Legend of the Seeker – Do they have a potion for that?

(Season 1, Episodes 4-6 – “Brennidon,” “Listener,” “Elixir”)

Sorry for the absence the last couple of weeks in the Seeker reviews. There was a snafu with ye olde DVR. Apparently, my local affiliate decided to re-air the pilot episode as two new installments, which my DVR then thought was the new episodes for the week, so I didn’t get them recorded so I couldn’t – you know what, it doesn’t matter. I’m here now, and so is the Seeker. As such, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

I’ll admit that I didn’t watch Hercules: The Legendary Journeys or Xena: Warrior Princess on a regular basis, so I’m not sure if they had the same kinds of developing story threads that Legend of the Seeker has. If you’ve read Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth book series, then you know there’s an epic story this is all based on, but so far, we’re dealing more with episodic adventuring. Even still, though, these episodes are laying the groundwork for the larger story.

“Brennidon” gave us some important back-story on both Richard’s true lineage (no, book fans, they haven’t revealed that particular morsel yet), and on Darken Rahl’s evil. And particularly, the evil that his minions have no problem spreading. Then, in “Listener,” we got to meet yet another one-named person of significance to go along with the “Seeker” and the “Confessor.” Only the “Listener” was a little bitch.

This week’s episode was scheduled to be the third episode, but got pushed back. I’d guess because it played more like a filler episode, and they wanted to establish a bit more of the meat of the series before they started throwing these at us. We did get a little more insight into the abilities of the Confessor and their effects on those she “confesses.”

All in all, while I wouldn’t consider Legend of the Seeker to be great Shakespearean fare, it’s nevertheless good action-entertainment. Yes, the slo-mo fight scenes are overdone and thus lose all their cool factor. Especially because while it’s one thing to be able to see bad fight acting, with fists missing faces and sword play that’s just completely ineffective, it’s so much more to see it in slow motion so you can be sure that, yes, that guy really did fly back from absolutely no impact from anything.

• I did expect Zedd to tell Richard to put the blast shield down when he was trying to hit the invisible fruit. The parallels between this relationship and the one between Obi-Wan and Luke are a bit too obvious, but I guess it’s hard to avoid such comparisons when in a similar genre.
• I want to know how Kahlan gets those whites clean. At the beginning of most episodes and, in fact, constantly when we see her, the hem is practically glowing white and clean, and yet half the time, it’s filthy and brown dragging in the mud.
• I’d still much rather see a long-form adaptation of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, which I’ve always thought The Sword of Truth was derivative of, but it would have to be handled a lot sharper than this. Less popcorn fun and more serious drama.
• Bruce Spence can tone down his performance a bit; I won’t be mad at him. He’s a little over the top as Zedd, and it really pulls me out of the story from time to time.

Is it sad that despite all of its shortcomings, Legend of the Seeker is still a better show than Crusoe. I’d rather see it on prime time than that crap. Also, why is it that a show like this (fantasy/adventure) is always relegated to syndication? Hell, they brought back the syndication format for this show. Is prime time still not ready for a live action fantasy series? Yeah, probably not.

Clacked by Jason Hughes
on Nov 30, 2008 @ 19:45 EST5EDT