re: Wheel of Time Season 2

I finally got around to hate-watching this over the weekend.

I know, I know...



The biggest key to understanding this is that it's not the original story, but rather Rafe's re-write of the novels. A lot of the elements are there but a lot have been picked up, changed and/or moved around (Thom was absent this season, Jain Farstrider hasn't even been mentioned, a whole lot of the timeline of the Horn, almost everything involving Mat, etc).

If you can get beyond that, S2 wasn't too bad. There were some definite "wtf" moments and things they should have spent more time on (Egwene's time as a damane, for example). Were this series to change the names of characters, locations etc, it likely would get a better reception (at least from the book readers). But then that's the problem. When you take the name of a book series and say you are bringing that story to the screen, readers are wanting just that, not someone else's version of it.

The sfx really stepped up (although Loial still needs to be bigger and not have that ridiculous frizz-head), that helped.

So taking away the very legitimate gripe that this is enough of a re-writing of the novels to almost be a completely different entity (which includes brown-washing the cast), the biggest problem I see right now is that there is just too fricking much story to tell in only 8-episode seasons. They've created angles (like Moirraine's "stilling") which have taken time away from the other stories, thus making only 8 episodes an even worse idea. If I had one complaint right now about the series (aside from it not being the novels put to film) it would be that the pace moves so fast that it doesn't take adequate time to explain things well enough or get viewers deeply invested (the importance on angreal, Egwene/Renna, etc).

All in all, it wasn't "bad". It just isn't really the "Wheel of Time".