Wheel of Time Episodes 5-6
Well, that didn’t last long.
I’ll get to explaining that in a minute. But first, my review of episode 5 and part of 6 of the Wheel of Time tv series.
Episode 5
This was kind of a meandering episode. But then, the books are a bit on the meandering side anyway.
A month has apparently passed since the end of episode 4, and can I just say that the pacing of this show really struggles? In one breath it both feels like the story is racing along and skipping all the important things from the book, while also feeling super slow and pokey and really… just kind of extremely boring.
But everyone has reached Tar Valon. Nynaeve is inside the tower sort of hiding from all the Aes Sedai in the Warders section of the tower (because: reasons?) I don’t know. Seems weird. I was highly underwhelmed by Tar Valon in general and the White Tower specifically.
I am appreciating the incorporation of the different ajahs in the artwork and architecture of the tower itself.
The false dragon Logain is paraded down the streets and Rand and Mat—who have also reached the city, but now don’t know what to do or where to go—see this. Mat makes Rand swear that if either of them is ever found out to be able to channel, that they will make sure neither of them ends up in a cage, gentled like Logain, increasing Rand’s suspicions that Mat can channel and is hiding it.
We meet Loial the Ogier. Who… wow. Okay. Special effects budget epic fail. Yeah, sorry… that’s not… I don’t even know what to say about that. But no. Just. No.
Also, apparently Thom died. We didn’t get to see it or see how Rand and Mat reacted to it, or really how they feel about that, and there was no building of a relationship with Thom, and so we don’t really feel anything about this. Thom seemed cool, but he was in the show for all of 6.7 seconds (exaggerating for effect).
This is one of the main issues that you’re inevitably going to run into trying to translate a story onto screen that has 2,782 named characters (not exaggerating. look it up).
Egwene and Perrin and the Tuatha’an have also reached Tar Valon, but before they reach the interior of the city, they run into the Whitecloaks again who take Egwene and Perrin prisoner and then present them with an impossible choice: either Egwene channels and Perrin lives, or Egwene doesn’t channel, and Perrin dies. Well, that’s fun. Good old “if she weighs as much as a duck” logic going on there, but what do you expect from the more rabid Whitecloaks, really? Also, much graphic torturing of Perrin as Child Valdar slices into his back with a dagger. (Cue Perrin’s eyes turning gold and wolves howling).
Sidenote: (They’re going to have a devil of a time trying to get their viewers to accept that not all Whitecloaks are horrible people later on in the series, just sayin’)
Ahem. Moving on to the next subplot… so. much. jumping. around. I feel like the pacing could have been improved if we didn’t try to show what everyone is doing all the time. Pick a set of characters and just follow their adventure for an episode. Or something. Giving every character 8 minutes of screen time per episode does not help endear them to me. I barely know any of them. And by the fifth episode, I should at least care about someone! Anyone! No? Okay. What do I know?
Stepin (warder whose Aes Sedai was killed by Logain) is dealing with the death of his Aes Sedai and we get a glimpse into the closeness of that warder/aes sedai bond once more as he grieves. Lan and he chat about whether or not Stepin will let Alanna bond him (the Aes Sedai who is apparently sleeping with all her warders…) and we get a more blatant hint here in their conversation that Alanna’s warders aren’t just sleeping with her, but also with each other, than we did in a previous episode.
Stepin decides against all of this, and takes his own life instead. This is one of the few moments in which we actually get to see some true emotion, as Lan mourns the death of his friend. We also get to see the vastly different funeral rites for Aes Sedai vs Warders.
Egwene figures out how to channel just enough to let Perrin loose (thank you for not making her all OP and “I can do this just because I’ve been told it’s possible,” we actually see her try and fail and struggle before she finally manages to burn through the ropes holding Perrin). Chaos erupts in the Whitecloak camp as the wolves descend en masse and eat their faces off. Literally. But they leave Egwene and Perrin alone, allowing them to make their limping escape into the city of Tar Valon.
Let me interject a few general observations I’ve had about the show here before we move on to episode 6.
After episode 5, I was really struggling to want to keep going. Derek mentioned that episode 6 was available, and I just sort of had this, “Do I have to?” reaction. I’m just… the show keeps leaving me extremely… bored. And that’s kind of a problem.
Combine my general feeling of “meh” and boredom with the feeling that I’m watching something where I feel like I’m constantly on the edge of “will I have to turn this off in a minute when it goes off the rails"? is super draining.
I don’t like it.
Also, I just haven’t been able to connect with any of the main characters so far, especially the three main characters (that the script-writers don’t seem to understand ARE the main characters).
Mat is a creepazoid, and I really kind of hate everything about the way they’ve written his character.
The guy playing Rand can’t act. Sorry, but he can’t.
And Perrin is just all wrong. Completely, 100%, all wrong. I was trying really hard to be okay with the plot-device they used on him… but I just can’t.
I wanted to like this show. I really did. I’m trying really hard. But they are not making it easy.
Lan does not make me believe that anyone would think twice about messing with Moiraine as long as he’s around (which is how he’s depicted in the books, this massive Borderlander that you glance at and just know he’s gonna feed you your own teeth if you look at his Aes Sedai crosswise). This actor… can’t pull that off. The only time we see him doing anything epic is in their big budget pilot episode in the fight with the Trollocs, but even then, he’s completely overshadowed by Moiraine. In the battle in episdoe 4, he’s just one of many. Nothing about him stands out. He’s not a protector. He’s not a guardian. He’s a side-kick.
By the end of episode 5, Nynaeve, Egwene, and Moiraine so far were the only characters I even partially liked or thought were doing a good job with their roles. Oh, and Thom. I liked Thom… but like I said… 6.7 seconds isn’t a lot of time to really get to caring about a character.
Also, the White Tower is…. not how I pictured it. I mean it… just… yeah, no. It’s kind of hideous from the outside, honestly. And it just… the inside is cool, but the actual shape of the structure is… well… it’s just not even close to how I imagined it when I was reading.
I wish they had tried more with the Warders to give them an actual uniform. I mean, I get that “color changing cloaks that kind of act like invisibility cloaks” is hard to do on a TV show budget. But they could have at least TRIED. They could have at least given the warders all the same cloak, the same type of weapons, made it look like they were an actual fighting unit that trains and has a uniform of some kind.
And the Aes Sedai rings aren’t even… they didn’t even try. What is with the super ostentatious jewel things? That’s not how they’re described in the book. The serpent eating its own tail. That’s it. It’s pretty clear. I can understand taking license with something that Jordan didn’t describe… but this isn’t one of those things.
What I do like, is the scenery. The show was shot in The Czech Republic, Croatia, and Slovenia, and it’s really neat to see some very different parts of the world than we usually get to see in tv shows. It doesn’t feel like the Canadian forest, because it isn’t. It doesn’t look like LOTR because they didn’t shoot in New Zealand. I really have been enjoying that. (But… it probably says something fairly negative about the show in general that this is my favorite thing about it and the nicest thing I can say about it).
Moving on…
Episode 6
We get a brief and not-at-all satisfying glimpse into the backstory of Siuan Sanche and her humble beginnings as a fisherman’s daughter. Cue random act of house burning and she takes off on a raft all by herself to go to Tar Valon, leaving her father behind to… I dunno, rebuild or something? No explanation of why he couldn’t take her to Tar Valon. Sending a 10 year old off into the wilds by herself doesn’t seem like a great idea to me.
Anyway.
Moiraine and Liandrin and Alanna must answer for their act of battlefield justice as they took it into their own hands to “gentle” (cut off from the power of sai’din) Logain after he killed one of their own. The Amyrlin Seat is not happy, Bob. Not happy.
Moiraine is keeping all the secrets, and has located all of the Two Rivers folk, but isn’t telling any of them that the others have arrived. When she finds Mat she discovers the Shadar Logoth dagger and heals him of his connection to it, reprimands Nynaeve for not coming to her when she saw how sick Mat was, and then breezes away after assuring them that she has scouts and spies keeping watch for Perrin and Egwene.
Sidenote: in the books, it takes specific numbers of Aes Sedai to do certain big things, and Mat’s connection with the dagger is not fully severed until book 2, when he is taken to the White Tower and multiple Aes Sedai, with the aid of a sa’angreal (powerful one power channeling artifact), manage to fully heal him and separate him from the dagger. So we’re not sure at this point if Moiraine has fully “healed” him, or just merely prevented him from dying.
Next, Moiraine visits Perrin and Egwene, tells them a similar half-truth about keeping an eye out for Rand and Mat and Nynaeve, and Egwene confesses about the weird wolf-ish things that happened with Perrin while they were being held captive by the Whitecloaks.
After this, Moiraine wants a bath, so she goes to the bath house and meets with the head of the blue ajah and we see many topless women. Fully topless. So, annoyingly, now the show includes nudity. Or I guess just toplessness? I mean, technically they have towel things artfully wrapped around them so that their tops are the main things that are uncovered, which begs the question: What is the point?
The head of the blue ajah warns Moiraine that she has been gone too long and maybe it’s time to come back to the Tower and behave herself, she’s already got enemies, and now the Amyrlin Seat is mad at her (because nobody realizes that Moiraine’s mission was both created and sanctioned by the Amyrlin Seat).
Then Moiraine heads through the secret sai’dar enabled passageway between her own quarters in the White Tower and the Amyrlin Seat’s…. um… tiki cabana thing somewhere else? And the two of them start kissing.
That type of relationship never existed between Moiraine and Siuan in the books, and makes no sense for either character. Especially given things that happen later on in the series (spoiler alert: like Siuan marrying Gareth Bryne, for example).
But it is now clear that the show-runners are more interested in pushing an agenda than remaining true to the story as laid out in the books.
Aaaaaand, that’s it. I’m done.
This moment was for me, the third and final strike for the show after bad writing, agenda-pushing, and nudity had already taken front and center.
To be honest, it took them longer than I expected to completely destroy a story I liked. But it’s not like I didn’t expect it.
I don’t appreciate it. But I’m not surprised.
At least I don’t have to try to care about something anymore that was struggling to keep my attention anyway.
