Amazons live action "The Wheel of Time."

Has anyone checked this thing out yet and in your opinion is it worth the sign up for Amazon prime?

This is absolutely a pivotal Old Man Yells At Clouds moment for me because I thoroughly refuse to engage with an adaptation of those books.

It is absolutely irrational but something about it irks me.

Wheel of Time megafan here, read the entire series multiple times.

So far we have 3 episodes out. I really liked all 3 and think the show is very promising. The main cast is stellar, especially Rosamund Pike as Moiraine- she is absolutely perfect in the role. I feel like the show has managed to capture the spirit of each character very well.

YMMV when it comes to the effects and pacing- some seem to love them, some seem to hate them. I think the effects range from pretty good to great, and I think the pacing works pretty well for a show that is condensing a 300,000 word novel into 8 episodes.

There are changes from the books. I think for the most part they are smart and necessary to keep things moving and bring in a new audience. My main point of contention is the Big Controversial change in episode 1 (Perrin having a wife and accidentally killing her immediately). I understand why they did it, and I think the spirit of it works, but I think they could have done it without relying on the tired wife fridging trope. They could have just had Perrin kill Master Luhan instead and have largely the same effect, but oh well. Not a dealbreaker for me at all.

Overall, very solid start. The music and location shooting are excellent. I'm very excited to watch more.

TIP: If you do watch this, don't miss out on the animated shorts they hide away in the X-Ray section of each episode. They flesh out the lore of the world and include details from the books that they couldn't fit in the show proper. Each short is about 3-3.5 minutes.

For context, I am currently reading the books but have only gotten as far as the third one.

I also watched the opening episode of the show as i was excited to see the adaption.

I thought it was really disappointing.

The script was clunky, the actors were not up to delivering what they had been given. It made what seemed like significant changes to the world and plot.

My girlfriend fell asleep and i couldn't blame her.

@nophilip: Huh. That’s a… curious change.

I can see how it could work in spirit but also seems like it sort of misses the point as well.

It will be interesting to see how this end up. I was pretty into the books like twenty years ago. I got through book 5 or 6, the I got sick of the plot being stuck in neutral and descriptions of dresses that went on for pages, and stopped.

I was sort of put off by the promotional material. Outside of Rosamund Pike, it just didn't seem very well cast. I was getting strong "fantasy 90210" vibes off the trailers.

My history with the book series is pretty much the same as TheRealTurk’s above, and my thoughts are almost 100% the same as nophillip’s. Adaptations necessarily change things to make the story they’re telling fit the medium they’re being told in. Apart from the one change nophillip outlined that was unnecessary and, to me, the laziest way to do what they were trying to do, those first three episodes were perfectly enjoyable and I thought each one was better than the last.

If they keep the pace moving and developing the characters well, I’ll be happy.

Thanks for all the feedback. I think I will check it out need to watch the latest season of The Expanse anyways so it looks like I'll be signing up for Prime for a little bit just need to remember to cancel after I'm done.

I have always hear Robert Jordan books disappoint. But, truthful what turned me off was that I was burned by Shannara by Terry Brooks. Shinnara and C.S. Lewis just make me -illogically angry- when I think about them. They ruined most fantasies for me, or made me very skeptical of most series. Probably Robert Jordan is okay, but I'm so picky about my fantasy that I avoid most of what people recommend.

@monkeyking1969: I will always have a soft spot for his work but the WoT books are messy. He has a bizarre understanding of how men and women interact with one another and will never let a scene stand without over describing it and what everyone is wearing for good measure.

The main problem though is pacing. He introduces too many plot threads and eventually forward momentum grinds to a halt for several door stopper length books.

In spite of it all though it’s a series I’ll always have fondness for.

I liked the spell showcase in the first episode, but I fear they basically blew their budget on it and the series is gonna turn into a Walking Dead thing (first and last episodes of each series are pumped up to dazzle). Other than that I feel like there's absolutely no tension at all. In just three episodes there's been how many "we're in a dire situation" moments, but you know none of them are gonna die. Every time they just "magically" get saved somehow. Maybe it's just the start of the series, and it's gonna branch out more as it goes, but it's already starting to get pretty repetitive.

I got farther than you did but had basically the same complaint. IIRC the first book covers about a year or so and stuff moved along fairly well. By the time I made it to book 9, I was hundreds of pages in and it hadn't even covered 24 hours, and nothing happened. I finally quit reading in disgust, which is not something I usually do when I'm already that deep in to a series. This was late high school/early undergrad.

A friend of mine read the whole series and told me that the Brandon Sanderson books that capped it were better than Jordan's own (or at least the more recent ones), which I'm very willing to believe.

Many years later (15 years-ish?), I tried re-reading them. Couldn't get into them at all, and couldn't for the life of me figure out why I'd liked them in the first place. Maybe they seemed less tropey to my younger self and I'm just too jaded at this point.

Funny aside that has stuck with me over the years: I vividly recall that seemingly whenever Jordan wanted a female character to say she thought a guy was sexy, he'd have her say that he had "a well-turned calf." WTF does that even mean?

FWIW my favorite high fantasy these days has got to be Robin Hobb's Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies. Anyone who has ever liked fantasy books should give them a shot, at least. Hobb is just ridiculously good at creating compelling characters. And if you want something lighter, try Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. That series is sort of like the show Supernatural, but in book form and better (though the first book is admittedly a little weak... there's like 17 of them now and they mostly keep getting better).

Anyway, I'll at least give the Wheel TV show a shot, at some point. It's been so long now that I've forgotten a lot of the plot, so I'm not sure I'll recognize where there have been changes. Though the discussed change with Perrin certainly seems weird and ham-fisted.

@atheistpreacher: If I’m remembering correctly nearly the entirety of book 10 is what was going on in the rest of the world while the finale of book 9 was happening. It is…. difficult to get through.

It is nice at least that Book 11, the last before Jordan’s death, is actually very good. It just.. cost a lot of time to write himself out of the corner he had himself in.

Just watched episode 4. Without getting into spoilers, I don’t think fears of the effects budget being blown are well founded - this one seems on par with the first.

Also, I was pretty positive coming out of the first three episodes. This one, to my hazy memory of The Eye of the World, takes by far the most liberties we’ve seen so far (minus episode 1’s terrible no-good change we’re just going to pretend didn’t happen)…and is the best episode so far. We’re split among three groups: one is pretty much all exposition and world-building, and the other two are a pretty fair balance between those and plot action. Again, staying as spoiler free as possible, the climax of this episode was pretty fucking rad.

Color me interested as someone who read the first 10 books like 18 years ago. I really should read the last 4 books (of which I own volume 11) but I feel like I need to find a refresher podcast or something before I proceed. I'm certain any and all changes in the show are going to piss me off irrationally but I'll say some fancy fantasy cinematography already sounds far more appealing than Jordan's often times laborious narration style.

Can't possibly be worse than the Cowboy Bebop adaptation.

Just finished episode 4. I know very little about the world (basically going in, all I knew was that women can wield magic and men can't). I've since looked into some lore stuff. I don't think I'll ever read the books. I seriously believe that most fantasy authors are too up their own ass with word counts.

Aside from pretty glaring similarities to LOTR (the river crossing in particular stood out), I'm really enjoying it. The lore is interesting, if not particularly unique. I absolutely despise "chosen one" stories, but if the rest of the stuff is good or interesting I can put that aside. I will say the pace of the episodes is wildly incongruous, but the end of episode 4 is a great mid-season action scene where we get to see someone learn their power.

I don't really think there's a world in which we see all of the books made into a show, but I'm always willing to give high fantasy and space opera shows a try.

Just got done with Episode 1. My initial impression is that it's a worse version of the Netflix Witcher. Kind of like that show, there are times that it looks great, and then there are times when it looks like a slightly higher budget version of Xena/Hercules from the 90s. However, I think the Witcher had way better casting for what it was going for and the action scenes were a lot better. I'm really not feeling most of the main cast outside of maybe Rosamund Pike and dude who plays Lan.

This particular show would be much better off if it spent more time building the world and characters rather than attempting to manufacture teen drama bullshit. I said in an earlier post that the previews made it look like "Two Rivers 90210" and the first episode did nothing to get that idea out of my head. There were so many eye-roll moments in that first episode that it was kind of painful. Between Perrin's TV Wife, Mat's Redneck Mom, and Lord Roose Bolton being Rand's dad, I was pretty checked out by the end.

Well I finally got around to checking it out and whew boy it's fine enough I guess but goddamn they chose a hell of a series to try to adapt. As they started introducing more and more stuff I just started to remember how massive that series is and just how much different stuff is in there. Now I'm on board to continue watching it just to see how in the hell a TV show is going to spin all those plates and whether or not they can keep it going or see how spectacularly it all comes crashing down.

I'm on book.... Seven? I think? Eight, maybe? Honestly, I've lost track, but anyway I have such a weird relationship with this series. On one hand, I spend a lot of time bitching about the terrible rush hour traffic level of pacing in the books after like the first 3, Jordan's need to repeat himself and the characters' inner monologues constantly (PERRIN SMELLS A THING. RAND IS AAAAANGRY!) and have people behave in ways no actual human would (NO ONE WOULD HAVE PHYSICALLY YANKING ON THEIR OWN BRAID AS A NERVOUS TICK. THAT'S NOT A NORMAL THING. WHAT THE FUCK DOES KNUCKLING ONES FOREHEAD EVEN MEAN. OH LOOK SOMEONE IS DRY WASHING THEIR HANDS AGAIN.).

On the other hand, all the changes made for the show make me irrationally angry and make me not want to watch it despite my constant ribbing on the books themselves. It's very nonsensical.

Also they did my boy Loial dirty in the show, from the images I've seen. He looks like a god damn clown.

The show was never going to get enough time and seasons to properly cover the source material, so it's feeling quite condensed down to a "greatest hits" of the first book rather than a deep exploration. I guess, it's always going to have that problem, fantasy books to tv show, especially RJ's writing, as it rambles and splits so much that every book you thought was going to tie up some loose ends introduced 50 more. It was an effort of epic proportion Brian undertook to pull all that shit together and still have a satisfying conclusion.

So I'm treating the show as a series of "best-of" vignettes from the series and so far, apart from the waygate not having the trefoil, and maybe Loial looking a little too human, I've been reasonably ok with it.

Enjoying it very mch so far. My expectations were low to begin with, and I always understood they were going to have to truncate a lot and take out a lot of stuff to make a TV show, and make some choices specifically for the format narrative-wise. The cast is great, I think the writing has been above average and the colourful look of everything is a good set up for the inevitable juxtopasition against what should be some really dark shit. Poor, innocent Rand...

Interestingly, the actor who played Matt quit halfway through shooting the most recent episode, that's why it ends like that. They have recast matt for the second season, let's hope its not too jarring of a change.

And I like Loial. He looks a bit silly but he was always gonna look silly. The actor is doing a great job, and the way everyone just interrupts his droning ramblings is spot on!

They have also done a great job of really hitting home how strong the warder bond is, which is going to mean a lot later on.

Theres plenty I dislike about it - I thought it started very weakly (how do you not open with he Lews Therin prologue) and does not do a great job of introducing the world lore and factions etc. I am more than willing to put up with that kind of jank tho as all in all it is far more hit than miss for me, and there is a reverence and attention to detail that I am very much enjoying.

Looking forward to some more big characters showing up, and bring on the forsaken!

@splodge: Oh weird I didn't know about Matt's actor quitting. Was wondering why he stayed outside the ways. Will be interesting to see how they work around that. Also agree about Loial could be a better coustume but seems they got the personality pretty spot on.

Also a few other random thoughts. Even tho he hasn't have a whole lot of screentime yet I like how there portraying Thom. Also I wasn't expecting the whole thing to be so horny lol .

@cyrusraven: haha yeah a lot of the sex in the books was just implied. Robert Jordan was almost oddly chaste in his writing. "Pillow friends" etc. Couldnt say hey these ladies be straight up doin it

I'll admit the show has grown on me as its gone on. I agree with @splodge that the beginning was kind of the weakest part and that they should have started the show with Lews Therin. One of the things I think the show struggled with is portraying exactly why people are so freaked out about discussing The Dragon, male channelers, and why Logain is more than just a random warlord who happens to be able to do magic. Showing the consequences of Therin going nuts would have gone a long way to ease some of the confusion I feel like newcomers would feel.

Other than that, it's been small niggles. Parts of the book I remember begin great (Thom, Rand and Matt with the dagger) are still great. Parts I remember being tedious as hell (everything involving Egwenne, Perrin, and the Tinkers) are still tedious as hell. I'm also not a huge fan of cutting Mordeth out the Shadar Logath. I suppose depending on how much they truncate things it might not be that huge a deal, but if they end up going for a substantial number of seasons it seems like that omission would have a knock-on effect down the line. If nothing else, it makes fore more interesting world building and helps explain just what's up with the dagger a little bit more.

@therealturk: From what I've read, they're intentionally remixing the chronology of certain events, so I wouldn't be surprised if Mordeth comes later. Padan was a pretty background B-tier villain until, you know, he suddenly wasn't, so they might not want to use screen time setting him up as much 'till further on.

@therealturk: Was thinking along the same lines it would have been great opening with Lews Therin "prologue" to give newcomers a little background but... even if they did that I really don't see how someone could come into this blind. TWoT is so dense that I don't see a newcomer being anything but lost the whole way thru.

this is interesting and a pretty good fantasy series that is worth watching if you're looking for something new. I would score this a 7/10.

I ever could finish the novels. Hopefully the show removes 90% of the fluff and at least 70% of the braid pulling.

Omg the braid yanking kills me. Like find a new lane.

I don't know, man. I don't have braids but I feel like, if I did, I would yank on them all the time.

Definitely, if you have long hair it will be yanked from time to time. Perhaps don't write that sentence that often though :p

I finally binged through it last weekend and it turns out, I kinda liked it! Maybe being nearly 2 decades removed from the source material has made me less precious about it, maybe I've just mellowed out in general. Even with the changes, liberties, and truncation I couldn't help but get sucked in to this version of the fiction. There's something about seeing actualized versions of characters like Ny'naeve in addition to iconic locations and sequences that was making me feel weepy and wistful.

Sure sometimes the production feels a bit cheap, I must have missed the meeting where middlebrow fantasy shows weren't allowed to be a little shoddy. Like the Trollocs look real generic, it's asking a lot but I wish they had at least a few with bird heads and feathers to express a slight variety as oppose to merely being off-brand orcs. I personally would like to see more of this show and where it goes from here though I could also see book-agnostic people bouncing off of it.

I won't restate what others have beyond that I loved the series and think the show is engaging, not great.

I will say in watching this with my wife, they did a very poor job grounding people who have never read any of the books.

I don't see how a show that fans seem to think is "fine" whilst seemingly leaving the vast majority of viewers feeling lost about what is happening, has any legs.