I saw it on channel 251, the same channel that Smallville comes on on DishNetwork. I thought, "Hey, I liked Goodkind once upon a time, before he went crazy and all the money went to his head. I'll check this out."
It's been about, wow, 10 years since I read Wizard's First Rule... my god... did they read it at all? I think the script writers just got a synopsis and "based" it on that.
My wife and I suffered through episode 9 and 10, where Richard doesn't turn the sword white with forgiveness, though that was a huge plot point in the book. I guess the script writers didn't get that in their synopsis. Their synopsis probably just said, "Richard overcame his captors." But I don't seem to remember a retarded attempt to rescue Richard by Kahlan, nor a silly fight scene between Kahlan and the Mord'Sith. Funny how fuzzy my memory is.
I also seem to remember that there aren't a lot of confessors running around. Yet there was another confessor and a small band of "confessed" soldiers ready to rescue Richard.
Zed was also there. Was Zed with them at this point in the book?
Also, Richard seems to be around 5'9'' or maybe 5'10'' and scrawny. I think he's described as around 6'5'' and probably pushing 270 lbs of muscle. The Sword of Truth in most of the cover arts almost looks like short sword he's so big.
And, bad as I hate to give any credit to Goodkind, there are a lot of things that set those books apart from your typical fantasy flare (including quality after book 4). The writers/directors/producers don't seem interested in doing any of that. They want a AD&D romp with a new name.
My gripe is this: Wizard's First Rule is decently self contained. There is no guarantee of future storylines after it and you can read it and put the rest of the series off. So they have twenty something episodes to cover the book. That's about enough time to do the book justice. Shows like Lost and 24 show that people will show great amounts of patience with shows that are well produced, well acted, and well written. THEY DON'T HAVE TO REDUCE EVERY HOUR DOWN TO FORMULAIC NONSENSE. They have Darken Rahl skipping around from place to place, always showing up to cause trouble, looking nothing like, or acting nothing like, the Darken Rahl we know from the book. All in all they took what could have been twenty good episodes of television, considering that Wizard's First Rule is by FAR the best that series has to offer, and just trashed it. They trashed the storyline. They trashed any credibility to the claim they'd work close to the source material.
Rubbish. The filter would catch how I actually feel about this show. When I caught it on I immediately set up a timer to record all of them. Twenty minutes in I deleted the timer. My wife agreed. It was crap.
Also, why aren't there any decent fantasy shows on? We browsed around and caught a cheesy show based on Robinson Crusoe. Ten minutes into it we noticed it getting cheap. Then we switched over to Sci-Fi channel for five minutes of a horrible movie starring Adrian Paul. Then we watched five minutes of You, Me, and Dupree and decided that TV is dead and we'd be better served by popping in Kill Bill Vol. 2 in the DVD player.
Seriously, TV is the pits if the Office or Lost isn't on.
Kahlan and Cara are great women characters, i like them so much. I admit, series and books are different but this is a good exception. As bonus i also saw my lovely TPol in Seeker...
