Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Just recently Hawk and I resumed watching the Wheel of Time TV series with season 2. Here are my thoughts as we watched S2E1, "A Taste of Solitude". Originally I started structuring this as Five Things but then realized it was getting way too long, with 4-5 paragraphs per Thing. Thus I'm splitting it up into a few pieces. The first one is the infamous Darkfriend Social.

The episode's cold open portrays the scene from the prologue of The Great Hunt, the second book of the series. That tracks with season 1 lining up with the first book of the series. At a mysterious location a dozen or so powerful darkfriends gather secretly to be given instructions by Ishamael, the most powerful of the Forsaken and the Dark One's right hand.

As a note, the term darkfriend comes directly from the story. It's an epithet characters across multiple cultures use to describe those who secretly serve the Dark One, the evil power trying to destroy the world. Calling this scene the “Darkfriend Social”, though, was coined by a net.friend of mine in 1993. Yeah, that's a long time ago now! I'm glad to see it's caught on pretty widely across fandom.

In portraying this scene the TV show writers once again make a change from the books I don't entirely like. They change the viewpoint character.

( Scene Details (click to open) )

This is one of those situations where the change seems good for the short term, making the TV scene emotionally powerful in the moment, but bad for the story in the long term, depriving us viewers of important foreshadowing that's essentially buried in the scene.

In my previous blog I wrote about a new streaming series released on Amazon Prime, The Wheel of Time. The arrival of this TV program takes me back 30 years; that's how long ago I read the first book of the series by Robert Jordan.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and go, Jordan wrote in the foreword to each book. Well, the 30 years of the turning of this wheel have intertwined a lot with my life. It would come to define years of my life and even my family. Here's how it started.

Thirty Years Ago

In a year called 1991 by some, a year long past, a year yet to come, I read the first book of the series, The Eye of the World. 1991 is not when the story began; for the book was published in 1990. It was not the beginning but it was a beginning. 1991 is when my story began.

I read The Eye of the World that summer, a memorable time in life. I was a university student staying at school through the summer to take my next semester's worth of classes early as part of the Engineering Co-op program. When the normal school semester began in September I'd be off to work as a junior engineer at an industry job.

But that summer I was largely alone. Nearly all my friends had gone home. I was sub-letting a room in a strange place. I literally stepped over an unconscious person in front of my door once and sometimes walked past piles of garbage so old there were maggots on them. These were inside the building. I didn't have a lot of money to spend on entertainment— I think I went to a movie once that summer— and I didn't mix well with the other people in my building so I read a lot of books.

I absolutely loved The Eye of the World. It's a swords-and-sorcery story drawing inspiration from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Five young people— 4 are portrayed as teens and one as likely a 20-something— are escorted from their village by a powerful sorceress (Moiraine, an Aes Sedai), her Samurai like guard (Lan, a Warder), and a traveling minstrel (Thom, a gleeman) in search of fulfilling a prophecy about stopping the spread of evil across their land.

A Series that Went Long

One advantage of starting the series 18 months after the first book was published is that I was able to read its sequel, The Great Hunt, right away. It, too, was published in 1990, so it was there for me in summer '91. For the third book, The Dragon Reborn, I'd have to wait until later that year. Oh, the yearning!

That yearning for the next novel in the series would play out many times. Series creator Robert Jordan said in interviews back in the early 1990s that he'd conceived the story as being told in a trilogy but quickly realized as he wrote the first book that it would stretch to 4 volumes. Then he realized it would be 5. Then 6. Then.... Well, the series finally completed in 2013 with 14 volumes.

The series even outlived the author; Jordan died in 2007, not having finished the series! The final 3 novels were completed by Brandon Sanderson from partial manuscripts Jordan left behind.

Indeed, the series' length was the main criticism against it. It was long not just because the story was long but because Jordan wrote in a lengthy style. To some the verbose descriptions of characters and settings were extraneous detail. "Reading Robert Jordan is like drinking a gallon of gravy," one online critic quipped. To others of us, though, the depth of detail was part of what made the series so enjoyable. We could picture the fantastic cities of his realm, and the characters seemed so real and complete we could imagine them jumping off the page.

Next in this series: Usenet Newsgroups in 1993