J Schmo (Joe)

If you are an avid fan of The Wheel of Time this series is something you’ve long awaited. Unfortunately, the anticipation for me led to even greater disappointment. The actors for the most part do a good job with the disjointed dialogue and the poorly summarized storylines. Many of the characters you grew to know in the books which were highly detailed and descriptive show up in the series with very different back stories and looking very little like how they were described in the books. The non-human characters are cartoonish at times. The magic is indicated by odd “smoke wisps” that are equally low-budget. I could go on but it would be exhausting. This show will inevitably be compared to Game of Thrones and the comparison will not go well. It’s disappointing that many people will have this as an introduction to the brilliant work of Robert Jordan and come away with the impression that his story is somehow lesser than George R.R. Martins. I really wanted to like this but in the end I just couldn’t embrace this thin presentation of a vibrant world and the editing decisions that gutted the story into a comic book version of Robert Jordan’s masterpiece.