The Wheel Of Time (Amazon Prime) TV Show • Page 20

This episode and the first episode are proof this season needed ~180 more minutes. More thoughts to come.

 

Josha finally feels like Rand; which is excellent news.

Watching those three women burnout was brutal and visceral. Nynaeve didn’t burn out… because Egwene healed her? I know so much of how the power works is hard to translate to the screen, but some beats are working really well to explain it and then some are head scratchers.

Loial, Uno, and Masema currently bleeding out on the floor/dead considering their book arcs has me a little nervous.

Padan Fain is a great villain and it seems like we’re getting a hybrid TGH/TDR season up next with the chase for the horn/dagger. And with how Mat’s looking we will need the dagger scene from the books. So I’m really curious how Mat gets roped back in. You can tell where he’s been written out of this episode a little bit. Wtf happened there?!

Moiraine was severed? Shielded? Is this their attempt to change the Aelfinn and Tower of Ghenjei?

Ishamael and the Age of Legends were great.

Also? The Seanchan arrival was AMAZING.

Season is a solid 6.5/10. The cast is nailed in. It’s time for two extra episodes.

 

That was easily my least favorite episode since the pilot, which is a bummer. At least on first watch. I'll need to rewatch it a few times and see how I end up feeling, but I think for me this episode was hurt by my feeling like the pacing has been too rushed straight from the first episode and right on through to here. I think I had unrealistic expectations / I was expecting too much.

I don't know what I was expecting exactly, but when I think about everything I wanted out of this last episode of the season, realistically to fit even some of those things would mean the episode would have to be at least twice as long as it is, if not more.

I suppose the Seanchan arrival was pretty cool to see, but does that have any meaning at all to viewers of the show who haven't read the books.....??? That really came out of absolutely nowhere.

 

Me during most of this season and especially this final episode:

 

Hey @CarpetElf, what’s your read on the tidal wave at the end?

 

Pretty similar to all other tidal waves - bad

 

This is not really important, but it's the kind of thing I get stuck on when a show or movie didn't really work for me, and also it seems like a particular weakness of fantasy things or anything involving magic, where the magic kinda makes the battle plan the characters are utilizing not make any sense:

Why does it make sense for the men of Fal Dara to ride out to the fortress wall in Tarwin's Gap just to die kinda pointlessly, when they could've all just stayed anywhere behind Agelmar's sister / the channeling women and just let them sweep up and wipe out all of the attacking Trollocs with the burny lightning...?????

 

Look at the brightness of the weaves. Without Nynaeve and Egwene, none of that happens. If those three ladies are the known channelers (where’s Ingtar’s Aes Sedai advisor?) in Fal Dara, it makes sense to not plan around them.

 

So without the last minute addition of Nynaeve and Egwene - who were not part of the battle strategy - the channeling women would not have been strong enough to do what we saw them do...???

I suppose that makes more sense than I initially thought, but then why/how would Agelmar's sister have known that N&E were powerful enough to help her do what she did?? I suppose they had a little last minute strategy sesh that maybe we didn't see...

 

When she links with Egwene, shock crosses her face. It happens again when Nynaeve joins. It’s one of the few things in this episode I noticed that was like “oh, they’ve got this down right.” Because we know Lady (I forget) is a failed Accepted so when she felt them the second and fourth most powerful women on the planet join their power, I think she changed her plan.

It went from a “buy them time” thing (they think the remaining women in the city are planning a defense behind them, not that Fain and the Fades have infiltrated), to “oh my THIS POWER”… which is why the three burned out.

 

4, 7, 3, 6, 5, 2, 1, 8.

I think. I don’t hate any of them. There’s a lot of good here, but also a lot of room for improvement. I’m still just very happy these characters are on my screen. I’ll always have the books, and I’m already itching for a re-read.

 

I think I struggled with the premier and the finale, partly because I had to see and accept what they're doing with the story, the whole overall plan for the season. I'm gonna rewatch it a few times and see how I feel. I do think having a longer (preferably two hour) premiere and finale would have gone a long way for me in helping this season work. As it stands now I think it's a mixed bag leaning towards positive.

The season felt to me like it absolutely ROCKETED through the story it was telling at an absurdly breakneck pace, which has the effect at least to me of dulling the impact of everything that you do see. Nothing really lands with the weight it should even though a ton of epic stuff happens. I know pacing is extremely important - and the powers that be seem TERRIFIED that a tv viewer maybe bored for even a split second on this show - but so is connective tissue and the character beats that really make you care about the story you are watching. When you rush through the story so fast it's almost like why bother even trying to tell it? Pick a shorter and/or easier story to tell.

 

Wait I always thought this came out on Fridays

 

It’s midnight in London so 7pm for EST, haha.

 

I feel so let down by this finale, but the more I think about it, the less sure I am that any 60 minutes of tv was going to satisfy me and give me what I was looking for out of this season. I suppose given how it felt like they were rushing through the season so fast, in my head I'm just thinking 'Ehh, maybe we'll get to that later' repeatedly over and over the entire time, and then the season ends and we never got to that later, so-to-speak.

It was a nice change of pace that Rand got to do *something* this episode, but I was left feeling disappointed that we didn't get to see him do something FUCKING EPIC, just totally unleashed. Show us that The Dragon is something to be feared with the power to break the world.

I do think it was a good idea to give the other characters something to do, but I would have loved to see them being overpowered despite their best efforts and have had epic power Dragon Rand come in and do something to turn the tide.

I don't mean this as a critique of the CGI or special effects, because I really do not care about the occasional wonky effect if I am invested in the story, but when all is said and done with this season, it feels small to me where it should feel epic, similar to how the first season of GoT *clearly* needed much more of a budget than they had. I think it's a little weird that Amazon peeps have to keep piping up telling people how much they spent on this show - the show should kinda speak for itself in that regard.

 

Just finished the prologue. Re-read # 3 begins!

 

I know EOTW didn’t have the biggest payoff, but this felt very underwhelming for a season finale, knowing the source material. Although I do think a non-book reader would like this enough to be curious as to what they’re doing next. I do hope Morraine being “disconnnected” from the source, Loial being “dead” and Rand running off on his own are just the writers trying to have good cliffhangers and not indicative of how the story will unfold moving forward.

Seanchan entrance was dope.

 

Right after I first watched episode 8, I pretty much fucking hated it. I thought it was awful, actually. I've softened on it a little bit, although I still do think it was just a bad episode of TV as well as a really disappointing season finale.

I don't know whether it was lack of money, lack of post-production time, on-set COVID restrictions, or likely some combination of all three, but if they were not able to present an at least decent looking Battle of Tarwin's Gap, they should have either skipped showing the battle at all or come up with some other way to do it other than large army of Trollocs. A handful of Myrdraal linking up mirroring what the women channeling were doing or something. I don't know. But not that.

I think two main things would have gone 90% of the way to fixing this episode for me:

1. The Eye of the World book prologue (with LTT looking for Ilyena in the palace) as the cold open
   
   
2. Not playing cutesy and mysterious with who Rand was facing at the end of the episode, and making that confrontation better and less anti-climactic

The cold open we got was just a lame and boring scene on its own, and it also does a lot of crazy things to book stuff as far as I can remember. The book prologue would have been epic here, it would have been able to keep pace with the amazing cold open from episode 7, and it perfectly plays into Rand's confrontation at the end of the episode. They could even have kept up the stupid game about who exactly the burny face mask guy is for the cold open, although I think that is a bad and annoying device that purposely just robs the story you are telling of resonance and meaning for the sake of just temporarily confusing your audience. That's not mystery, that's just witholding information in an annoying way. I hate this technique in general, but especially coming as the finale to an entire season of television. I don't care about setting up future shit at this exact moment - I just want a badass satisfying finale that leaves you DYING to see the next season immediately.

The scenes with Perrin & Padan Fain & Fades just chilling & hanging out were really fucking bad too, but those weren't a deal-breaker for me, mainly because I felt those scenes were clearly adjusted to write around the actor for Mat being suddenly gone, and also the show has kinda just had Perrin standing around doing nothing the entire fucking time so that was nothing new.

I understand why the decision was made to have the women be the ones who defeat the army at Tarwin's Gap, but I don't agree with it. It takes something major away from Rand who honestly needed something major to do at this point without giving anything back to him. It should have been the women *almost* holding but being overpowered / overrun despite their best efforts and needed to work with Rand also to get the job done, somehow tying into what Rand's doing at The Eye at the same time.

I would have done everything completely and utterly different myself - but these are the two main things I would have done to fix this episode as it is and still have it be a 60-minute episode.

 

Haven’t read the books, watched the entire season over the last couple of days. I barely have a clue what’s happening so the finale fell pretty flat for me. Rand is easily the least interesting of the main cast for me so it’s a little difficult to get invested. Not sure I’ll be in for next season but who knows

 

Worst episode of the season probably. Pacing was horrible. Everything was pretty anticlimactic. Also they gave ishmael such a goofy looking suit I couldn't take him seriously lol.

 

And I don't know I just dont think rand and Perrin are good actors.

 

The Wheel turns, and the Wheel Of Time ends its first season

This review of the finale really sums up my feelings on the episode/season as a whole.

Nerfing Rand is a mistake that needs hard corrected fast—both for his power as a channeled and for the fact he’s actually a great character. I think that’s my biggest complaint for season one: they did an excellent job of making us fall in love with everyone but Rand.

 

I really liked most of the cast, and it's awesome seeing a version of these characters on my tv. The finale was disappointing in some ways that really exemplify bigger issues with the season. The battle at Tarwin's Gap and the "battle" at the Eye both sucked. Some weird diversions from the source material too. I hope the success in viewership wins them some more freedom from network interference or whatever. Then there's covid concerns and all kinds of other excuses. Idk, some things I really liked, some I really didn't

Anyway I wanna buy one of their WOT "seven rings" hoodies

 

Subbing but I'm way behind.

 

Rewatched the finale for a third time, my wife's first time watching it. I've come around on the episode a tiny bit but I still think it was a massive disappointment and the worst episode of the season by far. She liked it a lot but felt it was a little bit of a letdown after some really good episodes.

I will say that there is a chance that the majority of my gripes with the show were a result of Amazon pulling rank on the creatives and simply mandating that things must be a certain way, like how they were not allowed to have the premier run longer than an hour no matter what, fuck what the story called for. Fingers crossed for the success of season 1 to buy them a little more wiggle room for season 2...