Author name: Shannon Garcia

Andrew: Three seasons in I think we have discerned a pattern to the Wheel of Time’s portrayal of the Pattern: a mid-season peak in episode four, followed by a handful of more table-setting-y episodes that run up to a big finale. And so it is in Tel’aran’rhiod, which is a not-entirely-unwelcome slowdown after last week’s intense character-defining journey into Rhuidean.

The show introduces or expands a bunch of book plotlines as it hops between perspectives this week. Which are you the most interested in picking apart, Lee? Anything the show is tending to here that you wish we were skipping?

Lee: Yes, this was a good old-fashioned move-the-pieces-into-place episode, and you gotta have at least one or two of those. I think, if I were coming into this having not read the books, the most puzzling bits might have been what’s going on in the White Tower this episode, with the who-is-the-darkfriend hide-n-seek game the Aes Sedai are playing. And it turns out that in spite of the Sisters’ best attempts at a fake-out, Shohreh Aghdashloo’s Elaida is in fact not it. (And Elaida gets the crap stabbed out of her by another Gray Man for her troubles, too. Ouch. Fortunately, healing is nearby. Nobody has to die in this show unless the plot really demands it.)

I was a little taken aback at the casualness with which Elaida takes lives—her execution of Black Ajah sister Amico Nagoyin was pretty off-handed. I don’t recall her being quite that blasé about death in the books, but it has been a while. Regardless, while she’s not capital-E EEEEEVIL, she’s clearly not a good person.

We do get our first glimpse of the Sea Folk, though it felt a bit ham-fisted—like they spent both more time than they needed to tee them up, and much less time than was needed to actually establish WTF this new group of people is. (Though I guess the name “Sea Folk” is pretty explanatory—it does what it says on the tin, as it were.)

Andrew: Our first glimpse of show-Elaida is an advisor to a new queen who casually murders her former political opponents, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that she just straight-up executes someone she thinks is of no further use. The show is also happy to just quickly kill tertiary or… sextiary (??) characters to streamline the story. There are lots of those to go around in the books.

There’s a lot of Aiel and Sea Folk stuff where the show is just kind of asking you to take things at face value, even if book-readers are aware of more depth. One of the big running plotlines in the book is that the White Tower has weakened itself by being too doctrinaire about the way it absorbs the channelers of other cultures, totally taking them away from their families and societies and subjecting them to all kinds of weird inflexible discipline. This is why there are so many Aiel and Sea Folk channelers running around that the White Tower doesn’t know about, and the show has nodded toward it but hasn’t had a lot of room to communicate the significance of it.

Lee: That’s a point that Alanna Sedai comments on in this episode, and the reason she’s in the Two Rivers: The Tower has been too selective, too closed-minded, and—somewhat ironically—too parochial in its approach to accepting and training channelers. Further, there’s some worry that by spending thousands of years finding and gentling (or executing) male channelers, humanity has begun to self-select channeling out of the gene pool.

This doesn’t seem to be the case, though, as we see by the sheer number of channelers popping up everywhere, and Alanna’s hypothesis proves correct: the old blood of Manetheren runs true and strong, spilling out in ta’veren and channelers and other pattern-twisting craziness all over the place.

Alanna has her own challenges to face, but first, I want to hear your take on the Aiel in this post-Rhuidean episode, and especially of Cold Rocks Hold—a place that I know a subset of fans have been imagining for decades. What did you think?

Andrew: Rocks! It’s all rocks. Which makes sense for a desert, I suppose.

The show does a solid job of showing us what day-to-day Aiel society looks like through just a handful of characters, including Rhuarc’s other wife Lian and his granddaughter Alsera. It’s an economy of storytelling that is forced upon the show by budget and low episode count but usually you don’t feel it.

We’re also getting our very first look at the awe and discomfort that Rand is going to inspire, as the prophesied Aiel chief-of-chiefs. Clan leaders are already telling tales of him to their children. But not everyone is going to have an easy time accepting him, something we’ll probably start to pick apart in future episodes.

Alanna is definitely in the running for my favorite overhauled show character. She’s visible from very early on as a background character and loose ally of the Two Rivers crew in the books, but the show is giving her more of a personality and a purpose, and a wider view than Book-Alanna (who was usually sulking somewhere about her inability to take any of the Two Rivers boys as a Warder, if memory serves). In the show she and her Warder Maksim are fleshed-out characters who are dealing with their relationship and the Last Battle in their own way, and it’s fun to get something unexpected and new in amongst all of the “how are they going to portray Book Event X” stuff.

Lee: Book-Alanna by this point has made some… let’s call them questionable choices, and her reworking into someone a bit less deserving of being grabbed by the throat and choked is excellent. (Another character with a similar reworking is Faile, who so far I actually quite like and do not at all want to throttle!)

I think you’ve hit upon the main overarching change from the books, bigger than all other changes: The show has made an effort to make these characters into people with relatable problems, rather than a pack of ill-tempered, nuance-deaf ding-dongs who make bad choices and then have to dig themselves out.

Well, except maybe for Elayne. I do still kind of want to shake her a bit.

Andrew: Yes! But with show-Elayne at least you get the sense that a bit of her showy know-it-all-ness is being played up on purpose. And she is right to be studying up on their destination and trying to respect the agreement they made with the Sea Folk when they came on board. She’s just right in a way that makes you wish she wasn’t, a personality type I think we’ve all run into at least once or twice in our own lives.

In terms of Big Book Things that are happening, let’s talk about Egwene briefly. Obviously she’s beginning to hone her skills in the World of Dreams—Tel’aran’rhiod, which gives the episode its name—and she’s already using it to facilitate faster communication between far-flung characters and to check in on her friends. Two other, minor things: We’re starting to see Rand and Egwene drift apart romantically, something the books had already dispensed with by this point. And this was the first time I noted an Aiel referring to her as “Egwene Sedai.” I assume this has already happened and this is just the first time I’ve noticed, but Egwene/Nynaeve/Elayne playing at being full Aes Sedai despite not being is a plot thread the books pull at a lot here in the middle of the series.

Lee: Regardless, Eggy’s growth into a dream-walker is fortunately not being dispensed with, and as in the books, she does a lot of things she’s not supposed to do (or at least not until she’s got more than a single afternoon’s worth of dreamwalker training under her belt). She sort of heeds the Wise Ones’ directive to stay out of Tel’aran’rhiod and instead just skips around between her various friends’ dreams, before finally landing in Rand’s, where she finds him having sexytimes with, uh oh, an actual-for-real Forsaken. Perhaps this is why one shouldn’t just barge into someone’s dreams uninvited!

And on the subject of dreams—or at least visions—I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t check in on the continuing bro-adventures of Min and Mat (which my cousin described as “a lesbian and her gay best friend hanging out, and it’s unclear which is which”). The show once again takes the opportunity to remind us of Min’s visions—especially the one of Mat being hanged. Foreshadowing!

Andrew: Honestly of all the plotlines going on right now I’m the most curious to see how Elayne/Nynaeve/Mat/Min get along in Tanchico, just because these characters have gotten so many minor little tweaks that I find interesting. Mat and Min are more friendly, and their plots are more intertwined in the show than they were in the books, and having a version of Nynaeve and a version of Mat that don’t openly dislike each other has a lot of fun story potential for me.

I am a little worried that we only have three episodes left, since we’ve got the party split up into four or five groups, and most of those groups already have little sub-groups inside of them who are doing their own thing. I do trust the show a lot at this point, but the splitting and re-splitting of plotlines is what eventually gets the books stuck in the mud, and we’ve already seen that dynamic play out on TV in, say, mid-to-late-series Game of Thrones. I just hope we can keep things snappy without making the show totally overwhelming, as it is already in danger of being sometimes.

Lee: I seem to remember the time in Tanchico stretching across several books, though I may be getting that mixed up with whatever the hell the characters do in Far Madding much later (that’s not really a spoiler, I don’t think—it’s just the name of another city-state where readers are forced to spend an interminable amount of time). I’m reasonably sure our crew will find what they need to find in Tanchico by season’s end, at least—and, if it follows the books, things’ll get a little spicy.

Let’s see—for closing points, the one I had on my notepad that I wanted to hit was that for me, this episode reinforces that this show is at its best when it focuses on its characters and lets them work. Episode four with Rhuidean was a rare epic hit; most of the times the show has attempted to reach for grandeur or epic-ness, it has missed. The cinematography falls flat, or the sets look like styrofoam and carelessness, or the editing fails to present a coherent through-line for the action, or the writing whiffs it. But up close, locked in a ship or sitting on a mountainside or hanging out in a blacksmith’s dream, the actors know what they’re doing, and they have begun consistently delivering.

Andrew: But yes I agree that there’s usually at least something that goes a bit goofy when the show attempts spectacle. The big battle that ended the first season is probably the most egregious example, but I also remember the Horn of Valere moment in the season 2 finale as looking “uh fine I guess.” But the talking parts are good! The smaller fights, including the cool Alanna-Whitecloak stuff we get in this episode, are all compelling. There’s some crowd-fight stuff coming in the next few episodes, if we stick to Book 4 as our source material, so we’ll see what the show does and doesn’t manage to pull off.

But in terms of this episode, I don’t have much more to say. We’re scooting pieces around the board in service of larger confrontations later on. It remains a very dense show, which is what I think will keep it from ever achieving a Game of Thrones level of cultural currency. But I’m still having fun. Anything else you want to highlight? Shoes you’re waiting to drop?

Lee: Almost all of the books (at least in the front half of the series, before the Slog) tend to end in a giant spectacle of some sort, and I think I can see which spectacle—or spectacles, plural—we’re angling at for this one. The situation in the Two Rivers is clearly barreling toward violence, and Rand’s got them dragons on his sleeves. I’d say buckle up, folks, because my bet is we’re about to hit the gas.

Until next week, dear readers—beware the shadows, and guard yourselves. I hear Lanfear walks the dream world this night.