Wheel of Time (Season 3)

⭐ 7/10

I've been holding off on my review, mostly because when I think about this show my mind races with the things I didn't like. But I will start by saying this is easily the best season. It might be because this covers events from possibly my favourite book of the whole series, but to their credit I think they knocked some of the big scenes out of the park.  Rhuidean in particular was imaginative, and while not perfect I thought it really captured the magic of reading that chapter for the first time.

I will also say I still think this show is well cast, and when I think of the characters many of these actors are now the faces I think of. The acting can be hit or miss, but Elayne, Moghedian and many of the other newer faces that get more screen time do a great job.

My favourite moment of the season was a fight that made no sense the moment it happened, and the person Rand fights makes no sense, but the way his use of the power was depicted was so spot on I felt like I was reading the books again. Magical powers in shows always looks cheesy, but this was ominous and conveyed his immense strength but also the knifes edge he walks on every time he uses it. Really, really great, except when I remember who he should be encountering from the books and it saddens me that we didn't get that character.

And that triggers my slew of negatives. Egwene gets a monumental moment at the end of this book, and its completely foregone, replaced with a girl boss moment of using love to break the chains that bind her. Every season they have her do something that is supposed to be spectacular and it is always so lame.  Speaking of spectacular, this magic has no rule or boundaries, so crazy things that happen in season 1 raised the bar too high and now untrained people can just heal everyone.  Consistency is key here, and its been bungling that since the start.

There is a character death in the end that would have brought me to tears if I had read it, but its not in the books, and the character is so flat and underserved that it didn't matter at all. In the post-show interview thing the creator says they have too many characters so they had to get rid of one to focus on others, which is basically an admission that he is a bad show runner.  Every heard something called Game of Thrones? It can be done, its not about the amount of time you spend with someone, its the quality of that time, and this show squanders not only my time but that of its characters.

7 might be too high, but I thought this was a narrative step forward.  It has an ambiguous final moment, which I always like, and got way closer to the book for me. The Perrin arc was lacking, another favourite from the books, and it feels like they spent all their time working on the battle choreography where in the book there is so much more going on in his return to the Two Rivers.

I was trying to wrap up and then I remembered Perrin, and now I am remembering Mat, who is probably the best cast person for playing that character, but gets basically nothing to do. He has a magical encounter at the end that is very weird in the books and even weirder here, and its funny to think that if the show gets cancelled that will be his last scene.  I did like his dynamic with Min, and while I don't wish Rand could have 3 women fighting for him like he does in the book the distance all the characters have from his central plot makes me care less about it. The choice they make with two of his lovers from the books to actually be in love with each other actually makes sense, but it comes out of nowhere and plays as grasping at representation.

Okay I gotta stop. Best season, but I don't want this show renewed.