The Wheel Of Time season 2 review: Richer, more engrossing, and just plain better
The stakes certainly feel higher for Prime Video's epic fantasy series, which, considering they were sky-high last time, is no small feat
TV Reviews The Wheel of Time
Photo: Jan Thijs/Prime Video
Robert Jordan’s sprawling fantasy epic, which spans a whopping 14 novels and a prequel, was never going to be easy to adapt for TV. Still, Prime Video has given it a jolly good try (and thrown a lot of money at it, too) in a bid to give Jeff Bezos his very own Game Of Thrones. And, to be fair, the first season of The Wheel Of Time was the streaming platform’s most-watched original series of 2021. It just—how do we put this?—wasn’t all that beloved by those who watched it, is all.
Most of us agreed that the world-building was amazing—as was, naturally, Rosamund Pike. But a lot of us also all concurred that that the eponymous wheel took far too much time to get spinning. Still, despite the lukewarm reactions from many critics and viewers, we have been gifted a second season, which premieres September 1, to … well, we’d say sink our teeth into, but The Wheel Of Time is a bit more like an aged whiskey. You sip it, you savor it, and you consider its many merits—all while wondering whether, y’know, if you actually like whiskey.
A lightning-quick recap, for those of us who don’t remember (or for those of us who, possibly as a result of losing a dare, are diving into season two blind): The Wheel Of Time is set in a matriarchal land overseen by the Aes Sedai, magic-wielding women who channel the so-called One Power to keep the peace. Once upon a time, men were able to get their magic on as well, until they were all corrupted by the Dark One and ruined it for themselves. Cue the Aes Sedai taking it upon themselves to hunt down and kill the few magical men left alive (it’s for their own good, okay?)—and Pike’s Moraine to [checks notes] hunt down the Dragon Reborn, defeat the Dark One, and save the world. No biggie.
As anyone who watched The Wheel Of Time’s season one finale will tell you in no uncertain terms, Moraine’s mission is far from a successful one. The Dragon Reborn himself, Rand al’Thor, ditches her at the Eye of the World when he realizes he’s slowly going mad. Yet another new threat lurks on the horizon in the Seanchen, too, which spells trouble for episodes to come. And, on top of all that, Moraine is left unable to even touch the True Source or wield the One Power. So is it any wonder that the season two premiere finds her filling buckets of water, lugging them up hills, pouring them into bathtubs, and taking emotionally sudsy soaks? (We get it: It’s how we handle bad news, too.)
Basically, the stakes certainly feel higher this time around which, considering they were sky-high before, is no small feat. The battles are every bit as bloody and bawdy as we remember; the looming threat on the horizon every bit as … looming, we suppose. It looms wonderfully well. And the Aes Sedai are every bit as impressive and frightening in their coolly detached approach to their life’s work, too. Hell, we even get to learn more about them (via our beloved Nynaeve al’Meara, of course) here, including The Arches, which form the basis of some of the sisterhood’s more twisted novice trials. (Anyone who has watched The Empire Strikes Back will undoubtedly have a flash of deja vu when Nynaeve is forcefully ushered into a magical portal to face her worst fears, but we were still here for it all the same.)
To put it bluntly, the second season is an improvement on the first, not least of all because it feels more assured. Don’t get us wrong: It’s still slow and ponderous (what epic fantasy series isn’t?), and it’s still positively overflowing with vastly overcomplicated and convoluted plot points. And, yes, the background music is every bit as distracting as we remember. (Note to the producers: Sometimes silence is better.) But everything that showed such promise about the first season—the outstanding performances, the worlds so real that you feel like you can reach out and touch them, the rich lineup of female characters that aren’t forced to parade around naked to be ogled and shamed simultaneously—are more than just still there. They’re somehow richer and more engrossing.
Unlike Thrones, though, there’s still infinitely less universal appeal to The Wheel Of Time. Yes, there’s politics and intrigue, and, yes, the acting is ace, but it all feels less human than HBO’s fantasy epic. Or, if you prefer, it’s all a bit much for the uninitiated—and that’s coming from folks who play Dungeons & Dragons and Magic The Gathering on a weekly basis.
The Wheel Of Time may still spin a little too slowly, then, for those unused to the beats of high fantasy. That unhurried pacing may lose the attention of even the most captive viewers here and there—especially as it sometimes feels as if we need to watch the show with a glossary of its most used terms to hand, just in case. And, yes, some faces may have inexplicably changed (we see you, Dónal Finn, and don’t think we don’t). On the whole, though, this ambitious TV project makes for a satisfying sit and it’s absolutely piqued our interest for the confirmed third season. We guess patience really is a virtue, eh?
The Wheel Of Time season 2 premieres September 1 on Prime Video
52 Comments
S1 felt very much like an attempt to make a grownup show from teenage source material – the gore and torture (can’t remember if there was nudity or not) quite at odds with the simplistic characters and motivations. The trollocs were cool though.
The Wheel of Time books definitely aren’t YA fantasy.
Eh… they were written before that was a thing, true. But they do have a touch of that feel to them.
I mean, not really. If you mean it’s not as violent or sexual as grimdark, then yes. It’s definitely not grimdark. Otherwise, I don’t see how they could be considered YA.
I said “a touch”. And yes, it’s partially because it doesn’t revel in violence, and it’s sexual content is PG-13 at its most graphic. But also because it’s about teenagers, has at least a couple of love triangles in it, and in general works best if you read it in your early to mid-teens.
Right. I didn’t say “YA”, I said “teenage”, because YA is a genre with specific expectations. WoT felt not like something an adult would write for teenagers, but more like something a teenager would have written. A teenager who’d read a lot of Tolkien and wanted to sex it up a bit. It made me think of “Eragon”, though that author had obviously watched Star Wars a lot more than read Lord of the Rings.
Eragon was about the closest thing I could come up with as an analogue for WoT, too, but I didn’t want to insult WoT. Even telling people to skip whole books in WoT, I’d still say its considerably better than Eragon.
Nah, YA fantasy tends to not be so stuck up its own ass exploring DEEP CONCEPTS like REINCARNATION and ORIGINAL SIN. Most YA fantasy has competently written female characters as well.
True enough about the female characters.
Just the opposite. They turned an excellent adult fantasy into a low budget (even though alot of money was spent on it) YA series – a very very bad one. I have been waiting decades for this adaptation, but everybody involved in this show should serve jail time for such ineptitude.
As someone who is reading the books for the first time (currently on The Shadow Rising), does the TV series follow the books fairly faithfully or is it not worth trying to compare the two.
It does not, but it is worth comparing the two to see why Sanderson himself called this a very different turning of the Wheel and why Judkins’ arrogance took primacy in S1.
It takes creative liberties but the main threads still mostly align
As a huge fan of the books, don’t compare the two at all. The show is…poor man’s LoTR, which since I love the source material and already pay for Prime is perfectly acceptable to me as an audience member. But the books are beyond the show in a way I rarely see in any tv/film adaptation.
The show is basically not an adaptation of the books. Every criticism that has been leveled at the faithfulness of Netflix’s adaptation of The Witcher applies a thousand fold to Wheel of Time.
I disagree with some others as I’d say it does follow the books, or rather, not having seen the second season yet, the first season follows the first book. However, as with all adaptations it does make changes, and I wouldn’t even say it makes a ton of changes. I’d just say the changes it does make are baffling and damaging to the soul of the story. It’s like they looked for everything that makes the first story work and then cut it out or changed it. But it didn’t take a lot of changes. Just the worst ones possible.
Friend,.it does not. Is Mats father an absolute POS in the books? So Rand and Egwene get their freak on in in the inn in the books? Does all of shienar compose itself of a single fort, and do all the aes sedai defending it still themselves in the books? Have you read the books? This is like the books, as if written by Verin.
Most of us agreed that the world-building was amazingGiven one of the many legitimate criticisms of S1 was that it turned one of the richest and most developed fantasy settings out there (Jordan’s unpublished notes are apparently comparable in size to those eventually put out by Christopher Tolkien) to into a generic teenage fantasy, this is one of the more bizarre defenses of Season 1 that I’ve ever heard.The Wheel Of Time is set in a matriarchal land overseen by the Aes SedaiWhaaaaat?The Aes Sedai try to influence the world in between bickering among themselves and preparing for the Last Battle. They never “ruled” it, having learned that lesson multiple times when they tried, and the world is definitely not “matriarchal”; one of the many weaknesses of the show is the substantial neutering of the interesting fights between the sexes even if Jordan has some bizarre ideas about women and (mostly) can’t write them worth a damn. I’m pretty sure even Judkins would substantially disagree with this representation.The rich lineup of female characters that aren’t forced to parade around naked to be ogledIt appears you feel very strongly about this for the genre, even if it’s utterly irrelevant to WoT – the source material of which has a grand total of a handful of PG rated sex scenes that mostly fade to black, so it was never going to be World of Boobs. But if you’re going to open up the comparisons to early season GoT, then you’re leaving out that even in your case where you didn’t like the presentation, D&D took the utter mess of source material in S1-5 and did one of the all time great editing jobs with focusing the narratives before turning it into a dumpster fire when they had to do their own writing in the later seasons. Judkins instead took the single book of the series that had a coherent main plot – the Dark One hunting the Dragon – and not only pretty much removed it but didn’t replace it. This, more than all the complaints about wokeness and such, is why Season 1 fell flat on its face. If you’re going to whinge about that aspect to GoT, you’d best give fair credence to what they did right – and what Judkins has done wrong. Granted, the finale of S1 here was so genuinely awful that you could make a comparison to Season 8, but that’s an opportunity you missed.The Wheel Of Time is a bit more like an aged whiskey. You sip it, you savor it, and you consider its many merits—all while wondering whether, y’know, if you actually like whiskey.First, perhaps you should consider not wasting good whiskey for your wallet (or likely someone else’s since for your sake I hope you’re not dropping real money on the good stuff if that’s how you really feel underneath) and your taste buds.Also, while I hope you’re right and S2 is better (which is admittedly an extraordinarily low bar), you’re coming at the show from such a strange angle that it’s almost impossible to parse if there’s anything to it. Perhaps someone else on AV Club’s staff could take a shot at any future writing on it.
even if Jordan has some bizarre ideas about women and (mostly) can’t write them worth a damn.Does he ever, and oh my god, can he not.
*tugs on braid*
[Nynaeve tugs on her braid]
[A female character SNIFFS and thinks about her NECKLINE.]
Apologies to the grey who made the same joke two hours earlier.
Found a book cloak here.
Yeah, I find this classification of WoT as being feminist or matriarchal just kind of a weird misunderstanding of the text.A man committed Original Sin, which explicitly caused a lot of problems for the world, and male channelers. And in response, only women channelers don’t go crazy. And this has given of power and agency to women across a number of different cultures with varying classifications of gender politics.But it’s not really feminist, and while there are some real standout women characters (imo, Moiraine, Egwene, Elaida, Aviendha, and Min to name some of my personal faves) a lot of the Aes Sedai in particular all just start to feel the same. And the way that both genders equally assign vague attributes to the other in a monolithic way has aged really poorly.Jordan did a remarkable job for his time, but Randland is the furthest thing from matriarchal.
There are a lot of matriarchies in Randland, so I don’t think that calling the setting matriarchal is necessarily wrong.Feminist it definitely isn’t. Jordan’s gender essentialism and tendency to write all women as shrews aside there’s a lot of horny-old-man fantasy to it. The various groups of women wizards inevitably all have one or more secret rituals in which they must get ritually naked, there are no gays but a lot of lesbians (who are either evil, actually bi, or just went through an experimental phase in wizard college), polygamy and polyamory is a-ok but only if its one guy with multiple women, etc.The horny old man bits aren’t dominant themes, unlike the gender essentialism which definitely is. I like the books for all that, even rereading them as an adult, but a lot of scenes inspire some severe eye rolling.
Well, there were the Greens, who routinely would sleep with some or all of their Warders, and I don’t recall RJ particularly casting aspersions on that; although I suppose other characters sort of thought of the Greens as weird for doing it, but nobody would have ever tried to, like, stop them.
>polygamy and polyamory is a-ok but only if its one guy with multiple women
You had some great points, but this is something you’re clearly incorrect about. By far, the most commonly portrayed poly relationships in the books are between Green Ajah and their Warders. In other words, most of the poly relationships are one woman, multiple men.Also, while they’re blink-and-you’d-miss-it moments, there are a few side characters in the books who are described explicitly as gay, including a Warder that Lan talks to (and whose name I can’t for the life of me recall), and some of the Asha’man (male Aes Sedai-equivalents in the later books). Overall, though, while lesbianism is pretty frequently and favorably depicted, there aren’t many gay men in the books. It’s just not zero.
… polyamory is a-ok but only if its one guy with multiple women, etc.This isn’t true. The green Ajah often have multiple male warders, whom they fuck. See: Alanna.
The series leant really, really hard into some winking, Twitter-grade “Men fucked things up, as usual, and we girls have got to pick it all up…as usuall – amirite, ladies? Eh?” which is Kayleigh’s only frame of reference, it seems. IIRC, the intro of the first ep basically says “Men ruined everything”, but don’t quote me on that, as it’s not like I remember anything, or continued watching.
It seems odd to gripe at a review for critiquing what is on screen only, and not how it relates to the page. For people who did not read the books, the world building in the show was…good, actually? And the weird gender stuff in the books hopefully is being rectified by the adaptation. One could argue the society depicted is not truly matriarchal, but it’s certainly more matriarchal than, well, almost any other fantasy world yet depicted on screen. For these observations; I think this reviewer is spot on.
Yeah 3 episodes in and the author’s hilariously bad assessment of S1 is propagated in their assessment of S2.Mat’s arc continues to be stupid, and the character is just totally ruined with the obsession with having a traumatic childhood continuing with his whole emo personality schtick. Perrin continues to be a passenger who does nothing of use for anyone even though in Book 2 he definitely carried his weight. Rand’s arc is sort of in line with what’s going on and kind of makes sense.Look, I get it. I’m the first to criticize the gender essentialism and bad writing of women in Jordan’s books. But it feels like Judkins is so obsessed with counteracting that he’s wildly changing stuff in ways that make the series worse. You can soften the sexist edges of the story without making Alanna and her two bisexual warders sage advice givers (I’ll bet you my bottom dollar Judkins doesn’t have the courage to have her committ her most memorable act) and give Liandrin more screen time than anyone except Nynaeve in the first 3 episodes.
The world felt oddly empty last season, but that may have been due to covid.Really enjoyed Pike’s performance. It’s hard sometimes to connect with super noble characters, but she made it work.
So, what I’m getting from this review is “It’s better than Season 1! Just don’t expect it to be more sensical in its plot, or have characters with more clear motivations, or a more lived-in feel to its fantasy world, or basically to fix any of the problems of Season 1.”It doesn’t make me especially hopeful, I guess.
S1 was a lot of cool costumes to look at while foolishly hoping this was not going to be yet another show where the plot is basically just waiting for the generic white boy to be anointed savior. That’s when I gave up. There’s some fun videos from women who have recreated costumes.
*ren-faire grade costumes that no one thought to age, even for the poorest and most bedraggled characters on the show
Funny, because I had S2E1 on while cooking and thought, I could watch this with the sound off just to look at the costumes and be just as entertained.
Did we ever get an explanation for why Mat’s original actor left? I feel like I lost track of that story.
If memory serves, he was asking for a pay increase before the first season had even aired.
There were some IRL issues with the original actor.
I recall seeing some explanation somewhere, but it was still vague. Basically he didn’t show up to finish filming after the COVID shutdown, so they hastily wrote him out of the last couple of episodes and then recast him for season 2.
I’m not exactly sad to see him go. If I recall—and jesus, it’s hard to remember anything about this show—the original actor played him as kind of a joyless sourpuss, when Mat is supposed to be like the one character in the entire series who isn’t a joyless sourpuss.
Well, you have to remember that the series turns his decent, down to earth father into a horrible POS for no story reason at all. So this new emo Mat was probably abused or something.
Moraine is left unable to even touch the True Source or wield the One Power.
I’m fairly certain that you meant the True Power (as I can’t find a mention of the True Source anywhere in the books), and Moiraine clearly wouldn’t be able to touch the True Power, considering the fact that the True Power flows from the Dark One. She especially wouldn’t be able to wield it as the Dark One only allows certain members of his followers to touch it.
I know it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things but this is why it’s so frustrating to read any coverage of this show. None of the people writing about it have read the books, and it’s aggravating to see these kinds of mistakes.
I watched out of a sense of duty to see where all the money went…stayed a few episodes because Pike was so committed…then there was the one good episode with Sophie Okonedo…and mostly it was a bunch of incredibly boring badly written kids. Is Okonedo in this season at all? Because I would watch the palace intrigue secret lesbian show. She’s honestly one of the most underused hidden gems in acting. I might tune in again this season if it’s better, mainly again for Pike…funnily I think her best casting was as Karl Urban’s sister in “Doom”–they both have kind of a taste for elevating trashy things, him just barely enough but her somewhat more.
I always enjoy reading reviews about fantasy adaptations like Wheel of Time or The Witcher and then jumping to the comments sections. Any praise of these shows seems to poke the hornet’s nest, and it makes me appreciate journalists even more because they often have much more level-headed takes that are not flat out praise nor flat out condemnation.I’ve read the first few WoT books, I played the Witcher games (and read a lot about the background lore), and I can honestly say, with a straight face, that these two series are not as bad as people make them out to be. Yes, they could be better (it’s fine to say that they deserve better, too), but the comments you read from diehard WoT/Witcher fans online would have you believe these series are irredeemable garbage when the truth lies somewhere in the middle. They’re fine. They’re not groundbreaking. They have a lot of potential. But mostly, they can still be enjoyable to watch, and I always love seeing fantasy worlds brought to life. Contrary to what most commenters would have you believe, the production isn’t that bad, and the overarching storylines are actually followed (naturally there are some creative liberties here and there regarding minor plot points or relationships).So my advice to anyone who is curious about Wheel of Time is just to check it out for yourself, whether or not you’ve read the books. Go in with no expectations then take it from there. There are tons of valid criticisms about the show, but it’s shrouded in such an antagonistic atmosphere that you’re going to see a lot of black-and-white, emotionally-charged opinions.
As an uninitiated it’s not an all bit much for me. I don’t read fantasy genre, but i love watching it on the screen. I haven’t read any of the screen adaptations of the beloved fantasy series in the past 20 years, but i watched them all and i judge them as works of film and tv. Unlike devoted readers who find all sorts of faults in these adaptations, i generally enjoy them a great deal because i can’t compare them to the source material. I liked WoT and i’ve been looking forward to the 2nd season. It’s been a while since my last fantasy fix with the D&D movie, so tonight i’ll be kicking back with some snacks and enjoy the show.
The producers explained that S2 has substantial changes in order to combine books 2 and 3, and make a truer-to-books S3/book 4. If you know and accept that going in, and judge the season based on its own merit rather than as a scorecard for book accuracy, this is absolutely *phenomenal* television!For me, both S1 and 2 have brought the essence of Jordan’s characters, world, and complex themes to life, but S2 is where things have gelled and in many ways hit new heights. The things I already loved like the casting/acting, music, choreography, and costuming shine like raging suns, and some of the bumps like writing, pacing, and VFX got smoothed the f out. For book fans, there’s also a torrent of foreshadowing/easter eggs and changes that mostly feel additive rather than subtractive.WE RIDE!
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Man…slow is understatement…I watched two episodes last night…spent a lot of time scrolling and almost fell asleep. The action and set pieces are well done…just takes forever to get there.
The fact that Rima Te Wiata is in this season is enough for me to keep watching. She brings joy to every scene she’s in. If any of you haven’t seen Housebound, it’s one of the best horror movies of the last 20 years.
Aside from all the nonsense, the seanchan take a Gardner hostage. Shame, shame, shame.