Owen McConnors

Starts off with a stumble but starts to hit its stride by the end of the first episode. Now I’m hooked. The first episode started out clunky with clunky dialogue and clunky exposition. It also had a pet peeve of mine namely a “diverse cast”. There is nothing wrong with diversity in a fantasy world… as long as it makes since within the rules of the world. Game of Thrones got this right but Wheel of Time did not. We start out in Whitebridge, a small and extremely isolated mountain town where our protagonists reside as well as a veritable rainbow of people from every continent on Earth. That makes sense for a cosmopolitan city but not for an isolated mountain town where everyone should not only be of the same race, they should all look related. I understand that it’s a stylistic choice but it is one that jerks you out of the elaborate fantasy world they are attempting to construct. Between that and the clunkiness of the first minutes of Episode One I was thinking that I wouldn’t watch beyond the first episode… then the climax of Episode One happened. There we get to see the magic system of this world in action, we get to see the bad guys and the story kicks into gear. The magic system is fun and visually enjoyable to behold. The bad guys are well done and menacing. The story starts simple but is engaging for it. That all kept me watching the later episodes which advanced the story, built out the world and introduced interesting and engaging secondary characters. The clunkiness of the first episode got smoothed out to a large extent and even the “Diverse Cast” became less grating for me as we start to deal with multinational organizations where such diversity would make sense. I’m hooked now and would recommend this series to any one who enjoys large scale epic fantasy… at least up until episode 4. We will have to see how the rest of the series turns out. Note: I read the source material years ago and didn’t have a particular connection to it so I can’t speak to how closely the show follows the books. I just say to the fans of the books that no film adaption is perfect. To those who didn’t read the books and complain that there are too many tropes in this show just remember that Eye of the World (the first book in the series) was published in 1990 and created a lot of the tropes that infuse fantasy to this day.