And here's one issue. The mechanic of how the Warder bond works when either of the pair dies isn't relevant in earnest until FOH, and the next time it's plot-relevant big time is MOL. The docks of Cairhien likely won't be there until end of S3. There's plenty of time to explore the essence and implications of the Warder bond and there is zero need to devote a complete subplot to it in S1 - besides, the audience will forget about it by the time S3 rolls out. I'm not saying the Steppin plot arc is bad, because it isn't - it's pretty good. However, in a very time-limited adaptation of a doorstopper novel where we have to cut chunks of content at every corner - do we really have the time for such a distraction? Much like in chess - many bad moves are, in and of themselves, decent. They are bad because they are not addressing the requirements of the position - much as devoting as much screen time to Steppin's arc as was done does not address the requirements of the adaptation. Could not agree more. I mean, there's a ton of change that I give a pass. There's another ton of change I give a pass because I see a possible production reason that could necessitate it. The changes I oppose are ones that (all IMHO, of course) a) don't save production money and/or screen time, at least appreciably - or even spend it inordinately b) act detrimentally to the character dynamics/development or c) produce ripple effects necessitating other changes falling into criterion b. In short - changes which don't make this a better show; some of them making the show worse.

One of the big problems of S1. Many characters central to the book and entire saga turn to be "Who the F is this guy and why should I care?" I feel like the decision to keep the ambiguity of the Dragon was altogether detrimental to developing the characters of Mat, Rand and Perrin; to a lesser extent, Nynaeve and Egwene as well. With Steppin I would agree - while the storyline and the concept are quite decent, they could be told in different means using existing characters in less time. As to Logain - I bear in mind the possibility that the TV character might be an amalgamation of also Taim and even possibly Asmodean. That, coupled with the terrific job Alvaro Morte does with the character, makes the time allotted to Logain potentially justifiable. Down the line, he also becomes pretty important to the plot and gets quite some page time, while Steppin just remains dead.

They've put out a small scene from S2 featuring Rand and Logain. If one wants to be nitpicky, Logain in the books wasn't that larger than life as Alvaro Morte is portraying him. However, for all the extra ham, Alvaro completely steals the scene.

I'm sure that Barney's departure wasn't the only issue here, but there is the question of Ep 8. Say, in Witcher S1 the last episode was awful, but so was the penultimate one. Here, for all the tremendous beef I sometimes have with the series, I really liked Ep 7. So, the show was never particularly bad, although never particularly good, and (for all the plot changes etc.) managed to hit a pretty high note before plunging headfirst off a cliff. My guess here is that they probably needed to rewrite Ep 8 more or less from scratch, and that either with little time available, or in the face of severe constraints, being forced to write what they can film as opposed to that they want to film. I also have to mention that Mat and Perrin don't have much to do in the last chapters of TEOTW, so most of Ep 7 would be unchanged, Mat or no Mat. One notable change would be the Min viewing, of course. I'd say that this adaptation has over 50% chances to end up being an abomination, but "over 50%" is not 100%. I also don't think Rafe did a very good job, and I do think that whatever agenda he has does negatively impact the quality of the product, but I am also aware that in the view of all the circumstances, many of which are unknown to the general public like me, he may actually be doing a pretty good job within the limitations he has. The biggest problem I see is that it overwhelmingly looks like that Rafe wants to tell Rafe's version of RJ's story. Let me give you a comparison. Peter Jackson, while filming LOTR, tried telling Tolkien's story, and it paid off. While filming the Hobbit, he tried to tell Peter Jackson's version of Tolkien's story, and it was very subpar if not an outright disaster.

The only standout character for me was Logain. He was well-written and well-acted - especially given that we know nothing of Logain pre-gentling.

In Rafe's defense, there were hints in TEOTW. I read those as a product of Egwene's mind being a little messed up, which is completely valid in the circumstances. An interesting parallel would be that Harry/Hermione dance (a beautiful scene) that had half of Harry Potter fandom squeeing and the other half incensed :). However, it's really subtle in the books and doesn't go anywhere, which quite often happens IRL. Rafe's decision to make more out of it is questionable, but he didn't conjure it out of thin air.

This is some really great analysis. I must admit that the concept went absolutely over my head on both the first and the subsequent rereads - until this very summary. I would hence hazard a guess that this would also go over the head of a your average show fan, which ironically makes it an omission target. However, you could rework both Noam and Elyas into one-episode (or two-episode) wonders, which would make it much more filmable.

I'd argue it's the only proper way to experience the Daughter of the Night.

Complaining about artistic direction is no longer fun :). On a more serious note, the character lives and dies on whatever the scripwriters have for it and how the actor/actress can deliver. So I reserve any judgment until I've seen her in action. To me, it's like Rand's shaven head - I don't think it's right, but it's a minor issue, all things considered. Nail on the head. The portrayal as acted fit well a world-weary person well into her thirties, not the Min of the books. Even though they seem to have aged the characters, that's still too much of a gap. Especially as Josha Stradowski does pass somewhat convincingly for someone in his late teens/early twenties.

RJ to the rescue! "Renna patted her on the head as she would a dog", "a certain good will for a dog in training", "Damane are like furniture, or tools, always there ready to be used", "Damane are too valuable to be killed out of hand", "I do not mean to train this damane only to have her thrown away", "Her hand stroked Egwene's hair, a mistress soothing her dog". I would suggest that Renna as of TGH is a pretty good authority on damane.

Could you share a link? I don't doubt your words, I'm just curious; as a practicing DM, I'm always a little on the search for curiosities. Perpetual abuse and dominance and control are fine. However, do you perpetually abuse your guard dog? Your hunting dog? Your horse, be it riding or draught? You surely don't dilly-dally with them and you give them the occasional kick. But perpetually abusing them is just a bad investment. Same with damane - they are valuable property, at the very least on par with a really good horse. A single pacifier used by a slightly kooky sul'dam is fine - but as a standard fare it's too much.

It's really interesting how they deal with Rand's arc. Hurin, Loial, Selene - that's one kind of group dynamics, just Selene - well, that's completely another. "You called yourself LTT and were her fervent lover". On a more serious note, the way you develop a character is by its interaction with other characters. One of the reasons we see just a handful of Rand in TDR is because he's alone. The alt-world travel with a little of Selene, then some weddings from TDR, then "the garden scene" to introduce Elayne, then skip to Barthanes's feast and then reunite with Perrin?

Increasing the emotional impact on Egwene or the audience? She has issues for the next few books. My biggest problem with the pacifier gags as they are is that they are so impractical they're anti-practical. Try biting on an average-sized plum and walk around your home for a few minutes that way. You'll be yearning to chew it down. Kid pacifiers and dog muzzles allow to keep the mouth and lips shut or almost shut, the construct that was in the trailer - doesn't. Not being able to close your mouth/lips for a prolonged period of time brings active discomfort. When you are in active discomfort, you are not as good at whatever you are doing. A damane is a tool and a weapon. People are not above neglecting their tools and weapons, but I've yet to see people who actively damage them for no reason. Hence it breaks the suspension of disbelief for me.

I would term this "narrative creep". GoT (or ASOIAF), LOTR, Witcher all start as a concentrated narrative, but later as the series gains scope, you ultimately get multiple arcs, multiple PoVs and the narrative speed starts slowing down. LOTR has that to the least extent, but at a certain point you get four narratives (Frodo, Pippin, Merry, Paths of the Dead) in parallel. WOT started with branching and reconvening as early as post-Shadar Logoth. As of TSR, Jordan abandoned the "reconvening", and from about ACOS the sprawl started hitting hard with the low point in COT. I don't really thing there is an option to avoid that in the series. However, GoT managed to juggle four lines (North, Riverlands, King's Landing, Daenerys) reasonably well. Cutting large swathes of ultimately secondary plots could help keep the amount of parallel threads under that number. At least "long-running threads", defined as those which run longer than a single episode. RJ actually does a good job of merging threads while branching new ones in the early 3-6 books (depending on the viewpoint). I wouldn't worry past that point at the moment.

I probably wouldn't say "best", but definitely "at least reasonably good". I liked the cold open as it was, for all I like the LTT-Ishamael scene that starts the book. Which actually can be toned down almost to the level we've seen in S1. Requires careful thought and planning and a few old cinema tricks, but definitely doable. I'm way out into giggles territory here, but Eurotrip shows you can make at least a movie out of this premise. Okay, without naming names, Rand gets a home run with a total of three females, and possibly some three other females were trying to get to some base of their own volition. I discount, say, a certain Selande because she was more or less ordered to, and possibly a couple of others for the same reason. A popular high schooler can get through the same number on a summer vacation. And let's say that Rand is all any Marty Stu could dream of, not just a popular jock. Mat is another matter entirely. On-page, IIRC, he gets hot and flustered with three females. Sure, he flirts in any inn and steals kisses, but with how many of those tavern girls did he actually get a home run? As per anyone's head canon, anywhere between all of them and none of them. Besides, he's handsome, he's a ladies' man, he has coin and a certain aura about him - so he's probably the most interesting male for miles around. That's possibly not enough for a home run, but first or second base seems both safe and fun. If you recall the details of his love life preceding that "girl in every tavern" phase, the lad probably had PTSD for Pete's sake.

I must disagree. The concept of sister-wives can be dropped (make Amys not Rhuarc's wife, drop Dorindha if not also Melaine and Bael). The Aviendha-Elayne-Min triangle can be resolved in a myriad ways not involving sister-wives. Say, you can retain Elayne as a kissing-basis affection which never gets further and then gets dropped (or drop the line entirely, making Egwene rather than Elayne one of those "three beautiful women"), Aviendha as a one-time experience after which both decide not to pursue the relationship further and Min as the first girl who wins. Not the worst way to deal with it, and I'm sure there are zounds more. And you could make, say, a lesbian couple out of Bain and Chiad and have that rescue plot with the "drive alongside Perrin" and one of them teaching the other sing. Actually, now that I mention it, I think this can be done very well if approached with tact and proper storytelling. Bottom line, giving Aviendha Gaul's part in TDR and the same part to Bain or Chiad or both from TSR onwards is quite a workable solution. The devil, as always, is in the details, but I see no fault with the concept.

I would suggest WAFO, just don't hold your breath. OTOH, the butterfly effect is hard to reverse - things that made sense in the books stop making sense in the show just because you don't have the right characters in the right place at the right time - the "teleports" largely happen to fix that. On the other - Witcher managed to remain sensibly close to the original in S3 despite being way off the charts in S2. It didn't help the show much, but, well, at least they tried. Should have been. But it ain't. Darn shame. I was... and I wasn't. To me as a fan, it was horrendously bad. However, my esteemed spouse who doesn't care for RJ (she's got lots of other redeeming qualities, not in the least being able to put up with myself) said that she kind of liked it despite its mediocrity. So it could sell well, and it seems that it did, so why not make another season of something making a profit? I earn my living in tech, and I've seen a lot of technically bad decisions that were made because they made sense from the financial perspective. Hell, I made some myself. And I expect to see a lot more till I retire. That's the imperfection of life, I guess.

People love watching a well-filmed boink. In the words of Avenue Q, "the internet is really really great FOR PORN". Even a not-so-well filmed boink gets some points for the effort. Were those scenes necessary? They weren't. Do I like them? Nah. Can I make my peace with their existence? Well, yeah. You are mostly preaching to the choir here. Does that material belong? Mostly it doesn't, although there were scenes making enough sense to warrant the screen time. Can I make my peace with its existence? Well... a bottle of beer and a bag of popcorn are known to go a long way to help with that. I reserve my judgment till I see it in action. Maybe they come with a reasonable enough justification. Maybe, even likely - not. Okay, another bag of popcorn on its way. A really lame scene and plot in a long list of lame scenes in the show. I stopped counting and bothering mid-way through the season. First, I wonder what's the weed that HBO scriptwriters smoke but I can see why they don't sell it to other studios - that's a clear competitive edge. In my opinion, Rafe is honestly trying to do his job. He's failing at it, but, well, I have my share of bad days at the office. There is zero excuse that the plot of the show is of fanfiction quality - and the people writing fanfics do this for sheer pleasure in their spare time, not as a paid job. However, at some point even before S1, I made my peace with the fact that this - absolutely, um, crappy - adaptation is the only one we are getting of our beloved book series. It's a darn shame, really, but it is what it is. I could go all day criticizing the show and another week nitpicking at it - but what would be the point? Nah. There are quite a few people in this forum who don't think highly of the show, myself included. However, degenerating the forum into a flood of hate speech - mostly if not all justly deserved - is just not something worth its time. It's way more interesting to discuss the aspects of the show worth discussing. It's not like the people aren't seeing the elephant in the room. They've just agreed it's there and are discussing its color, ear size and shape and the length of the tusks.

I'd say that I like the show a lot less than I could because I've read the books (my wife found it "kinda ok", she hasn't read the books). However, I would not have been attracted to the show if I hadn't read the books in the first place. I mean, fantasy shows are a dime a dozen these days, not that it helps with the quality. My biggest beef with the show is not that it's bad as fantasy shows go, it's just so much worse than it could have been. Should have been.

Well, the heyday of sci-fi started no later than Jules Verne, which was way earlier than the heyday of fantasy, which we would count from Howard or Tolkien. I can't really state the seminal sci-fi movie, but it happened no later than "2001" in 1968. The seminal fantasy movie is definitely LOTR. You could then think of Game of Thrones as the fantasy equivalent of Babylon 5. One other issue with fantasy is that it can sometimes border good old-fashioned historical romance. Where do we put all the multiple Arthurian films, for instance? Arthur aside, there've been quite a few good original fantasy movies (Dragonheart) or adaptations (All the three Pratchett live-action films - and Pterry isn't an author easy to adapt to the screen). A yet another issue was that LOTR was too good, as well as at least the first half of GoT. Twenty and ten years counting, respectively, and the industry hasn't produced anything you could put on the same shelf. It's almost same as with the "Quest for Fire", which opened - and, at the same time, closed - the genre of serious pre-historic film, being an extremely tough act to follow. Summing it up: the genre is, indeed, way younger than sci-fi and had hence less time to develop; the seminal film and show were so good that they actively discouraged following suit, as you'd pale in comparison - and, last but not the least, there are good fantasy films/series/adaptations, but they are not mainstream. However, seeing the sorry state of mainstream cinema these days, I wonder whether that's a blessing rather than a curse.

Well, the LOTR can of worms has been opened. I remember, 20 years back, I, a Tolkien hard-line purist, was sitting in my kitchen with my best friend, another Tolkien hard-line purist, and a sheet of paper. After an hour-long or so discussion we'd agreed that out of the first film, 30 minutes could remain, everything else should be re-shot in a more purist way. We'd also agreed that the film was great as it is and if Peter Jackson managed to shoot the rest in a similar way (he kind of did), then the entire trilogy would be a classic. Since then I've mellowed considerably, and yet in no shape or form was S1 a good season as it was, and I've never been a Jordan book purist. The problem isn't that the scriptwriters had to make significant changes, the problem is that despite those they haven't managed to tell a good story. The "key things that need to take place" argument, I think, has a drawback best illustrated by the last season of (I open another can of worms here) Game of Thrones. That team did a pretty convincing job of connecting the dots and ticking the checkboxes. What they didn't do is make a convincing story out of those key things. I mean, the result of a story matters, and I have all too often read through the last 10 or so pages of the book to know the ending before reading the actual book. But how it got achieved and how it is told matters as well, and it is in this department that the show sorely lacks. Let me give you an example. The Mat-Rand-Moiraine-Lan scene in Tar Valon (Caemlyn in the books) and the dagger. In the books, and I quote, "One minute Lan was in the doorway, the next he was at the bedside, as if he had not bothered with the intervening space. His hand caught Mat's wrist, stopping the slash as if it had struck stone". In the show, Moiraine herself intercepts the dagger with a flow of Air. This doesn't change the "key things" not one bit, and the change has zero consequences in the events of the story. However, the book version of the scene establishes Lan as an almost superhuman warrior (which he is), shows the meaning and sense of the Warder-Aes Sedai relationship and shows Moiraine's complete trust and confidence in Lan. The show version just shows us a master magic user and a tagalong swordsman. Summing it up, the problem with the adaptation is not that the story is condensed, cut or reshaped. The problem is that it's just very badly told.

There have been suggestions that we may see a certain Elyas this season. As I've written in a different thread, the fact that Aviendha was shown alongside Bain and Chiad and we see her in the trailer in the Perrin context, she still may well be taking over Gaul's role in TDR. Of course, Gaul and Aviendha go very different ways in TSR. However, while Gaul is (minor spoiler alert) pretty important throughout the books, both Bain and Chiad - not so much; it is well possible that his role will be eventually split between these two. I wouldn't hold my breath for Faile in S2 and Tear at all. The showrunner team has indicated that they are largely amalgamating the plots of TGH and TDR, so Falme might be the only Tear we are going to see.

This comment officially made my day. And to be on the topic, a yet another thing that the show sorely lacks is the development of the characters. RJ sure took his sweet time doing that, but he did show how relatively unimpressive lads and lasses developed into the military, magical, political or what-have-you powerhouses later in the series. Hopefully we see more of that in S2 and less of "Hey, X is a main character here, viewers, rejoice at their powers!"

Well, you've asked, now you get an answer 🙂. I've tried re-watching it a couple of weeks ago. I found out that I managed to watch the, um, "palatable" parts, of which there were fewer than I would've liked. Scrolled through the rest. I think I've found Ishamael's scenes more acceptable on this re-watch, but nothing else. One very unhealthy advice is to re-watch with the daughter, but arm yourself with some popcorn or (if the daughter approves) a beer. I got through a pair of really dumb kid shows this way :).

Went through the trailer at quarter speed just because I can, I guess, and it seems that the a'dam design isn't the same. In the trailer, it's seen three times: when damane fling away Uno & comrades (A), when Egwene/Elayne face a damane (B), when worn by Egwene (C). (A) does not seem to have underarm straps, although the lighting does not help with fine detail. (C) also does not have them or at least behaves as it doesn't. (B), which is the same damane as in the photo shot, has the straps quite wide, closer to two fingers than one in width. Also, (B) has a higher and tighter collar whereas the one of (C) is somewhat lower and wider. I'd ascribe that to minor costume differences, but it does seem that we have two slightly different models. I might be overthinking. And now for something completely different. The final quote of the trailer. "You are not a spoke, boy. You are ... the water that turns the Wheel itself". At the point where I've put the ellipsis, the pause between the words is shorter than normal, and also the tone of the voice slightly changes. Might it be that these are actually two very different phrases that happen at different points in the film, glued together by trailer sound engineering?