Enlarge / Moiraine strides purposefully, as usual.
Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Time books, and they’re bringing that knowledge to bear as they recap each episode of Amazon’s new WoT TV series. These recaps won’t cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. If you want to stay unspoiled and haven’t read the books, these recaps aren’t for you.
New episodes of The Wheel of Time will be posted to Amazon Prime subscribers every Friday.
Moiraine in the Ways. It’s dark in here. Like, Game of Thrones season 8 dark. (credit: Amazon Studios)
But the thing that stuck out most is the pre-credits intro, where we get to see an Aiel Maiden of the Spear doing what Maidens do best: killing the crap out of things. The moment of compassion between Tam (wearing the Golden Bees of Illian) and the maiden during Rand’s birth was so incredibly powerful—it was an instance of pure raw humanity that transcended conflict, and I thought it was really nice. On the other hand, book readers know precisely who Rand’s mother is, and without spoiling anything at all about that Maiden’s identity, I’m starting to wonder if the show is going to change up Rand’s mom from the books. I am somewhat doubtful, given how well the woman we see on screen fights, that her identity is the same as it is in the books. Do you think I’m off-base here, Andrew? Either way, I loved the little prologue. Easily my favorite part of the episode, and possibly my favorite series moment so far.
Another image from the Ways. Like Moiraine, Lan is also good at striding purposefully. (credit: Amazon Studios)
Once in the Borderlands, we meet Agelmar Jagad, Lord of Fal Dara, and his sister Amalisa. We also find out Amalisa can channel, though not strongly enough to become a full Aes Sedai. (credit: Amazon Studios)
I wish the Ways themselves had been a little easier to see on the screen—they were a little Battle of Winterfell-esque in how dark they were. (Though that may just have been the lower bitrate of the media screener we were watching.) Obviously it’s hard to depict on screen a place that’s pitch black and lit only by torches, but I could have used a little more light to actually, you know, see stuff.
There is one major complaint I have about Machin Shin’s whispers, and it has to do with the show not playing fair with its mysteries. But lemme table that for just a moment—I’ve got a big bit of spleen-venting to do about the episode’s middle, where the characters rest overnight in Fal Dara.
This episode has some high school relationship weirdness that would have felt more at home on The CW. (credit: Amazon Studios)
Huh? Obviously two people with shared trauma and a lot of rough traveling—like Perrin and Egwene—will develop some closeness, even if it’s not romantic. This makes total sense. But there are clues here that paint a different picture—is Perrin always supposed to have been in love with Egwene? Is that the reason why Laila didn’t go to Egwene’s braid ceremony celebration back in the Two Rivers?
It’s a weird moment that feels unearned and… just… weird. Rand eventually laughs off the accusations, which might just be part of the post-channeling “madness lite” that boys experience the first few times they touch the One Power, but that was just an odd scene. It smelled more like the result of studio notes than organic storytelling. (Though I guess we got to see Rand do the “Flame and Void” archery trick, at least.)
Rand has been taking lessons from Lan on how to look off into the distance and brood. (credit: Amazon Studios)
I am also just completely lost with how I’m supposed to feel about Perrin’s Dead Wife, and how he feels about her, and just what her sketchily drawn character was supposed to be doing for the story in the first place (the most interesting theory I’ve heard among my friends is that she was a Darkfriend and she was actually going for Perrin at the moment he killed her, but the show hasn’t offered much to support that). We talked last week about how Perrin and Mat were feeling a bit underwritten compared to a lot of our other characters and this kind of scene is what you get when you try to use an underdeveloped character to prop up an emotional beat like this.
As for Mat, he’s just gone from this episode after last week’s cliffhanger, and it says something about his presence on the show that neither the viewers nor the characters on screen seem to actually miss him much.
Min Farshaw, bartender and Pattern-seer. Book fans know Min’s importance to the story; if you’re coming to the show not having read the books, just know that Min is definitely going to show up again. (credit: Amazon Studios)
Well, it turns out that the scene wasn’t absent—it happened, and we just didn’t get to see it until now. And also, in the Ways, the Black Wind whispered some more stuff to Rand that we didn’t hear the first time around, about how he’s, you know, the Dragon Reborn and stuff.
Look. I enjoy it when shows give us mysteries to play with. I loved it when Westworld constructed this amazing puzzle box story and dared you to solve it. And I’ve been enjoying the game of “Who’s the Dragon” that WoT has been stringing us along with.
But this isn’t honest storytelling. This is cheating. If you’re going to lay out a mystery for the audience to solve, you can’t spring up at the last second and say “LOL, psyche! We actually withheld critical information from you, so there’s no way you could have pieced together the solution on your own!” This is taking what should have been an earned and gratifying resolution to a season-long puzzle and turning it into a cheap gotcha. It’s the same complaint I have about Rand’s Machin Shin whispers—we see one set of events it happens, and then a bit later the show comes back with the rest of what it said to Rand. It just feels like a low blow.
The gang sits down to talk through their problems and sling some wild accusations at each other. (credit: Amazon Studios)
I did really enjoy the snippets of time we spend with Min (who, apart from being transplanted from a tavern from early in Eye of the World to a tavern from later in Eye of the World, does and says pretty much what she does and says in the book). I think the bits of Lan-Nynaeve we get here are basically fine—on the gauzy side, but the presence of Lan’s “family” here is keeping with the books’ depiction of him as a sort of king-in-exile whose former subjects are scattered across the Borderlands. This episode also makes explicit what eagle-eyed book-readers have probably picked up on by now—that Padan Fain, a barely-remarked-upon peddler in the very first episode of the show, has been tracking our party from a distance, Gollum-like, lurking in the shadows and waiting for… something.
But I do think this episode’s busy-ness hurts it, and that the show would really have benefitted from a 10-episode season instead of an abbreviated 8-episode order that needs to rush so many things.
Moiraine is unimpressed. Look at that side-eye. (credit: Amazon Studios)
And I really like the visual look they’ve got for Fal Dara—it looks Tibetan, and that fits in really well with my mental image of the Borderlands. We even get a glimpse of what I assume is Tarwin’s Gap next to the fortress—and then, near the end of the episode, Moiraine and Rand ride out into the Blight together.
The Blight, for non-book-readers, is the part of the physical world that’s withering and rotting from being in proximity to the Dark One’s prison—the prison that the show has apparently relocated to the Eye of the World. There are a ton of unresolved threads around the Bad Guy side of the story so far, and wrapping together the Eye, the Forsaken, the weird dreams Rand is having about Dude With Fire Coming Out of His Eyes and Mouth, and the overall tale of the Dragon Reborn is going to be a pretty tall order for the single episode we have left.
Whatever happens, we’ll be back to talk about it (and our impressions of the season as a whole) one last time next week. May you always find water and shade, Lee!
(credit: WoT Wiki)
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