Defeating the Dark One. Winning the Last Battle. Healing the broken world. Noble goals all. But the quest I’d most like to see The Wheel of Time fulfill is this: giving its main characters one (1) new emotion to express, other than “confused dismay.”
It wasn’t until right near the end of the episode that I realized how badly the show needs this. It happened as Moiraine and Rand, on the run from the Forsaken called Lanfear and her Freddy Krueger–esque ability to infiltrate her victims’ dreams, debate whether or not to allow Rand to fall asleep and thus lure her in. The idea for Rand is to convince her he loves her and wants to ally with her since Lanfear and the original Dragon Reborn loved each other in the past. In fact, she only became Forsaken because the Dragon dumped her, hoping the power of the Dark could win him back. (Voluntarily becoming a Ringwraith because you’re carrying a torch for your ex is only marginally less embarrassing than accidentally liking a 37-month-old Instagram pic of them at the beach at 2 a.m.)
Anyway, Rand fears that Lanfear will see right through the ploy … at first. But there’s a moment where he pauses, thinks about it, and says, “Whatever she is, I don’t think everything between us was a lie.” It’s just one line, but it shows Rand doing something more than asking Moiraine what the hell is happening or where the hell they’re going. It shows him taking a moment to think really hard, carefully formulate his thoughts and feelings, and express them clearly regarding a matter of both the heart and life and death. Josha Stradowski comes alive in that little moment, and so does the show.
I find myself hoping for a similar moment for Marcus Rutherford’s Perrin. Ever since he accidentally killed his wife during that Trolloc raid — a traumatic experience, to be sure! — he’s spent basically the entire series mumbling sadly. Occasional psychic wolf powers and Hulk strength aside, he’s kind of a big lump.
But in this episode, the werewolf-in-training encounters a pair of people who bring out another side to him. First, there’s Dain Bornhald (Jay Duffy), a friendly guy who takes Perrin in when he returns to the village where he and his friends were taken prisoner, only to discover the Seanchan gone. Dain is part of the reason why: He’s a member of the Children of Light under Perrin’s former torturer, Eamon Valda (a deeply creepy Abdul Salis), and they ran the Seanchan the hell out of there.
But being Children of Light, their draconian discipline extends to caging up live prisoners to die of thirst and exposure. In this case, the prisoner in question is Aviendha (Ayoola Smart), an Aiel woman who talks like a Fremen from Dune and fights like the Bride from Kill Bill. Perrin frees her, they miraculously escape, and she flirts with him heavily while filling him in on her backstory.
It’s fun, isn’t it, to watch Perrin do something other than frown? Sparing Aviendha on the simple grounds that “People shouldn’t be in cages.” Sparing Dain because he helped Perrin out and gave Aviendha water against Valda’s orders. (From Arrakis on down, giving someone water is a big sacred deal to SFF desert cultures.) There’s even a momentary glimpse of a Perrin who would, in fact, take Aviendha up on her joking suggestion that she might want to hit that. A livelier Perrin will make for a much better show.
Which is good, because TWoT is at the point now where, after two very good episodes, a merely decent episode like this one feels like a step in the wrong direction. In part, this is because of the decision of the filmmakers (the episode was written by Rohit Kumar and directed by Maja Vrvilo) to stage half the episode at night, when the show has demonstrated approximately zero capability of making nighttime scenes look anything other than dim and lifeless. Not even the big fight scene between the Children of Light and Perrin and Aviendha, which is too rapidly edited to really convey the physicality of the battle, can overcome this handicap. It’s really wild: I was watching today’s episode of Billions, which at various times turns Manhattan alleyways into portals of danger and mystery, and wondering, “How the hell can a financial drama about Wall Street make the night look brighter and more magical than a megabudget fantasy spectacle?”
Fortunately, things remain pretty bitchin’ from a plot perspective. As we’d feared, Liandrin is indeed a member of the dreaded Black Ajah, the rogue Aes Sedai who serve the Dark One. That’s why she was grooming Nynaeve for power — so that her true master could wield it. Everyone’s got a price that will turn them against the Light, Liandrin explains to her captive. “Was your price worth all this?” Nynaeve responds after running down the shambles the Darkfriend has made of her life. (Nynaeve isn’t even aware that Verin, the formidable Brown sister with whom Moiraine had been staying, is on the case of the disappearing novices like a fantasy Columbo.)
Via Liandrin’s journey to surrender Nynaeve, Egwene, and Elayne to the Seanchan, we also discover that the bad guys are far from a unified front. Liandrin and High Lady Suroth hate each other. High Lady Suroth and her boss, High Lord Turak (Daniel Francis), hate each other too. Turak is no fan of Ishamael, who, despite not proclaiming his identity openly, is still obviously an outsider. For one thing, he lacks the flat American accents that all the other Seanchan have been given — a very clever way of showrunner Rafe Lee Judkins to convey how alien these people are to the rest of the show’s largely British Isles–accented fantasy cultures. Ishamael hopes to keep Turak satisfied (at least until the time comes to kill him) by gifting him Egwene, who, as a channeler, is collared and chained as a slave per the Seanchan custom. (Nynaeve and Elayne escape to a nearby city, where an Aes Sedai and Warder in hiding spot them and whisk them away to a hiding place.)
Not even Ishamael and Lanfear are fully on the same page. Ishamael openly wonders if Lanfear will betray him; Lanfear almost cheerily informs him that, yep, she will. It’s a good thing for him that he’s the top dog among the Forsaken, the only one to whom the Dark One directly communicates, precisely because he’s the only one who truly believes in the cause — i.e., ending all suffering by breaking the Wheel of Time itself.
This is all communicated in a nifty little lucid-dream sequence in which the pair find themselves in bed together after Lanfear first poses as Rand, allowing Ishamael to delicately caress the young man’s cheek, faces within kissing distance, before revealing her true self. A few minutes later, she conjures a Rand stand-in into another bed as they discuss him. There’s an intimacy being established between hero and villain here, an appreciation of the Dragon by his opponents that’s almost sensual.
In Lanfear’s case, as Moiraine points out later, it is sensual. Even putting aside her past relationship with the old Dragon, Moiraine notes that Rand has been sleeping with her innkeeper incarnation for months; if she’d simply wanted to hurt or kill him, she’d have done it before. Of course, how this squares with the metal circle to which he finds himself staked as she reclines before him on a throne in all her goth splendor atop a desert cliff within his dreams remains to be seen.
I’ll remain to see it, too, and not just because it’s my job. This may not have been as solid an installment as the previous two remarkable efforts, but it’s not a disastrous plunge, either. It’s more a matter of settling into a new, somewhat elevated status quo, after two episodes that really pushed the ceiling much higher. Those heights can always be reached again.
