The Wheel of Time: My Emotions! My Emotions!
In its quest for shocking competence, Prime’s WoT adaptation rushes the tempo.
The Wheel of Time represents a watershed of sorts for me, personally. When I was a kid and descended into full-on book nerd-dom1, I tore through fantasy and sci-fi series with wild abandon. I read constantly, staying up late every night and carrying a book with me everywhere. In what is a familiar experience for a lot of people, reading speculative fiction was an escape from an adolescence that was actually kind of emotionally stressful2, and in order to fuel that decade-long reading binge I fell into the habit of buying books more or less based on the cover alone. I didn’t have the time to read reviews or make judgment calls beyond whether the book had a Daryl K. Sweet cover3, and there was no Internet offering easy access to billions of book opinions4.
The last time I did this—purchased a honking huge fantasy novel based solely on the cover—was in 1990 when I stumbled on The Eye of the World in a now-defunct book store in the Village in New York City5. I was in college at the time, and drifting fast from my fantasy/sci-fi roots. But The Eye of the World could have been genetically designed to appeal to Past Jeff, and I couldn’t resist. A few years later I went through that common young adult pretentious period where I read very little spec fic because I was smart and mature6 (only to come crawling back a few years after that). But by that time I was mired deep in Robert Jordan’s maddeningly slow epic7. It was, in other words, the final series I started reading in my Adolescent Book Frenzy. And I came to deeply resent how much time we spent moving characters incrementally down a seemingly infinite road.
In many ways, The Wheel of Time is the final example of classic, Tolkien-esque doorstopper fantasy before George R.R. Martin and others reinvented the genre. It’s earnest and pure in ways you can’t get away with these days where everything is at least a little grimdark8. And one side effect of the maddeningly slow pace was that you got deeply invested in the characters and their emotional beats. After reading a series for decades and sifting through millions of words, every braid-tug9, sniff, and sign of encroaching insanity hits you. Without really meaning to, Jordan kind of created a simulation of real life, where things happen slowly and the only way to fall in love is to spend time.
And that’s where Amazon Prime’s adaptation of the series—which the A.V Club’s Zack Handlen hilariously notes possesses “almost shocking competence10”—falls flat. Because it’s tripped into the common mistake of rushing the emotional beats.
The Wheel in the Sky Keeps on Turning
Man, remember those heady innocent days inf 2015 when a production company dropped an epic ashcan pilot for The Wheel of Time starring Billy Zane as Ishamael11? BILLY ZANE! Personally, I’d sign a petition to have Billy Zane reprise the role in the new series, because Billy Zane is awesome12.
That “pilot” was only created and aired due to legal issues surrounding the rights, and it sure looks it. It also only adapts basically the first few pages of the first novel in the series, and even if you’re familiar with the books and the characters there’s very little emotional resonance there because it’s a prologue—this, of course, is one reason many writers deprecate the prologue13. You’ve got what should be huge emotional beats here but you can’t appreciate them because who the fuck are these people anyway? You just started reading!
And yet the ashcan pilot doesn’t handle its emotional beats any worse than Amazon Prime’s adaptation, because The Wheel of Time is impatient. On the one hand, it’s “shocking competence” shows in how well it has condensed and streamlined Jordan’s sprawl—the show moves along in its first few episodes with admirable economy, eschewing exposition for action and doing its world-building in the margins. I love the casting, and if the One Power depictions are a bit silly14, well, magic tends to be a bit silly in film and television, and I find Rosamund Pike’s physical contortions entertaining for all their inherent silliness. But the show is trying for an emotional depth it hasn’t earned—especially if you’re unfamiliar with the source material.
The perfect example is towards the end of the fourth episode, “The Dragon Reborn.” The character of Nyneave has tracked Aes Sedai Moraine and her warder, Lan, and been brought to an Aes Sedai encampment where the False Dragon15 Logain is being kept under magical guard. She begins to lose the instinctive distrust she has for Lan, and the two share a tender moment when he translates the last words her parents ever said to her. This is a nice moment, and if you have read the books there’s all sorts of stuff to unpack because you know where these two are headed16.
Then Logain, who isn’t the actual Dragon Reborn (spoilers, eh?) but who is an incredibly powerful channeler being driven insane by the corrupted power he’s wielding, breaks free as his army arrives on the scene. A chaotic battle ensues, and at one point Lan receives what is certainly a mortal wound to the neck. As he lies there bleeding out, Nyneave collapses at his side and offers one of those Hollywood Nos where she screams at the heavens in rage and despair17, except she’s also a powerful channeler (though she doesn’t realize it yet, and the adaptation has promoted her to potential Dragon Reborn as well18) so she unknowingly unleashes a hurricane of magical healing power, basically healing everyone in the room. Even Logain, who has been icily confident in his immense power up to this point, is shocked19.
It’s a nice moment! But totally unearned. In the adaptation’s timeline, Nyneave and Lan have known each other for roughly ... two days? ... at this point. They’ve shared a few stories around a campfire and that nice translation moment. Would Nyneave be upset to see Lan bleeding to death at her feet? Sure! Would she experience an epic emotional breakdown that leads her to channel nuclear-fission levels of the One Power? I don’t buy it.
I Don’t Need This or This ... Just This Ashtray
Writing can be challenging, because the worst thing that can happen is boring your audience20. You can have deep, rich world-building and interesting, compelling characters, and maybe your plot over the long haul is fantastic. But if your readers get bored because there’s no big moment, you can lose them before you hook them.
Many reviews of The Wheel of Time have compared the show’s first few chapters to Game of Thrones, which famously depicted brother-sister incest and the attempted murder of a child in its first episode (also: BOOOOOOBBBBSSS). There’s a either a faint sense of disappointment or a faint sense of approval regarding WoT’s relative wholesomeness, depending on the reviewer, but it also underscores the problem: We’re trained as an audience to expect big WOW moments to hold our interest. The Wheel of Time writers clearly know this, and Nyneave’s big healing outburst is clearly meant to be a gut-wrenching emotional beat to hold our interest — a moment viewers are meant to unpack and discuss. It just doesn’t land, because it’s rushed. Lan and Nyneave’s relationship isn’t deep enough yet. If they’d somehow engineered a mortal wound to Egwene, Perrin, Mat, or Rand—then maybe this would have worked. We don’t know them well at this point either, but the show has done a decent job of demonstrating a long, deep, pre-existing relationship between these characters, so Nyneave having a One Power-powered breakdown over one of the other four would be believable.
Lan? A man she had contempt for literally just a few hours before? It doesn’t land21.
Is it fatal to the show? Probably not. And to be fair, Jordan had infinite space to develop his characters and build their relationships22. If the show gets the runway to go multiple seasons, this scene will be a blip. If the show crashes and burns, it will just be one reason. But it demonstrates the difficulties writers have in balancing a fast pace with character depth and development, and this sequence should serve as a mild example of what not to do.
Then again, I regularly form powerful emotional bonds with inanimate objects like pens, so perhaps I’m the one who doesn’t understand how emotions work <bursts into angry tears>23.
Next Week: Game of Thrones and the destructive power of the Rule of Cool.
Those of you who only know me as the cool international man of mystery I am today are shocked, I know.
Also: Pretty boring, to be honest.
Sweet’s cover paintings were beautiful, but also notoriously only vaguely connected to the story within. Still, I was a sucker for those pretty, shiny covers.
I used to take the bus into New York City to prowl bookstores all by myself when I was a kid, and it was awesome. Although I once bought a book at the 14th Street Barnes and Noble that gave me some really weird evil vibes. I can’t explain it. I bought it even though it was not at all what I normally read, cracked it open, and just got the weirdest feeling that it was … wrong, somehow. I took it back but couldn’t find my receipt, so I just put the book back on the shelf and left. This anecdote was brought to you by Kids Are Dumb.
Sadly, that does not narrow it down. So many of the bookstores are defunct.
I now realize that I will never be smart or mature. Pull my finger.
I swear to god, there’s a book in this series—an entire book—where absolutely nothing happens until the last 20 pages or so. I almost burned it ritualistically.
I may have tried to write an epic fantasy inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire about a violent and morally gray world, it’s true. But years before I actually did write an epic fantasy inspired by George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and someday I will reveal it and collect my many prizes.
If you want to trigger a Robert Jordan fan, sneak up behind them and whisper “she tugged her braid” and watch the fireworks.
I agree, BTW. In 99% of the multiverse, this series was a disaster.
I vividly remember waking up to headlines about a WoT pilot and then being epicly disappointed for months.
I couldn’t find any YouTube clips to post, but Billy Zane’s bit on Community as the head of Honda’s stealth marketing is pure genius and earned Billy my undying loyalty.
Someday I will write a novel that is almost all prologue just to see some heads explode. For extra points the prologue will also be a single sentence that runs 105,000 words.
The first rule of magic on screens is that it is always silly. Gandalf and Saruman in Jackson’s movies? Silly. Harry Potter waving his wand about? Silly. Perhaps the sole exception is the original Suspira.
Let’s pause for a hat-tip to Jordan, because complicating your Messiah narrative with a bunch of fake Messiahs is absolutely genius.
Subtle hint: It’s bonetown. Yes, I’m a professional wordsmith, why do you ask?
This is done so hack-handedly I was surprised the director didn’t just zoom out from Nyneave’s mouth to outer space in order to really convey the emotion.
Making all 5 of the Two Rivers bumpkins potential Dragons is such an easy win for diversity and destroying the patriarchy that it made my heart swell one whole size. But Rand had better still be the real Dragon Reborn or I will set my television on fire, then have regrets, then go on a bender.
Not gonna lie, having Logain’s insanity be calm and meditative is smart.
I take that back: The worst thing that can happen is continuously making a joke about never wearing pants and always being drunk and discovering that this has become your authorial brand.
I mean, there are people I’ve known intimately for decades who would get little more than a shrug from me if Trollocs burst into the room and dragged them off into the darkness. I may be a misanthropist, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong about this.
At least, some sections of the middle novels in this series felt infinite, if you know what I mean.
Also, this keyboard, who I have named Gary and is one of the best damn people in the world.
I’ve written that prologue.