To me, it makes more sense as the cold open to the finale.

Didn’t like it at all. I didn’t say that. Books and tv aren’t the same. Things that work in one medium don’t necessarily work in the other. It’s not that the prologue wouldn’t work in the series at all. It’s just that it’s not a good beginning in the tv medium.

Yes. But this prologue would be a terrible way to introduce a tv audience to Wheel of Time. Nothing that happens in the prologue is developed in any meaningful way by the plot of EotW until the very end. It would be an odd, stand alone scene with no connection to any of the characters or places the audience would experience. And it would confuse casuals because it would appear to be happening in the future rather than the past. I really don’t get the love for filming the prologue…

There absolutely is. That reason is that he was writing a book, not making a tv show.

I don't know why you keep insinuating that I am somehow saying that S1 was great and should stand unchanged. That's never been my position. My position has been that you can't just 'do the books'. I didn't think it was great. I thought it was ... okay. Better than much of the fantasy on tv, but worse that the good shows. As for your list: I would have nixed it too. At least in terms of making it the Prologue. As I've said over and over, I would have opened the show with the Dragon being reborn juxtaposed with Gitara's prophecy. I would choose this to center the audience on what the series is going to be about: this boy, this prophecy. And I would have used it to provide a visual and thematic connection for my B plot centered on the Tower's efforts to capture Logain. I actually thought they only did it alright. The battle lasted a little too long. We got Perrin killing his wife, which I pretty much hated. (Though I'll admit they managed to pull that thread through his relationship with Faile pretty nicely.) We got the lame "women's circle badassery". We got Nynaeve dragged off. Didn't like any of that. I didn't mind the way the show did Shadar Logoth. On rewatch, it was probably the strongest episode. And you're probably not remembering the episode correctly if you think they only spent 5 minutes there. It was the majority of the episode. This one I understood from a practical standpoint. It's pretty expensive to build a full on city set that you're only going to use for about an hour of show time. I probably leave it in and hope to get away with interiors and some CGI for Tar Valon in Season 1. Again, your memory is messing with you. The episode spent the majority of time in the Ways and actually wasn't bad. I didn't like "Machin Shin is drawn to channeling" too much, or the changing of the key to channeling. Impossible ending that needed to be changed. What they came up with was dog water. (I'm interested to see the original script before Barney left). I would have played the whole season as a psychological thriller where Ishy was purposefully leading Rand there and Moiraine was unknowingly bringing him right where Ishy wanted. I would have left the Green Man as a surprise and a guardian of this place of rest. But just when it seemed they had a moment of peace, Rand follows Ishy's call, finds the seal, and is tricked into destroying it. The seal breaks, Ishy is free, Rand and Mo have to fight to survive. Meanwhile, in the b plot, we drip hints about the Horn throughout the Season, maybe even weaving together the calling of the Hunt with the takedown of Logain. Lan knows that the Horn is, in fact, hidden in Fal Dara. We have a big set piece where they foil the plot and take Fain captive. We end with Fain scrawling on his prison wall.

I'm glad you mentioned that. Because you are correct. So what was it that GoT did so successfully with the lore in that show? They made it integral to the plot - the Game of Houses. They made it mysterious and wrapped it up inside little plot points and character moments. They made learning about the lore a plot element of the show that was revealed to the viewers drip by drip. And what was that lore? Not grandiose prophecies about things no one knew or cared about (other the A'zor A'hai prophecy, which everyone simply assumed meant the winner of the struggle for the throne). Rather the lore was about people. Simple stuff - my ancestor did this, their ancestors did that. There was not giant magic system to explain. There weren't magic items, and seals, and overlapping prophecies or a whole philosophical structure upon which the whole story was built. GoT basically asked audiences to accept two things in S1: Zombies and Dragons. That's it. The rest of the magic was kept intentionally vague and of questionable efficacy with the biggest 'magic' being sneaking Stannis into Renly's tent. These things made it more accessible - more 'normal' if you will - to general audiences. So you're correct. The writers of WoT should have tried to duplicate GoT in that they should have gotten the audience invested in the lore, then dripped it out to them in a way that left them seeking it instead of fast forwarding or tuning out when it was brought up. You absolutely could not do that and keep the ending of EotW as written. LOL. No. You just retreat back to 'books good, show bad' and 'the Stepin arc sucked!' as the answer to everything. And yeah, since the show is over, If you think you can do better, I'd like to see your brilliant ideas. But it's much easier to sit back and smugly play the role of Monday morning quarterback.

We’ve seen it in action. In this series. There’s a reason E4 was so popular.

That doesn’t make it less of a barrier to entry for people not inclined to enjoy speculative fiction. In fact, it’s an actual turn off.

The first thing that needs to be established. How are you gonna do this? A flashback? How are you setting up the flashback? Is it a cold open? You’ve got about 3 minutes. The second thing. Same questions. Linking this to number One? Fine. But now you also need to know about the taint. Where are we setting that up? Okay. New character. How are we introducing him? Dialogue with Moiraine? When? Okay. We are introducing the idea that if we need something enough, we will find it. Tricky. How are you doing that? Dialogue? When? Tricky. Oh, we are doing this all in a “quick aside to Lan?” Yeah I’m sure that dialogue will feel very natural. Shoot. That’s sort of complicated to portray. How are we supposed to do that in a visual medium? Seems tricky to pull off. How do you want to get that across? There’s some more new characters we have to introduce. When? Are we following them there? How do we build any tension with them? Or do they just randomly appear and we explain it later? How are we showing this to the viewers? Seems tricky. Especially if we haven’t been following the Forsaken. I kinda think it was.

All of this would have bored people to tears.

(a) “pretty clearly” is subjective and doing a lot of heavy lifting. (b) the book explained via exposition. Exposition makes for boring tv and is one of the biggest barriers to entry to the genre. As mentioned above, average people don’t care about the lore. They hate listening to characters talk about people and things that they don’t know about. They don’t want to feel like they have to do a bunch of homework to understand what people are talking about.

If it were me, I would have written the Eye to be a place known (to Moiraine at least) as a safe haven and home to an ancient power. I would have Mo learn during the journey that Tar Valon was not safe and divert there intentionally. I would have split the party in the Ways with Lan and the rest of the EFF landing in Fal Dara and start the tGH plot there, cutting Tarwin’s Gap and substituting it with Fain’s attack to steal the Horn.

Also LOTR consists of an A plot and a B plot that are entirely linear. The only time it even needs a C plot is the brief period where Merry and Pippin are kidnapped. Wheel of Time's story is more complicated by several orders of magnitude.

First off, I have consistently argued that the mystery was dumb, so don't pretend that I'm defending that choice. Second, the Eye is poorly set up in the books not to mention the constraints of the tv show. Moiraine just wanders off and decides that she'll be able to find it because she "needs" to. Two random Forsaken show up out of nowhere for some reason. Why are they there? Not really explained. How do they prevail? The Green Man - a character that isn't set up and just sort of appears. Why is he there? Not really explained. But there's a pool there of uncorrupted Saidin. Why? Not sure, it's not particularly well explained. The Horn and the Banner are there. Why? Not sure, it's not particularly well explained. And suddenly Rand just knows how to use that power and kills all the Trollocs. The end. Bad TV. That's not to say they couldn't have done something closer to the books. The actual ending of EotW is just not written for TV. (None of the books are.) So yes, they could have prioritized a story that hewed closer to the original text. But "just film the books as written" is not a good answer. It's reductive and ignores the difficulty of adapting the text.

The Eye as written would be awful television. No one would have any idea what was happening.

They aren't sisters. So it's not incest. Are all "first sisters" actual sisters?

So people who read the books when they came out and saw this as a romantic relationship were "agenda driven"? YES!! And that means that literature is open to a wide range of interpretations. Which is the only thing I'm arguing here. It's like banging my head into a wall.

I'm actually not. I am just not prepared to say that my own interpretation of the text is the only reasonable interpretation of the text. You go on and on about them being sisters. But they weren't written to start out as sisters. They became sisters via a ceremony that also resembles a wedding in many ways. The ceremony occurs inside a culture that is entirely alien from our own and conceptualizes a 'sister' as something entirely different from being born from the same mother. There's no reason to climb aboard some high horse and pretend I have a monopoly on the only reasonable way to interpret the text. Books say different things to different people. It's not my place to tell someone who sees different things as important that they are wrong. ADDED: Also, "there's no way to quantify how much of this thing that exists really exists" isn't much of an argument. What you're essentially saying is that no one may, in good faith, read that relationship as romantic. The evidence clearly shows that many people ready that relationship as romantic. Are they all acting in bad faith?

I feel silly belaboring this point because ultimately, I agree with your interpretation. But the question isn't about what RJ intended. It's about whether someone reading the books could, in good faith, read that relationship as romantic. I submit to you that the existence of a sizeable number of fans have interpreted the Avi/Elayne relationship as romantic dating back to well back before the show existed is proof positive that people can interpret the relationship as romantic in good faith. So while I agree with your interpretation of the text, when dealing with something subjective like this I am not going to push my interpretation as the one and only true answer. Bottom line: I don't think that making Elayne and Avi bi was a terrible change, I don't think it was completely unsupported by the text, and I definitely don't think that it was Rafe trying to punish fans by making a character gay. There was another factor involved in the decision was well, which is the "ickiness" factor involving polygamy. I'm not sure why anyone would worry about it, given the fairly libertine sensibilities around sex in general, but there's no denying that "dude with a harem" is looked at differently than "three people in a polycule."

Did you see Winter Dragon? It's too disconnected from the main plotline to be effective as a television hook. I think the prologue needed to be in the show at some point. But from the perspective of new viewers (as opposed to readers, who are different animals with different habits), the foretelling draws viewers immediately into the story, focuses it on the main character, explains Moiraine's purpose, and gives everyone an instantly recognizable focus point for subsequent world building.

This would be a stronger argument if ALL of the sex in WoT wasn't implied. For example, we know that Tylin and Mat are having sex, but we never see it. So when a book gives you two female characters who are essentially "sister wives" that you can't be upset when people take this as an implication that the two are romantically involved. When you add this to RJ's winking toward other lesbian relationships (pillow friends), you can see where people could read a romantic relationship between the two. Now I happen to agree with you. I do not believe that RJ intended the relationship between Avi and Elayne to be a romantic one. But I do understand why others see those elements and I have a hard time getting mad about a writer wanting to roll with that interpretation.

Every one of the things you don't like ultimately served that part of the plot. (Although I'd argue the prologue would have been an extremely poor way to start the series. I will die on this hill: It should have started with Gitara's foretelling and the cold open fight scene on Dragonmount.)

Incest angle? I legitimately have no idea what you're talking about.

I guess I'd ask you to be specific about which "decision" you're talking about. If you're talking about the decision to base the entirety of Season One around a contrived 'which one of these characters is the Dragon' plot, then yes. That was a really poor decision and ultimately is what doomed the show. If you're saying that Rafe - and Rafe alone - chose to structure the plot that way for political purposes, you're gonna have to bring me more evidence. As I said above, the structure of season one feels like it was written by committee.

This is a leap in logic that many are making. The “de-gendering” of the source didn’t actually happen. The Dragon was never going to be female. The offending lines of script were included to serve the silly “Who is the Dragon” plot line. Rafe didn’t change anything. But in order to support that silly theme, he introduced controversy where none was necessary. It smacks of Story by Committee to me.