Ok. Here’s the deal.
When I was in middle school, I read the first four or five of the Sword of Truth novels. Before this, I had read Eddings (the Belgariad, Mallorean, Elenium, and Tamuli), Brooks (Shannara), Brian Jacques (the Redwall books), and a few others. But the Goodkind was a bit, well, different.
(Spoilers ahead, for both the books and TV series, so if you care, stop reading!)
When I say different, I don’t mean just that it was slightly more, well, “adult” than the others. It was more…personal than the rest. Eddings, of the three I mentioned previous, was probably the best at creating a more believable or personable character. I certainly remember that Silk was the first book character to make me literally laugh out loud (for those that have read Eddings – I’m thinking of the part where Silk is having a fight with another fighting master, throws him over a ledge, and wonders if the guy can fly; when he hears the guy bounce off the ground, he wonders aloud whether that counts).
But Goodkind was different. While many of the struggles were “epic”, in the way that epic fantasy is epic, certain struggles were internal, and more so than the “normal” hero-story style development. We’ve all read that story a million times – a headstrong boy learns from his mistakes and grows up to vanquish evil blah blah blah blah.
The thing I remember most of Wizard’s First Rule is Richard’s time with Denna – the torture and internal struggle that he experienced at her hand. I don’t remember too much about the particulars of the books I did read, but I remember that the chapters around Richard and Denna were different than anything I had read before, in a way that something like works of Tolkien could never capture about the human spirit (blasphemous, I know, but I really didn’t enjoy The Lord of the Rings – I can only take world building in limited quantities).
Enter “The Legend of the Seeker”, which is a new television show produced by Sam Raimi (ick). On the one hand, Raimi, created Xena and Hercules and all that, which I (am a bit ashamed to say) enjoyed watching frequently when I was little. On the other hand, he created the gigantic piece of shit that was the Spiderman movies, and he basically makes the exact same film/show over and over again, with different actors and slightly different storylines each time (but always the same slow motion fighting effects).
If you’ve seen the show yet or talked to anyone that has, you’ll know that the show effectively destroys the book, and not in the normal “aww, that movie/show isn’t exactly like the novel!” While some of the subplots in the novel end up reflected in the show, you can tell how they’ve been “hercules/xena-ized”.
Of course, I understand that many things in the novel just wouldn’t translate into a television show. Maybe it was easier to call Kahlan a “confessor” instead of “Mother Confessor”; maybe it helps the story for the characters to related that “many of the confessors have gone into hiding”, instead of being killed off by Darken Rahl. Who knows. Ironically, according to the Legend of the Seeker wikipedia page, “Goodkind had resisted selling the rights of his books on multiple occasions before he met Raimi because he was not confident that those producers would maintain the integrity of his stories and characters.” Whoops :)
Most of the people I know who have both read the series and are now watching the television show stopped after the third or fourth episode. In their words, Raimi was murdering the storyline, and, I’ll add, not just in the way that plot points differ. Raimi is getting rid of the parts that make this more than just the whiteboard hero-story.
I’m again ashamed to admit that I’ve watched every episode so far, in a horrible Hulu orgy, as I like to call it now.
Definition: Hulu orgy – watching every episode of a show available on Hulu in the shortest amount of time possible, which involves skipping bathroom breaks and going to bed at ungodly hours.
And I’ve been able to accept the show, thus far, by thinking of it as only very mildly related to the books. Oh, and Bridget Regan is goddamn hot.
But anyways.
Episode 8 is where I draw the line. Episode 8, “Denna”, details the “relationship” between Richard and Denna, and Raimi fucking missed the boat.
Let’s see if I can say this in a way that would make sense for people who haven’t read the boat; Shakespeare was just a poet. Steak is just meat. An 82″ LCD flatscreen is just a TV. An Aston Martin is just a car.
And now, as it relates to the TV series:
What Denna does to Richard is just about pain. That is what Raimi does. Sure, he includes the idea of Denna “breaking” Richard, complete with some of the little details, like when Richard asks for another Mord’Sith to work on him one day, so that Denna won’t have to feel the pain of the agiel. But he misses the point.
He even changes the “end” of that, where Richard overcomes Denna ’cause he looks at Kahlan, and when Denna tries to “take over” his sword again, he can withstand the fact that it gets hot because she taught him to withstand pain.
Now, to be fair, I think Craig Horner (who plays Richard) does a magnificent job attempting to capture, visibly, the struggle that Richard is forced through (simplified, of course, so it can fit into TV and such). I could almost look past the side story of the episode, where a second confessor (what?), who has “confessed” a whole village (say again?), argues with Kahlan about if it is right to take away the free will of the people (oh, I get it; it’s the deep moral quandary of the episode!). I can certainly accept that scary prophecy is that Kahlan will betray Richard (leaving out “in her own blood”, which is really the part of the prophecy that feels the most important and ends up being, well, the most interesting), since I think the conclusion of that would end up being inappropriate for TV (people who’ve read the series would concur, I think – the prophecy is from Temple of the Winds, if I recall correctly).
But the TV series kills so much of what the story is about. Richard is “just” a good guy. Kahlan is “just” a strong woman. Zedd is “just” a wise and funny old dude. Every “important” character you meet (there is always one “important” other character that they meet each episode) starts off being a complete douche/bitch, does something else stupid, realizes the idiocy of his/her ways, and then repents and loves the Seeker.
The book is deeper than that. The characters are deeper than that. The plot events are there to serve the character development, not to show another slow-motion fight scene of Richard trying to fuck up some D’Harans like a kung fu master (which is entirely unbelievable, and skips the important issue around how killing with the sword causes him pain). Of course, I do have to admit that it is really fucking hot when Bridget Regan does her little spinning-around-and-slicing-people-up-with-her-knives shit.
Fuck it. If I do watch any more, I’m gonna put it on mute and just skip the scenes that don’t have Kahlan in them. At least then I can watch her and her hotness without ruining my memories of the book series.
I guess something good will come of this, though: since the TV series is slowly eating away at my childhood memories, I’m going to have to re-read the series to experience the real legend of the Seeker of Truth again.
Fuck you, Sam Raimi. You know where you can stick that agiel.