But it does stand out, much in the same way as making Dumbledore the main character in the first Harry Potter film. That’s not a bad thing, given that Pike is both one of the most recognizable members of the cast and one of the best parts of the show.
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The series also focuses more on Rosamund Pike’s Moiraine as the protagonist for the show, fleshing out her role in the story and her screen time. It feels like an odd choice, given that it’s a fairly easy-to-guess answer, unless the show plans to diverge in far greater ways than it has in the six episodes that I got to see. And the first season over-commits to making the central mystery of the series the basic question of which of the five main characters is going to be the prophesied Dragon Reborn, capable of wielding massive power and challenging the Dark One. One male character, for example, is paired up with a spouse that’s created from whole cloth for the series solely for the purpose of fridging her in the first episode so that he can have something to be sad about over the course of the season. Egwene and Nynaeve are given bigger roles, in particular, whereas Rand, Perrin, and Mat tend to take up most of the spotlight in the books. The cast is aged up and far more diverse than Jordan’s iteration of his protagonists.
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Judkins does make some key changes to update the series. I did mention that there were a lot of characters. There’s Rand (Josha Stradowski), a shepherd boy Perrin (Marcus Rutherford), a blacksmith Mat (Barney Harris), a gambling thief Egwene (Madeleine Madden), the innkeeper’s daughter and Nynaeve (Zoë Robins), the village’s healer - any of whom could be the Dragon Reborn. She, along with her Warder (a warrior ally who travels with and protects an Aes Sedai), Lan Mandragoran (Daniel Henney), follows the trail to the Two Rivers, a town far in the mountains and recruits five young individuals who might fulfill the prophecy. One of the Aes Sedai, Moiraine (Rosamund Pike), is searching to try and find the prophesied Dragon Reborn to usher them onto their path of destiny. The show starts off leaning heavily on cookie-cutter fantasy tropes, though. The Wheel of Time does its best to ease viewers in Amazon is also promising animated shorts that will be available alongside the show to help explain some of the backstory and lore (although those weren’t made available ahead of the premiere). The Wheel of Time does its best to ease viewers into all that, paring down some of the more esoteric names and concepts and spreading out the minute details of how the world and its magic works over time. That includes the Dragon, the person who caused magic to be tainted in the first place and who is destined to either destroy the world again or save it. The world of the Wheel of Time is a cyclical one, though, where people are reborn in each age. Women, on the other hand, were still spared that disaster, leading to a group of powerful magic-wielders known as the Aes Sedai, who hold considerable sway - both sorcerous and politically. Thousands of years before the show begins, magic was corrupted, tainting the source of power such that any man who tried to use it would go mad. What distinguishes the initially generic Wheel of Time from other Lord of the Rings-inspired fantasies is its setting.
There are no fewer than 2,782 named characters mentioned over the course of the series, 148 of which are point of view characters at one point or another. The original books weigh in at over 10,000 pages (over twice as long as the completed A Song of Ice and Fire books) and were published over a span of 30 years by two authors (with Brandon Sanderson stepping in to finish the saga after Jordan’s death in 2007). To understand the difficulty of what Amazon and showrunner Rafe Judkins are attempting, you need to understand the sheer scale of the source material, which spans 14 novels and a prequel. The Wheel of Time is an interesting attempt at adapting Robert Jordan’s behemoth of a book series, but it’s also dragged down both by its unwieldy source material and its efforts to twist itself into a second coming of Game of Thrones.
It’s a big adaptation of even bigger fantasy novels, an attempt to beat HBO’s blockbuster hit at its own game and give Amazon a prestige genre series of its own.īut for all the money and effort that’s gone into the show, Amazon hasn’t made a Game of Thrones successor, try as it might. And The Wheel of Time, along with Amazon’s eye-wateringly expensive Lord of the Rings show coming in September 2022, are the results.
“I want my Game of Thrones,” CEO Jeff Bezos is reported to have said.
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The Wheel of Time is Amazon’s second-biggest TV bet ever.