Big Wheel Keep On Turning

Thoughts on Season Two of The Wheel of Time

Long-time readers will know that the Wheel of Time and I go way back— I read the first book soon after it came out, and spent much of the 90’s eagerly waiting for the next volume. Kate and I met via a Usenet discussion group for the books, and I’ve read and re-read the series a bunch of times. And I’ve written about it at some length, both back in the Usenet days, and more recently here, talking about a re-read of the series in two parts, and a kind of mid-season look at the tv adaptation, then comments after the finale.

I mention this just so you know that it was basically inevitable that I would watch and comment on the second season of the TV show, which came out on Prime a little while ago. As always, it’s taken me a little while to get through it, because most of my tv-watching gets done while riding the exercise bike in the basement, and the weather was good enough that I didn’t have to do too much of that. But I watched the finale a few days ago, and wanted to talk a little about it.

This will, of course, involve spoilers for both the show and the books, so if you’re averse to that sort of thing, consider yourself warned. I will note before some spoiler space that I generally liked Season Two: it starts off a little slow, but does a decent job getting to the main beats of the original story while working within the constraints of the changes they made to bring it to the screen.

And now, the spoiler space…

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So, this picks up in the aftermath of the Season One finale, which saw Rand battle Ishamael at the Eye of the World, then setting off alone leaving his friends to think he’s dead. Moiraine goes along with this, in part because she’s unable to use the One Power any more, and has to grapple with how to help Rand fulfill his role as the Dragon Reborn.

The season starts off a little slowly, with the various characters scattered around: Nynaeve and Egwene at the White Tower, Moiraine off somewhere scheming while Lan frets about her mental health, Perrin chasing the Horn of Valere, and Mat imprisoned in the White Tower by Liandrin, along with Min. Rand is in Cairhien, where he’s working as a sort of orderly at an asylum/ sanitarium that just happens to be holding Logain, the former False Dragon. He’s trying really, really hard not to channel (but also trying to get close to Logain, so as to learn how to channel if he eventually needs to). Also, he’s shacking up with a young-ish woman who runs an inn of some sort, who readers of the book will be totally unsurprised to learn is actually Lanfear.

The biggest change from the books is that they spend a couple of episodes building up a bit of sympathy for Liandrin, the Aes Sedai of the Red Ajah who was a bitch on wheels in the previous season. She turns out to have a secret soft spot, and takes an interest in Nynaeve that appears to be genuine, right up until the sudden but highly predictable betrayal. This actually plays pretty well, in large part because of Kate Fleetwood’s performance.

Second biggest change is to Mat’s arc, which takes a looong time to get going. He’s separated from the rest, and they really play him up as an ineffectual coward for most of the season. It’s a little disappointing, since in some ways it’s doing his arc from The Dragon Reborn, only instead of being a lot of fun, it’s a total bummer until the finale.

Perrin is also ill-served by the adaptation. They’ve moved a bunch of the wolf stuff that happened in the first book to the second season, which was mostly okay (Elyas is fun). The two big problems I had with this are is 1) the wolves are way too obviously just trained dogs, and 2) Perrin continues to be written as annoyingly dim, which pushes my buttons a bit. (I haaate the Big Equals Dumb trope, for fairly obvious reasons.) There was also a bit less made of him suddenly taking up arms in the finale than I expected; this may or may not be an actual problem given the other things they did with the character.

In new-ish additions, Meera Syal is a lot of fun as Verin, and Natasha O’Keeffe is having a great time playing Lanfear. Donal Finn is a good replacement Mat in kind of a thankless part. I was not super impressed by Ceara Coveney as Elayne, but then she’s got next to nothing to do. On the other hand, Xelia Mendes-Jones is incredibly creepy as the sul’dam Renna, which is good, because she gets a lot of screen time.

They really lean into the Egwene among the Seanchan plot, which gives Madeleine Madden a lot to do, and fortunately she’s up to the task. Moiraine’s role is also beefed up quite a bit from the books— there’s an extended subplot with her family in Cairhien that gives her a sad backstory— as you would expect given that Rosamund Pike was the only actor with much standing before this series started.

In terms of the visuals, the big weakness of the first season was that a lot of the sets were very obviously soundstages and didn’t extend far beyond what you could immediately see. This season is a little better in that regard, but not much. They did put a good deal of work into designing the look of the Seanchan, though— it’s not what I picture from the books, but it’s very distinctive, which is nice.

Between the Moiraine stuff and the Egwene stuff everything else gets a bit shortchanged, making the finale feel a little rushed as they scramble to tie up all the various threads; it probably could’ve done with a longer run-time. Ingtar in particular gets very badly shortchanged by this. Some of the battle stuff gets compressed in a way that lets them fit it in a soundstage, and Rand is awfully inert, but it basically works. I’m not wild about the CGI dragon at the end, but whatever.

All in all, this was at least as good as the first season, probably a bit better. It does a pretty good job of not feeling completely Generic Medievaloid, and hits the key story beats from the book with enough of a twist to make a few points at least mildly surprising.

I’m curious to see where they go with the third season, assuming they get one. A number of the changes they made kind of pre-empt things that happen in that book, but I’m not sure they could skip straight to book four, either. Anyway, I’m pleased enough with what they’ve done that I’m in for another season, which is more than can be said for a lot of streaming series these days.

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