World Without End

Does anything good ever happens to these people? only in the last 10 min of the last episode - otherwise it's 8 episodes of depression. Don't bother.

It starts in 1327. The old king Edward III loses the civil war to his french Queen Isabella. She installs her son Edward III in as the new king. A knight Sir Thomas escapes after the murdered of the imprisoned former king to the fictional town of Kingsbridge. He seeks sanctuary as a monk. The toad Sir Roland uses his influence with the Queen to take over as Earl of Shiring. He launches a reign of terror condemning Edmund Wooler as well as the old Earl and others to death. Edmund's evil sister Petranilla (Cynthia Nixon) who poisoned Edmund's wife bribes to get Edmund freedom. Edmund's daughter Caris (Charlotte Riley) has the feel for medicine but the backwards world has little use for her except Petranilla is sending her to marry the brutal Elfric Builder. Petranilla's son is the weasel Godwyn (Rupert Evans). Roland spares the lives of the old Earl's sons taking Ralph as his squire while Merthin is given as Elfric Builder's apprentice. There are about twice as many other important characters.

It's a maze of characters. This feels like a cheaper version of shows like Game of Thrones without the dragons. It's work to stay on top of every character. Basically the theme is bad things happen to good people. The world is an ugly place and people are ugly, too. It feels very repetitive. The best ugly people has to be Cynthia Nixon and Rupert Evans. That's a crazy mother and son duo. Caris feels a little too modern. She should realize what comes with the world she lives in. She seems to be always shocked at the injustice. Overall, there are good actors in a reasonable mini-series.

This series was disappointing for me. I saw Pillars of the Earth which was very good and so I was expecting something better.

I didn't give this series a one-star rating because the costumes were very well-made and some of the cast like Miranda Richardson, Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Nora von Waldstätten performed very well.

But there were too many rape scenes, and I didn't like the incest. Is it really necessary to show incest in so many TV series? The anti-Catholic theme (lesbian nuns, gay monks, evil prior, executing healers, old priest draining blood) was over-the-top. In reality, most at that time in history were very religious and their behaviour was influenced by the fear of eternal hell-fire.

People were unrealistically naive and too easily fooled by Godwyn and his mother as they kept on murdering people, episode after episode.

I was disappointed in the then age 14 Edward III being cast as an age 33 actor in the first episode. Later we do not see his beautiful wife, and first-born son, just his third child Joan. The old queen mother had no power after 1330, yet we see her and Joan trying to manipulate Edward into going to war with France.

Edward III is cast as an indecisive, wimpish, dark-haired little man, but was in fact very confident, tall, broad-shouldered and fair-haired (a typical Plantagenet in appearance). Edward III has been one of my favourite people in history since I first read about him as child, so I was unhappy to see him portrayed this way.

Was that battle in France supposed to be the Battle of Crécy? It happened nothing like what is shown! In fact, the French in far superior numbers attacked with crossbowmen and mounted knights, and were slaughtered by the longbows. Where is Edward's son the Black Prince? He was just a 16-year-old at Crécy, yet did very well in the midst of the heaviest fighting.

There is plenty of interesting drama in real history during that time period, like the story of how Edward took Calais. But of course the producers decided to ignore that.

I greatly enjoyed the "Pillars of the Earth" miniseries without having read the novel and was then inspired to read World Without End which I loved. However, having watched the first episode of "World Without End" miniseries, I am dismayed to find a greatly altered beginning, minor characters transformed into major ones, and drama that just didn't occur in the book. I'm also not thrilled with some of the casting choices.

Otherwise, the production looks pretty good. You will probably enjoy it if you haven't read the book. Be prepared for possible disappointment if you have.

I supposed I should go and read Pillars of the Earth now and find out what I missed.

World Without End is an amazing television series, full of fascinating characters and twisting plots set within interesting historical times. Loosely based on the Ken Follett novel, the first 7 episodes are exciting and capture the spirit of the book, with small plot deviations suited to television. The finale, Episode 8, diverges greatly from the book and becomes trite, with several unbelievable events, including a sword fight between two highly unlikely combatants. While I look forward to watching the first seven episodes again and would highly recommend them to others, I would skip the finale as it just does not match the quality of the rest of the series.