Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Wheel Of Time’ On Amazon Prime Video, An Adaptation Of Robert Jordan’s Novel Series

You can find all available episodes of The Wheel of Time streaming on Amazon Prime Video. For even more Wheel of Time, check out the epic book series, also available on Audible. 

It’s hard to adapt sprawling fantasy novel series. How many attempts did people make at The Lord Of The Rings before Peter Jackson nailed it? People still think Game Of Thrones lost what made it great during its final seasons. But there is a lot of fantasy IP out there for streaming services to throw money at; one of them is The Wheel Of Time by Robert Jordan. Amazon finally stepped up to take on this task; did they do a good job?

THE WHEEL OF TIME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman dresses to get ready for an expedition; we hear her in voice over talk about how a man called the Dragon almost destroyed the world, and a group of magic-wielding women called Aes Sedai was left to pick up the pieces. Now he’s been reincarnated and she’s tasked with finding him.

The Gist: Moiraine Damodred (Rosamund Pike) is an Aes Sedai who has been tasked with finding the born-again Dragon before The Dark finds him or her. She sets off with Lan Mondragoran (Daniel Henney), her right-hand man, to find him.

After seeing a rival Aes Sedai named Liandrin Guirale (Kate Fleetwood) kill one man that might be the Dragon, she senses that it isn’t him; she and Lan will go to The Two Rivers to find him. There, next to a massive cliff over a raging river, Nynaeve al’Meara (Zoë Robins) inducts young Egwene Al’Vere (Madeleine Madden) into the influential Circle of Women; part of the initiation is to be pushed into the raging waters. If she trusts the river, she should be able to survive.

At a local pub, old friends Perrin Aybara (Marcus Rutherford), Mat Cauthon (Barney Harris) and Rand al’Thor (Josha Stradowski) discuss the mercenary activity going on in the south, but then attention turns to Egwene, triumphantly returning from her initiation. When Moiraine and Lan come to the inn for a place to stay, everyone’s curiosity is piqued, but not in a good way.

Nynaeve, the youngest Wisdom (she talks to the wind) the region has ever had, doesn’t trust Moiraine’s presence; the Aes Sedai turned her mother away because of her youth and poverty, and that’s colored how she sees the group. She also wants Egwene to apprentice under her, a lonely life that Rand, who is in a relationship with Egwene, doesn’t think is right for her.

Lan, seeing some carnage in the woods, tells Moiraine that The Fade is about to attack the village, with hundreds of violent Trollocs as their soldiers. But she can’t go, because she knows that one of these five young people is the born-again Dragon. She just doesn’t know which.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Wheel Of Time is based on Robert Jordan’s popular novels, but it’s not hard to think of it as Amazon’s attempt to mount their own version of Game Of Thrones, or at the very least, The Witcher.

Our Take: Rafe Judkins (Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.) has taken the bold challenge of adapting Jordan’s sprawling novels for television, and it’s a daunting task. Because the ultimate story is that Moiraine is taking Nynaeve, Egwene, Mat, Perrin and Rand on a journey to avoid the Dark and its minions while she tries to figure out which of them is the Dragon, there are a lot of characters for Judkins to introduce in the first episode. And he takes his time to do so. But what that leaves is a story that meanders along and is hard to follow.

We found our attention wandering during the many, many scenes of setup, to the point that when the Trollocs attacked the village, it felt like a surprise attack to us. But a re-watch let us know that Lan knew they were coming, and warned Moiraine that they should leave. But her confidence that one of the villagers is the Dragon kept her in place.

This is a case where there might be too much concentration on establishing the characters before the real meat of the story starts. It could be because none of the setup distinguished these characters as anything but generic fantasy-show villagers. The mysticism of the Wisdom, and things like the relationships between Mat and Egwene and Egwene and Nynaeve are not well-explained, leaving a newcomer to the material like us scratching our heads.

When the Trollocs attack, the battle takes up most of the last third of the episode, we don’t have a sense of who we’re rooting for to survive and why. For instance, we forgot an earlier scene between Perrin and someone who works with him at a foundry, so when an accident happens during the Trolloc attack, we have no clue about how that impacts him. And when Moiraine comes in to use her magic during the attack, we’re wondering why it seems like she can’t protect the people she’s come to protect.

Listen, this could be a case where the narrative will tighten up as this group goes on their journey. But the first episode has a lot of talking but not a lot in the way of interesting story, meaning we’ll unlikely take this journey with them.

Sex and Skin: Moiraine and Lan get in a bath together, and she warms it up for him with her magic. But that’s about as risque as the first episode gets.

Parting Shot: As the group leaves the village, Moiraine says in voice over “There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.”

Sleeper Star: We’ll go with the steely brooding of Henney as Lan.

Most Pilot-y Line: None in particular, but when Amazon’s X-Ray feature fills in information about the show that makes you actually understand just what the hell is going on, then that’s a bad sign.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The Wheel Of Time is definitely a talky mess of a show, at least to start. It throws a lot of characters at us, but somehow all the time taken to establish them doesn’t give us any more idea about them than when the episode started.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Wheel Of Time On Amazon Prime Video