The party becomes separated…

The first two episodes got our heroes out of their bucolic lives and into a bigger world. It saw violence, uncertainty and the tiniest hints of what’s to come. Episode three takes us further but also reveals some of the struggles the series is going to have to grapple with in bringing this story to the screen.

Most importantly, I think the show is currently struggling to convey the size of the world in its broadest palettes. At the scale of the individual it’s largely succeeding and that’s what’s brought me through to the other side, enjoying it as I have. The different characters, Egwene, Nynaeve, Matt, Rand, Perrin and all the rest have their moments of intimacy, of close proximity and space to explore their emotions. I like that the show has managed to grasp something distinctive about them all and bring it to the screen in a way that, despite the fact they’re all friends who’ve known one another for their entire lives, they still have a sense of being individuals with their own likes, quirks and needs.

On this basis the writing and casting has succeeded.

Where it struggles more is when these characters are encountering the larger world. Too often in this episode it felt stagey and by that I mean there were so few characters and the sets so similar that you could be forgiven for thinking they’d not actually gone anywhere.

I’m still chewing over why this is. There’s a lot of commentary that it’s both shiny and grimy, that it’s both anachronistically new and still trying to be medieval. I think those complaints are rubbish. This is proper secondary world fantasy and with its particular conceit of there being recurring ages it’s done some expert heavy lifting in showing us the ruins of ancient cities, of delivering songs to us that work, and poems and histories that are woven in which do a great job of laying the foundations for the exploration of a big, big world.

I think the pressure of trying to get it all on screen in a palatable way without confusing viewers will pass and the show will find its own identity. I think much of the issue is really that the show isn’t quite sure what it wants to be.

For most of its run time it’s a solid young adult kind of story with great diversity and even stabs at representation that are entirely missing from the original. Yet there are sudden sharp staggers into violent territory where the tone feels entirely off (the murder of the first dark friend Rand meets being one example). Like it saw these moments and decided it needed to be Game of Thrones when most of the rest of the time it’s channelling Willow with occasional loving glances at the BBC’s Merlin. Yet the third episode managed to find its own feet more often – a set of scenes with a gleeman being a particular standout as well as a chase through a forest right at the beginning of the episode.

I remain confused by the special effects. In places they are phenomenal (the Trollocs being one spot among what’s generally very strong physical effects work) but the digital effects remain slightly underwhelming, on a par with the BBC show Merlin which suffered from budget and technology constraints which I cannot think this show would recognise. It’s a shame because it comes across as televisual when so much of the rest of the show is cinematic in feel.

Ultimately I think a cinematographer with a more cinematic ambition would have lifted this to the next level. There have been no shots so far where I’ve marvelled at the screen or at the composition and I can think of dozens of shows in the last year where that has been the case (The Underground Railroad being the absolute stand out example of raw story telling power delivered through jaw dropping visuals).

Regardless of the show’s faults, it’s doing solid work and that’s carrying it through for me. The magical underpinning of the world is being gently laid out, lots of seeds are being sown and, as I’ve already mentioned the characters are all being explored in unique ways.

I particularly like how these previously comfortable people are discovering the world for themselves for the first time and each of them is engaging with this sudden pulling of the rug from under their feet in a different way. There’s cynicism, distrust, fear, insecurity and rage. It feels authentic and it’s brilliant the way none of them simply clap their hands and get their heads round the change in their circumstances like they were slipping on a different pair of shoes. What they’re going through is massive and the show does a good job of showing the impact of that on them.

My final point is the Tinkers. Oh dear. They’re out of the book but an Irish accented Romany group of travellers is not a good look. It’s patronising and racist. I mean, they could have gone with any accent (or none at all since no one else seems to have an accent in the show) but at least one of the major Tinker characters has an identifiable Irish accent. It’s a big unforced misstep. Narratively, I hope the Tinkers go somewhere otherworldly and stop relying on stereotypes about an oppressed minority from our world but in this episode it’s really jarring. If it wasn’t for the Tinkers I’d have enjoyed the episode a whole lot more but once we hit them I found it hard to stop shaking my head in disappointment. 6/10

Stewart Hotston