Rosamund Pike is bathing with her legs up, and Daniel Henney is practicing swordplay with his shirt off in the season two opener of The Wheel of Time. Hey, you’ve got to satisfy public demand!
The difference between “not bad” and “pretty good,” you see, is relatively thin, and for the majority of its current runtime, The Wheel of Time has stayed right on that border. The expensive Prime Video series never looked like a lot more than an entire season of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys with a budget that allowed not so much for better costumes, props, and set design, but simply ordering a few hundred more of them. The series was itself just a blip on the radar of the far more expensive, much more creatively suspicious epic-fantasy tale The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Pike, Henney, and the rest of the main ensemble make for entertaining on-screen presences, and not just for horny ones either. However, horny ones do exist, and showrunner Rafe Lee Judkins would be foolish to not capitalize on them.
TWoT is a series that rarely stands out, despite being adapted from the works of author Robert Jordan, who is primarily satisfied with playing Songs in the Key of Tolkien rather than forging new paths. Beyond the production’s sheer size, Jeff Bezos’ financial investment in it is barely visible onscreen. When it comes to unforgettable, magnificent imagery, Apple+’s Isaac Asimov-inspired Foundation beats it (and all other non-House of the Dragon sci-fi/fantasy adaptations presently airing) out of the water. However, most of the fits and sets are uninteresting.
Performances have also failed to set it apart. There is no denying the appeal of Pike and Kenney’s tragic romance. However, before you claim that all relationships between extremely attractive couples have chemistry, allow me to disprove your claim with the example of Josha Stradowski’s hero Rand al’Thor and Madeleine Madden’s magically endearing Egwene. Barney Harris’ performance as the edgy, cursed Mat Cauthon was, in fact, the season’s most memorable turn. However, he is no longer on the program; Dónal Finn has taken his place.
Therefore, opening cold with a scene that was completely unrelated to anything we had previously seen on the program might have been the second season premiere of the show’s second-best move. A gathering of evildoers, including the traitorous peddler Padan Fain (Johann Myers), deliberates their next course of action in a structure resembling a cathedral with six-pointed spires. The chairman of the board, the unidentified manifestation of evil personified by actor Fares Fares, comforts the young girl who enters the room & hides under the table from the Trolloc creatures that wait outside. He’s only a minion of the Dark One, not the Dark One himself, as you can see if you read anything about this program or watch the “this season on TWoT” promo that plays during the closing credits, but this hasn’t been made obvious by the show itself to this yet. Anyway!
Whoever he is, he informs the terrified girl that he has been called a monster, but from the way he looks, he can’t be all that horrible, can he? He leads her outdoors and calms a Trolloc down sufficiently for her to pet its shaggy face. He ponders the possibility that all monsters are actually critters hunting for food. Then, they wouldn’t be quite so horrible, would they? Monsters, like him, are simply acting in accordance with their perceptions of what is right. Already, the Wheel has given us a much more intriguing explanation of evil than it did the previous time.
What comes next is an “around the horn”-style episode on a scale that eclipses anything television has witnessed since Game of Thrones, bringing us current on this vast fantasy world’s cast of dozens. It comes out that the main protagonists of the drama are dispersed all over the world.
The White Tower is a training facility for aspiring Aes Sedai, and Nynaeve (Zo Robins) and Egwene (Madeleine Madden) are two female magic users who have made the trip there. In their capacity as newcomers, they carry out menial jobs while being subjected to the strict supervision of teachers like the seductive but requesting Green sister Alanna (Priyanka Bose) and the evil leader of the fanatical Red Ajah, Liandrin (Kate Fleetwood). Liandrin takes a particular interest in Nynaeve because she is the most potent channeler the Aes Sedai have witnessed in centuries and would be a valuable asset to the inquisitive Reds if she weren’t so terrified of her own power that she is now not willing to use magic at all, that Liandrin finally prods her into doing.
The Red sister has other side interests than Nynaeve. She has Mat, who has been missing along with Nynaeve and Egwene, in custody and is questioning him for information that he doesn’t have but that she assumes he has given his involvement with the cursed knife from the previous season. She is also torturing him by purposefully leaving out any mention of him from the letters his buddies have been writing to one another. Man, that’s just insulting.
Perrin (Marcus Rutherford), the letter’s author, has been kind of a sad-sack cipher on the program while having awesome werewolf abilities. He has joined a group of warriors that is looking for Padan Fain and his “darkfriends,” who are in charge of the stolen artifact known as the Horn of Valere, together with his towering Ogier companion Loial (Hammed Animashaun). They meet Elyas (Gary Beadle), a tracker who has psychic abilities and golden eyes that identify him as a fellow wolfman, throughout this process.
Our dispersed plot lines have a Moraine and Lan-centered center that is the most emotionally compelling. The Aes Sedai Verin (Meera Syal) and Adeleas (Nila Aalia), as well as the gray-haired Warder Tomas (Heikko Deutschmann), now live in a charming small quasi-English Patient compound with her after she was severed from the One Power. Moraine hosts a number of mysterious visitors in an effort to collect artifacts and details about the breaking of hearthstone, a material that allegedly cannot be broken but which broke during her and Rand’s battle at the Eye of the World. While they loiter, eating and drinking such as one of the nicer character groups during a season of The White Lotus, Moraine hopes to gather information from these visitors.
Okay, on to the compellingly emotional portion. During the conflict, Moraine lost her link to the One Power, and with it, her connection to Lan. She’s changed, keeping Lan at a distance in a way that’s killing him from the inside, as happens to many individuals who have one great loss too many in a short period of time. It takes the compassionate counsel of Verin and Tomas to persuade Lan that she is dying on the inside as well, maybe in a way that is more profound and excruciating than his own.
However, by the time he attempts to make amends with her, she has already fled in secret, probably in order to follow a lead from a poem discovered to have been written in blood (yeah, fantasy!). and to leave Lan, whose presence clearly hurts her because it serves as a reminder of the relationship they formerly shared. Unfortunately, she immediately encounters a group of lamprey-mouthed Fades, the worst of the bad guys. The episode’s highlight is a clever opposite jump scare at which Moraine gets the upper hand on a Fade instead of the other way around. The fight scene that follows also serves as a good example of the show’s careless lighting choices, as the entire battlefield is bathed in sourceless digital gray murk. In any case, not even Lan, who discovered what had happened and found her, is a skilled enough swordsman to overcome them. That takes the magical, flame-bladed intervention of Verin and Tomas, who are obviously a lot less retired than they appear to be.
Rand al’Thor is the sole remaining character, which means that the Dragon Reborn, the bleeding messiah, is also the primary character. He… resides in a village somewhere, shaves his head, observes customs related to holidays in his and his friends’ hometown, and looks good, but otherwise does not appear in this episode. He shares Nynaeve’s fear that no one man should hold all of this power, particularly given that he is a man and that possessing any power, much less as much as he does, is a surefire path to madness for men in this society.
There are times when the show that is the outcome of all this business seems less like a story or a real world and more like a very large box that was bought for a few hundred million dollars and into which various objects in the shape of stories or real worlds can be dropped. I strongly support the elaborate White Tower as a set and setting because of its pure snow-colored latticework filigrees, which mark it as a place that is too strong to be affected by and tarnished by the ongoing warfare its inhabitants wage. If nothing else, the show stands out from the crowd due to its flamboyant poly-couple sex positivity. Pike and Henney possess exquisite beauty. The ideal monsters under the bed are the Trollocs. Beyond that, I’m not sure what we’re receiving here isn’t available elsewhere in greater or better quantities.
However, you know, sometimes that’s enough. I often view The Wheel of Time through the perspective of my 12-year-old son, a fantasy enthusiast for whom anything fitting that description is still novel in the live-action epic fantasy genre. Even if Jordan’s novels weren’t a part of my own library, I’d be lying if I claimed I didn’t still have enough of the fantasy nerd from when I was 12 inside of me to at least occasionally respond to the show in that manner. There are times when you just want to see folks in tunics cast waves of magic at people wearing monster costumes while possibly interspersing their attacks with swords. You can get that from The Wheel of Time, and if you enjoy that kind of thing, you’ll like it.