First, don't you dare disrespect my man Billy ZANE and his Oscar-worthy performance in Winter Dragon. I'll happily put that up against Rafe's entire Season One. Second and slightly more seriously, I don't think the low budget slipshod ashcan of a Winter Dragon "pilot" is good evidence that the Prologue couldn't have worked as... exactly that: a prologue to a fully developed show. The audience would have made the connection to the prologue by the end of the first episode when Tam is fever-dreaming his story of finding Rand on the slopes of Dragonmount.

I agree with you that the show had many problems. Which you probably have now seen me acknowledge in a post I made after the one you quoted. But yeah, I think the departure from canon on gender of the Dragon was the biggest problem, and pretty closely related to your "who is the Dragon" mystery issue. And I think the departure from canon on gender of the Dragon was a much bigger problem than you are acknowledging. Let me explain it this way... As I've mentioned previously, reincarnation and the gendered magic system where one gender has been tainted is the BACKBONE of the story. The Dragon will be reborn as a man doomed to madness because of a taint his actions contributed to, and he will be both destroyer and savior as a result. It is a highly original concept in fantasy, and it is AWESOME. BUT, the Red Ajah continue to hunt male channelers, even though much of the Aes Sedai (certainly Moiraine, Siuan, the rest of the Blues, likely the Greens and many more) know full damn well that they could be gentling the Dragon Reborn! That's a kickass concept!!! Which the show immediately proceeds to piss all over by, at best, making Moiraine a bumbling moron who didn't know the prophecy. At worst, it makes the Reds much more justified in their actions because, hey, if the Dragon comes back as a gurl no big deal. It undercuts the CENTRAL CONFLICT of the story. Oh, and sorry, I'm never gonna buy the Covid excuse for the botched ending to the Season 1. Not after everything else they botched along the way. The terrible ending had absolutely nothing to do with not depicting Tarwin's Gap as a massive fight scene. People forget, the book only depicts Tarwin's Gap for less than a page, and mostly in the past tense. Rand shows up and vaporizes the army. That's it. They could have spent 10 seconds of CGI on that in the show. Instead, the show completely changes the entire Eye sequence so as to render it unrecognizable. Covid didn't cause Rand and Moiraine to walk alone into the Blight for a little monologuing with Ishamael.

Why wouldn't the prologue have worked? When I read it for the first time, I was like "ok, this is weird and awesome and I LOVE it!" In my mind, you've got a ruined palace, dead Ilyena, crazy LT, gloating Ishy, get to see a GATEWAY for the first time (and only time in the next two seasons, btw), Rand blows himself up into Dragonmount, cue opening credits and that badass GOT music!!!! Seriously, this show deserved a much better title sequence and music.

Well, I think we're largely in agreement then! I'm not sure it was the only thing that doomed the show, but it was probably the biggest thing.

I have read WOT start to finish twice (well, the second time I skimmed books 7-11). I consider books 1-6 to be some of the best fantasy ever written. I was PUMPED when this show was greenlit... 7 or 8 years ago?? In short, I am a FAN... and I'm glad the show is DEAD. I'm not going to say something I don't believe like "I'm sorry for the people who liked it." Because I'm really not. The people cheering Rafe's decisions to wildly depart from the source material (granted, that's not everyone who supported the show) are part of the problem, in my opinion. I don't doubt that Rafe is also a fan of WOT. But he clearly loved the world of WOT a lot more than the central character and story of WOT. The beating heart of WOT is Rand's hero's journey through a world upended by the taint on Saidin resulting in a society largely run by women. Rafe appears to have loved this world and its many strong female characters a lot more than the central character. There were so many other problems... A more faithful adaptation of EotW would have made for a barn burner of a first season. Instead, Rafe totally omitted, distorted, or best sped through FIVE of the book's SIX major set pieces. He gave EF and Winternight the spotlight it deserved, but he then totally skipped the Prologue and Caemlyn. He sped through Shadar Logoth and the Ways. He totally distorted the Eye. There is no excuse for these decisions. Not Covid. Not runtime. Rafe had EIGHT HOURS - nearly as long as the entire Lord of the Rings theatrical movies - to TELL ONE BOOK. And instead he wasted so much of it just making stuff up. Then there was the look of the show. It looked CHEAP. Poorly produced. I cannot say why this is the case. Maybe the show was just badly lit, badly shot, I do not know, but it looked like one of those young adult shows found on the CW. GOT, by contrast, was movie quality. The one silver lining of this show is that, now that it has been cancelled, maybe it will prompt more people to read the books to learn the REAL story.

Your analysis is SPOT ON. There were so many problems with this show, but for me the biggest by far was the blatant departure from canon re gender of the Dragon. This undermined the entire mythology that made the books so great. The BACKBONE of WOT is reincarnation and a gendered magic system where one gender has been tainted. The Dragon will be reborn as a man doomed to madness because of a taint his actions contributed to, and he will be both destroyer and savior as a result. It's an AWESOME (and I think original?) concept that Rafe basically wiped his butt with to be more "inclusive." Rafe's defenders on this point basically fall into two camps. There are the true believers who, like Rafe, loved the "inclusion and diversity" of this decision, story be damned. And then there are others who are trying valiantly to muster some canonically-consistent explanation because they're just happy a WOT show, even this one, was actually made. I'm never gonna agree with the first camp. But for the second, I wish they'd just be honest and admit "yeah, that was a really dumb decision."