The Wheel of Time series began as an entertaining fantasy genre series that I didn’t take too seriously, nor did I need to. The enjoyment was in reading a book that I knew was more or less guaranteed to have a big climactic scene at the end that would take the series one major step closer to an awesome, magnificent battle.

Robert Jordan failed on all accounts.

He failed even before he died, and he failed in a spectacular fashion. The protracted agony of having Brandon Sanderson finish the series because Jordan was dead was simply a symptom of several much larger problems with the series. These problems can all be summed up in a few words: he let the series get away from him.

Let’s be clear: the world that he built was never really that complex. If anything, it was just a terrible pastiche of different ideas. Each nation was poorly patterned off a world culture of the real world, replete with a bad accent, but everyone miraculously spoke the same language. Even the Seanchan, who had been separated from the main continent for over 1000 years, speak modern English. The only other language, called simply “the Old Tongue” (and filled with apostrophes that serve no purpose, which are as a result ignored in this post completely), is nothing even remotely like English and there is no explanation as to why a language with completely different vocabulary, grammar and syntax ended up becoming English. This, of course, supposedly developed in the course of those same 1000 years. No real language on Earth has completely changed in such a radical fashion, and any significant changes have usually been tied to invasions and the influence of other languages, none of which existed in Jordan’s greenhouse-like world.

Also, in his world magic is pretty damn useless. It exists, yes, but no one seems to have bothered to make much use of it to make peoples’ lives better. Aes Sedai seemed to go around intimidating the crap out of people and manipulating kingdoms, but they were piss poor at exploring their powers and developing them. After all, somehow a scrappy group of teens to twentysomethings upend the entirety of Aes Sedai knowledge by reading a few books and experimenting with some angreals. It’s just absurd.

And speaking of absurd, why are there no churches in this sad excuse of a reality? Does Jordan really expect us to believe that in a world filled with hideous monsters, vampires, wraiths and all sorts of crap like that, that no one would seek the help of the Creator or pray to the Light in an organized fashion?

Moving from the large to the small, Jordan’s characters were a huge disappointment. They weren’t people at all, just big placeholders for where more realistic people might have been. Lan is a wooden, two-dimensional sort of character (perhaps even one dimensional, really). Nynaeve is just there to pull her braid and get mad. Egwene is there to annoy the Hell out of us with her stupidity. Mat is pretty much exactly the same person at the end of the series that he was on its first pages. Perrin seems drawn from a Puritan morality play, struggling against shit he doesn’t need to out of some bizarre sense of values that he doesn’t ever end up straying from. Rand, for all the ink that is spilt telling us about his inner struggles, never really changes or grows as a person. He just becomes an asshole, then sort of stops being an asshole at the end. The Forsaken, despite being thousands of years old, seem to have learned almost nothing about stopping the aforementioned teens to twentysomethings.

All of this could have been excused if the story had been a bit faster and more fun. It was, at first, but then the story got away from Jordan. At that point I started to ask why the characters were so flat. It would have been better if maybe Lan failed to save people because he put Nynaeve before his duty, so that he dies in the Last Battle to expiate his sense of guilt. Mat’s “luck” and attachment to the Shadar Logoth dagger could have made him unstable and dangerous. After all, in the multiple realities that the heroes experience when traveling through portal stones (I think that’s what they were called), Mat says to Rand, “You know I wouldn’t ever kill you, right?” Clearly, that was something that could have been developed, so Mat found himself thinking he needed to kill Rand. Alternatively, the dice could have been a “gift” from Shaitan.

This lack of depth made itself felt as soon as the series hit Books 7 and 8, when the pace slowed dramatically and the book size shrank. A hideous amount of time was wasted on the Masema and Shaido story line, and there were chapters that were careful to name every Aes Sedai’s horse and describe in great detail the dress each woman was wearing. At one point I began to wonder if Jordan was angling to start some line of women’s clothing based on the expansiveness of the descriptions.

Not only did the slowing pace make me start to see the lack of depth, both at the cosmic level and at the personal level, but it also left me feeling that Jordan was milking the series by intentionally dragging it out in order to sell more books. It was certainly his prerogative as it was his series, but as a loyal reader I felt like I had been cheated. I was promised one thing and I ended up getting something else altogether.

Because the series expanded in ever new directions, there were entire lines that never got explored because Jordan’s premature health failures and eventual death cut short what would almost certainly have been a 20-book series (if not more). The Dark Prophecies were left unexplored, the Sea Folk Prophecies were ignored, and weird ideas were added like the Guardian of Far Madding. Jordan also clearly displayed an intent to completely change what he had planned when fans were able to “figure it out” too easily. The signs for Taimandred in The Fires of Heaven and Lord of Chaos are unmistakable. The entire reason to have foreshadowing of this sort is so that it ends up resolving itself in a way that is consistent with that foreshadowing. In Jordan’s world, this meant a lot of non sequiturs and dangling ends.

Two of the worst dangling ends were Padan Fain and Demandred. Both were built up to be formidable adversaries and both are misused. Fain was used very well early in the series, but then he virtually disappears in the later books only to be killed as sort of an afterthought in the last book. Demandred, the gun that never fired, was clearly misused by being introduced too late in the series for anyone to really care, only to be killed a few hundred pages after appearing.

The other problem with the series is that its last battle, Tarmon Gaidon. It was supposed to be Armageddon. It was supposed to be spectacular and amazing, filled with surprises and twists. Instead, it was about 300 pages of trollocs attacking in stupid fashion and some Sharan channelers blowing up the earth here and there. A better Tarmon Gaidon would see Taimandred betray Rand as the battle starts, throwing the Light’s plans into complete disarray and causing mass casualties. It would have seen a Seanchan mutiny lead to a huge diminution in the forces of good, who would retreat up the slopes of Dragonmount to try to keep Rand safe long enough to win, fighting against an overwhelming force. Rand, bleeding from his wounds and doubting the outcome of the battle, would waver and then become dominated by the Shadow, which would use him to blow up legions of shocked and horrified Aiel. Logain would take Callandor and strike him down, chopping off his head and then balefiring Demandred and sealing the Bore. In the process, the transformation of the “dragon” into a symbol of evil would be effected, thus perpetuating the notion of the Wheel of Time world being our world in a different aeon.

And that’s just one option. Perrin choosing Berelain would have been fun, with a spurned Faile dying in the battle saving him despite everything. Instead, we got lots of Trollocs and a really conventional battle. The battle actually seemed less interesting than other ones that came before it.

But the problem was that Jordan was bad at depth and expanded the breadth of the story far, far too much, while at the same time removing the Dan Brown-style of page turning excitement that made the series interesting in the first place.

So in the end, I thought it was terrible. It was worse than being a bad series. It was a fun series that became a terrible series, squandering an incredible amount of good storytelling that had gone before it. Yes, Sanderson got a lot of the characters wrong, but it was partially because they were so poorly defined to begin with that only by slavishly copying words and gestures could they “feel” right. And yes, Sanderson was not able to finish the series properly, but to do that would probably have required throwing out all of Jordan’s post Book 7 notes and rewriting the series.