The Wheel of Time: The Wheel Weaves as Jeff Bezos Wills (Book Spoilers)

[Ran]

7 minutes ago, jurble said:

With regards to the One Power and anti-grav, the WoT wiki says this 

which would imply that anti-grav cars wouldn't be using the One Power directly

I think that quote refers to channelers in the present Age saying that you can't really lift yourself off the ground with the OP, but this seems to be because now they basically just make weaves to literally try and lift themselves up and that doesn't work; it's like trying to lift yourself off the ground by pulling on your bootstraps. OTOH, if you created a weave that created a bubble/field  around you that negated or countered gravity, you wouldn't be "lifting" yourself, you'd let the force of (anti)gravity do the work.

This fits with the Sharom's levitation being based on a One Power technique and then refined into tech that used Earth's own magnetic and gravitational field, but ultimately the One Power is in there in some fashion.

I guess it would make sense for them to create  mass-produced things using using One Power-made devices that produced that non-channelers could then operate the mass production process. That way you don't tie up channelers doing mundane things but figuring out how to create the mechanisms by which the rest of the public can do the mundane things.

[Werthead]

19 minutes ago, jurble said:

With regards to the One Power and anti-grav, the WoT wiki says this 

which would imply that anti-grav cars wouldn't be using the One Power directly

Yeah, the rule is that you can't use the One Power to make yourself float/fly. You can certainly use it to carry other people around, but they have no control over it. That limitation doesn't apply to the True Power (not sure if they can heal themselves with the True Power as well).

That seems to indicate that One Power-driven antigravity wouldn't really work, unless your hoverfly was sending directional commands to a remote relay which was then moving the vehicle around for you near-instantly. Maybe possible.

That kind of digital-driven One Power system doesn't really seem in keeping with it, and perilously close to the One Power being used without the intervention of a living conduit, which is a definite no-no.

[Ran]

Again, the Sharom levitated using the Earth's own magnetic and gravitational field via technique discovered and refined with the One Power.

It's a loss of knowledge thing, IMO, rather than a fact that you can't "fly" with the One Power. You can't lift yourself, but it seems they figured out how to counteract gravity and then you're not lifting yourself at all but letting the Earth do it.

[Werthead]

Potentially. But it is clear that the sho-wings are just electric (or otherwise renewable) versions of modern jets, hoverflies and jo-cars weren't exclusively operated by Aes Sedai (hoverflies sound possibly more like helicopters than true flying cars, which is what jo-cars were) and the 3DTVs in people's homes weren't operated by the Power. Heat exchangers could just be ground source heat pumps, glowbulbs are renewable bulbs taken to the nth level of effectively lasting forever. The shocklance seems to be a lethal application of the taser, on a larger scale.

The Age of Legends is simply our world stripped of environment-destroying technologies and overlaid with the discovery and use of the One Power. The One Power does a lot of heavy lifting in the AoL (particularly in agriculture and very high-level scientific research; the Sharom I've seen as a One Power-designed equivalent of the LHC, and stasis boxes seem to be One Power-derived ter'angreal rather than some kind of cryogenic device) but it doesn't do everything.

[IlyaP]

Well. 

That was...something. 

My partner kept saying "Waitaminute, in the books, didn't they have things go differently?" more than a few times. As I winced at the really spotty CGI and utterly bizarre camera work (It's Ishy! It's Rand! It's the mountains! It's a sinkhole! Look up, look down, look at Rand, now back to Ishy, now back to Rand, where are you? You're in a cave! I'm on a horse! It's Bella!)

I am dearly curious as to what the production timeline was for the last episode, as the CGI was incredibly spotty, and some of the camera editing was just so bizarre, with the Michael Bay-esque spinning shot technique.

Famously, many shows are uneven in season 1, and by the second season find their tone, style, and voice. Hopefully that happens with this adaptation, which at the moment has left me monumentally underwhelmed. 

[Scott_N]

10 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

The casting doesn't seem that great to me.  A lot of the leads are devoid of any charisma at all, which you really need actors with good presence in a fantasy story where many viewers won't absorb the plot details.  Egwene and Perrin are especially bland and Rand is also on the bland side, but he distracts me because he looks like a red haired Ryan Phillippe...I even thought at the beginning he must be RP son.  

I agree about Perrin and Egwene but I think Rand is alright. Nynaeve is great which is astonishing really given some of the dreadful lines they've forced on her, but it is clear the show is putting a heavy burden on Moiraine and Lan to carry it going forward.

[Starkess]

Well, that's that then. I did not enjoy this finale. I've found the entire season to be a letdown and honestly I just get the feeling that Judkins doesn't actually like the books at all, despite his statements to the contrary. Actually, I've found a lot of his statements to be downright contradictory, and I think this bait-and-switch feel contributes quite a lot to my disappointment with the series. But at the end of the day, it just didn't work on its own merits for me. The writing, the directing, the costuming, the lighting, the storylines, most of the acting. The extensive changes to the lore to "update" it in incredibly unnecessary ways. I found it a chore to finish the season, but I had hopes maybe it would all payoff with something great or at least good enough. That didn't happen, so I'll be bowing out now. If I hear S2 turned things around, I might check it out after the fact, but ... life's too short to watch another season of whatever this was.

On 12/24/2021 at 7:13 AM, Ran said:

This is a real problem with the show, indeed. If Judkins hadn't said otherwise, I would have assumed that Egwene is by far his favorite character and that's why the show has been written as it is. 

Judkins did say that Egwene is his favorite character. (Well, he said she has his favorite character arc, listed her among his favorites when he said he couldn't pick one, and said "I'm obsessed with Egwene. I think, of all the characters, she faces some of the most dramatic/impossible choices in the series. And to me, characters you fall in love with are the ones who have to face these choices and come out stronger on the other side. She is going to rock")

[felice]

18 hours ago, Darryk said:

But instead they have five barely trained Aes Sedai wipe out the entire army.

They're putting a lot of emphasis on how powerful Nyneave is, which is all well and good, but it was a missed opportunity to announce the Dragon Reborn in dramatic fashion, and show the audience just why everyone is so afraid of this prophecy.

Except nobody knows about the Dragon Reborn yet in the aftermath of the first book - his return doesn't become general public knowledge till much later. So keeping him out of Tarwin's Gap is a definite improvement over the books in that respect. Having a woman who's been fully trained as Aes Sedai direct the power supplied by Nynaeve and Egwene is a smart move, and though perhaps somewhat overpowered, they should certainly be capable of much more than Moiraine unleashed in the first episode.

Having them stand outside the city was unbelievably stupid, though. The idea that they risked damaging their own fortifications makes some sense, but that really should have been made clear onscreen, not left for fans to retcon. And even given that limitation, put them in front of the gap wall, not behind it, so they can make the job of the male defenders easier rather than waiting till they're all dead. And as for the design of the wall...

[UnplayableChar]

8 minutes ago, felice said:

Except nobody knows about the Dragon Reborn yet in the aftermath of the first book - his return doesn't become general public knowledge till much later. So keeping him out of Tarwin's Gap is a definite improvement over the books in that respect. Having a woman who's been fully trained as Aes Sedai direct the power supplied by Nynaeve and Egwene is a smart move, and though perhaps somewhat overpowered, they should certainly be capable of much more than Moiraine unleashed in the first episode.

A woman who's fully trained as Aes Sedai, and yet doesn't know how to let go of a circle...right. And no it's not that she becomes so obsessed witht the power, Nynaeve asks her to let go, she answers quite lucidly that she can't.

[Gertrude]

18 minutes ago, UnplayableChar said:

A woman who's fully trained as Aes Sedai, and yet doesn't know how to let go of a circle...right. And no it's not that she becomes so obsessed witht the power, Nynaeve asks her to let go, she answers quite lucidly that she can't.

It's already clear you don't like it and so you're viewing this in as uncharitable light as you can. Personally, I feel that it was established that Amalisa was trained, just didn't quite have quite what it took to make the next step. She may have been part of a circle at the Tower, she may have seen others leading and picked it up, she may have been leading small circles with the other two women - it's not clear what her exact experience is, but she does have formal training.

I find it believable that the addictive nature of all that power would make it difficult or impossible to let go of - not because of the lack of training, but because of her lack of experience in wielding THAT much power. It's mentioned often in the books that the girls are very aware of the dangers of pulling too deeply, and I am sure Amalisa was too, but she was willing to sacrifice it all and forget about safety concerns.

[UnplayableChar]

36 minutes ago, Gertrude said:

It's already clear you don't like it and so you're viewing this in as uncharitable light as you can. Personally, I feel that it was established that Amalisa was trained, just didn't quite have quite what it took to make the next step. She may have been part of a circle at the Tower, she may have seen others leading and picked it up, she may have been leading small circles with the other two women - it's not clear what her exact experience is, but she does have formal training.

I find it believable that the addictive nature of all that power would make it difficult or impossible to let go of - not because of the lack of training, but because of her lack of experience in wielding THAT much power. It's mentioned often in the books that the girls are very aware of the dangers of pulling too deeply, and I am sure Amalisa was too, but she was willing to sacrifice it all and forget about safety concerns.

Am I being uncharitable? I'm judging it based on the info we have: Amalisa was in the Tower for years (suggests a good amount of training), is incapable of letting go of a lot of power (suggests she wasn't properly trained). Saying she got the training equivalent of a full Aes Sedai I feel is wrong, because we've never seen a full Aes Sedai fail to let go of the power. Every Aes Sedai who's led a circle, used an angreal or sa'angreal has drawn more power than she ever had before, they don't burn out from not letting go. Clearly something is missing there.

[Ran]

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

But it is clear that the sho-wings are just electric (or otherwise renewable) versions of modern jets

They flew using aerodynamics, yes, but they derived their power from the One Power:

Quote

Energy to propel vehicles and operate devices was dispersed through a broadcast process that made it available to anyone with the proper receiving equipment.

I don't know if that's the "standing flows" that Mesaana mentioned to Alviarin regarding the "telephone" ter'angreal she had, but seems likely since it's the clearest example we have of something being powered remotely with the One Power that non-channelers could use.

So to my mind, sho-wings had devices that used the One Power to provide electricity, which then turned electric turbines or whatever.

I mean, the One Power works on vaguely scientific principles, but basically in the AoL the One Power was used to initiate everything. Did they have fusion? Probably, but I'm pretty sure ter'angreal  were involved in fusion plants, just as they were in transportation, in agriculture, in textile manufacture, etc. That's how I see it, anyways.

 

[Gertrude]

35 minutes ago, UnplayableChar said:

Am I being uncharitable? I'm judging it based on the info we have: Amalisa was in the Tower for years (suggests a good amount of training), is incapable of letting go of a lot of power (suggests she wasn't properly trained). Saying she got the training equivalent of a full Aes Sedai I feel is wrong, because we've never seen a full Aes Sedai fail to let go of the power. Every Aes Sedai who's led a circle, used an angreal or sa'angreal has drawn more power than she ever had before, they don't burn out from not letting go. Clearly something is missing there.

I think you are. And look, the scene wasn't perfect and had lots of little issues, but I think the core of it was fairly sound.

Yes, Amalisa was trained, no, she wasn't perfectly trained - or didn't get to practice certain techniques to perfect them. Amalisa was never tested, therefore it's impossible to know how she would react to channeling under stress from what we were shown. Full Aes Sedai who lead circles would have been tested and probably gotten a chance to practice. Amalisa was doing the best she could, and it was good, she just didn't have the experience or self control to disengage herself in this situation. 

We're basically saying the same thing about training level, we're just choosing to view it in different lights.

If everything else about this finale was above par and this particular scene was the only thing bringing it down, would it bother you as much?

[Arakasi]

I went over this a bit in the other thread but I was thinking what made WoT good for me to read. It’s not the character interaction that’s mostly awful. Faile and Perrin, Egwene and Gawyn, Rands contrived romances, Nynaeve and Lans unconvincing relationship, Mat and Tylin/Tuon, Siuan and Gareth, etc. Now that I think of it other than Rand and Min there is not one convincing romantic relationship in the entire series. Jordan did do better with same sex as there is some good ones there. I feel he could write a mentor/mentee relationship pretty well. Lan/Rand, Rand/Rhuarc and Perrin/Elyas, Moiraine and the girls are fairly solid. But still nothing great.

It’s also not really the characters. They’re too many and mostly boring or tropes. There is one thing with the characters I do like and that is some of the character growth arcs. It’s cool seeing Rand, Mat, Perrin and Egwene develop.

It’s also not the plots. Most villains are incompetent and the series is rife with evil overlord cliches. He also didn’t know how to scope his plot and clearly in later books just added more side characters for whatever reasonZ
 

So why do I like the series? Sounds like I hate or dislike everything. One thing I do love. And it’s the same reason I like Marvel films (also filled with pathetic villains and repeated tropes.) The SCALE, SET PIECES and SPECTACLE/AWE of crazy scenes Jordan writes. The problem I have is it’s clear as day for whatever reason they are not able to make that work. Sure pandemic and all but regardless of excuses if they can’t do that then imo they really can’t do the part of WoT I love. 

Falme, Rhuidean, the end of TFoH, Dumais Wells, the cleansing, Telanrhiod, the last battle, etc all require huge scale. Even something say like the armies they use in Last Kingdom which is very impressive for a TV series just aren’t enough. Those scenes in cases require movie (Aka RotK) level scale and scope and I don’t see how they can even get close to it. So while I appreciate some good adaptations of characters it’s clear they can never give the scope WoT needs. Also why a tv adaptation of Malazan would never work either.

[UnplayableChar]

19 minutes ago, Gertrude said:

I think you are. And look, the scene wasn't perfect and had lots of little issues, but I think the core of it was fairly sound.

Yes, Amalisa was trained, no, she wasn't perfectly trained - or didn't get to practice certain techniques to perfect them. Amalisa was never tested, therefore it's impossible to know how she would react to channeling under stress from what we were shown. Full Aes Sedai who lead circles would have been tested and probably gotten a chance to practice. Amalisa was doing the best she could, and it was good, she just didn't have the experience or self control to disengage herself in this situation. 

We're basically saying the same thing about training level, we're just choosing to view it in different lights.

If everything else about this finale was above par and this particular scene was the only thing bringing it down, would it bother you as much?

The core of the scene didn't bother me from a story logic perspective, I took issue with the post describing her as "a woman who's been fully trained as Aes Sedai", which didn't make sense to me for the reason I explained. I think it would've made perfect sense if the scale was turned down by about 100x.
I still think it's a really bad idea from a storytelling perspective to sideline your main characters for a character who's had about 10 minutes of screentime. But then having Rand make a choice that didn't at all matter as the thrust of his arc was also ridiculously bad from a storytelling perspective. Oh you chose the light side? It literally doesn't matter because you still broke the seal. Idiot. Fantastic conclusion to the season.

[Arakasi]

On the Nynaeve/Egwene parts here I think I’m in the middle. It’s really hard to see if the show intended to have it be a suicide mission or an actual part of the defense. If it was the latter than why were they where they were. I agree they made it clear that Amalisa was shocked by the power coming in but basically everyone else died and they won. They really lost a good opportunity to show a negative to the power they unleashed there. Without that negative then it’s just pure power creep and shows those two are awesome and why do they even need to go to the White Tower. All they really needed was a couple sentences from Amalisa and then to have their power be wild and not controlled. Annoying they couldn’t do that in an episode five minutes shorter than the previous.

Regardless I think something shows have a really hard time doing is giving characters partial credit for victories. I can think of several things in the LotR movies. Why can hobbits kill orcs with thrown stones? Why is there eight guys left in Helms Deep? Why are the main characters so badass and everyone else so incompetent? They didn’t need to give the girls such a clean win here and it takes away from their progression and need to go to the tower.
 

I also forgot if it was here or elsewhere but they really shouldn’t have shown the battle at the gap if they couldn’t do it justice. Have the men go out and defend it, have Amalisa sense her brothers death and then do a mini Menetheran where they go ballistic and kill waves of trollocs and damage the city. Would have saved them the cgi and sets from the wall defense and it would have given the girls a reason to want to go to the tower.

It’s a shame I think because imo 2/3 of that episode was great. Rand and Ishy were great and I really liked Fain. It’s just they couldn’t pull off that battle.

[Ran]

48 minutes ago, UnplayableChar said:

I still think it's a really bad idea from a storytelling perspective to sideline your main characters for a character who's had about 10 minutes of screentime. But then having Rand make a choice that didn't at all matter as the thrust of his arc was also ridiculously bad from a storytelling perspective.

Well said.

You've gone this entire season about how important and how scary and how significant the Dragon Reborn is... and when you find him he chats with the Man in the Eye of the World, does something that appears to have broken something, and takes off. The most significant thing to come out of that whole passage was Moiraine no longer being able to touch the source, while the most spectacular thing to come out of the finale is a battle scene where you have this sense of the apocalypse about to happen, of the trolloc hordes swarming across the face of the continent, and the Dragon Reborn isn't there at all. They literally even have Egwene think that the defeat at Tarwin's Gap means Rand failed, so the show is explicitly calling attention to the fact that what Rand does should matter at the battle, but then the far-too-clever writers have become enamored of the idea of totally faking out viewers, subverting their expectations, and showing that in fact Rand doesn't matter at all there.

No doubt Judkins thought this was really clever, but it was in fact imperative across the entire season that Rand was, in fact, the one to finally show his power.

Judkins says in an interview, oh Rand does everything at the end, the seal, Tarwin's Gap, the Horn, etc., so we spread things out to other characters. You know how they could have given Nyn and Egwene something to do? Have them at the Tarwin's Gap fortress! Have them doing cool OP stuff to try to defend the fortress with the soldiers, but they're simply not strong enough. Have Agelmar and his men sacrifice themselves as the fortress is falling to cover the escape of the channelers so they can fall back to the city to defend it from there with the women.  Have them and the last surviving Shienaran soldiers cut off (those loping trollocs must be faster than people!) and trapped  outside of the city and making their own desperate last stand -- and *bam* Rand appears out of nowhere and his power is so great and terrible that he destroys the trollocs, kills most of the Shienarans by mistake as well, and oh, the remains of the Tarwin's Gap fortress get wasted too, and Tarwin's Gap itself as the cliffs shatter (admittedly, this would have been cooler if Liandrin didn't do a version of this in the first episode).

Maybe it's all just "We didn't have the budget for it," but to a large degree this was just a poor choice of trying to be clever and trying to shape a novel that is 3/4ths about Rand into a pure ensemble piece. It doesn't work this early. It undercuts the Dragon Reborn entirely to have this strange and mysterious talky interlude in the Blight when everything that says real and meaningful, visceral stakes is somewhere else, and you're explicitly telling your viewers that there's a connection between the two when there in fact isn't.

The entire conceptualization of how to adapt this series from the books has simply been misbegotten.

ETA: And yes, the cinematography and editing of this final episode was especially painful. I still don't understand why they thought a Michael Bay-esque 360 spin around the Eye was a great idea.

[felice]

1 hour ago, UnplayableChar said:

But then having Rand make a choice that didn't at all matter as the thrust of his arc was also ridiculously bad from a storytelling perspective. Oh you chose the light side? It literally doesn't matter because you still broke the seal. Idiot.

It matters! Choosing light is still a loss, but it would have been a far greater loss if he'd chosen darkness. As it stands, the war is only beginning, but if he'd surrendered here, it's basically already over, with practically guaranteed victory for the Dark One.

[Gertrude]

1 hour ago, UnplayableChar said:

I took issue with the post describing her as "a woman who's been fully trained as Aes Sedai", which didn't make sense to me for the reason I explained. I think it would've made perfect sense if the scale was turned down by about 100x.

If it was a post of mine, I only meant to say that she's had as much training as she can get, which is considerable since she just fell short of Aes Sedai. She's on good terms with the Tower, so I doubt she was put out for shirking her training. She got it, she just didn't get the last bits a full sister would. So yes, I see it near full formal training.

I do agree that the power scale was cranked up to a problematic degree. I disliked the Nyneave heal bomb, I disliked Nyneave holding off Machin Shin, and I disliked the power level of this. It just makes it look effortless and sky's the limit for Nyneave and that doesn't really sit well with me. Sure, show us glimpses of her potential, but Lan bleeding out and looking pretty gone and then unleashing a heal powerful enough to heal everyone on the ground was a lot.

I disagree that Rand should have destroyed the armies - that would have been so confusing to have him appear, kill off trollocs, then disappear into the wilds again. And I do like that he just runs off - it's setting up the condensing we all know needs to happen. I would perhaps have made the trolloc army not as big and apocalyptic as it was, so that the win didn't seem so miraculous. Like I said, everything just looks effortless for Nyneave, I would have loved seeing her block come into play before she gets mad enough to reach it. Give Fal Dara a narrow victory, but give them the win.

[Ran]

6 minutes ago, Gertrude said:

I disagree that Rand should have destroyed the armies - that would have been so confusing to have him appear, kill off trollocs, then disappear into the wilds again.

I don't know, if the power he unleashes is so uncontrollable that it kills good guys as well as bad guys and shatters mountains, I think people would understand why he'd be terrified and take off. He's the Dragon Reborn, he might Break the world again, and seeing evidence of that is basically what Jordan does with it in EotW.