The Wheel of Time

After some months of waiting, LC and I finally started the "Wheel of Time" TV series. She then dropped out after a few episodes; I gutted it out to the bitter end. And it truly was a bitter end - what a pile of rubbish that was!

I've got to be honest, I knew they were in trouble as soon as I heard some of the key changes, and to explain that I'll need to provide some background:

The "Wheel of Time" books wouldn't be written the way they are these days - some of the material is now considered problematic. In particular, one of the central conceits is that the One Power, the source of magic in the setting, has two halves: a male half and a female half, where the male half has been tainted, leading to all men who call on it inevitably going mad and dying. Additionally, the setting posits a prophesied saviour, the Dragon Reborn, a man who will use the One Power to save the world... or break it.

This creates something of a problem, partly because strict sex binaries are now considered unbearably passé, and partly because you just can't have a prophesied male Chosen One these days.

And yet this is entirely foundational to the series, because the central tension is that you now have a saviour who is also inevitably doomed to madness and death; not only is there nobody around to teach him how to use his power, but how could you ever trust him?

The TV series discards that, of course: here, the One Power is not split (though men still go mad), and the saviour could be a man or a woman.

Now, I should note at this point that I have no objection, in general, to changes to stories and settings. And the notion of a female Chosen One is perfectly fine with me (although the Chosen One narrative itself is extremely dated). But there are some changes that just don't work, because making them so fundamentally alters everything else that it breaks the whole story - you can't have a male Jane Eyre, or a female James Bond. And the Dragon Reborn needs to be a man, or the whole premise falls apart.

Anyway...

If that had been the only problem with the series, that wouldn't have been unrecoverable. If nothing else, they haven't actually changed the identity of the Dragon Reborn, so ultimately it doesn't matter all that much.

And they did make some other changes that were all to the good: compressing a load of stuff, bringing some elements forward so that we won't have entire seasons where nothing happens. And they've shifted the focus, making Moiraine the main character - an especially good idea as Rosamund Pike is excellent in this series.

But that very excellence is in contrast to the other massive problem with the series: Rosamund Pike is excellent, and is perhaps the only actually good performance in the series. The rest of the main cast, and especially the five potential Dragons, are more wooden than the sets.

Beyond that, yeah, I guess it's fine - in a kind of extremely-expensive-yet-somehow-low-budget kind of way. It's just so po faced, tedious, and... blah. There is nothing to recommend this over the books (which I can't recommend either), or indeed going and watching something else.

Ultimately, this is one to avoid. And I won't be returning for season two.

Such a shame.