*This article contains spoilers for the Wheel of Time Amazon series and the Wheel of Time Book Series*
I started reading the Wheel of Time in the 1990’s. Book six had just been released when I began the series. For those of you that do not know, The Wheel of Time is a fourteen-book series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson.
Amazon Prime did a made for television verson loosely based on the book series. Very loosely based. To be honest, it is very difficult to take a beloved book series and turn it into a on screen production that book lovers will adore. It rarely happens. That is one reason it took so long for this to happen.
Amazon wanted to make it more adult themed by making the characters older than they are in the book series. That seems to happen a whole lot with teenaged characters and on-screen portrayals. Think Percy Jackson who is in his early twenties in the movies and 16 in the books. The main character Rand Al’Thor is a teenager in the book and in his mid-twenties in the series, as are Mattrim Cauthon, Perrin Aybara, Egwene Al’Vere and Nynaeve al’Meara is slightly older.
While those changes can be done well, my opinion is that the characters picked for some were not good. As in every modern show or series, the characters were picked to fit a certain narrative in the directors/producers’ political views and not true to the original series. The description of the characters in the books and their onscreen counterpart are not the same thing. I was pleasantly surprised by the acting of some of the people portraying people I grew up reading about, but some missed the mark by a long shot.
Josha Stradowski, who plays Rand, did a very good job at the role in my opinion. He looked the part and he played Rand pretty close to how I had him in my mind. Again, Barney Harris as Matt also did a good job. The writing for him could have been better, but they had to move his character along much faster than in the books and that bothered me a bit.
Rosamond Pike and Morraine Damondred and Daniel Henney as Lan Mandragoran also did a very good job. Lan was not exactly as portrayed in the book, but for me Henney did a very good job capturing the essence of Lan.
On the not as good side, Marcus Rutherford as Perrin Aybara acted the part well, but he was not given an accurate representation of his character. From him having a wife to begin the series to him killing her by accident and being all torn up about it, it was nothing like the Perrin from the books. Perrin was one of my favorite characters from the series, so to be honest it would have been hard to please me on this one.
Zoe Robins as Nynaeve captured only one side of the character, the sassy, always angry side. She played it well, but they made the character way too one dimensional. Not the fault of the actress, the fault of the director and the writers for being short sighted.
Min Farshaw was possibly the worst written character in the on-screen version of the story. Kae Alexander acted well, but she was not at all Min. the description of Min is happy and mischievous, where the Min from the Amazon series was somber and downright depressing. I was very disappointed in their interpretation of her.
Thom Merrilin was another major disappointment. Alexandre Willaume, who played the character, said they wanted to have a different Thom Merrilin than in the books. A darker, more brooding character. That seems like a bad idea for a gleeman. Thom is another of my favorites from the books, and they missed him by a mile on the series.
Now, the story was rushed at best, and the real story was neglected at worst. They had to add things like lesbians and political correctness to make sure all the critics who lean left politically would really love the series, leaving the series readers in the dust with shattered dreams of what could have been.
If you have not read the series, you were most likely lost, and the plot didn’t make a ton of sense to you. It felt rushed to a reader like myself, but I knew what was going on because I had read the entire series. If you had not read the series, they assumed you would get vague references to the series, which is incorrect.
The season finally was extremely loosely based on something that happened in book 3, but it was not nearly as good or understandable as the book version. I tried to hold my judgement for a period of time after watching the series, and now as I look back on it, I am disappointed but not completely turned off to the next season.
It can be salvaged with some better writing and some more time spent explaining the world to newcomers. It can be a good series, but they have to be either more true to the original, or they have to explain things better to the new people they are trying to bring into the Wheel of Time world.
Overall, I am disappointed. It was what I feared it would be but hoped it would not be. A modern telling of a well-loved book series with a political and social skew to it. It is never possible to do a book series of this magnitude complete justice with an on-screen version, but Amazon didn’t really try very hard to be true to the original. They, unfortunately, made it to be “modern”, which, to be honest, I am never going to enjoy completely.