WARNING: There are slight spoilers here.
For the TL;DR set, I think I’m ok with the finale.
My thoughts on Wheel of Time’s Season 1 finale are too much to fit into one tweet, so I thought I’d write them out here. There will be no commenting here. I’m posting a link to this on various social media sites, and you can comment there.
Except for bookcloaks. I have neither the patience nor time to deal with you. I will delete your comments and block you.
Bookcloak (n): A fan of the Wheel of Time books with strong, unreasonable opinions about the Amazon Prime TV series. Unreasonable opinions include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Complaining that the show is “too woke” or “too feminist”
- Complaining about the races of the actors
- Complaining about the height of the actors
- Insinuating that anyone who likes the show has not read the books, doesn’t understand the books, isn’t a real fan of the books, and otherwise insulting those who enjoy the show.
- Insinuating that Rafe Judkins has not read the books, doesn’t understand the books, isn’t a real fan of the books, is doing the show just for himself, is a shill for Amazon, is destroying the show and otherwise insulting him.
- Stating that there is absolutely nothing good about the show or the show is nothing like the books or that the show should be cancelled.
Yes, those types of people actually do exist.
I started reading the books in the mid-90s, so I had to wait like everyone else did for the next book to drop, and when it did, I did a re-read. I soon realized that I could not remember all the details from all the books, and so created the encyclopaedia-wot.org.
Note that this post is my personal opinion and not the opinion of the Encyclopaedia. The Encyclopaedia has no official position on the quality of the show.
There’s several changes from the books, but for the most part, I understand and am fine with them. Right now, Rafe is planning for eight seasons. Assuming that each season will have eight one-hour episodes, that means we’ll have only 64 hours of runtime for 14 books, or 4.5 hours per book. Something’s gotta give. Fewer characters will be included and/or they will be combined. Minor subplots will never appear. Shortcuts will have to be taken. Further, the books include internal monologues and the TV series will have to “show, not tell” those things in creative ways. Books will have to be mixed together. Some things from TEotW will be in season 2 and some things from TGH will be in season 1. I can see that the changes so far have been made in accordance to these limitations. I can also understand that some book fans are uncomfortable with some of those changes.
I think that the difference between episodes 1-7 and 8 are the amount of changes. The other episodes had a trickle of changes, while the finale itself had much more, plus just some weird things:
- Only Moiraine and Rand going to the Eye?
- Lan didn’t know how to track Moiraine without using the bond?
- The Eye of the World is a seal, not a pool of pure, uncorrupted saidin?
- Seals are now that big, not just handheld?
- Moiraine is shielded?
- No fight in the sky above Tarwin’s Gap with a sword of fire?
- The Horn of Valere is in Fal Dara?
- How did Fain get the ruby dagger?
- Is Rand having a dream or what? How is Ishamael doing that?
- Are Loial and Uno dead?!
- How did Egwene heal Nynaeve with that tiny trickle of power?
- Why would the Seanchan launch a tidal wave against a mountainside?
- Pacifiers?
The day after watching the finale, I started looking around the web for some answers, and I found some.
Decider.com
On Moiraine’s shielding:
Judkins referenced the fact that after the introductory chapters of The Great Hunt, Moiraine is rather absent. “In Book 2 she really is in just one chapter, and she’s so limited in what she does. So, we looked at that piece that she has in Book 2 and then we figured out how to take that story that’s told in Tifan’s Well in Book 2 and expand it out to a whole season,” he said.
On only Rand and Moiraine going to the Eye:
“And so, we really wanted to take all of the things that Rand does in the finale of Book 1 and split them out amongst the rest of the characters. So we gave Egwene and Nynaeve the battle at Tarwin’s Gap instead and it sets up their characters really nicely for where they go in Book 2, to really see the power that is possible inside of them so they know where they’re headed in the rest of the series.”
On Fain having the ruby dagger:
Judkins said, “The dagger, yes. We did a little hint. You should be able to see if you look closely at the episodes that Padan Fain has in fact been everywhere the dagger was,” Judkins said, “and the hints are there for how he got [the dagger] along the way.”
From the web:
As far as “pacifiers”, I’ve seen several comments around the web, especially from women, that those are more horrifying than a leash and collar would be, so this might well be a better choice.
TVLine.com
(https://tvline.com/2021/12/24/wheel-of-time-recap-season-1-episode-8-finale-rand-dark-one-battle/)
On Loial’s death:
“Dead! He’s dead! No, I’m just kidding, he’s not dead, don’t worry. I adore Hammed, he’s still in Prague shooting. Some people are in great jeopardy at the end of Season 1 and survive, and some of them don’t. But hopefully this will also be a light heart-flutter scare for audiences to emotionally prepare themselves for future deaths.”
On events from different books being in the same season:
“And secondly, where all the characters land at the end of this is different than they do in the first book because we are moving into seasons that will tell multiple book stories in one season. So you’ll see some of them heading off in a direction that’s very reminiscent of a later book, and some of them heading off in directions that are reminiscent of Book 2. We’re trying to always keep in mind the bigger picture and how we can, if we’re lucky enough to do it, land this ship at the end of the story.”
On the Horn of Valere:
“I think it’s too iconic and too important to Book 2 to ignore it, and we’re trying to use it as much as we can to tell a really emotional story for two of our characters in Season 2. It’s one of those things that people would cut out, but I think it would be a mistake to do that. It’s too important to the series, and I think we’ve figured out a way to make it feel really cool.”
TVInsider.com
“So we really wanted to set up that world and this world of the Borderlands and what it means really clearly in this season. We kind of have the Two Rivers, traveling time, the White Tower and Fal Dara. And we could do just those four places. So the reason we chose Fal Dara to be one that we really committed to was to get more about Lan’s [Daniel Henney] backstory, to understand the Borderlands… like, there are people in the world who do know what Trollocs are and that they’ve been fighting them for a long time. They are much more familiar with the Dark because it’s much closer at their doorstep, so to speak.”
“Everything we’re doing in Season 1 is about trying to make it an ensemble piece because the books as a whole are an ensemble piece. So we’re trying to split out the ending that Rand had in Book One and give parts of that to some of the other characters. That’s what we did with the Nynaeve-Egwene [Madeleine Madden] story.”
Entertainment Weekly
https://ew.com/tv/the-wheel-of-time-showrunner-burning-questions-season-1-finale/
On events from different books being in the same season:
“Fans of the books will see that some characters are diving more into their book two story in season 2, and some of them are diving more into their book three story in season 2. We have to tell stories so efficiently on the show because we’re trying to do 17,000 pages. Even if we’re lucky enough to go as long as we possibly can go, that’s still only gonna be 50 or 60 episodes of television. We’re trying to be as precise about that as we can, so we had done a lot of breaking for season 2 before we finished season 1.”
On new stories:
“We only add new stories when we need to. In season 1, we really needed to emotionally explain mythological things about Aes Sedai and Warders, so we had to add story there. We’ll obviously have to add story for Moiraine and Lan (Daniel Henney) because they’re basically sidelined for a couple books, but we’re not going to put Rosamund Pike on the bench. We have to add some story while we’re compressing, so it’s still a tense battle to fit every season into those eight episodes.”
CBR.com
https://www.cbr.com/wheel-of-time-rafe-judkins-interview/
On Perrin and Egwene:
“I think you do see in the books this idea of, “Did Perrin have feelings for Egwene?” We’ve milked that a little here. I think it will continue. Each of those characters goes on to have very important relationships, Egwene with Gawyn, and then Perrin with Faile. And so those relationships, we will also take those, those are two big relationships that are really foregrounded in the books, and so we’ll take them and really run with them too. I think any real romantic relationship that we do have in the foreground, we want to use.”
On Rand and Min’s relationship:
“Yeah, we tried to give her, in Episode 7 actually, we wanted to make sure that — because Min and Rand is a really important relationship later in the books that we see — the two of them have a scene, just the two of them. And so we gave that in Season 1, Episode 7 so that you could see the kernels of this relationship that ends up being really important for both of them later in the books.”
The Empire Spoiler Special Podcast
https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/empire-spoiler-special-film-podcast-sign-up/
On the ending … Nynaeve was not dead, bad job by the show crew for not making it more clear to book readers, it’s very important that you cannot heal death and that’ll be reinforced in book 2. The original scene had Egwene coming full-circle and using her skills as an apprentice Wisdom but this was a COVID casualty.
To Wrap It Up
So these articles answer some of my questions and leave me with the feeling that all those things I mentioned aren’t just random things thrown in to mess with book readers. It sounds like Rafe still has a plan and I’m willing to stick around to see how it plays out.