incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Show and book spoilers, you know the drill.

( Episode 5 )

( Episode 6 )

We watched the first three episodes of The Wheel of Time TV show yesterday morning. The kids were in the room, and SteelyKid ended up watching along with us and was pretty into it, which as Chad says is definitely a good sign for the overall accessibility and appeal of the show for non-book-readers. Indeed, judging by the reaction of my very book-loving friends, it probably goes over better--not only for SteelyKid, but for me. I'm going into this with--low expectations sounds wrong, but no expectations? Basically I'm willing to be pleased but I'm not strongly emotionally invested in how it adapts the books. I deliberately did not reread before watching, because I know that just gets in my way of appreciating a visual adaptation as its own thing. As a result, I remember only general impressions of the first book, The Eye of the World, which these first three episodes are adapting.

So I wasn't bothered by the pacing or the omission of certain bits of the book; it's a very long series, of course that's necessary, but more importantly I didn't remember them to miss them. I did recognize tweaks to backstories and character arcs and thought they worked well to position the characters in the broader story--with one huge question mark, which I'll get to under the spoiler cut. I thought Moiraine and Lan were great, both individually and in the ways that their partnership and friendship were portrayed, and the Two Rivers kids were played appealingly. (I especially love how angry Nynaeve gets to be and how well it comes off--SteelyKid was a big fan--and Egwene is lovely.) And I appreciated the ways that the show has tweaked the books' treatment of race, gender, and gender relations, though we haven't had occasion yet to see whether it recognizes the existence of gender outside the binary (which, fair warning for the book non-familiar, is pretty baked into the books).

Long story short: I liked it.

My spoiler thoughts are all intertwined with the books, I'm afraid (and so if you're looking to remain unspoiled for those, I'd suggest you avoid these comments as well).

( show AND BOOK spoilers )

Anyway, I think that's about all I have. What'd you all think, those of you I haven't seen discuss it elsewhere? (Which is not to say that you all aren't welcome to comment, just that I don't expect it.)