Legend Of The Seeker (Hope For This Show?)

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m a HUGE fan of Terry Goodkind’s "Sword Of Truth" series. And to other fans of the books it should come as no surprise that I think the show is a step down in storytelling. They’ve done more than adapt "Wizard’s First Rule" for television. They’ve cut huge chunks out of the original story and replaced them with empty, self-contained episodes that add little or nothing to the main plot.

As of last night, I’m hoping that trend has begun to change. The chapters I was most curious to see on television were featured in this weekend’s episode and I was fairly pleased. I knew they wouldn’t be able to include the graphic brutality and implied sadism of the book’s torture sequence. But they covered the characters fairly well. Richard had more backbone than we’ve seen so far on the show. (Hopefully he’ll continue in this trend and quickly get out of his naïve, inept, "wide-eyed" phase.) The character of Denna was performed well, if not exceptionally so. Much of the mental storytelling couldn’t be translated to the screen, but I was very pleased at the effort they made in that regard and the results were pretty good!

I missed the lingering respect and bizarre "love" that Richard maintains for Denna in the books after her death. But her story may not be done anyway. It’s been awhile since I last read "Wizard’s First Rule", but I don’t remember Denna coming back to life after Richard kills her. So I’ll be interested to see where they are going with this. Will she take the place of another Mord Sith that was supposed to interact with Richard and remain in the story for the rest of the seasons? I’m not sure what’s going on. I’ve mostly given up on hoping they will follow the books with this series. At this point, I’m only hoping they can make a good story out of what they’re doing.