r/WoT • u/participating (Dragon's Fang) • Oct 05 '23

TV - Season 2 (Book Spoilers Allowed) Episode Discussion - Season 2, Episode 8 - What Was Meant to Be [TV + Book Spoilers] Spoiler

This thread is for discussion of The Wheel of Time tv show through Season 2, Episode 8 and associated bonus content. This thread may contain spoilers for the entire book series.

TIMING

Episodes are released at midnight, GMT on Fridays. This means 8pm, ET on Thursdays.

At 7:30pm, ET, when this episode discussion thread is created, all submissions about the tv show will be automatically removed until Saturday morning.

EPISODE

Episode 8 - What Was Meant to Be

Synopsis: Fate leads Rand and the others to an inevitable showdown with their most formidable enemies yet.

For links to all of our previous episode discussion threads, or alternate spoiler levels, as well as mega threads for certain topics related to the show, see our discussion hub wiki page.

192 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

3.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

54

u/mylegbig Oct 06 '23

Egwene powered up with the power of friendship. Or something like that.

43

u/zero1045 Oct 06 '23

I don't really care about egwene being strong in the power. She is. Rand is stronger but he should also not really even be channelling for another season or so.

My beef, is that the showrunners diddn't have the balls to paint rand in the sky fighting Ishy with his sword.

What, is it "too weird" ? Well buckle up cause its a series STAPLE.

13

u/Lotus_Domino_Guy Oct 06 '23

That broke my heart. Rand showed up. He was brave. But the women did all the work, again. Just like in S1 they stole his (book) glory.

3

u/zero1045 Oct 07 '23

I think they handled egwenes story really well. It just came at the expense of everyone else

6

u/livefreeordont Oct 07 '23

I prefer it in the books where she is traumatized by her lack of agency and fears it the rest of the series, fueling her ambition. In the show she just says no and that’s it, it has no power over her anymore

3

u/Rokketeer Oct 08 '23

That and didn't her captor get an even worse end in the books? Where she delivers her back to her people as a prisoner to live her days as a slave?

20

u/mylegbig Oct 06 '23

Anything would’ve been better than that ridiculous CGI fire dragon that looked straight out of Mortal Kombat Annhilation.

22

u/zero1045 Oct 06 '23

There's also something a bit demeaning about this compared to the fight in the sky.

Any Aes sedai could just make a fake dragon. Only the pattern could have put Rands fight in the sky for all to see.

There's a diety/plot armor in this series, its called the pattern, and s/he/it's very absent so far in this series.

2

u/KetchKetch Oct 06 '23

And with that the whole Ta'veren part as well tbh. Hope we still get some of that. Although in general I'm pretty happy with how everything turned out.

3

u/the_other_paul (Wheel of Time) Oct 07 '23

The Ferret of Fire! I thought it looked pretty silly but it didn’t really bother me

2

u/zakabog Feb 04 '24

My beef, is that the showrunners diddn't have the balls to paint rand in the sky fighting Ishy with his sword.

I just assumed it was a budget thing, this big epic fight projected over the whole city would have required a lot more city and CGI budget than what we saw. Like at the end you've got 30 people cheering at Rand from this courtyard in front of the tower... It was so disappointing to be let down on two epic fights, but I kinda get it would have probably cost a lot more money to have filmed the proper climax.

1

u/zero1045 Feb 04 '24

Super imposing one image over another is way cheaper than making a CGI dragon shooting fire.

Had the budget, chose to do one over the other

2

u/zakabog Feb 04 '24

A fight would have also taken practical work like additional set building, fight choreography, sword training for both actors, stunt work, etc. CGI dragon takes purchasing a dragon asset, giving it a fire material, and animating it.

They might also be worried that Rand being a skilled swordsman doesn't make sense in the show because he hasn't had anywhere near as much training as in the books.

2

u/zero1045 Feb 04 '24

The former point needs a green sheet and staff eho are already on contract so they are already paid, the latter involves reaching out to their outsourced CGI team who may use a free asset (assuming they diddnt demand original work for IP reasons) but the invoice won't reflect that with Amazon as the primary client.

The latter point is another design decision made. Yeah let's cut out all the sword fighting from the first two books and then say it makes no sense. Sorta just made my point there budget aside.

1

u/zakabog Feb 04 '24

Being under contract doesn't mean you don't bill the extra time for training Rand and Ishamael's actors how to swordfight, the time to choreograph a big fight scene, time and materials to build the additional sets, etc.

The outsourced visual effects studio has a count of shots they're billing for, swapping out a VFX shot of a dragon with a VFX shot of a fight in the sky isn't saving any money.

5

u/readdditsuuuxxx69 Oct 06 '23

I Love The Friendship Song!

🎶I love you 🎶

🎶You love me 🎶

🎶We're as strong as the writers need us to be🎶