mostly successful, as it is betrayed mostly by the nature of its source material and by factors it can not so easily control. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an adaptation with such a strong devotion to its source material. It deviates quite a lot from it, for sure, but most choices seem to make sense from a filmmaking perspective and they will hopefully help accelerate the series as we move forward towards the Last Battle. I had long since speculated that season 2 will need to obligatorily adapt books 2 and 3, with book 2 being mostly downplayed. Truth be told, there is already quite a lot of foreshadowing for the events of book 2 in this season (including the tease at the end of the last episode), as well as an important visual “name drop” for book 3, so I am expecting good things out of it. The two following books, called The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn, are both much better than The Eye of the World, having some incredible climaxes and character moments. I’m extremely satisfied that this has become Prime Video’s best performing series in its entire existence up to this point, because I really, really want to see all 8 seasons being made. The Wheel of Time needs to be successful. The book series is, I daresay, as important to fantasy as the Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire. It is the missing link between those two hallmarks. It is both an embrace of the Tolkienisms of the time, and the complete subversion and outright rejection of those Tolkienisms. It’s as if Dune and Star Wars both existed in the same universe, if that makes sense. Season 2 has a larger budget, and they seem to have already had their growing pains in this season, so I am truly expecting things to only improve going onwards.