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Reviews
Flight from Shadow (2013)
Is it great? No, but in comparison to the TV show it's platinum
A bit awkward on the beginning, though the Fade looks great The TV show cost 90 million dollars to make once the show progresses past the opening to 4 kings the scene here is a better adaptation than anything in the show.
The Wheel of Time (2021)
A show for dumb people made by dumb people
Imagine you're a contestant on Survivor that somehow managed to leverage that into writing gigs on middling primetime TV shows. Where you wrote middling scripts for those middling TV shows. Now imagine you convinced the world's third largest company to let you helm one of the most expensive TV shows ever made. You too might convince yourself that you're much more talented than you are.
Dan and Dan get a lot of flak for fumbling the final season of GoT, but at least it took them 7 seasons and 90 or so Emmys to convince themselves that they could just do whatever they wanted. Well, at least 5.
There's a reason that even beyond the writing the technical aspects of this show are not nailed, and the castings are not nailed. The Witcher is an example of a show that hits on those aspects but fumbles with the writing. GoTs is an example of a show that hits on everything. WoT is an example of a show that hits on nothing - which is the fault of the Showrunner.
Don't get me totally wrong. I would rate this a 5 or a 6 if it were just a TV show, and the 2 is for it being an 'adaptation'. I think show-only people can be forgiven a little for not seeing the cracks they're putting into the story and thinking it's better than it is. Remember, this is a 14 book series, things they do wrong here have ramifications in the future. In the last episode, did Nynaeve just get brought back from the dead? Was she mostly dead? Did Miracle Max whisper into here ear? And while you might enjoy the channeling moments, Nynaeve healed, Nynaeve healing in episode 4, the women linking and defeating 20,000 trollocs in episode 8, these things don't make for sensical plotlines in the future. If 5 untrained women can link and destroy an Army of Trollocs, what threat are they to the White Tower with 1000 women? Previously we saw 7 Aes Sedai get attacked by 20 guys in the woods, so even internally to the show there is no consistency. Also If all you ever have to do is really want something, where is there ever any tension?
The entire 8 episodes were built around the need to build up to 'whoa' moments, but they all didn't work and sacrificed the story. Episode by Episode
1. For the Trolloc's attacking Emond's Field (not the Two Rivers btw, Emond's Field, but you wouldn't know that if you only watch the show) they spend not enough time in Emond's Field to care about it. IT's just generic fantasy village you expect your heroes to move on from.
2. To get to Shadar Logoth they blow through 40% of the book. The end of episode 2 is 40% of the way through the book. In an attempt to not have slower paced travelling episodes without big payoffs that might be rated as 8.2 on here they rushed to get there to try to have a 9 but didn't get it. They didn't fully explain the evil and just truncated and simplified and made more blunt the evil. They think you're stupid.
3. Woman is a Dark Friend and gets a sword and chases heroes. However Mat and Rand's journey involves running into many darkfriends and a never ending feeling of danger because of it. A feeling that htey will be caught eventually. Here the concept is just introduced and you go, well, that's interesting, but the feeling isn't captured.
4. Nynaeve AOE heals everyone and Logain is stilled. Actually works pretty well. The army was terrible. The other climax here isn't fully effetive though, and that's Thom sacrificing himself. Thom is there from the start in the books se he isn't built up enough to care.
5. Lan rips open his shirt and cries - what do you want to know about this one......
6. Moiraine is exiled! But this doesn't happen in the books and is inconsistent with her character both in the books and the show because she shouldn't care about being exiled. We spend an entire episode on a plotline that doesn't make sense
7. Rand is revealed to be the Dragon Reborn. As a book reader it's hard for me to judge how them trying to keep this a secret worked for the audience engagement. However there are many moments throughout the series which are harmed because they tried to keep this a secret. You don't know who is tDR until the end of the book either, but it's even more obvious there, but the real question that's answered in tEotW that they failed to answer here is what it means to be tDR. Because the Writers failed to realize the strength of the finale they thought they needed to alter the storyline for more intrigue. They were wrong
8. Hilariously they sacrificed a more interesting Finale from the book to Rand's story, much more dramatic, so that they could give what he did to Nynaeve and Egwene. Instead Rand.....channels and a guy disappears. On the Flip side Nynaeve and Egwene get to defeat a bunch of Trollocs, which is more interesting than what they did in EotW, but the more you think about the whole sequence the worse it is. Why didn't the women defend the gap in the fort? Surely that's where they'd be most effective. How can 5 women defeat an army of thousands when 7 aes sedai had trouble with 20 or 50 earlier in the season? Characters can heal death? The woman leading the circle can hold onto the power and has to and can't let go for exactly as long as is needed to create maximum drama? Awful. Also, Moiraine is going to let Rand al Thor, the Dragon Reborn, walk off into the Blight alone where touching things can kill you even though she thinks it's just 'the first fight'?
The other egregious beat they keep missing is completely failing to treat the male characters correctly. Personally I think there are probably minor improvements to be made on the treatment of female characters throughout, minor improvements, but for the male characters there's a lot of hitting the nail on the head when it comes to RJ's characterization. These writer's eliminated the character of Elyas so they could save time to have Warders standing around talking about their feelings. The reason is because they don't understand what Elyas brings to the story or Perrin. And because they're hacks they're worried about Perrin being sidelined a bit in the 2nd book so want to drag the wolf thing out forever. Elyas is a masculine mentor character to Perrin. The writer's deemed this boring and unnecessary. Perrin didn't love Egwene either, a show invention, and he didn't love Egwene because he respected her and Rand's relationship, and he looked out for Rand against Aram, Aram a character they completely re-wrote to make sure Egwene didn't look bad. Lan is not nearly stoic enough, the actor does not want to be clearly and is therefore miscast. Mat isn't a ruffian with a heart of gold, he's 'tempted by evil' or something. We're told not shown unless you count the petty thievery they introduced to the show. Agelmar is a moron that if only he listened to women everythign would be ok. Lews Therin Telamin is a moron, that if only he'd of listened to women, everything would have been OK. Tam 'al Thor is a blademaster that can't take one Trolloc, but a pregnant 'Rand's Mom' can take on 3 men at once after ahving killed 3 or 4 others despite giving birth.
Also - Those Seanchan sure were angry at that one little beach girl in particular, huh? A dumb show for dumb people.
Bottom line is that I wouldn't recommend this show for book readers as it's sure to leave a bad taste in their mouth, and I wouldn't recommend this show for people that only watch shows as it's plainly mediocre and as they haven't respected Jordan's carefully crafted world the only thing that can result in is crumbling going forward.
Centaurworld: Hello Rainbow Road (2021)
Borderline Embarrassing
What happens when you have no talent but like 'weird' shows like Adventure Time and have outsized ambition and presumably check the boxes that Netflix wants to throw money at? Why, it's CentaurWorld. There's no charm here, the world is boring, the plot derivative. This is the product of someone that works in the animation industry and wants to make a show and so they spent time trying to make something 'le random', brainstormed a 'le random' world and came up with something that they pitched and some executive was fooled into thinking that they're a creative. I've never seen a cast of less inspired characters. All of the denizens of CentaurWorld have the same personality and the some place in the story. To be "Le Random' to the main character's serious.
It gets two extra points for integrating uninspired non-memorable songs that they've borrowed directly from Disney when it comes to when to have a song. It gets 3 points for animation department trying. With those two things I do expect it probably hits some high points with songs occasionally because I imagine they let the right person write a song that they get right.
Dialogue: 1/10 - Derivative, try-hard, not funny
Characters: 2/10 - 1 point for every day sympathetic. None stand out, all are different skins on the same attempt to be le random
Animation: 6/10 - Hurt by the budget but there is effort and skill
World: 1/10 - I can't give it a 0. The world is a nothing, it's just the sort of world where they can insert any given writer's idea, so there's no cohesiveness.
Plot: 3/10 - 3 points for being functional. It's essentially a much worse Infinity Train.
Song: 5/10, but I'm sure this is going to occasionally be what gets lower IQ people to call this show 'Amazing'
The Wheel of Time: Blood Calls Blood (2021)
The Writers being Encouraged to Write Fan Fiction Sinks It
This episode had three plot lines and two were decently executed whereas the third ran on too long
We have Egwene and Perrin with the Tinkers. They get captured, escape, Egwene channels a little, the wolves come to fight for Perrin and Perrin goes a little wolfy. Valda is a good villain. All worked decently and while it was very different, it was mostly from the books. Good performances from everyone, wolves were a little clunky but it's what we expect from a fantasy show and expect them to improve as the series goes on. The only real downside here is that we don't learn anything we don't already know.
Second we have Mat and Rand, which is probably the strongest bit. Mat's illness is concerning and well conveyed, the wonder at seeing a city well conveyed though the majesty of Tar Valon was not quite there. Makes me wish that they had done the book route and gone to Camelyn which I think would be easier to convey. They fit in a great book moment - though pulling all the subtlety out of it, when Logain sees someone sitting atop something. In the books that someone is far away and we only learn much later that Logain was laughing because he saw that person. The proper way to shoot this scene is to have that character still far enough away, and for Logain to turn at the last moment and begin to laugh just before he disappears into whatever building he's going into, just like the books. We meet Loial, who is entertaining and a good rendition, and Rand has a moment with Nynaeve where Nynaeve gives the Breakbone fever story. Of course, in the books Breakbone is not deadly but the symptoms are scary which causes Nynaeve to channel to cure the illness which would have cleared up on it's own. So the story in the books has nothing to do with Egwene's resilience, but everything to do with Nynaeve needing to heal people. Another example of lack of subtlety. Though this obvious bit of exposition and try-hard writing works OK here, and the characterization of Egwene as unbreakable is true to her character. Overall this story is again decent. Real tension with Mat, characters put into interesting new setting, Loial introduced going well, good character reunion (though my favorite comment I saw online was 'RAND, I HAVE ADVANCED THE PLOT OFF SCREEN WITH MY SUPERIOR OGRE INTELLECT' referencing when Loial brings Nynaeve')
Those first two plotlines, stories are pretty strongly, though still different, from the books. The final plotline is someone's attempt at being a good writer and to showcase how good of a writer they are. Try-hard writing. Meaning, they want to get to a certain emotional ending and gad dammit they're going to get there whether it's earned or not. Problems abound. Stepin is a generic nobody that the audience has no reason to care about beyond basic empathy. We have him tell his backstory (these writer's love their clunky cliched backstories) but that backstory in no way informs who the character is now. It's an attempt to make the story more cohesive and it backfires and is unnecessary. We already know what we need to know. Stepin warder, warder sad when Aes Sedai die. We already saw that last episode, so instead of spending time trying to make Stepin happen they just need to show him once sad, twice talking about Alanna's offer, three times dead.
Instead, they bore us with a character that will never be seen or heard about again, that was never really more than a bit player in the narrative, and that had no real connection to the other characters. But it's still OK, overdone, but OK. What doesn't work at all is Lan, and surprised to most of the people who don't like this scene at the end, that's not the problem. The problem is Lan's characterization in the show so far. Book Lan is stoic to the extreme. Nothing makes him smile, nothing makes him laugh. He's stone faced and unchanging and dangerous. His presence should be like that of The Rock not when he's in a goofy movie, but when he's serious and dangerous in a movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator. Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner. And that last is maybe the most apt comparison. The twist being showing the multifaceted nature of a character who appeared to be the polar opposite up until that point. It appears opposite, but it works because those new dimensions aren't really knew, they fit perfectly into what was already there, and seeing them come on screen at the end means we completely view everything that happened before in a deeper way. When Rutger Hauer saves Harrison Ford it's an affirmation of life, his speech is an affirmation of life in the face of death, and that means that everything we see before that moment needs to be understood as being carried out by a creature that values life. So the replicants are transformed from brutal inhuman murder machines to superhuman entities with more capacity for life and appreciation of life than typical humans. The idea with Lan in this episode was to take someone who appeared to be completely stoic and stone-faced, unflappable, and unfeeling to in fact be capable of extremely deep emotion. Turns out this doesn't work if you've presented Lan to be a typical guy that has above average fighting skills for 5 episodes. Book Lan isn't talking about his feelings with other men and then offering to stay the night with his buddy to make sure he's OK. Book Lan would understand that Steppin was going to kill himself and not try to stop it. They need a scene of him expressing to another character that, that's what Stepin is probably going to do, that it's his choice, that a man is his duty and he failed his duty or something, and then for Steppin to kill himself, for Lan to continue to show no emotion, and then to have him have a rage moment in this funeral ceremony. But Lan doesn't feel hard, stoic, or imposing in this rendition. They do things like make him sound sentimental for getting back 'home' to Tar Valon just to give Moiraine a layup for how she don't need no home. U go gurl. So when Lan has his little rage cry fit it doesn't hit us like 'Oh he really does care, he really does feel emotion,' it hits us like, 'ok, we get it, jeeez, can we move on please'. This episode could have been a 9 or a 10 if they had played it better - the core idea works, but it works for book Lan, not for show Lan.
Rafe Judkins is the showrunner of the wheel of time, and having Rafe Judkins in this role is an opportunity cost. It's not that he's the worst ever, but if the show were run by someone with more talent it would be better. It's his job to make sure the storylines people include work and to make sure they take the correct elements of the books and are consistent with them. Because he failed at this, the episode writer's core idea which in my opinion is solid, fails completely.