I agree Greg is in some sense the least sympathetic character because he seemingly has the least reason to be so awful. It is easy to see him as just a shallow person enjoying clawing his way up in status (from the endless middle towards the bottom of the top! with 20 of his own Gregs! and arguably King of France?).

I love how Shiv recently made it explicitly clear to Tom that their relationship was always fundamentally transactional, to the point she called Tom unfair for trying to make it into something different. She had a point, and yet she failed to understand that Tom truly accepting that view meant he would start thinking…

I also felt someone genuine anger/grief/disappointment in Logan about his children’s inability to trust him. Of course in his warped worldview, that means accepting Daddy will always win and therefore the only thing that matters is to keep Daddy happy. But still, it seems like in his warped way, his children losing…

I’m hoping that is the seed of something that continues to grow next season, with Connor basically abandoning his attempts to live a life apart and joining fully into the family rat race.

Did you watch the after show commentary on this episode?

This season:

I was encouraged by the last episode of WOT. I found it very enjoyable, and I think it established a template for a successful version of the series.

I know, right?

So far, it looks to me like the show is intending to separate out the central heroic figures from the Dragon. Egwene, for example, so far seems like the “Harry Potter” to Moiraine’s “Dumbledore”, in that she is emerging as the group’s leader in part because she has the moral core necessary to lead them to face off…

If you believe Amazon (and their behavior), it must be doing at least pretty well with non-book readers.

So the basic structure of the Wheel of Time book series is pretty much like that in the sense it alternates between times when the central characters are isolated/travelling, and when they are embedded in a bigger conflict with a lot more characters involved.

So that is definitely a deliberate choice for the adaption, as the scene in this episode with Moiraine expressing her own doubts and confusion about the Dragon aptly illustrates. In this version of the story, the last Dragon was so long ago that any written or oral records from that time are not reliable, and so the…

My guess is the TV show essentially changing the main, versus supporting, characters of the story to include, or maybe just be, Moiraine, Egwene, and Nynaeve isn’t temporary.

It is definitely a dodge, but I think it is helpful to remember the 1990s was a transitional period in terms of how prominent social institutions were dealing with these issues, and specifically one in which Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (“DADT”) became official U.S. military policy. And it was a hypocritical policy in just…

You seem to have written a different adaption in your head that you would prefer to see. Of course that is your right, but I think there is a virtue in not thinking there is only one way to adapt a book, and that deviations from the adaption that you would do are necessarily worse as opposed to just different.

Well, we will have to see how that is handled when it happens. Right now you are imagining a sudden, crude, and unsatisfying transition from Rand The Least Special to Rand The Dragon Reborn. But the show hasn’t made that transition yet, and maybe it will be executed in a more satisfying manner than you are imagining.

The 1/2 Hour News Hour.

So since the LOTR movies were a huge hit, I don’t really see there being a good case that only anti-fantasy like GOT can work with wider audiences. I think LOTR and GOT could both be hits despite GOT essentially being a critique of LOTR because both were actually good.  The Harry Potter movies also made a ton of…

I watched it with an open mind and I just didn’t like it that much for what it actually was. Parts I did like (mostly Faye stuff), parts I thought were unwatchable (mostly Vicious/Julia stuff), and lot just fell flat for me (most of the Spike/Jet stuff).

My advice is feel free to try it, and then feel free to quit it after the first episode if you are not enjoying it.