Legend of the Seeker – Retrospective of Season 1 « multipleverses.com

Legend of the Seeker –Retrospective of Season 1 By Erika Blake Multipleverses.com Photos courtesy of ABC Studios. For anyone who missed season 1 of LEGEND OF THE SEEKER, ABC has rebooted the entire season and you can rewatch all 22 episodes in reruns without interruption for the next 22 weeks. Currently they’re on episode 3, so if you if you missed the 2 hour premiere you can catch it on LEGENDOFTHESEEKER.com, hulu.com, or buy them on iTunes. LEGEND was Rob Tappert and Sam Raimi’s return to Fantasy television. Instead of harking back to their cheeky XENA and HERCULES days, they bought the rights to TERRY GOODKINDS 11 book fantasy series and brought the characters to life in a weekly serialized format for syndication. Terry’s books are often times violent, shocking, and sexy which made for a challenge for bringing the series to regular TV and not cable. When the season started I was worried that we weren’t going to get a lot of continuity over the course of the season due to the “stand alone” episode format that’s required for syndicated programming, happily I found myself pleasantly surprised. Not only did each episode contain its own story but usually the end of each episode was left somewhat open ended and gave us all hints of what was coming for the following week and then the next episode usually picked up right where the previous one left off. Another great plus was that rarely during the season did we have to worry about our characters having to discuss past events as a means of catching anyone up if they’d happened to miss episodes, overall the writers assumed the audience could remember what happened in the prior weeks and didn’t dwell too much on relying on flashbacks. Other than one clip episode (HOME) any flashbacks were brief. In fact the season had fewer stand alone episodes than I would have expected which gave the overall season a nice sense of continuity and flow. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve read some of the books, but I’m not a fanatic for them. The one thing I always remembered from the books was how much I loved Richard and Kahlan as characters and IMO the writers and the producers did a wonderful job at maintaining the core elements that make them such great literary characters. Even though there might’ve been a few questionable creative decisions on how the characters were presented on the show, overall I felt like the Richard and Kahlan that I loved from the books lived on my television. Craig Horner & Bridget Regan were great choices for the power couple who are the heart of the book series. Casting relative unknowns meant that the whole world could be introduced to these 2 talented young actors for the first time and allowed them to develop and craft the characters on their own terms. Out of the two actors, Craig Horner grew the most over the course of the season. In the beginning of the season Craig spent a huge portion of each episode seemingly over-sighing and employed a lot of breathy acting that people often think of as soap opera-ish. When DENNA finally aired and Richard got the snot beat out of him by the Mord Sith Denna, two things happened, not only did Richard grow up from a boy and into a man, but Craig ceased his over-breathing thing. There are a couple of possibilities on why this could’ve happened. Either he intentionally did that in the beginning of the season to showcase Richard as being wide-eyed, young, and innocent and then dropped it to show Richard as being more mature; or experienced XENA/HERCULES actor/director Michael Hurst who directed the pivotal episode pointed it out to Craig, he listened, and then stopped relying on that particular acting technique. Regardless of which was the case – once DENNA was over not only had Richard changed as a character but Craig’s performance became stronger and stronger. In “Wizard’s First Rule” I always had a problem with how Mr. Goodkind “grew up” Richard at the end of it. For 400-500 pages or so we have Richard being love-sick over Kahlan and then spent months getting tortured by Denna and within the last 150 pages of the book. He went from being a crying, love-sick puppy to being super tortured wimp, to super stud without any real transition period in between. The writers on the show must’ve felt the same way that I did because instead of having Richard be love-sick throughout the entire season and then WHAM have this huge transformation at the end of the season, they placed his Mord Sith capture at the 8th episode mark which in return gave them tons of time and room to grow him up and allow him to mature in a more natural way. Bridget Regan who did some Broadway work and guest shots on shows like LAW AND ORDER CRIMINAL INTENT came in as a much more polished actor and needed fewer pushes to get her into her character. Bridget herself admitted in several interviews that it was weird for her to step into a fantasy show since she knew nothing of the genre when she took the job. After the first 4 episodes or so she finally seemed to get what she was doing and brought emotional depth to her butt-kicking, D’Haran throat slashing, warrior-woman role. One of the greatest things about Richard and Kahlan in the book series is that they feel like real people. They routinely screw up and make messes out of their lives. They keep things bottled up inside when they shouldn’t and they keep secrets from the people who they love. In short, they’re flawed just like you or me. Kahlan was crafted on the show to really mirror her emotional journey in the first book. There were changes that were made. In the beginning of the book she was the last known Confessor and held the burden of being the Mother Confessor from the outset. She was very withdrawn and emotionally fragile a lot of the time. The show mixed things up and a handful of Confessors still existed. As they got wiped out throughout the season we got to see what an emotional toll this took on Kahlan as she rose up in the ranks and eventually was named The Mother Confessor. We also got to see why she was the best choice for head Confessor, that her values in goodness were untarnishable. Kahlan overall was harder and more determined in the series and yet there is an intense vulnerability that is always present that she usually only shows to Richard. In the book Kahlan keeps what she is from Richard for a VERY long time and her keeping the secret from him had pretty much the same results as it did on the show with them having this wedge between them that kept the angst flowing throughout the entire season. To add to the stress of her journey with Richard, the writers explored her ability to bring forth her “Blood Rage” aka The Con Dar. The Con Dar is another shocking element that comes out of nowhere in the book but that I felt was treated nicely on the show. They used it twice during the season, we were introduced to it in Episode 15 CONVERSION and then re-introduced to it in ep 19 CURSED. The Con Dar truly frightens Kahlan and her not knowing how to control of evoke it is something that was left up in the air to be further explored in season 2. Over the course of the season we also saw Kahlan growing into her power. In PROPHECY using her ability to Confess a person completely physically drained her, by the end of the season instead of collapsing, she was only mildly sweating from the exertion. Adding the Con Dar into the mix gave Kahlan’s powers room to grow and expand as she grew to control her regular power. The show wouldn’t have survived without the wonderful supporting cast of characters who surrounded our two leads. Experienced Sci-Fi actor Bruce Spence (The Matrix, Mad Max, and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith) was brought on as a new kind of Wizard. Instead of being the monkish wise old man, Zedd is a horny old guy who’s always hungry and fast to find humor in any situation. For all that he was often used as the comic relief, the writers were always certain to make sure that Zedd was never THE joke of the story. Zedd got to shine in episode 9 PUPPETEER where he got to be the master manipulator in Queen Minela’s castle and steal her Box of Orden. The episode was very well written and Zedd was shown as being a mighty opponent for Darken Rahl who matched and outsmarted the evil ruler intellectually. Zedd is also the anchor in the emotionally fraught whirlwind of the Richard/Kahlan doomed love relationship. He’s the steady ear to listen to each of his young charges worry and offer them sound advice and warnings. Zedd’s wonderfully warm and caring and yet isn’t afraid to bellow out his opinions if he believes that he’s not being listened properly to. Zedd’s love for his grandson Richard and the young Confessor is evident and Bruce does a great job of showing how much both of the young people mean to the old wizard. Speaking of Darken Rahl, we met the show’s villain, (played by “Lord of the Rings” actor Craig Parker) in the first 2 episodes and then had a 7 episode drought without him. In the beginning he seemed to be a mustache twirling, typical 2 dimensional villain, yet when Craig Parker became available for more episodes the writers did such a wonderful job of taking this character and breathing depth into him. He was fiercely intelligent, such as in PUPPETEER when Richard and Kahlan tried tricking him into riding into an ambush, yet he sent a decoy instead. The writers also wrote him to be evil not because he sat around thinking of nefarious plots to take over the world, but because he truly believed that he wanted to help people and somehow didn’t realize that burning down villages, wanting the power of Confession so that you could MAKE people love you, and sending plagues out to them were NOT acts that usually make great, kind leaders. Rahl at his heart was also cowardly and fearful which is something that you don’t see very often in villains which made it a nice change. Another character who got a bit of a makeover on the series was the witch Shota played by Xena actress Danielle Cormack. In Wizard’s First Rule she’s rather a cackling crazy witch woman, instead the writers made her a bit ambiguous and yet kept her a bit power hungry and selfish, and yet she was loyal to Richard’s cause. We found out in CURSED that she and Zedd had a torrid past which explained their crackling standoff at the end of IDENTITY. Something tells me that she’ll be back in a bigger role next season. In all sorts of the behind the scenes features and interviews that came out of New Zealand we saw glimpses of the crew working on creating Mud People, but they never materialized on the show. I have several theories on why they were omitted. First off – in the books, Richard and Kahlan spend a lot of time hiding with the Mud People and even though we get lots of character growth that goes on when they’re there – not a lot of ACTION goes on (excluding a certain Spirit House scene – but that’s not the kind of action that I’m talking about.) I believe the writers felt that Mud People would slow down the story and make for boring TV. Also the Mud People don’t speak the same language as everyone else and Kahlan would have to spend her entire time translating them to Richard – that would waste precious episode time. Finally they’d require having a whole set built for them, a set that likely couldn’t be retrofitted to use for other purposes. So they were replaced by ‘the Resistance’ who gave Richard, Kahlan, and Zedd shelter from the D’Harans. In the end, I believe that they’ll use Shota to be the real mystic on the show. There were some truly spectacular episodes this season and some fabulous flops. On the plus side the stand outs for me were BRENNIDON, ELIXIR, DENNA, PUPPETEER, SACRIFICE, HARTLAND, CONVERSION, BLOODLINE, DECEPTION, CURSED, and FEVER. The ones that least impressed me were BOUNTY, LISTENER, IDENTITY, CONFESSION, HOME, and SANCTUARY. If there is one thing that I have to say about LEGEND, it’s a nice pace from watching SUPERNATURAL where all of the little girls are evil nasty things; on LEGEND the girls are the ones with the brains whereas the boys are brats and evil. I have mixed feelings about the season finale RECKONING. Something kept gnawing at me wondering why I didn’t feel as jubilant over it until I realized what it was that bugged me. The end of the book is spectacular because Richard completely outsmarts Darken Rahl and employs WIZARD’S FIRST RULE on him ‘people will believe a lie because they fear it either is true or it might be true’ (paraphrased) – in the book he tricks Darken Rahl into opening the wrong Box of Orden. Rahl already had figured out that it was the wrong box to open but he believed a big deception/trap that Richard had set for him and opened it anyway and won himself a one way trip to the Underworld. We still got that same result of Darken Rahl getting zapped and sent to his death, but the how that it happened irritated me. I don’t mind the whole time travel thing, that I felt was strong in the episode. My problem was that that writers told us from the very beginning what it was that Richard needed to do to get back to his right time. The episode would’ve been thousands of time stronger, more powerful, and shocking had we just heard Shota say “there is a way to get him back to his own time” and instead us hearing it – they cut to Kahlan agreeing to marry Darken Rahl and her suffering through raising her little boy in silence and our never knowing why in the hell she agreed to the marriage in the first place. How much stronger would the episode have been had Richard found a half crazed Shota at the palace who couldn’t remember squat on what he needed to do, his leaning over Kahlan’s sarcophagus and figuring it all out on his own? For me, this would have shown that their love was stronger than time itself and would’ve been a spectacular finale. As it was, by telling us what needed to be done and knowing the formula of the show, we already knew the outcome which took a lot of the surprise out of it. So unfortunately, I also have to put RECKONING into the missed category because the writers themselves missed a great opportunity to culminate everything that they had worked to build up over the course of the season. The episode still wasn’t bad though and certainly left things wide open for them to take the series in new directions for next year. Overall I enjoyed the season, it was dark enough and adult enough that I didn’t feel like my intelligence was being questioned when watching it. The writers pushed the limitations on what is acceptable for standard TV. They kept in Richard’s torture by Denna, Kahlan in a lot of ways is a more vicious killer than Richard, and there were a couple of episodes that were so steamy and sexy they make daytime soap operas look tame. Yet at the same time LEGEND’s approachable for kids. Bringing Jennsen in early was a great way to give their young viewers a character who they could relate to. Ken Billar hinted that they’d be taking stuff from the second and third books for pathing out next season. There are still unanswered questions that were resolved at the end of WIZARD’S FIRST RULE that they completely skipped over in season 1 – one being the whole Richard/Kahlan “a Confessor’s power would blast his soul into oblivion” aka “Kahlan will orgasm Richard’s soul into the Underworld” thing and the second being Richard’s parentage. Both of these things were likely, intentionally held off as big plot points to explore next season. Since season 2 won’t start until October 31st there’s plenty of time to read both STONE OF TEARS and BLOOD OF THE FOLD if you want to spoil yourself silly. And if you haven’t checked out season 1 and you’re bored with little new TV this summer, go catch up on LEGEND, the series is fun. The writers pay homage to Terry’s work and yet they have crafted the show into its own entity. The scenery is breathtaking, the FX are on the level of anything that you see on any STARGATE series, and it’s highly refreshing to watch a show that’s different from anything else that’s offered today in TV. LEGEND is a story riddled with magic, but at its heart, it’s a sweeping epic love story, and a journey about self discovery. Get lost with LEGEND and take a vacation from the ordinary. This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Legend of the Seeker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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