“Wizard’s First Rule” (Terry Goodkind)

Supersite Ain’t-It-Cool News has gathered snippets of reviews for the pilot episode of Sam Raimi’s Legend of the Seeker, a show filmed in New Zeland and based on Terry Goodkind’s epic Sword of Truth series. Most of the reviews are less than flattering.

I must admit that, having read the first four books, I’m not a fan of the series. I find a lot of the violence gratuitous and many of the characters derivative and uninteresting. The only real characters of interest to me in the series are the dominatrix-like red-leather-clad Mord Sith, who undergo some interesting development as the books progress.

You can check out the show’s official site here. I watched the first ten minutes of the show online a week or so ago, but as of this posting I can’t seem to find the link. You can, however, download some free preview material from the show’s page on iTunes. In any case, fans of the series haven’t long to wait. The show premieres tonight on ABC. Not wishing to fall into the vice of contempt prior to investigation, I too will be watching the show and reporting my findings here in the next day or so.

A spirit walker, an ice queen, and the eponymous villains!

Just when I think the show has totally jumped the shark, Heroes redeems itself with a fun, fast-paced episode. The high point of this episode, for me, was Ali Larter’s new character, Tracy Strauss, is so far vastly superior to her Niki and Jessica Sanders split personality of the first two seasons. The writers aren’t taking the easy way out and pretending Niki never existed, though. Strauss is a dead-ringer for the super-strength-packing stripper, which is is jeopardizing her position in the New York political machine.

Mind-reading Matt Parkman ends up in a desert somewhere in Africa, where he meets a spirit walker who paints prophetic images on rocks, similar to the comic sketches of Isaac Mendez in the first season. I really enjoyed the divination-through-art motif the first time around, and I’m looking forward to its further development this season.

Given that this chapter is entitled Villains, it’s probably not letting too many cats out of the bag to reveal that, by the end of this episode, a dozen empowered and enraged bad guys are loosed upon the world. If handled ineptly, this could turn into a hydra of plot threads poised to strangle the show’s powerful storytelling. Done well, however, the appearance of these menaces could make for interesting power struggles and shifts in allegiance.

The major storyline of season three still seems murky and byzantine, but there are so many fun moments in this episode that the Theseus-like viewer is enticed to follow the labyrinthine path anyway.

“The Graveyard Book” (Neil Gaiman)

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors. I first fell in love with his writing after reading the brilliant, multi-layered American Gods. I enjoyed Stardust and Neverwhere almost as much. While I feel he missed a trick with the American Gods spinoff Anansi Boys, in general I hold Gaiman’s work in high regard.

The Graveyard Book, a young-adult novel whose title intentionally alludes to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, tells the story of a boy named Nobody–Bod for short–who is orphaned and grows up among the supernatural beings in a graveyard. I don’t know much more than that, at the moment, although I’m sure some excerpts have surfaced, since the 30 September release date is right around the corner.

Even better, for me at least, Neil Gaiman will be in my hometown of Santa Monica on 6 October. I missed the chance to see him speak when I was in Oxford, so I’m very excited to now have the opportunity.

I’ll report on both the book and the public appearance very soon.