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

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Denvek said:

I think you've got it the wrong way round - Bornhald was continuing south with his soldiers (so the way they were originally going, presumably to join the fight against Logain), while Valda was going to take the Questioners west to investigate why there were Trollocs.

Valda explicitly says he wants to take Questioners south, and Bornhald questions him saying that she had just told them the trollocs were to the west. Valda responds that Bornhald and his Children are meant for battle, but the Questioners have a "higher purpose".

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, Denvek said:

I think you've got it the wrong way round - Bornhald was continuing south with his soldiers (so the way they were originally going, presumably to join the fight against Logain), while Valda was going to take the Questioners west to investigate why there were Trollocs.

I agree with whoever up thread said the Padan Fain actor was amazingly well-cast, and also, even though we've only seen him for about 5 seconds, I'd say the same for Logain.

I rewatched the episode and no. Valda says he's going a different way and Bornhald asks why when the Trollocs are to the west, and Valda says, "You are made for battle."

Valda going west 

Spoiler

makes it unfeasible for him to find Perrin and Egwene later on, some distance to the east.

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There were definitely shots where I feel the frame rate/lighting/camera issue/whatever it is the I've seen Daniel Greene talk about which inexplicably makes things look cheap even when they aren't, and I'd really like my brain to abandon that connection.

That might be the digital filming gap, which some directors and DPs are still struggling with, especially if they've mostly been working with film. Digital filming can make something feel too crisp, clean and new, even if you shoot the exact same thing with the same lighting on film and it looks more naturalistic. A good example is the Game of Thrones first episode, where the shots from the original pilot shoot are on film and the shots from the reshoot are digital, and you can see things like Ned's costume or Robert's face go from looking kind of lived-in and weathered on film to a bit too crisp and clean on video between shots. GoT got on top of it and by Season 3 at the latest (maybe late Season 2, actually) they got the digital filming looking pretty good. Season 1 is still a bit overlit compared to the rest of the series (and they did use inferior digital cameras for the first season compared to afterwards).

[SpaceChampion]

Did Nyn channel on Winternight to heal the Crabby Old Man Formerly Known As Cenn Buie?  One youtuber was saying it looks so, healing his knee but obviously died anyway.

[Ran]

44 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

Did Nyn channel on Winternight to heal the Crabby Old Man Formerly Known As Cenn Buie?  One youtuber was saying it looks so, healing his knee but obviously died anyway.

No, I think they're misunderstanding either Nynaeve trying to set a torniquet above it, or they're reading the look that passes between Nyn and Egwene as being about channeling, which I interpret instead to be Egwene looking to see if Nyn thinks Cenn will make it and Nynaeve not looking hopeful.

[Chad Vader]

I know we are only 3 episodes in and this may be extremely premature but there are few casting choices so far that are anything like I expected. Love the diversity, but the actors dont feel right. Rand foremost. I love Padan, fits his role perfectly. But other than Fain, Morriane and Tam and maybe Mat Ive been sorely dissapointed.

[Rhom]

8 minutes ago, Chad Vader said:

I know we are only 3 episodes in and this may be extremely premature but there are few casting choices so far that are anything like I expected. Love the diversity, but the actors dont feel right. Rand foremost. I love Padan, fits his role perfectly. But other than Fain, Morriane and Tam and maybe Mat Ive been sorely dissapointed.

Really?  Honestly, that sort of surprises me.  I kinda thought he looked like he walked straight out of an awful Darryl K. Sweet cover painting.  He is basically exactly how I always pictured Rand.  Do you think maybe it was more the way the character is written in the show as opposed to the actor himself?

[Jaxom 1974]

56 minutes ago, Rhom said:

Really?  Honestly, that sort of surprises me.  I kinda thought he looked like he walked straight out of an awful Darryl K. Sweet cover painting.  He is basically exactly how I always pictured Rand.  Do you think maybe it was more the way the character is written in the show as opposed to the actor himself?

Yeah. I'm still just seeing Annakin Skywalker...even some of the mannerisms and accent...I know it isn't right, but there it is...

[Lord Varys]

Watched the first three episodes.

Agree with the criticism about the beginning. The random manhunt seemed to be pretty random and confusing.

Most of the character moments are interesting, though. I liked it that Perrin was married and killed his wife with his axe - it helps establish why he doesn't really like using his axe - which is something the books never really do. Mat's family background also makes sense - in the books he is just a generic trickster guy without the author explaining where those character traits come from.

Them dropping the silly gender essentialism thing also just makes things better. It is called the One Power, so why should it have two aspects? It certainly means healing men from 'power madness' would have to be accomplished in a different manner, if it is necessary for the story.

Nynaeve's background is also much better than in the books - her irrational hatred of the Aes Sedai/Moiraine never made much sense ... but now she has good reason to loathe them even before Moiraine's arrival. And the fact that she was taken by Trollocs and never really understood why the gang were taken also helps with the groundwork for her hostility.

It is also kind of telling how the writers fixed silly Jordanism like the Aes Sedai not travelling in pairs (which they usually do, in the show), the guys just pointlessly exploring Shadar Logoth without anybody realizing what's going on (in the book Moiraine is conscious the entire time, knowing about the threat inside the city whereas the show had the brains to make her unconscious, forcing Lan to tend to her the entire time; the absence of Nynaeve also helps there).

The effective cutting of Mordeth is also very good idea (although he could show up later since Mat saw a shadow luring him to the dagger). The crucial point is that Padan Fain gets infected/possessed

It is also great that Thom doesn't show up at Emond's Field considering nothing in the books ever explained what a guy with his background would want to do at that backwater.

I actually like some of the manierism of the show pretty much - the channeling stuff looked pretty good, showing without telling that the Aes Sedai use different elements for their magics, not to mention that it looks as if they are 'weaving' their magic. Then they take time to establish lore using songs and stories ... which I think worked fine with both Manetheren and Thom's song about the Dragon.

[SpaceChampion]

44 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

The effective cutting of Mordeth is also very good idea (although he could show up later since Mat saw a shadow luring him to the dagger). The crucial point is that Padan Fain gets infected/possessed

There is apparently the sound of Padan Fain whistling in that scene and another in episode 3.  I'll have to rewatch to hear if it's there.

[Ran]

The whistling I recall, but assumed it was Mordeth. 

In episode 3, though? Where do people hear whistling there?

[Gertrude]

I've watched a few youtube reactions from non-book readers. It's interesting to see their takes. Apparently the first episode did it's job better than I thought it did. Had one guy react strongly to Perrin's situation and claimed him "my ride or die". Others really connected with Mat when he ran out to find his sisters. Everyone perked up during the battle and the bad ass mage. It helped me get out of my book bubble and see that ep1 had more strengths than I gave it credit for (not that I think it was bad overall, just that I had preconceived notions and definite opinions.)

[Lord Varys]

3 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

There is apparently the sound of Padan Fain whistling in that scene and another in episode 3.  I'll have to rewatch to hear if it's there.

Oh, yes, somebody whistled in Shadar Logoth. So Fain could already be there. I thought we might see him being forced into the place later, but perhaps he was already there?

And, yes, the Fain actor is really great so far.

But Mordeth as a character is really completely silly in the book and as a concept he isn't needed, either. The good people of Aridhol don't really need Wormtongue-like outsider to poison their minds ... they could have decided to do what they did all by themselves. I'd also expect that the character of Fain can work much better if the Shadar Logoth infection just gives him, Fain, the power to resist and attack the Shadow rather than him being turned into a Gollum-like double personality.

Overall, I think it makes a lot of sense for basically all people in this world to be pretty mixed. The Breaking and the Trolloc Wars would have forced people to migrate all over the place, so we should actually have no distinctly real world ethnographic in this show. It is weird, though, that the Emond's Frield folk do not all look mostly alike. They should have not gone with that.

The ta'veren line also feels like later attached explanatory nonsense - like the manhunt with Liandrin. I guess they could repair the ta'veren thing by having Siuan later reveal that they somehow 'detected' there were ta'veren in the Two Rivers ... and that's certainly something they could establish as something the Aes Sedai could do.

23 minutes ago, Gertrude said:

I've watched a few youtube reactions from non-book readers. It's interesting to see their takes. Apparently the first episode did it's job better than I thought it did. Had one guy react strongly to Perrin's situation and claimed him "my ride or die". Others really connected with Mat when he ran out to find his sisters. Everyone perked up during the battle and the bad ass mage. It helped me get out of my book bubble and see that ep1 had more strengths than I gave it credit for (not that I think it was bad overall, just that I had preconceived notions and definite opinions.)

I think them avoiding the Shire-like quality of book Emond's Field is overall a good thing. If people got the impression this was another LotR it would set up false expectations.

Although I'd say they should have stayed with the Emond's Field folks up until the Trolloc attack, only revealing what Moiraine was then.

But we could also have had some kind voice-over prologue setting up the Wheel of Time, the Dragon, and the Aes Sedai.

[Gertrude]

23 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

It is weird, though, that the Emond's Frield folk do not all look mostly alike. They should have not gone with that.

Using this as a jumping off point.

This conversation has been done to death, but I am really having a hard time wrapping my head around what a mostly isolated population would look like two thousand years down the road if you started with a mixed population. There is no evolution taking place, no selecting of advantageous traits, so the genes are all still there waiting to be expressed in the right person. I do think that most people would have some mixed traits but also that there would be a fair number of people with the different expressions all along the scale.

For the show what they've done works fine, but I've recently just been trying to figure out what that population would actually look like. This isn't my area of expertise and apparently my google skills are poor because I can't really find anything that talks about this. You can see a lot of articles about black/white twins, or how technology will change us, but that's not what I'm looking for.

Does anyone else have any actual ideas of what would really happen?

[Lord Varys]

6 minutes ago, Gertrude said:

Using this as a jumping off point.

This conversation has been done to death, but I am really having a hard time wrapping my head around what a mostly isolated population would look like two thousand years down the road if you started with a mixed population. There is no evolution taking place, no selecting of advantageous traits, so the genes are all still there waiting to be expressed in the right person. I do think that most people would have some mixed traits but also that there would be a fair number of people with the different expressions all along the scale.

For the show what they've done works fine, but I've recently just been trying to figure out what that population would actually look like. This isn't my area of expertise and apparently my google skills are poor because I can't really find anything that talks about this. You can see a lot of articles about black/white twins, or how technology will change us, but that's not what I'm looking for.

Does anyone else have any actual ideas of what would really happen?

Not 2,000 years down the road. We should not overplay this. The Trolloc Wars destroyed Manetheren, but afterwards there were other kingdoms, then Hawkwings empire, and after that the rise of Andor.

Backwater inbreeding may be part of the last couple of centuries ... prior to that, there must have been more interaction with the larger world, people moving there, people leaving the region, etc.

[Maltaran]

It’s not even clear if it is two thousand years in the show, they may have compressed the timescale. There’s that weird line when Egwene and Moiraine are talking about the Oaths and Egwene says they were adopted in order to end Hawkwing’s siege of the White Tower, which is a big change to the book history 

[Ran]

29 minutes ago, Gertrude said:

 

Does anyone else have any actual ideas of what would really happen?

An article like this may be helpful.

In general, if you have several distinct ethnicities represented in equal amounts in an area,  medium skin tones between that of the ethnicities will become more and more common because skin tone is a trait controlled by multiple genes, meaning blending will happen.  It needs no evolutionary pressure, it's simply math: if you have two distinct groups, and half the members of each group marry within each group, and half marry outside the group, the end result is going to be an increasingly smaller amount of people in the "pure" source groups as compared to the mixed group.

Say there's 100 Purple people and 100 Silver people.

50 of the Purples marry among one another (25 couples), and 50 marry the Silver (25 couples), and 100 marry out (50 couples).

Assuming replacement-level reproduction (2 per couple, for sake of ease), what results is: 50 Purples, 50 Silvers, and 100 Purple-Silvers.

Now do it again: 25 Purples, 25 Silvers, and 50 Purple-Silvers marry among one another, and the rest marry out.

And so on. Keep going and the "pure" Purples and Silvers will diminish in number as more generations pass. That's very simplified, but that's why the article and population geneticists say the future of humanity is mixed-race, especially as evolutionary pressures are less and less important for us given that we can compensate for whatever issues a mismatch in skin tone to UV levels causes in this day and age.

[Corvinus85]

14 minutes ago, Maltaran said:

It’s not even clear if it is two thousand years in the show, they may have compressed the timescale. There’s that weird line when Egwene and Moiraine are talking about the Oaths and Egwene says they were adopted in order to end Hawkwing’s siege of the White Tower, which is a big change to the book history 

I'm not sure if that just wasn't a name drop to establish the Seanchan down the road. I believe the animated short about the fall of Manetheren said a thousand years after the Breaking.

[fionwe1987]

27 minutes ago, Gertrude said:

Using this as a jumping off point.

This conversation has been done to death, but I am really having a hard time wrapping my head around what a mostly isolated population would look like two thousand years down the road if you started with a mixed population. There is no evolution taking place, no selecting of advantageous traits, so the genes are all still there waiting to be expressed in the right person. I do think that most people would have some mixed traits but also that there would be a fair number of people with the different expressions all along the scale.

For the show what they've done works fine, but I've recently just been trying to figure out what that population would actually look like. This isn't my area of expertise and apparently my google skills are poor because I can't really find anything that talks about this. You can see a lot of articles about black/white twins, or how technology will change us, but that's not what I'm looking for.

Does anyone else have any actual ideas of what would really happen?

An interesting question. I don't really focus on this kind of genetics, without needing to get into genetics per se, we can just look at the history, and that doesn't point to very clear ethnic divisions in the Westlands making sense. 

I'm going to assume a starting point (pre-Breaking) to be all Manhattan like. Very multi-ethnic, with instantaneous global transport and airplane flight available.

You then have global mass migration, continental drift, billions of people dying. This time is also going to establish new geographic barriers to further mixing.

Post Breaking, we see the establishment of national identity and this is when you'll see somewhat stable populations emerging. 

You the have 300 years of the Trolloc Wars, and more migration again, but contained to just the Westlands continent.

The you have Hawkwing, who unified all the nations and established right to migrate anywhere within his empire, followed by the war of 100 years, when we can expect a lot of migration again.

At the end of it all, I don't think any kind of pure ethnic separation makes much sense. RJ had some sense of this, but he also didn't follow it always. Some level of ethnic homogeneity in the Aiel Waste makes sense. Same for the Sea Folk. In the main continent? Not so much. 

13 minutes ago, Maltaran said:

It’s not even clear if it is two thousand years in the show, they may have compressed the timescale. There’s that weird line when Egwene and Moiraine are talking about the Oaths and Egwene says they were adopted in order to end Hawkwing’s siege of the White Tower, which is a big change to the book history 

Yeah that line definitely stood out to me. It isn't a terrible idea, but if the Aes Sedai didn't have the Oaths before...how was Hawkwing able to besiege them in the first place?

[Chad Vader]

4 hours ago, Rhom said:

Really?  Honestly, that sort of surprises me.  I kinda thought he looked like he walked straight out of an awful Darryl K. Sweet cover painting.  He is basically exactly how I always pictured Rand.  Do you think maybe it was more the way the character is written in the show as opposed to the actor himself?

I dunno, I pictured Rand as a more rustic looking kid from a farming town. This fellow looks more like a clean cut prince.

[SpaceChampion]

Rand uses the One Power to shave in his sleep.  He's always clean-shaven because of that.