Wheel of Time TV Show 7: And There Shall Be Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth

[Wouter]

3 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

 And having past female Dragons... That to me says there's going to have to be explorations of male Aes Sedai of the White Tower too, no?

I'm glad they acknowledged these are huge changes. But whether they considered the implications all the way through is a whole other question. 

I don't think there will be male Aes Sedai (except maybe much later, in the sense of Asha'man like Logain being "absorbed" into the tower). All the marketing stresses that Aes Sedai are women who wield power and protect the world.

Allthough Rafe says the writers thought about the implications, I doubt he means it in the way a book reader would.

There may be female false dragons mentioned, but I don't think chances of that are particularly high either.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Lord Patrek said:

This being tor.com, they would have loved it even if the three episodes were worse than the last two seasons of GoT. 

Tor has been on a never-ending cycle of WoT rereads for I think about ten years now (with this being the...third? I think, go-around), so it's not surprising they gave a broadly positive review. I don't think they'd have necessarily held back on giving it a more middling review, though, if they felt there was more wrong with it, but I doubt a scathing evisceration was ever on the cards.

[Lord Patrek]

Adam, I've been following tor.com since its inception and I don't think I've ever seen them give even a lukewarm review to a Tor Books product. This TV series, if it becomes a hit, could mean millions of copies sold for the publisher. So there's no way you can expect an objective opinion coming from them or anyone associated with them.

[Gertrude]

So r/whitecloaks may have started in good faith as a place for skeptics of the show who want a faithful adaptation, but it's pretty much going down the road of full on "get woke go broke" hate and memes. I do not recommend.

[Ran]

27 minutes ago, Gertrude said:

So r/whitecloaks may have started in good faith as a place for skeptics of the show who want a faithful adaptation, but it's pretty much going down the road of full on "get woke go broke" hate and memes. I do not recommend.

I gather the Gizmodo interview went down poorly there. It apparently did in some of the other subreddits that had apparently been more positive to the show up to now.

Can't say I was too impressed by some of the rounds Judkins made today/yesterday, myself. I think maybe they're making a a bit of a mistake having him be out there so much.

[fionwe1987]

I visited the sub after a while after seeing your post. The newest post is about how since the one case of a soul in the body of the "wrong" gender (moving past the absurdity of that sentence) was from the Dark One, that shows what RJ thought of transgenderism... Yeesh. Yeah, stay away from that toxic swamp. But they're well named, at least. 

[Lord Patrek]

14 minutes ago, Ran said:

Can't say I was too impressed by some of the rounds Judkins made today/yesterday, myself. I think maybe they're making a a bit of a mistake having him be out there so much.

It's basically been only him and Pike, for some reason.

The fact that the leads aren't part of the marketing campaign is odd. Yes, Pike has more clout and all that. But she will not make or break the show.

As for Judkins, the more I see of him, the less faith I have in the show. 

[fionwe1987]

The surviving four of the EF 5 (minus Barney Harris)  have been doing interviews too, though the questions and answers from them are becoming repetitive, probably because they can't spoil too much. I'll be more interested to hear from them once the show has aired. 

Pike and Henney have the easiest time because they can talk about all sorts of things that are background to the main plot. For the rest of them, almost everything is a major spoiler, so the questions have been about connecting with their characters, how much of the books they've read, and so on. And these all seem to have been recorded a while ago, too.

[Ran]

9 minutes ago, Lord Patrek said:

It's basically been only him and Pike, for some reason.

The fact that the leads aren't part of the marketing campaign is odd. Yes, Pike has more clout and all that. But she will not make or break the show.

As for Judkins, the more I see of him, the less faith I have in the show. 

A number of the actors were actually doing various live stream interviews. Saw them cropping up on Youtube. The actors for Rand and Perrin did a couple together. 

ETA: Here's one:

 

[fionwe1987]

You know, if they're really good actors, knowing where these characters are going will be very useful early on, because you can mine that to emphasize character aspects that either stay the same or get morphed by experience.

Like, Rand has a temper. We just don't see it much, early on, but it's there. And telegraphing the potential for that when he's in the "innocent sheepherder" phase of his character is a great way to hold his arc together. For viewers, it's those visual tics and small moments that can act as foreshadowing, just as we as readers got a bunch of foreshadowing through other means.

No idea if the younger actors are up to that task, though. 

[Slurktan]

14 minutes ago, fionwe1987 said:

You know, if they're really good actors, knowing where these characters are going will be very useful early on, because you can mine that to emphasize character aspects that either stay the same or get morphed by experience.

Like, Rand has a temper. We just don't see it much, early on, but it's there. And telegraphing the potential for that when he's in the "innocent sheepherder" phase of his character is a great way to hold his arc together. For viewers, it's those visual tics and small moments that can act as foreshadowing, just as we as readers got a bunch of foreshadowing through other means.

No idea if the younger actors are up to that task, though. 

Rand doesn't really have a temper though, until he has been channeling for a while.  And then when he snaps, he SNAPS.  I've always though it was fairly obvious that aspect of him was just the madness setting in.

[Lord Patrek]

1 hour ago, Gertrude said:

So r/whitecloaks may have started in good faith as a place for skeptics of the show who want a faithful adaptation, but it's pretty much going down the road of full on "get woke go broke" hate and memes. I do not recommend.

Why even go there? Seems rather pointless, no?

51 minutes ago, Ran said:

A number of the actors were actually doing various live stream interviews. Saw them cropping up on Youtube. The actors for Rand and Perrin did a couple together. 

ETA: Here's one:

 

True, but they basically say nothing in those clips. There is no substance to any of it. 

[fionwe1987]

Madness isn't the same as anger. And he shows temper well before any reasonable claim to madness can be made. I don't mean the kind of rage we see by Gathering Storm, I'm talking just regular anger, which he displays plenty of before he's channeled enough for us to think it has anything to do with the taint. 

Also, we see that temper flare at times after he's sealed off from the taint, too. Though that's Sanderson's writing, so make of that what you will. 

[Corvinus85]

Based on interview tidbits I've seen at least it seems that the actors have good chemistry with each other, which is good if the show is successful and goes on for several seasons. So again, it's unclear what the issue with re-casting Mat is.

Btw, on the Dusty Wheel's livestream from yesterday they showed another teaser focused on the 3 boys. There's a shot of Perrin's golden eyes, and during the Trolloc attack on Winternight, he takes an axe to a Trolloc. (plenty of gore confirmed) It was hard to see the axe though, but he grabbed it from near a wood pile, so it's more of a wood axe, than the battle-axes he has in the book.

[Lord Patrek]

The fact that production is keeping that hush-hush probably means that it's a case of sexual misconduct or drugs.

[fionwe1987]

8 minutes ago, Lord Patrek said:

The fact that production is keeping that hush-hush probably means that it's a case of sexual misconduct or drugs.

Or health. You can't reveal someone's health issues, or even confirm them. It doesn't have to be some kind of scandal, though that isn't impossible, I suppose.

[Werthead]

33 minutes ago, Lord Patrek said:

The fact that production is keeping that hush-hush probably means that it's a case of sexual misconduct or drugs.

That's a rather enormous leap to make on almost no data.

It could also have been health-related, or the actor may have decided during the pandemic that being away from home was not a good thing to be and he decided not to come back after the first season. There may also have been a bereavement in the family, or a creative clash that became irreconcilable (which is what happened on Sense8).

I doubt the showrunner would praise his performance so much if he behaved like a total arsehole on the show. It'll probably come out in time, like eventually it did why Tamzin Merchant did not go on to play Daenerys in Game of Thrones after the pilot, although in that case it took eleven years.

[Lord Patrek]

Well, in showbusiness hush-hush usually means something sexual of substance abuse. So I don't think it's an enormous leap to make.

Hopefully it's not. 

[fionwe1987]

52 minutes ago, Lord Patrek said:

Well, in showbusiness hush-hush usually means something sexual of substance abuse. So I don't think it's an enormous leap to make.

Hopefully it's not. 

Lol seriously? You think sexual and substance abuse issues in showbiz are kept hush hush? Are we living on different planets? 

[Werthead]

Someone's been adding castmembers to IMDB, apparently suggesting that some pretty interesting characters appear in Season 1:

Spoiler

Including Tigraine, Latra Posae Decume, Lews Therin Telamon, and reportedly a renamed Lord Ingtar, now called Lord Yakota for some reason.

OTOH, some of the information they provided is false ("Annoying Old Man" is Cenn Buie, and he's called Cenn in the one of the MCM London clips; Roman Dvorak plays the "hero Trollocs"; several of the episode counts for characters is off), so it might be a rando changing things for the sake of it.