Wheel of Time Discussion - Spoilers(with book spoilers)

[The Soloist]

The casting for the kids is not strong. They don't own their characters.

By contrast, I'm always happy to see Moraine's sisters, the black guy who gives the corrupt dagger to Matt and all the evil characters. The actors own their characters. I keep watching the show because of them.

 

[Stalker0]

The casting for the kids is not strong. They don't own their characters.

By contrast, I'm always happy to see Moraine's sisters, the black guy who gives the corrupt dagger to Matt and all the evil characters. The actors own their characters. I keep watching the show because of them.

I did feel Igwain pretty strongly in this season, I think her character ramped up quite a bit from what was a feeling a "wet rag" in the first season.

Matt's story at least seeeeems interesting to me; Perrin honestly I don't care a lick about right now....even in the big battle at the end he felt pretty useless and "just there".

 

[The Soloist]

I did feel Igwain pretty strongly in this season, I think her character ramped up quite a bit from what was a feeling a "wet rag" in the first season.

Matt's story at least seeeeems interesting to me; Perrin honestly I don't care a lick about right now....even in the big battle at the end he felt pretty useless and "just there".

I agree, that Egwene's enslavement and vindication were well played. She did annoy me in season 1.

The actress playing the young princess is well-centred on her character but she didn't get to do much except heal Brand at the end. Perrin was my guy in season one but they didn't do much with him in season 2 except killing the master of the knights. Matt was just there to blow the horn. Plot devices.

It's a case of too many characters for the writers to handle in a TV show format.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It's a case of too many characters for the writers to handle in a TV show format.

I don't think that's really the issue, though you're close. Plenty of shows manage a larger ensemble cast that this - most notably in this context, Game of Thrones.

The issue is how much they're trying to pack in to 8 episodes and that the books aren't written like a TV show. GRRM can say "I wrote ASoIaF to be unfilmable", and he has - saying this long before the show - but he wrote it like an ensemble TV show to a significant extent, and with significant TV screenwriting experience under his belt. So chopping ASoIaF down into a manageable TV show just really involved removing some less important characters and combining others, and then for the first four seasons it practically wrote itself. Whereas with WoT, the task is vastly more challenging. Not only do you have to remove and combine a lot of characters, but you have to deal with GRRM basically writing the entire hero-stories of all six main characters, not really leaving much to the imagination. All six of them have a ton of badassery they're supposed to do and power to gain, and it's no wonder the show is struggling with that a bit. And not just them, either! We've got a whole bunch of others who need a fair bit of time.

I actually think they did a shockingly good job to manage to do as well as they did. But Jordan wrote something much harder to put to film than Martin did.