Andrew and Lee do The Wheel of Time episode five: Funerals everywhere!
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Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Time books, and they’re bringing that knowledge to bear as they recap each episode of Amazon’s new WoT TV series. These recaps won’t cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. If you want to stay unspoiled and haven’t read the books, these recaps aren’t for you.
New episodes of The Wheel of Time will be posted to Amazon Prime subscribers every Friday.
And after that, we get a big, month-long time skip—and then we’re off to Tar Valon!
Amazon Studios
Andrew: For book-readers, being in Tar Valon this early will drive home just how far off the map we now are, in terms of adapting Eye of the World. Many of our characters, particularly Rand and Mat and Egwene and Perrin, are all caught up in plots that actually aren’t too dissimilar from the book’s version of events. But we are far, far away from Caemlyn, the city that anchors these story beats in EotW, which means we’re either skipping or delaying some major character introductions, and also that inter-Aes-Sedai scheming is a bigger part of the story.
I promise not to make this kind of pooh-poohing a habit, but the show’s Tar Valon doesn’t really match my headcanon appearance. I see no flowing Ogier masonry, no fluted bridges and connecting towers. The up-close shots of the city streets with their dirty white stonework look like they were borrowed from Minas Tirith in Return of the King. And the White Tower itself is an artless stump of half-melted wax—like if you put the book’s version of the White Tower in a microwave and let it just kind of… collapse on itself. If there’s an architectural antecedent to the design we see on screen, it’d be something like Angkor Wat—except without the grace or beauty. Sorry, Amazon, but the Shining City is a swing and a miss for me.
Amazon Studios
We have talked a few times about the differences in how the One Power is depicted in this show, and I came away from this episode mulling something that is kind of separate from that but also kind of not? Everything we see about Warder culture on this show is modeling an emotionally open and vulnerable version of masculinity that is really sticking out to me as a reader of the books. Most (if not all) of these men spend the books talking about duty and self-sacrifice and how they’re all too DANGEROUS to have friends or lovers. No one ever takes their childhood friend by the shoulder and just asks how they’re holding up. Book-Lan gives Nynaeve the Pee-Wee Herman “I’m a loner, Dottie, a rebel” speech pretty much verbatim.
But in the show we are regularly seeing groups of men having emotionally mature conversations, and crying, and just being there for each other? We briefly noted it last week, in that moment where Rand checks in on Mat because he’s worried about him. I am sure that this is going to piss off some element of the fandom, anyone who believes this affected machismo is something to emulate and not (as the books ultimately depict it!!) a character flaw. But I’ve found it strikingly refreshing.
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