So I watched the first episode of Wheel of Time last night. They made a lot of changes from the books, which is to be expected. I'm okay with most of them, but I'm really questioning some others.

1) Why give Perrin a wife only for her to have no real lines or characterization and then kill her off?

2) Why change Mat from mischievous to full-on criminal? And why change his parents into shitty people?

3) This one is petty, but Why change Two Rivers from the name of the region to the name of the village?

Sometimes they seem to change things just for the sake of changing them ... maybe to feel they have more creative ownership of the thing (I've seen it in other things, so ....)

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe they're setting things up later that we just haven't hit yet.

Watched the rest of the available episodes. I love this version of Thom Merrilin. He's not quite the same as book!Thom but I like him just as much already.

Really disappointed that the snarky innkeeper turned out to be a Darkfriend. She was awesome.

So folks online are speculating that Perrin's wife was a Darkfriend and was about to kill him. Hence her apparent fridging was actually more complex than that.

I'm curious if any non-book readers watched Wheel of Time, and if so what you thought?

I'm pretty sure I read the first book in the early '90s, but I don't remember it at all.

So far, the show has some very pretty scenery, but I'm not much taken with the stories or the characters at all yet.

I can see that. The first episode in particular felt really rushed. I know the showrunner wanted 10 episodes including a 2 hour pilot and Amazon gave him 8 1 hour episodes and made him change a lot of stuff in the pilot he did make. I'm hoping with the group split up we'll get more focus on individual characters, like we did with Rand and Mat in the last episode.

WoT Episode 4: Probably the best one yet and also clearly shows that the showrunner knows what he's doing because it was probably the biggest departure from the books plot-wise, but got to the right places character-wise.

I do wish we got more time with Thom to develop his relationship with the boys before the Fade showed up.

So far, the show has some very pretty scenery, but I'm not much taken with the stories or the characters at all yet.

This is where I am (I also haven't read the book).

I don't feel like I got to know or care enough about the main characters, before they split off (and the show introduced a whole lot of new characters).

Kalshane, is Thom the gleeman ?

I'm kind of an idiot about character names, when shows are new, and I have a harder time learning fancier fantasy-genre names, so I rely heavily on IMBd, but when the actors IMDb photos don't make the characters look like they look in fantasy costumes, I'm often lost.

Cindy- Yes. That's the one.