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Wheel of time pilot episode12/30/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() For a story that’s so heavily based on building a world through backstory, while moving it forward in surprising ways, the side characters themselves can be unpredictable, and the plotting gets the most energy from this angle.Įven with the many lives at stake, “The Wheel of Time” struggles to make an intricate emotional connection. As the young villagers move about the world, they find people who are surprisingly good, while others hold daggers behind their backs. The secret business of the Dragon Reborn-about who holds the power-sets more of a stage for the story’s larger, compelling motif about how people can surprise you, or that the secrets they hold can be in great contrast to how they appear. Perhaps aware of how much the show can be so chatty, “The Wheel of Time” has some bombastic scenes of combat that are fitfully claustrophobic and chaotic, and it can be jarringly brutal as if trying to prove something. It doesn’t add momentum to the story, but just gives you more mental juggling to do as a viewer, while being dragged through numerous scenes of characters detailing ominous backstory via the show's commonly on-the-nose dialogue. Meanwhile, they are being chased by a force called the Darkness, along with orc-like monsters called Trollocs (created with an impressive mix of practical costumes and special effects), who terrorize Two Rivers in the first pilot episode, and slaughter many of its villagers.Īnd then the show's focus splinters even more by the end of episode two, in a way that won’t be spoiled. But finding a possible Dragon Reborn in this group is just the beginning, as they have to venture to a place called the White Tower and reunite with Moiraine’s group of other powerful women, known the Aes Sedai. There’s Rand, (Josha Stradowski), Nynaeve (Zoë Robins), Egwene ( Madeleine Madden), Perrin (Marcus Rutherford) and Mat ( Barney Harris). Moiraine finds her roster of possible world-savers one night at the village watering hole, fraternizing as if it were just any old night. Being a hero seems like ho-hum activity in something as stretched out as "The Wheel of Time." One of the show's biggest problems is that it gives you five mini-heroes (along with Pike's superpowers and Lan's vigilance), but neither the characters nor the respective performances inspire much curiosity. ![]() The big catch is, however, that no one knows for sure who it is, even though Moiraine is confident that it’s one of five young, attractive, and relatively dull villagers in the town of Two Rivers. Along with her trusty assistant Lan Mondragon ( Daniel Henney), Moiraine is on the search for someone who is the reincarnation of an ancient power called the Dragon, in this case someone around 20 years old who will have the ability to either restore or destroy the world. Pike executive produced the series, and stars as a noblewoman named Moiraine, who, like select other women in the world of “The Wheel of Time,” has the ability to move things and shake them up (men once had the ability, as the pilot’s rapid-fire exposition lets us know, before they screwed everything up). But it's hard to get lost in this world when it feels so emotionally distant, so scattered, and so packed with thin plotlines. Its medieval world is on the brink of apocalypse, and Rosamund Pike can conjure wild streams of magic with the tense cupping of her hands. “The Wheel of Time,” at least in its first five episodes, is the case of a show that’s so busy, and so packed with characters worried about the past and present, and yet it fails to gain momentum or edge. ![]()
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