After finishing watching the first season this weekend, and reading several different reviews and threads on Reddit, I felt I should write a review to clarify my thoughts.
For full disclosure, I started reading the books in the 90's. Started being key. I think if I recall correctly, I gave up around book 7 or 8, as I was enjoying some other series' more at the time. Then, a few years ago while spending a lot of time commuting, I tried to go back and restart the series intending to finish it as audiobooks. I once again gave up around book 6 this time. I do like the storyline of the series, I read synopsis and reviews for all the books and kept an eye on forums to know what happens. My issue with the books was sometimes an overabundance of details, and perhaps some unfortunate choices in how to characterize female characters being upset or annoyed. If you cut out braid pulling, dress straightening, and sniffing, I think the books might have been 8 books in length rather than 14.
I mention this as one of the things I do like about the show is the pacing has much more brevity and moves more smoothly through the story than the books. Compressing much of book one into 8 episodes, in particular the first half mostly into the first two episodes, was a good choice. Dropping Baerlon and Whitebridge, while moving some of the narrative points to Tar Valon and to other characters definitely helps the show.
Overall, the look of the characters and the world, while not strictly speaking matching with what I had imagined, certainly is not generic, and definitely has a strong unifying visual quality, I thought. So far each location observed has had a strong visual style, portraying distinct cultures. I quite liked the overall look of Tar Valon and Fal Dara. While some of the CGI may look a bit off, I didn't mind the look of Aes Sedai using saidar or Logain and Rand using the tainted saidin.
As far as the cast goes, the acting is all very passable for the most part, there are some odd choices, but those are more based on the script. Rosamund Pike was certainly a stand out, and was one of the few Aes Sedai characters that was characterized fairly close to the book Aes Sedai. Daniel Henney certainly looked the part of Lan, though some of his storyline related to Nynaeve is very accelerated, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Aging up the Emond's Field five felt like a safe decision, though somewhat disappointing in some of the changes made to these 5 central characters in efforts to speed up some of their stories and try distributing the narrative burden. One of the most disappointing was the decision to fridge the show introduced character of Perrin's wife and use her as a shorthand for trying to quickly introduce Perrin's wolf brother/beast within narrative. This is further unfortunate as the show runners seem to have decided to completely drop Elyas Macheras (though that might change).
Yet another unfortunate change, and somewhat lazy story writing in my opinion, was the decision to make Mat's home life dysfunctional, so of course Mat making bad decisions can be simply blamed on, "well he came from a broken home". He still has his gambling and risk taking as one of his core features, but the show makes him feel less rakish and more like an addict chasing a high.
Before discussing Rand, I would like to highlight that for an ensemble and making the Dragon Reborn be more ambiguous before the reveal, it was a smart decision for a TV show. Unfortunately, the whole pay off in the final episode fell super flat. The Dragon is supposed to be the most powerful channeler, and his actions are meant to save or break the world. Instead of doing much, we get a somewhat tense dream world exchange (is that supposed to be Tel'aran'rhiod?) with Ishamael, though the dialog does not fully explain this until you turn on captions and see the man is labelled Ishamael (misspelled as Ishmael though strangely), Rand pours some saidin into a sa'angreal, then blip, Ishamael disappears, heartstone fractured underneath them, and that's it. Never once do the viewers get any indication of why the dragon should be important, he never does anything warranting all the attention due to one that saved the world and destroyed it at the same time. To also clarify, the exchange between Rand and Ishamael definitely echoes exchanges between Rand and the Dark One in the later books, and was well acted in the show and interesting, but it certainly didn't have the pay off in illustrating the Dragon Reborn as a force to be reckoned with.
Coming also off that, there is a small interlude showing the second age and Lews Therin Telamon, the man known as the Dragon. He discusses sealing the dark one with Latra Posae Decume, yet unlike the books where this decision was a desperate choice after a long drawn out war that was being lost, it seemed more like nothing bad was happening and the Dragon's decision was more like, "welp, the dark one exists, maybe we should. I dunno, seal him. Or something." The decision to majorly change the lore here felt very wrong and very jarring. The scene itself though had some interesting parallels to later parts of the story, but kind of a major fail in neglecting the important details like the dark one having been given easier access to the world by the bore created by Lanfear, the long war consuming all humanity due to the Dark One's increased influence, and the act of desperation that led Lews Therin Telamon to seal the Dark One away.
Until the seventh episode, while I was mostly okay with the changes and the series was primarily decent to good, the eighth episode kind of ruined most of the goodwill I had built up. The series is worth trying, and by all means might improve, but for me the end of the first season makes me not overly interested in getting more.
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