Wheel of Time ep 2. Less thrills and more chills

Last night I once again braved being up past a reasonable bedtime to watch the second episode of Amazon’s The Wheel of Time series.

Thankfully, despite the show having to rush through certain parts of the book, I think for the pacing of a TV series it’s doing well.

The main characters made their way to Taren Ferry to cross the river and get away from the trollocs. This tracks with the book. They make it across, and then as with The Eye of the World Moiraine causes a whirlpool, which destroys the ferry so that the trollocs cannot immediately follow. One change I liked in this episode though was that in the book, Lan simply pays the ferryman more gold to replace the ferry lost by “ill-luck”. In the show however, the ferryman, desperate to get back to his family dives in, and is also caught by the whirlpool drowning in the process. I thought that it was a nice way of raising the stakes, while also raising the suspicions regarding Moirane’s motives.

This also led to a great interaction after with Moiraine and Egwene, where Moiraine both justifies her actions in letting the ferryman drown (and quite frankly, I side with Moiraine’s pragmatism), and the three oaths that all Aes Sedai must be bound by. The explanation of the three oaths felt a little bit too much like exposition rather than natural conversation, but the show has 15 books (incuding the prequel) of world building to do, so I’ll cut it some slack.

On the flipside, I found myself teary eyed as Moiraine retold the history of Manatheren, and why the song calls on people to “Weep for Manetheren”. This felt less like exposition, and more like storytelling, which I loved.

What I didn’t really love was the drama between Rand and Egwene. I get that the writers are clearly trying to rope in some of the angsty young love drama for mainstream audiences, but I could live without it.

The rest of the episode had our characters fail twice at a peaceful night’s rest. The first was when all our Two Rivers characters have nightmares about dead bats and a man with glowing eyes… no biggie. The second is when they attempt to, and fail at spending the night in the super creepy abandoned Shadar Logoth, after encountering Whitecloaks, including a rather gruesomely effective Questioner. And if I’m being completely honest, I don’t remember his character from the books, but between the years and the baby brain right now, I’m honestly ok with some things feeling like surprises.

Of course staying in a haunted city doesn’t go well, and everyone has to make an escape before being consumed by the literal evil that creeps around there.

The episode ended with a split party and an incredibly weak Aes Sedai, who is essentially their healer. As any D&D player can tell you, this should all spell disaster for our party, but they’re main characters, and of course will have plenty of plot armor, like Nyneave, who spoiler alert, appears at the end of the episode.

I’ll be taking a break from WoT, to start some rewatches of the Sony Spider-Man films, but that’ll just give me more reading time to spend in the books again.