S1E8: The Eye of the World v2

[Chivalry]

3 hours ago, notpropaganda73 said:

I've just had another thought in relation to that^, full series spoilers for the books...

 

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This idea of the accepted wisdom in the current day being completely wrong could really elevate Verin's role (not that she needs elevated all that much!). She is a Brown so would be an accepted source of knowledge in the show, but she is also Black Ajah so would have sources of knowledge beyond the standard for Browns. There is potential there for hints about her secret to be littered through the show. 

 

I really hope they get Verin right! 

 

I love this character, I hope they get her right, too. 

[CaddySedai]

45 minutes ago, Chadouken said:

Isn't Episode 6 called "The Flame of Tar Valon?"

That is in reference to The Amrylin. 

 

Did you actually see the flame itself anywhere?

 

The Symbol of the female half of the power?

 

I am simply pointing out they only show it in one place… a place from the AoL. 

[fra85uk]

Wow on metacritic this episode has 1.6, 6.2 on imbd. On rotten tomatoes, after the last episode, the series is down to 67%, 54% for top critics.

 

These number are below Shannara, this is Cowboy Bebop territory

[ilovezam]

52 minutes ago, fra85uk said:

Wow on metacritic this episode has 1.6, 6.2 on imbd. On rotten tomatoes, after the last episode, the series is down to 67%, 54% for top critics.

 

These number are below Shannara, this is Cowboy Bebop territory

Rightly so... You can't character assassinate the Dragon (and also incorrectly call him the Dragon Reborn) without ruffling some feathers.

[Mirefox]

1 hour ago, fra85uk said:

Wow on metacritic this episode has 1.6, 6.2 on imbd. On rotten tomatoes, after the last episode, the series is down to 67%, 54% for top critics.

 

These number are below Shannara, this is Cowboy Bebop territory

It is quite unfortunate that Amazon very clearly wanted to tap into the GoT popularity and changed the tone of this story in an attempt to do so, thereby setting itself up to be compared to GoT, to which if falls quite short.  Quite a few of those critic reviews bring up GoT and how WoT falls far short in comparison.  I hadn’t read any critics’ reviews up to your post but they are quite enlightening.

[fra85uk]

Well, the problem is that this episode is both awful adaptation AND bad TV itself.

I tried to start a post of everything that is wrong with it and i surrendered immediately because of the sheer number of things to criticize.

[Mirefox]

You know how sometimes you paint a picture in your head of something from a book and it is hard to change that picture even when presented with story or pictures to the opposite?  I don’t know what I picked up on in the book but I always imagined the Blight as a wasteland.  Maybe something more akin to Mordor; a place where things can’t grow.  I KNOW that there is evidence to the contrary in the books but that image took hold.  The Blight, therefore, was a bit of a shock to me, but I ultimately think I liked it.  I liked the pictures of the real-life location in the Canary Islands even better, but that was also far more lush than I had imagined.  My only issue with it as presented is that it sure seems like an impossible place to move Trollocs around in.

[nsmallw]

15 hours ago, Mirefox said:

Did we ever get any confirmation what, exactly, it was that Rand went to?  They kept calling it the Eye of the World but Moiraine also called it the Dark One’s prison.  We didn’t have a pool of Saidin, no Green Man, no horn, no banner, etc.  I kind of assumed Moiraine was just wrong but the show Eye wasn’t really recognizable as the book Eye.  

Yes, I too was confused by the "Eye" section. I enjoyed the acting but am confused by exactly why they went to there, was it just a plot by Ishy to get the DR there, and what were both Moraine's and Ishy's expectations about what could happen at the Eye.  I've watched the ep. twice and still aren't sure. 

Please help if anyone knows a good breakdown.

[DreadParrot]

I now officially feel like the meme where the spouse storms back into the room and shouts "And another thing!"

 

Can't shake the aggravation and confusion the finale wrought upon me. My spouse is not a show watcher or a book reader so its falls to the forums...

 

This was a season finale...this is what you are leaving your audience to sit on for a year. You need  a payoff that justifies waiting 1 to 2 years to pick back up, or a set up that leaves people anxious to pick back up for another 1 to 2 years.

 

There were several "moments" in the finale.

 

Perrin finally gets into the same room as Padan Fain who has been sir appearing in the shadows for the whole season. He basically mugs for the camera and says they were manipulated, and he intentionally visited the two rivers each year expressly on orders from his lord. Several narrative problems or storytelling problems inherent here. First, we have gotten like 3 lines of dialogue the entire season from him. He slipped away from Winterfest massacre like he knew it was coming which is alluded to in the finale. When Perrin finds him it is confusion over what the heck is happening none of the cast saw him slip away during the attack, Perrin caught a glimpse of him once or twice but otherwise had no interaction, Matt bought the lanterns and got slighted in his attempts to profit from thieving, but that is it. This character who has randomly been trailing the group and seems to have orchestrated events in the background has virtually no context or interaction. Compare this to Horn Rim Glasses during Season 1 of Heroes. The mysterious man who we know virtually nothing about but seems to hound the characters from the background and then BAM! he is the cheerleaders father. I understand Fain as a bookreader, but as a show watcher the reveal of Fain in the Fal Dara keep feels flat. It was jilting especially because Perrin just walks in to see the soldiers down and Loial getting stabbed. He did nothing and attempted nothing. And in the context of the show I dont blame him. He barely knew Loial, had met the Shienarians like the day before and walked into a room where the Amazon Delivery Guy has several muder wraiths shanking random foreign soldiers while digging a box from under the floor. Confusion is his state as is the state of me watching the show. I am putting a lot of this from the context of a friend who is a non reader and his reactions.

 

The not yet novice girls form a link with Amalisa to set themselves up as the last line of the last line of defense against the Trollocs. The way that keep fortress was set up I feel like 500 soldiers could have held off the trollocs for like a week...but whatever. They break through and are going to destroy Fal Dara then ravage the borderlands unchecked. A hail mary channel bomb is fitting in this scenario. Only the control of that channel bomb is put into the hands of a character with five minutes of screen time, which reduces the characters we have spent time with to playing batterys for the tertiary character and then trying to not die.  I really dug Nynaeve in essence shielding Egwene from the backlash, that is fitting and heroic that is a season finale type moment. The concept that you literally burn out from over use is a good translation to the screen and I enjoyed that element. But this is a finale and your chance to make people WANT more. This really needed to be Rand. We needed to see what the Dragon is capable of. We already saw Nynaeve tank the Black Wind and Mass Heal. This really should have been Rand's moment.

 

Which brings me to "The Eye". Groan. Every fiber of my being believed the The Eye was not actually the prison site but a trap to lure Rand to Ishamael so they could corrupt the purpose of the cache left for the Dragon. Or that upon arrival Moiraine would realize she was wrong and it was not the prison. As a show watcher I left this scene with no clue as to what happened. No explanation or description to lean that figure who goaded Rand and did something unknown to Moiraine as either the Dark One or Ishamael or a different Forsaken for that matter. No Rand slipping and calling him by his pre-forsaken name, no proclamation that he was Baalzamon. He was just some guy who apparently taught Rand to channel (in a description to close to the way in which Saidar is accessed) and then got hit with a bright light. It almost looked like the Saangreal dissolved, not explained or even mentioned. Rand then asks for the Mark Twain moment I was expecting like 7 seasons from now and decides to go wander the earth. The woman who just held a knife to his throat in a gambit to prevent him from turning to the Dark and marched off to the Eye with the full expectation it would kill her LETS HIM GO. Offers not a word of resistance or even suggests that maybe he needs to stick around in case more needs to be done. Which even if she were mostly certain you would error on the side of caution. It is then immediately revealed when Lan shows up (those damn tracking tells) that she is filled with doubt and fears this is just the beginning. Every aspect of this falls flat, and felt disjointed. It didnt feel like a season finale, it felt like a rough first draft.

 

Finally...The Seanchan. I have echoed this sentiment recently and with gusto. SOOOO much of what the show got right made what it got wrong so much more disgusting. The Seanchan look fantastic and alien. They are scary and intimidating and feel completely alien to what we have seen. That is good. They tsunami a vacant beach. I understand this conveys their unified might and capability, it is meant as a tease to their power and the threat they pose. It was not meant to establish them just tease them. They chose the absolute worst possible vehicle to tease them. This was laughably stupid. This is the debut of the Shockmaster in WCW (worth a google if not familiar) awful. Budget concerns are a factor in any effects driven production. Why they felt like blowing a sizeable chunk on such a throwaway moment is beyond me. There are so many ways they could have done this better without even altering the effects or including more elements.

 

 

[Yojimbo]

I have't really posted all my thoughts about this episode because it would be pretty pointless.  It was such a mess I wouldn't know where to start or stop.  But one thing.  The Horn.  The box was so small and light that I am now calling it The Kazoo of Valere, because there certainly couldn't be anything much larger inside of that box.   

[WOTohnoes]

14 hours ago, Chivalry said:

I love this character, I hope they get her right, too. 

I will probably lose my mind if they don't take one of her lines directly from the book. It should be the closing line to an episode before absolute madness kicks in the following one. I would advise anyone to not back track this and look at the spoiler if they happen to not be a book reader. 

[Mirefox]

14 minutes ago, WOTohnoes said:

I will probably lose my mind if they don't take one of her lines directly from the book. It should be the closing line to an episode before absolute madness kicks in the following one. I would advise anyone to not back track this and look at the spoiler if they happen to not be a book reader. 

Quick, name three characters that they HAVE gotten right…

[fra85uk]

2 minutes ago, Mirefox said:

Quick, name three characters that they HAVE gotten right…

 

Bela, Mandarb, Aldieb

Edited December 30, 2021 by fra85uk

[DreadParrot]

Siuan, Loial and Uno 

 

3 characters right 

[notpropaganda73]

2 hours ago, DreadParrot said:

Amazon Delivery Guy 

 

I loved your whole post but you summed up my problems with Padan Fain throughout the season absolutely perfect and I am in tears at this nickname for him hahaha

[Mirefox]

27 minutes ago, DreadParrot said:

Siuan, Loial and Uno 

 

3 characters right 

Siaun, the apparent Dreamer who has secret lesbian trysts with a Moiraine that she pretends to be enemies with and who - since all Aes Sedai seem to be clueless - also knows nothing about prophesy?  Yup, nailed her…

 

I will grant you Uno and Loial as they were two that came to mind as well, though they were incredibly underused.

Edited December 30, 2021 by Mirefox

[EmreY]

The discussion here is being framed in such a fashion that I dare not disagree with anyone, because if I did, I would obviously be a fool.

[Scarloc99]

20 hours ago, Mirefox said:

Haha, yeah, the size of that seal was surprising but that is one of the changes I was ok with.  It always struck me as a little weird in the books that such unfathomably important things were so small.  I know being “indestructible” was a sort of protection but they struck me as the kind of things that would show up on some Randland Antiques Roadshow after someone found one in their great grandmother’s vase or something.

 

Of course, having them as big as they are in the snow ties them to a physical location so there may be a little more globetrotting ahead.

in my head I always saw the hand size seals as almost being replicas of far larger seals that where hidden/buried elsewhere, linked in some way, so when one cracked it signified the actual seal had been broken. 

[Scarloc99]

56 minutes ago, notpropaganda73 said:

 

I loved your whole post but you summed up my problems with Padan Fain throughout the season absolutely perfect and I am in tears at this nickname for him hahaha

Fain is a character who needs a massive overhaul anyway, he either needs to die very very soon, or needs to have his final battle with Matt be re worked to actually seem dangerous. In the books he was like the night king from GOT, built up as a massive massive threat right through and then just dies in the first proper fight he has 

[Scarloc99]

20 hours ago, CaddySedai said:

 

Well that was always the thing about the seals. Being small they could be hidden. Being small they could be lost.

 

While true - bigger means defending it is still on the table - and that its harder to lose. It will be interesting how they will be broken in upcoming episodes. 

 

If the series goes yard, will the sealbreaker be now a cool scene where Logain gateways from one seal to the other smashing them both?

 

 

Which would be in line with many of our views in the Books that he screwed up royally at the Eye. Though he was somewhat backed into the corner between bad option A and Bad option B lol.

It seems the knowledge of the seals has been lost completely, in the book Morraine knew what it was, it is obvious in the TV show that Morraine really has no clue about anything to do with the Dragon, it makes me wonder if she will play the role of Herid Fel. Re Reading the prophesies and then, instead of dying at the hands of a Gollum, fall through the door before she can tell Rand the answer to it all?

 

[DreadParrot]

1 hour ago, Mirefox said:

Siaun, the apparent Dreamer who has secret lesbian trysts with a Moiraine that she pretends to be enemies with and who - since all Aes Sedai seem to be clueless - also knows nothing about prophesy?  Yup, nailed her…

 

I will grant you Uno and Loial as they were two that came to mind as well, though they were incredibly underused.

Don’t get me wrong they are not using the character efficiently, the bond between the two is exaggerated for the show, but the feigned animosity fits their characterization. They absolutely had hidden agendas and maintained split facade in public.  The actress and her presence feels right for Siuan. She felt regal and in command. Metaphorically speaking if I imagined Siuan as a hammer they gave me a hammer on screen. They may be using said hammer as a screwdriver but it’s still a hammer. 

[WOTohnoes]

1 hour ago, Mirefox said:

Quick, name three characters that they HAVE gotten right…

No doubt. Besides not being better developed through Ep. 4, I thought everyone but Rand was doing alright. Sure, things were different with not enough character development, but it wasn't a disaster. Afterwards, I can't think of anyone they did right. I was hopeful after the 7th, but the 8th was pretty close to being that disaster.

 

Reading the rest of the thread now, I think the actor playing Loial is great, ignoring the costuming which makes him look like a lost Sesame Street character. The show has done nothing to say anything about who he is and why he's a part of the group. Uno was fine. Look forward to seeing him later. 2 characters no show watchers understand, so the fake deaths were even more useless. 

[KakitaOCU]

Characters done right include....

Moraine, Rand, Nynaeve, Egwene, Loial, Liandrin, Alanna, Siuan, I could keep going.

Characters with changed details but still the same person they were in the books.

Mat, Perrin, Thom, Lan, Min....

Characters actually changed from their in book selves and made worse.

Abell.

[fra85uk]

8 minutes ago, KakitaOCU said:

Characters done right include....

Moraine, Rand, Nynaeve, Egwene, Loial, Liandrin, Alanna, Siuan, I could keep going.

Characters with changed details but still the same person they were in the books.

Mat, Perrin, Thom, Lan, Min....

Characters actually changed from their in book selves and made worse.

Abell.

For you show-Mat is essentially the same as book-Mat? 

 

So i take Bilbo and transform him in a child abuser, as a consequence Frodo is a traumatized youngster on drugs that he buys by stealing from Sam and i can say to be essentially faithful to Tolkien's lotr? Great

Edited December 30, 2021 by fra85uk

[Yojimbo]

27 minutes ago, KakitaOCU said:

Characters done right include....

Moraine, Rand, Nynaeve, Egwene, Loial, Liandrin, Alanna, Siuan, I could keep going.

Characters with changed details but still the same person they were in the books.

Mat, Perrin, Thom, Lan, Min....

Characters actually changed from their in book selves and made worse.

Abell.

You are a most forgiving man.

 

And BTW I mean this sincerely.  I'm not as flexible.   I think they have butchered some of those characters.   Lan is the worst by far for me, but Rand and Moraine and Mat and Perrin are not far behind.  

Edited December 30, 2021 by Yojimbo