Tag Archives: The Wheel of Time

Binge Watching into yet another Autumn

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The summer has passed.  We’re past the false autumn and the last gasp of summer heat, the mornings are cool, there is some occasional fog, and it is time to start thinking about closing the window in the bedroom at night.

AI generated televisions out enjoying an Autumn day

It isn’t quite time yet for the leaves to fall, so we can sit on the couch and watch some more TV before having to get out the rake.  And what have we been watching.

Ahsoka – Disney+

My reaction to this series is no doubt a sign that I am not really a Star Wars fan.  Here we have a Star Wars show, a spin off setup in The Madalorian, with some recognizable characters and a framework that should be appealing and… I was bored.  Sure, maybe I don’t care all that much about Ahsoka and I didn’t watch the cartoon that led into this so few of the other characters resonated with me, but there was Thrawn!  I’ve written about Thrawn.  If he was the bad guy surely they wouldn’t mis-use him.  Alas, I watched the whole thing and found it flat, predictable, and lacking in any engaging qualities.  Thrawn?  More like Yawn!  Not as dumb as The Book of Boba Fett, but still dull.

Loki – Disney+

Here is the flip side.  I have no investment at all in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  There are maybe three movies out of the whole lot I would watch a second time.  So I was prepared to be bored.  Add in the fact that the whole thing feels like they saw Umbrella Academy and said, “Hey, let’s steal that idea for the MCU and make Loki the star!” and could barely be bothered to hide the fact.  Then I actually quite enjoyed it.  Granted, it is almost entirely carried by the performances of Hiddleston and Wilson, but sometimes that is enough.  Can they carry it into season 2?  I don’t know, but season one was fun.

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – AMC+

Where can we take The Walking Dead franchise next?  How about France?  Is France good for you?  Daryl ends up on a boat to France for reasons then gets thrown overboard or something and washes ashore in… France.  And they have zombies in France, because they are everywhere, but they’re late season TWD zombies where they only show up when the plot needs a jump scare.  The real lesson, as always, is that people are the real monsters, even if they all speak English with a French accent.  I honestly think one of the show runners just wanted to go see Jim Morrison’s grave.  So op success on that front.  I didn’t care for it, as it didn’t add anything new to TWD and it world vie, but my wife pines for Daryl and Carol to get back together, so we’ll have to watch the next season I am sure.

The Wheel of Time Season 2 – Amazon Prime

I think I am the ideal viewer for this series.  I’ve read all the freaking books, but long enough ago to have forgotten all but the major story lines, so a mini-series treatment that hacks off huge useless hunks of a bloated story… works for me.  I enjoyed this season as it blazed through the tale and look forward to the next. The Seanchan were dealt with, Matt blew the Horn of Valere, and Dragon Reborn was declared.  I think we’re into the fourth book by this point.  Robert Jordan purists… well, I know their pain, it is what I feel when I watch the Lord of the Rings movies, but nobody cuts me any slack.  Suck it up.

The Fall of the House of Usher – Netflix

I like this show.  First, it is not literally a series based on the titular Poe short story.  Rather, it is a result of taking the works of Poe, blending them in with the family dynamics of Succession, and using the whole thing to indict the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, the company that brought us the opioid epidemic through outright lies, which means it has plenty of fun gothic imagery and there is a whole “which Poe work is this bit in reference to?” side game along with it being pretty much spot on when it comes to the whole topic and what some people might richly deserve.  Good stuff, would watch again… though if I have to hear another Philistine say they thought it was about the rapper I might scream.

Binge Watching into the New Year

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There was a lot of free time over the holidays, which meant lots of time for TV.  We managed to get through three new series.  We were a bit late to the party for the first two… though that was fine, because it meant we didn’t have to wait week-to-week for new episodes.

The wheel weaves yadda yadda yadda

I was probably the ideal audience for this show.  I am familiar with the material, having read… or at least listened to in audio book form, which at least means I know how to pronounced things, sort of… the whole series.

But that was more than a decade ago for most of the series, and I didn’t come away as a huge fan of the tale, so I am not wed to the idea that every word is sacred and must be reproduced on screen as the late Robert Jordan intended.

I know the basic tale, am hazy on the details, and happy enough to see them bypass huge tracts of text to winnow the story down to something that can be told in less than a thousand one hour episodes.  So I enjoyed it, remembered enough so I was never really lost, and felt they got through first book just fine.  Just a dozen more to go!

The casting might have been the weak part of the show, not that I don’t love Rosamund Pike, and having Sophie Okonedo, who we last saw as the boss in Flack, as the Amyrlin Seat sparked some amusement, but the kids from the Two Rivers were all kind of bland.  We’ll see how they develop over time I suppose, but I’d like to get some more of the cast of Flack into the Aes Sedai.

The hard core Wheel of Time fans though, there are some very unhappy people in that group.  And I get it.  I like about 1.5 movies out of the six that make up The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  But I also try to remember that bringing something to a different medium makes it a different story almost by default.  Of course, that is easy to say when I’m not invested in the tale.

My wife was on the other end of the spectrum and knew nothing about the story and just had to go with what was on screen and the bits of clarification I could provide.  But even with that, she was on board.  We’re looking forward to next season.

Beautiful and pretentious

Another one where I might theoretically be a prime candidate.  When I grew up the science fiction club in middle school had drawn a line between those who worshiped Asimov and those true to Heinlein, and the weirdos like me who were off reading Niven or Burroughs learned to keep clear of the holy war between the two factions.  And while I warmed to Asimov later, the Foundation series has always been ill considered pretentious schlock in my book. So color me happy to see somebody re-interpreting it, because it always felt like it needed another pass to make it worth reading.  And the series looks so good.  Production values worthy of the tale.

A pity it is both pretentious and as dull as dishwater, though I suppose in that they have captured the original.  We plodded through, though I will probably need a serious “previously” recap when the next season drops… because it was good enough to get renewed for a second season.

Those opening credits

And a third series for which I was well primed, this time because I had never seen the original so I was not going to rend my garments every time something varied from the expected.  Overall the show had great casting, great music, tons of style, and really worked for me for the first eight episodes.  I very much enjoyed the practical set dressing, the retro-futuristic kitsch theme, the music, and the way the story kicked off.  I liked the opening credits so much that I didn’t even skip them after the first couple of episodes.

I was all into this.

The biggest chore was watching it with our daughter, who had seen the original, though she seemed mostly okay with this live action remake.  The problem was that she only wanted to watch one episode a night, and what kind of binge watching is that?

As it turned out, that managed to expand my enjoyment over more than a week.  On New Years Eve we watched the final two episodes and… well, we’ll always have the initial eight.  If they had stopped at eight and teased a bit of what was to come, we might have had a season two in the works.

They ran into what I think of as the Burn Notice problem, where there is a story arc for the season, but a lot of time is spent on quirky, fun side adventures that let you get to know the characters, but don’t always advance the main story.  And then in the last two episodes they went all in on the main story arc, with a whole episode of flashback and then a final conflict episode… and I really missed the quirky, fun side adventures.

We had also just watched The Last Duel, and there were some odd parallels between that and the final episode.  Anyway, the end wasn’t as satisfying… so much so that there will be no second season.

Expansive

Somewhere in season four the series kind of lost us.  But, the books also lost me at about the same point, so I guess that all adds up.

The cast is still good, the sets and effects remain top notch, and there are occasionally things going on that I follow and understand, but we were pausing and asking each other, “So what is going on here?” a little too often.  I think there is an argument here for waiting for a show to be done and binging the whole arc in succession so as to not lose the threads of the plot.  The wheel weaves erratically at times, such that even having to go a week between episodes left us a bit lost.

I don’t know why Amazon insists on weekly episodes.  If there is one streaming service we’re never going to cancel, it is Prime, because we use the subscription for other things as well.

Anyway, we muddled though, saw Holden as the reluctant hero once more, and saw some state of accord come to the solar system for a bit.  I’m just not sure what the scenes on the planet through the gateway were about and, honestly, I kind of missed the simplicity of “whose got the proto-molecule?”  But this was the final season, so I guess we’re done with that.

The Wheel Weaves as… Wait, What?

Oh look, news!

Red Eagle Games… or Red Eagle Entertainment… or whoever it was who announced that they had acquired the rights to make games based on the late Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series of books has… announced something!

I suppose I should be excited after having read the books so far… well, except for the new one.  But I need more that this tidbit of information to get worked up.

Not that it is bad news.

It seems that Obsidian Entertainment has signed up to help develop Wheel of Time based games.

That would be good news, in fact.  You might remember Obsidian Entertainment from such titles as  Knights of the Old Republic II and NeverWinter Nights 2, both of which draw on intellectual property developed elsewhere, along with their upcoming Fallout: New Vegas.

So they at least bring something to the table, experience with external IPs and a release or three under their belt, which contrasts them nicely with the aforementioned Red Eagle Games, about which there seems to be little written.

No news on whether Obsidian’s involvement will be an MMORPG or not, nor anything about the platform on which they might focus.  They mentioned the PC, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 in the press release, so I guess the Wii is out.

All of which begs the question as to whether or not somebody SHOULD make a MMORPG based on the Wheel of Time series, though if they do I look forward to a variety of  braid tugging and skirt smoothing emotes along with an “agelessness” slider in the character creation tool.

What else would a Wheel of Time MMORPG need?

The Wheel of Time – 3,430,682 Words Later…

I wrapped up the last available book in Robert Jordan‘s “The Wheel of Time” saga, “The Knife of Dreams,” this past weekend.  I am now all ready for the last entry in the series, “The Memory of Light” which is due out this fall and which might end up so long that it may need to be broken into two books to accommodate the estimated 700,000 additional words that have gone into this partly posthumous work.

I did cheat a bit to get to this point.

You will note I did not say I read the series.  I listened to the whole thing in audio book form.  Audible.com has the entire series available in unabridged format. (I insist on unabridged.)

The series adds up to nearly 350  hours of audio, or about 14 and a half days to listen to all 11 books plus the prequel.

Most of that listening was done in the car during my commute to and from work, a 60-90 minute round trip.  I started listening in mid-January 2008 and just finish in mid-March 2009.  I am afraid that MMO related podcasts suffered a downturn in listening on my part as a result.

One of the nice things about listening to the whole series is that I know how to pronounce everything!  I compare this to my attempt to read The Silmarillion for the first time; I could not pronounce anything correctly!  Too many umlauts, for a start!

At least I sort of know how to pronounce every thing.  The book was read by two people, a man for all the parts that were from a male perspective and a woman for all the parts that were from a female perspective.  Unfortunately, for the first few books they appeared to be working with different pronunciation guides, so a change of narrator would change how some things were said, sometimes dramatically.  For a while I thought there were two different characters, one with a name that sounded like “Moe-gah-dean” and one with a name that sounded like “Muh-gid-ee-en.”  After a while they seem to have had a meeting of the minds and settled on a single pronunciation of Moghedien.

On the other hand, I couldn’t spell very many names of people of places.  Rand and Lan I could handle, but Egwene and Nynaeve, and frankly many of the female names, were not so easy for me to sound out into written form.  I had to go look them up, even to write that last sentence.  Robert Jordan seemed to relish coming up with names that were spelled in unexpected ways, at least when compared to how they were pronounced.

Another nice thing about going through the whole series as audio books is that I have a good deal more tolerance for… well… the tedious or boring bits.  One of the issues with the series is that it follows the paths of so many different people that it makes the works of James Michener read like The Bobbsey Twins.  And amongst all those threads (yes, I get it, they all weave together on the wheel of time) there are a few that I just didn’t give a damn about or that I felt could have gotten the point across in a couple hundred less pages.

Having gone through the whole series almost one after another, I started to notice patterns as well.  Repeated phrases began to grate, rather like the constant reference to cigarettes, their availability, price, and quality, by nearly every character in the Harry Turtledove Timeline 191 series.  Some that come to mind:

–Must we hear about the ageless quality (or lack there of) of the face of every Aes Sedai that shows up?

–Smiles that do not reach the eyes – can we come up with another description?

–Tugging on braids; it was bad enough when just Nynaeve was doing it, but later other female characters show the same mannerism, at least when they aren’t needlessly/nervously smoothing their skirts, or stopping short of doing so.

–And speaking of skirts, do skirts with multiple colors ever have a second color that isn’t a “slash.”  Blue skirts slashed with red, brown slashed with green.  Had they not discovered stripes?  Was plaid beyond them?  Maybe I am just unclear on the concept.

–And, finally, can we dispense with the stock descriptions of some characters after the first couple of usages per book? Do I need to hear how Vanin, Mat‘s best scout in the Band of the Red Hand, sits in the saddle like a bag of suet every time he rides up?  Must I hear about Julin Sandar‘s red, flat topped conical cap (read: fez) or Thom Merrilin‘s mustaches every time they show up?  Every second tier character seemed to have some stock phrase associated with him or her that had to be used every time they showed up and it began to get on my nerves.

I know, who am I to nit pick?  I write a blog post and then I have to go back and remove my own excessively used turns of phrase, like starting sentences with, “So,” “Of course,” “On the other hand,” and the others that I over use out of habit.  And Robert Jordan has passed away, so it isn’t like he’s going to do a re-write for me in any case.

Still, maybe some author will take this to heart.  When you compare this with Patrick O’Brian‘s Aubrey/Machurin series, a 20 book epic of its own (also available on Audible.com) you will find that Mr. O’Brian never fell into this sort of repeated usage of the same phrases until they became tired cliches within his own work.  I have read interviews with him where he went on about the craft of writing and keeping just that sort of thing from happening.

Enough of that though.

I made it through the whole thing, listened to every word, never skipped ahead, and do not regret the effort.  I enjoyed most of the books and I do plan to read or listen to the final book(s) when available.  I have to find out how things end up for the five people who started off from the Two Rivers all those books ago, even if I am not so concerned about some of the people who they have met along the way.

But a company out there, Red Eagle Entertainment, says they are going to make movies and an MMO out of the series.  Is that viable?

For an MMO, there certainly is enough background material there.  There is a large and reasonably well described world.  There are key cities with lots of sparsely settled or empty space in between.  There are enough factions to go around and then some.  There is a set group of bad guys with their own army of slavering minions, plus a whole evil infrastructure in the dark friends to root out.  There is a wide range of potential classes.  The right company could make a Lord of the Rings Online level of game out of it.

I think the right company is the key, of course.  I know nothing about Red Eagle, so my confidence in there ever being such a game is pretty low.  And since they made their initial announcement, EA has loomed into the picture, adding not a whit of confidence on my part.  The wheel weaves as the wheel wills. (There was an oft repeated phrase that disappeared around book 7 or so.  I wonder why?)

As for movies… I rather picture the whole thing done as a low budget BBC 100 part series with old “Dr. Who” or “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” level of props but excellent writing for the screen play adaptation.

But that just might be me.