‘The Eye of the World,’ the eighth and final episode of the first season, rolled out on Friday and tried to wrap up one story arc while setting up the next. While book purists may take issue with how that was done – and in general with the liberties showrunner Rafe Lee Judkins has taken with the source material – it is worth noting that Jordan himself wasn’t terribly happy with the ending of his first book in retrospect. Perhaps the changes here will work out for the better.
Properly adapting an epic series with over 2,000 named characters, told in over four million words across 15 books and more than two decades, was always going to be a challenge. It stood to reason a lot of side plots, character building, and even characters themselves would be left out for the sake of time, space, and casting budgets. The trick is to weave the pattern in such a way that the end result looks substantially the same.
Peter Jackson caught a lot of backlash from Tolkien fans over his ‘Lord of the Rings’ adaptations, less for cutting some parts out than for choosing to embellish others by going beyond the source material and bringing in modern sensibilities. This was taken to an extreme in ‘The Hobbit,’ which is widely considered inferior. Judkins would do well to learn from Jackson’s mistakes, even as he seeks to emulate his success.
Amazon’s little “x-ray” extras – which ought to be made easier to find and view later – prove that a lot of love is going into making the show. Costume designers, for instance, used a map of which nations and regions of Earth to use as inspiration for costuming and designs. Now if only they would give up the forced “diversity” of people inhabiting those places and recognize that Shienarans, Andorans, Cairhienin, Tairen, the Aiel or Seanchan all look different, and not just by the clothes they wear…