One of Amazon TV’s latest original productions is a long-awaited adaptation of Robert Jordan’s epic High Fantasy series, The Wheel Of Time. It is in some ways between the more famous fantasy epics, not as bloody and cynical as George RR Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, but a little more political and complex than JRR Tolkien’s Middle-Earth cycle. It’s like Dune in that there is an all-female order of mystics trying to guide the destiny of human affairs, but there is a specific reason for the gender bias in magic. In a previous age, the Aes Sedai order was co-ed and led by a man named Lews Therin, called the Dragon. But when he and his allies confronted “the Dark One” and stopped him from conquering the world, the Dark One laid a final curse, corrupting the male side of the One Power that channelers use to perform magic. This taint corrupts male channelers in proportion to their power, and since Therin was the most powerful channeler of his age, he ended up going insane and killing his own family, and ended up doing far worse before finally dying. Since then the Aes Sedai has been an all-female group and one of their responsibilities in addition to finding female channelers to recruit is to isolate any male channeler and “gentle” him by cutting his access to the One Power. If this seems like a euphemism for gelding a stallion, that’s probably intentional.
The fact that this world’s Pandora/Eve equivalent is male instead of female creates an unusual influence for women in a fantasy setting; I sometimes think of The Wheel Of Time as the anti-Gor. It certainly has more pivotal female characters than Tolkien. In fact the series’ main Gandalf figure is Moiraine, a wandering Aes Sedai (played by Rosamund Pike, the closest thing to a name actor in this production), who at the start of the story enters a small village called Two Rivers because she has determined that the Dragon Reborn is one of five young townspeople: The hunter Rand al’Thor, his best friends, blacksmith Perrin Aybara and neer-do-well Mat Cauthon, along with Nynaeve the village wise woman and Egwene, her new apprentice, who happens to be Rand’s girlfriend.
There have already been a lot of changes made in the Amazon production compared to Jordan’s source material. For instance there’s a shocking character death in the first episode that wasn’t in the books. The main divergence as far as the plot goes is that in the books, Moiraine was originally seeking only the three male protagonists, but in the show, both Egwene and Nynaeve are potentially the Dragon Reborn. I had thought this didn’t make sense given that they wouldn’t be any more dangerous to the Aes Sedai than other female channelers, but someone on the Internet pointed out how this change resolves a plot problem with Jordan’s first novel: Moiraine has to take Rand, Mat and Perrin to her superiors but has no reason to bring Egwene, who basically tags along out of sheer stubbornness even though she still has a family in Two Rivers. The TV series takes the element of choice away: After the Dark One’s monsters attack Two Rivers, it’s clear that they’re hunting for the Dragon Reborn, and if the five youths don’t leave with Moiraine, their family and friends will be endangered again. Not only does this explain why Egwene would leave her parents, it also explains why Mat would leave his family, given that he seems to care about his little sisters more than their parents do.
Another change is that in the novels it was made clear no later than Book 3 that Rand al’Thor was the Dragon Reborn, but at this point in the TV series (four episodes in as of Thanksgiving) Rand has only performed one arguably superhuman feat, whereas Episode 4 ended with Nynaeve performing an epic channeling that saved the day.
My impression of the TV series is that it’s pretty decent but not spectacular, which is right because my impression of Jordan’s book series was that it was pretty decent but not spectacular. I, like a lot of folks, quit reading before it got to Book 10. (I liked one Internet comment that went ‘I plan to watch until Season 6 and then stop.’) I personally think of Robert Jordan as being akin to George Lucas: possessed of a great ability to create likeable heroes and a vast, enchanting background setting for them to adventure in, combined with an even greater inability to give those characters believable plots and dialogue. And so far, even George RR Martin doesn’t have Jordan’s problem with wrapping things up; Jordan died of heart disease in 2007, and the book series was only completed with notes given to his designated successor, fantasy author Brandon Sanderson (who is listed as a producer on the show along with Rosamund Pike).
Thus so far The Wheel Of Time does a pretty good job of conveying the setting, although like Amazon’s adaptation of The Boys comic, it reserves the right to change things around and keep the audience guessing. And while some purists are objecting to the changes already made to Jordan’s narrative, I’m sure there are at least as many who think that any change could only be an improvement.