Why Amazon's Wheel of Time Show Will Get Cancelled and Season Two Was Bad
Egwene, the real star of the show. Image courtesy of Amazon.
Season Two of Amazon’s adaptation of Wheel of Time is over. And it was not very good. Season One was also not very good, so I didn’t have high hopes. And that turned out to be wise. Because in Season One there were at least some potentially plausible explanations for why it was bad - a global pandemic happened during production; a main actor left during shooting; Amazon didn’t give them enough time or resources or whatever. But after Season Two, it is clear that additional episodes would not make this show any better, nor would more money. Casting issues are also not the problem. The writing is.
Season Two did a few very basic things better than Season One, and this has earned it plaudits from some people. The world feels bigger. Yes, it does but that is only because Rafe Judkins and the production team did a very poor job of making the world feel big in Season One. Some very obvious things - like tracking shots through the White Tower so we get a sense of its scale and its physical layout - are not a reason to praise the show. It is the most basic Filmmkaing 101 stuff that they should have already been doing. I think it is absurd to praise the show for finally doing some of the bare minimum things they should have done from the get-go just to establish the world-building.
I also still think the channeling looks off. I think it is mostly the sound effects, and also the fact that they have not established the metaphysics of this magic system or how it works. They could have done some really visually inventive stuff showing us POV of non-channelers who can’t see the weaves but can see the effects of them, then transitioned to a POV of a character like Rand so we can see the weaves. There are so many visually inventive ways they could have approached this. But they did none of them. And I think it looks bad, and the hand-wavey motions look extremely stupid.
But let’s get right to what makes this show bad: the writing, and the adaptation choices. It is clear they are not adapting the books very closely. And, that is I guess OK. But if they wanted to make their own thing they really needed to commit to making this its own thing “loosely based on” the Wheel of Time. I wouldn’t want to watch that, personally. But it might have been OK. What they have done, instead, is try to make it their own thing while also including fan service so we know it’s still, like, part of the Wheel of Time.
Case in point: the Horn of Valere. They could have either followed the books and made Season Two about the hunt for the Horn, in which case we would have found out what the Horn is, why our heroes want it, who took it, etc. And our main characters would have gone on a journey to try and get it back (while the girls trained in the Tower). And during that journey, we would have learned much about this world Robert Jordan created.
That’s not what they did. The Horn was irrelevant, and should have been written out of this season entirely. It also, when it finally appears, looks extremely stupid. Either make the Horn the inciting incident for the plot of this season, or just get rid of it and focus on the Egwene and Moiraine stuff like Rafe wanted. At least, had they done that, the season might have worked better. But because they tried to keep the Horn in, even though they obviously didn’t care about that plot line or its resolution, it doesn’t work.
This is also true, sadly, of Rand. Rafe and the writers don’t care about Rand. They don’t want him to be the main character, and they don’t want the show to revolve around him. Yet, they are unwilling to write him out. This makes the show very bad, because the main character is reduced to a nobody in his own story. You can either adapt it as it was written and make Rand the main character, or you can write him out and change it entirely. You can’t do both, which is what they are doing and that is why it is bad.
They are also just, in general, bad at writing. The characters are bad, they are uninteresting, the arcs don’t resolve in satisfying ways, we spend too much time with supporting characters or invented characters while the three main leads - Rand, Mat and Perrin- get very little screen time, and the show is being dragged down by this bad creative vision and terrible adaption choices. If Rafe wants to make this into a show where Egwene and Moiraine are the real heroes, that is fine. But make that show. Don’t toss in the Horn as an after-thought and give us a few Rand moments like it’s part of a contractual obligation.
There are so many other things that are bad about this show. But that is the main one. Instead of thinking about how they could adapt the source material in the best, most creative way possible, they decided to go their own route while also still including some things from the source material. And you just can’t have it both ways. That is why people who say, Well if they have 10-12 episodes they could do it, are wrong.
No, they could have adapted The Eye of World in a satisfying way even with 8 episodes. They could have done the Horn of Valere in 8 episodes. It’s not about the time limits. It’s about the fact that they are fundamentally uninterested in much of the source material, and want to do their own fanfic and CW stuff. Yet, at the same time they still feel beholden to the source material, and can’t quire get clear of it.
The result is a very bad and muddled show that pleases neither book readers nor non-book readers and it is a virtual certainty that, unless they change the showrunner and the vision for this show dramatically, it it will be cancelled soon.
