I did enjoy TGS. I still had a few early reservations/disappointments that TOM later amplified, for instance I found the addition of Perrin and Mat scenes was out of place for their lack of substance, and above all I thought the book lacked balance because it was too narrowly focussed on Egwene and Rand and kept too many side storylines for the upcoming book, and evacuated too much the side players, for instance Alviarin. The reason Brandon had to do that is the bloody deadline he worked under. A lot of the remaining time he spent creating "prequels" so that Mat and Perrin got scenes in TGS but those scenes wouldn't ruin the start of their real storyarc as planned by RJ. He ended up creating useless scenes for Perrin which even contradicted the ending of KOD, and a silly "adventure" for Mat, and chose to show on screen his meeting with Verin (whereas I'm totaly convinced Jordan's intent, with the first Mat scene he wrote, was to surprise and tease us by showing Mat in Caemlyn with this mysterious letter, and by the end of the chapter reveal how Mat came so fast to the city and what he promised Verin). He should have spent more or the remaining time going through the "cluster five" material (the misc. characters) to make sure he was forgetting anything that would have to discard if he did include now, and material which would have been better in the Rand-Egwene book, the Black Tower stuff for instance. Perrin and Mat added nothing and didn't belong, including them wasn't for the good of the story but under pressure that they would disappoint people. Never a good notion to base story decisions on expected readers' opinions (the recipe followed by Hollywood) rather than following storytelling instincts..

Reading TGS I had early fears Brandon had painted himself in a corner focussing everything on Rand-Egwene, and sadly when I read TOM it proved far worse than I imagined. Right when I saw the meeting of Egwene and Rand happened out of synch at the opening of the book I felt it would get of hand, and it did. Even Brandon admitted it, saying that when he wrote TOM he realized he had a great deal more scattered material then he thought and he would struggle to make a book out of that, and he did. Obviously, some scenes were even forgotten (they were not necessarily outlined by RJ, I mean Brandon would have eventually seen those story holes himself had brought the four storylines to Merrilor before splitting them over two books) and he coudn't go back (for instance, there's zero chance Jordan would have excluded the head of the Black Ajah from the part of the story when the BA is brought down).

On the whole I think Brandon/Harriet did an admirable job on most aspects of the project. I still think that. I think they obviously could have used more months of editing to do more justice to what they had accomplished, but it's still good.

But the finalized, assembled books just doen't work very well and thus aren't very enjoyable to read, even though tons of individual scenes are great, Sanderson's grasp of things is generally very good if not perfect, and the events themselves are great. The saddest thing is the single real mistake they made, their decision not to split the material chronologically rather than by storyline, is one that has such a negative impact for me and pretty much "ruined" all their otherwise fine effort, and made TOM in particular really fall flat.

It wasn't so perceivable with TGS, before knowning how much the themes and scenes of the Mat/Perrin/Aviendha/Elayne stories echoed and completed those of Rand/Egwene, and showing the epiphany early killed nearly all the dramatic impact. There was also the realization that Jordan had conceived the opening acts of AMOL with Rand and Egwene as its dramatic core and Perrin/Mat as counterpoint or "support role" for the themes (Mat's real role in AMOL starts with Ghenji). It's no wonder TGS still works - it contained the heart of what Jordan planned. But Perrin/Mat didn't work well, and after you know of Rand's epiphany, it all felt very flat, except for the last episodes for both, which had great moments even TOM's horrible structure couldn't ruin (the Hammer and the TAR battle, Ghenji).

Brandon only made it worse by revealing the meeting at Merrilor early, killing much of the suspense there was left. It was hard to be interested in the "trap" Perrin was in, knowing in advance Rand's epiphany would unblock many things for one, and that Perrin would get out and reach Merrilor on the other. Same for Mat, to a lesser extent.


BS and TJ delivered the story and they did a fairly good job respecting Jordan in this respect, but the structure they gave that story is very weak, and that was very detrimental to the dramatic impact and thematic structure planned by Jordan, and to the general enjoyment of the books. There they didn't respect Jordan's vision at all (his instance not to split the book should have been a red flag to be extra careful in how they did split it, compelling them to let Brandon at least reach Merrilor in draft form before they chose how best to do it), they did exactly what RJ sought to avoid with his attempt to keep the finale as one book. I didn't think it was possible to make a bigger structural mistake than the one Jordan did by focussing the second part of WH on Rand to reach the Cleansing and excluding the others for the time being, resulting in COT, but they did it.

It's probable Jordan would have had to split AMOL in two books in the end (the fact it's three is by and large because Brandon's style is different and he needs a lot more scenes that RJ to tell the same story), but I'm quite certain Jordan would have insisted to finish the whole book before publishing. Assessing the state of things when Brandon had finished the first two storylines, Harriet and Doherty had concluded there was nothing to be done to get a first novel out the year they promised - they were giving up - and Brandon had to continue writing and they must wait to split the material into individual novels. They should have followed their instinct, they were right. I sympathize with the extreme pressure Brandon felt that he would disappoint massively by missing the promised deadline and delaying the publishing of the first volume by a year at least, but he took a big risk and made a really bad decision.