Why Season One of The Wheel of Time is So Disappointing
Amazon’s Wheel of Time. Courtesy of Amazon Prime.
The first season of Amazon’s Wheel of Time adaptation has wrapped. And I’ll just say it straight up - this show was really, really disappointing. I was super hyped for this series when it was first announced, as I am a big Wheel of Time fan. I knew going into it that the task of adapting the series for the screen was monumental, and posed a wide range of creative challenges in terms of story and character beats, how to visualize things that have merely been described on the page and existed in our imaginations for years, and the more mundane stuff like surmounting budgetary restrictions. So I was willing to give some leeway. I think most fans were.
But the reason this show is a let-down is not just because of the difficult decisions they had to make. We know you can’t include everything from Jordan’s novels. But the changes and omissions need to make some kind of sense, they need to be grounded in a deeper understanding and appreciation of the story and the lore and the world-building. And more often than not, I felt like that wasn’t the case.
When Peter Jackson cut Tom Bombadil from The Fellowship of the Rings, book fans were upset. But there just wasn’t enough space in the film to fit him in. Frodo needed to get moving on his epic adventure arc, and another detour to Tom Bombadil, delightful as it might have been, would have weighed down the narrative too much.
The Wheel of Time writers had to struggle with similar trade-offs. Introducing Thom Merrilin later in the show, rather than at the beginning, is an easy one to justify because the first episode was already over-stuffed. Not going all-in on Loial to match his description in the books is also understandable, because they didn’t have the budget to animate him.
And to a certain extent some of these things were beyond showrunner Rafe Judkins’ control. He wanted a 2-hour pilot and 10-episode series, but Amazon gave him 1-hour and 8 episodes. He had to work within certain budgetary restrictions that clearly limited what the show was capable of doing. And the production was plagued by COVID-19 disruptions and Barney Harris (the actor playing Mat) simply never returned about 2/3 of the way through shooting.
All of that might be enough for me to give the failings of the first season a pass, except there were clearly a lot of fundamentally flawed decisions made with regards to writing, character arc, narrative structure and visual composition that would have weighed down the finished product even if production had gone as smoothly as possible. I am not going to go into everything, but there were two main failures that had nothing to do with the production problems. They were choices made by the showrunner and the writers and the directors, and they were simply bad. The first is visual, the second narrative
Visually, this show often didn’t look good. There were a few cool visuals, but for the most part it doesn’t look like a $90 million production. I am talking about fundamental things here, like scenes being badly lit, badly staged, badly blocked and poorly filmed. The finale is being rightly bagged out for having been rushed out with basically unfinished effects and almost avant garde editing, but even in the White Tower scenes we never really get a sense of scale or space.
There are no tracking shots, for instance, that imbue the surroundings with a sense of reality or depth. The sets, even though the designs are cool, often look cheap and I think this is largely because of the way they are over-lit, or shots are just composed with an amateurish feel. This is a big deal of course because Wheel of Time is all about the world-building, and if the visual space doesn’t feel real or textured it’s basically a total failure.
And it comes down to bad execution of basic things that shouldn’t happen in a production of this caliber. The basics of good film-making, of putting together compelling visual images that look good and dynamic, should not be an issue. The entire show, from beginning to end, is horribly edited, looks pretty sterile and actually ends up feeling somewhat small which is definitely not what the Wheel of Time should feel like. This is why I’m not really sure that an extra two episodes would have helped to build the world, because they did a pretty terrible job of visually building this world in the 8 hours they already had.
And this extends to another criticism I have of the visual decision-making: the channeling. It never looked good to me, aesthetically. We all knew this was probably going to be the biggest challenge, from a visual point of view - animating the channeling. Most shows and movies don’t show the way magic actually works - they show an explosion or a cool effect and leave it to the imagination of the viewer to imply the magic at work. Showing it too explicitly can end up looking hokey, and it’s better to let viewers fill in the blanks themselves. But Jordan created such a detailed, functional magic system that they had no choice but to animate it.
And I was really curious to see what they would do! They could have done all sorts of interesting things, like playing with perspective so that we only see the effects of the magic in the beginning and then as some of the characters start to use the Power, we start to see the weaves. I mean, there were a lot of ways they could have approached it. But what did they do? It’s just hokey smoke trails that fly around as people wave their hands around like dingbats. It looks utterly ridiculous. And it makes a noise! Why does it make a noise like tin foil being crumpled up?
As I say, I realize this was a big challenge for the show. But there were a lot of creative, visually inventive, outside-the-box ways of trying to crack it. Instead, they went with probably one of the least original, and it looks hokey and bad. This is my gripe with the show. There just isn’t evidence that very much thought was put into these foundational building blocks of the show. And so it ends up looking very bad.
The second major failing is in the narrative structure, and it was a massive mistake which was turning the Dragon Reborn’s identity into a big mystery, a Wheel of Time whoddunit. It really reminded me of the first season of Mad Men, where the show (or the studio or whoever) weren’t confident that audiences would be sufficiently interested in the themes and the characters, so they came up with an absolutely idiotic plot device about Don Draper’s stolen identity. I guess Rafe and/or Amazon felt the same way here and decided this central mystery should be the real driving force of the first season.
Monumental error on their part, because what it does it prevent the first season from having a main character. Rand is the Wheel of Time’s main character. Other characters start to come into their own as the series and the world fan out in later books, but the Eye of the World is told mostly from Rand’s perspective and he is the filter through which we experience the events of the book and learn about the world.
By trying to obscure the true identity of the Dragon, the show makes Rand, its actual main character, into a non-character! It then tries to spread the narrative out over several other characters, meaning none of them really end up carrying the plot and we don’t get enough time with any of them. It’s like, given all of the potential ways they could have approached this problem, they settled on the absolute worst one.
I can understand that early in the writing process, this idea might have been floated. But I don’t understand how nobody realized what it would do to the overall narrative structure of the show and then shot it down. If you look at The Witcher, for instance, the world-building happens mostly from the perspective of Geralt (with a little bit from other characters). We experience the world as he does, from a jilted, cynical vantage point. Most crucially, it’s a consistent narrative viewpoint and the viewer goes on a journey (of sorts) with Geralt.
We needed to go on that journey with Rand. So what if people figured out he was the Dragon Reborn? He is going to be the focal point of this show. Holding all that back so we can have a big shocking reveal (which is not even that good because the basic building blocks of this show are so poorly executed) in Episode 7 is not worth the damage the writers did to the narrative and the character arcs.
It’s OK for the other characters to be side-kicks for now. This show needed a main character to anchor it, and it needed to be Rand. This would have served a dual purpose because Rand is such a country bumpkin, so we would have discovered the richness and depth of this fantasy world as he did. You know, kind of like exactly how the book was structured. There was a reason for that!
When you look at this in its totality, what it tells me is that they just didn’t put a lot of thought into the show. They were looking for cheap shortcuts (the most head-scratching example being Perrin killing his wife). They went with the lowest common denominator for how to visualize channeling. They just did really basic things, like lighting and composition, very poorly.
I get that its hard to re-write the last 2 episodes when one of your main cast members is gone. I get it that COVID-19 maybe made it hard to get enough extras together to give these big battle scenes the scale they needed. I get it that Amazon wouldn’t give them the time or the budget they needed to tell this story more fully. And I get that adapting one of the most popular fantasy novels of all time into a television show is almost impossibly hard. But the flaws go well beyond that, to fundamental choices like making the first season without a main character simply so you can do a lame late season reveal.
If the second season doesn’t fundamentally re-think itself and deal with these issues and come back stellar, this show is not going to make it to season 3. Nor should it, because so far the showrunners, writers, directors, and the studio have shown that they aren’t really up to the task of adapting this book. Maybe no one ever would have been, but at least in different hands we might have gotten scenes that were properly lit and competently edited.
