The biggest problem with The Wheel of Time isn’t what’s onscreen, but what isn’t. Watching the seemingly endless credits spool out, listing a crew of hundreds if not thousands across multiple European nations, I found myself wondering what all this money and all these resources were being thrown at and drawing a blank. What is The Wheel of Time about in the end? Friendship? Yes, it’s nice to have friends; no, I’m not sure a massive monster war is required to illustrate this. Destiny? What does that even mean? Is anyone watching this show going to become the one single person capable of stemming the onrushing tide of evil? There are no Dragons Reborn IRL, I’m afraid. So what are we watching, exactly?
To draw a couple of comparisons that are sure to annoy a lot of people, TWoT is a lot more Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker than it is Game of Thrones. I hope it’s not tooting my own horn to say that I’ve made my position on the conclusion of Game of Thrones very clear, but the point I’ve always tried to make is that from the start it was a show about something, namely the way that man’s inhumanity to man keeps us from uniting against a massive common threat. (In 2021, that framework is more topical than ever.) The Rise of Skywalker, by contrast, is about how important the grandchildren of the antagonists of the previous trilogy of Star Wars movies turned out to be, which is another way of saying it’s about nothing in particular. I see a lot of Rey in Rand, and that’s not a good thing.
TWoT’s great hope for the future is that Rand’s discomfort with his own status, his drive to protect his friends by removing himself from their orbit, results in a journey of personal growth that’s both engaging and relatable. The chances are that no one reading this review will be the single person responsible for saving American democracy, stopping fascism and climate catastrophe, and generally setting the world to rights. But certainly, some of us reading this review — to say nothing of the person writing it — feel that they have personal traits best kept away from the people they care most about. If Wheel can lean into that aspect of Rand’s narrative, allowing us to relate to his decision to walk away from his friends lest he drag them down into madness and death with him, it can actually be about something, and thus become more than just a pleasant diversion in a fantasy world far, far away.
I reviewed the season finale of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.
Tags: fantasy, reviews, the wheel of time, TV, TV reviews, vulture