Old faces in unexpected places: The Wheel of Time season 3 rolls on

[Karlston]

Episode six: Elayne sings karaoke, the Forsaken attack, and Rand pays his toh.

Poor Rand. 

Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

 

Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon's WoT TV series. Now we're back in the saddle for season 3—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory.

 

These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We'll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.

 

New episodes of The Wheel of Time season 3 will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers episode six, "The Shadow in the Night," which was released on April 3.

 

Lee: Welcome to Tanchico! In Tanchico, everyone wears veils almost all of the time, except when they’re flirting in bars. Mat gets the most fabulous veil of all because he’s Mat and he deserves it. Even Nynaeve has a good time! And I guess now we know all about the hills of Tanchico. Like… alllllllllllllllllll about them.

 

Andrew: Credit to Robert Jordan for mostly resisting one of the bizarre tics of post-Tolkien fantasy fiction: I'm not going to say the books never take a break to give us the full text of an in-universe song. But it does so pretty sparingly, if memory serves. But there are plenty of songs referenced, often with a strong implication that they are too lewd or horny to reprint in full.

 

Not so in the show! Where Elayne sings a song about "The Hills of Tanchico," bringing the house down for what appears to be... several hours (they're breasts, the hills are breasts). I don't mind this scene, actually, but it does go on.

 

But more important than the song is who is accompanying Elayne, a book character who has been gone so long that we weren't actually sure he was coming back. Who makes their long-awaited return in Tanchico, Lee?

 

Thom Merrilin finally shows back up. Nice hat. Wonder who else might end up wearing it.

Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Lee: That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, stomp your feet and bring your hands together for everybody’s favorite gleeman, seemingly back from the dead and rocking a strangely familiar hat: It’s Thom Merrilin! (Applause roars.)

 

Viewers who haven’t read the books can be forgiven for not immediately falling out of their chairs when Thom shows back up, but to book readers, his absence has been keenly felt. Believe it or not, Merrilin is an A-string player in the books, spending a tremendous amount of time front and center interacting with the main POV characters. He vanishes for a bit just as he does in the show, but he doesn’t stay gone nearly as long as he’s been gone here.

 

I’m glad he’s back, and it bodes well for our Tanchico crew—unlike them, Thom is an actual-for-real adult, who’s been places and knows things. He also provides fantastic accompaniment to Elayne’s karaoke adventure.

 

Elayne wins the crowd by singing about tittays. Thom accompanies because it's a subject in which he is apparently well-versed.

Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: The entire Tanchico crew is pretty strong right now—Mat and Min are pals again, show-Nynaeve is a version of the character who other characters in the story are allowed to like, and now Thom is back! It'd be a rollicking good time, if it weren't for these sadistic Black Ajah Aes Sedai and the Forsaken psychopath Moghedien stalking around, mind-controlling people, leaving holes in heads, and trying to find a Seanchan-esque collar that can subdue and control Rand.

 

We're entering a stretch of the story where the Forsaken spend as much time fighting with each other as they do with Rand and our heroes, which explains why the powerful villains don't simply kill our heroes the minute they find each other. Moghedien is in full creep mode through this whole episode, and I gotta say, she is unsettling.

 

Moghedien, doing her thing.

Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Lee: Yeah, watching Moghedien screw with the Black sisters’ food and stuff was particularly disturbing. The lady has no filter—and fantastic powers of persuasion. We get another clear look at just how ludicrously overpowered the Forsaken are compared to our present-day channelers when Moggy straight-up runs "sudo give me the bracelet" on Nynaeve’s and Elayne’s brains—much like Rhavin’s I’m-your-favorite-uncle routine, her Power-backed trickery is devastating and completely inescapable (though Nynaeve apparently does resist just a teeny tiny bit.)

 

And although there are still more doings to discuss in Tanchico—the quest to discover the bracelets-n-collars is heating up!—the fact that all of these episodes are an hour long means there are so many other things to discuss. Like, for example, the return of another familiar face, in the form of our long-absent whistling super-darkfriend Padan Fain. Dark doings are afoot in the Two Rivers!

 

Andrew: Fain in the books never quite rises to the level of Big Bad so much as he lurks around the periphery of the story practically the whole entire time, popping up to cause trouble whenever it's the least convenient for our heroes. The show does a good job of visually representing how he's begun to corrupt the regiment of Whitecloaks he has embedded himself in, without ever actually mentioning it or drawing much attention to it. You know you're a bad guy when even Eamon Valda is like "uh is this guy ok?" (As in the books, the show distinguishes between Whitecloaks who are antagonists because they genuinely believe what they say they believe about Aes Sedai "witches," and ones who are simply straight-up Darkfriends. Funny how often they end up working toward the same goals, though.)

 

Meanwhile, Perrin, Alanna, and friends recover from last week's raid of the Whitecloak camp. I keep needing to recalibrate my expectations for what Plot Armor looks like on this show, because our main characters get grievously wounded pretty regularly, but the standards are different on a show where everyone can apparently cast Cure Wounds as a cantrip. Alanna walks the Cauthon sisters through some rudimentary Healing, and Alanna (with barely disguised glee and/or interest) accidentally interrupts an escalation in Perrin and Falie's relationship when she goes to Heal him later.

 

Are we still finding show-Faile charming? I did think it was funny when that goofy county-fair caricature of Mat holding the Horn of Valere made another appearance.

 

Still not hating Faile, which feels surprising.

Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Lee: I am definitely still finding show-Faile charming, which continually surprises me because she’s possibly the worst character in the entire series. In the books, Jordan writes Faile as an emotionally abused emotional abuser who doesn’t believe Perrin loves her if he’s not screaming at her and/or hitting her; in the show, she’s a much more whole individual with much more grown-up and sane ideas about how relationships work. Perrin and Faile have something going on that is, dare I say it, actually sweet and romantic!

 

I never thought I’d be on any team other than Team Throw-Faile-Down-The-Well, but here we are. I’m rooting for her and Perrin.

 

When it comes to Alanna’s healing at the hands of the Cauthon sisters, I had to sit with that one for a moment and make a conscious decision. The books make it clear that Healing—even the abbreviated first-aid version the current-day Aes Sedai practice, to say nothing of the much fancier version from the Age of Legends—is complicated. Doing it wrong can have horrific consequences (in fact, “doing healing wrong on purpose” is the basis for many of the Yellow-turned-Black sisters’ attacks with the One Power). And these wildlings (to borrow a book term) are able to just intuit their way into making it happen?

 

We know that new channelers frequently have uncontrolled bouts of blasting out the One Power in response to moments of stress or great need—in fact, we’ve seen that happen many times in the show, including at the beginning of this episode when Lil’ Liandrin force-blasts her rapist-husband into the wall. So the groundwork is there for the Cauthon girls to do what they’re doing. It’s just a question of how much one is willing to let the show get away with.

 

I decided I’m good with it—it’s the necessary thing to move the story forward, and so I’m not gonna complain about it. Where did you land?

 

Fain returns, bringing with him the expected pile of Trollocs.

Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: Yeah, I made essentially the same decision. Conscious use of the One Power at all, even the ability to access it consistently, is something that requires patience and training, and normally you couldn't talk a 12-year-old through Healing as Alanna does here any more than you could talk a 12-year-old through performing successful field surgery. But training takes time, and showing it takes time, and time is one thing the show never has much of. The show also really likes to dramatically injure characters without killing them! So here we are, speed-running some things.

 

This leaves us with two big threads left to address: Rand's and Egwene's. Egwene is still trying to learn about the World of Dreams from the Aiel Wise Ones (I was wrong, by the way—she admits to lying about being Aes Sedai here and it passes almost without comment), and is still reeling from realizing that Rand and Lanfear are Involved. And Rand, well. He's not going mad, yet, probably, but he spends most of the episode less-than-fully-in-control of his powers and his actions.

 

Lee: It comes to a head when Rand and Egwene have long, difficult conversation over exactly who’s been sleeping with whom, and why—and then that conversation is interrupted when Sammael kicks the door down and starts swinging his big fancy One Power Hammer.

 

There’s a bit of channeling by Aviendha and Egwene, but then Rand grasps the Source and Sammael just kind of stops being a factor. Entranced by the Power—and by the black corruption pulsing through it—Rand straight-up destroys Sammael without apparent thought or effort, borrowing a bit of the method from the way Rand pulls off a similar feat in book 3, with a ludicrous amount of lightning and ceiling-collapsing.

 

It’s one of the few times so far that Rand has actually cut loose with the One Power, and I like it when we get to actually see (rather than just hear about) the enormity of Rand’s strength as a channeler. But this casual exercise of extreme power is not without a cost.

 

Rand does a 360 no-scope lightning hit.

Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: We've observed a couple of times that Rand and Egwene in the books had long since given up on romantic involvement by this point in the story, and here we see why the show held back on that—this confrontation is more exciting than a quiet drift, and it puts a cap on several "Rand is not the simple lad you once knew" moments sprinkled throughout the episode.

 

And, yes, one of them is Rand's inadvertent (if sadly predictable) killing of an Aiel girl he had forged a bond with, and his desperate, fruitless, unsavory attempt to force her back to life. Rand is simultaneously coming to grips with his destiny and with the extent to which he has no idea what he is doing, and both things are already causing pain to the people around him. And as you and I both know, book-Rand has counterproductive and harmful reactions to hurting people he cares about.

 

The attack here is partly an invention of the show and partly a synthesis of a few different book events, but Forsaken coming at Rand directly like this is generally not a thing that happens much. They usually prefer to take up positions of power in the world's various kingdoms and only fight when cornered. All of this is to say, I doubt this is the last we see of Sammael or his Thor-looking One Power hammer, but the show is more than willing to go its own way when it wants to.

 

Lee: Yeah, Rand doing saidin-CPR on Rhuarc’s poor little too-cute-not-to-be-inevitably-killed granddaughter is disturbing as hell—and as you say, it’s terrifying not just because Rand is forcing a corpse to breathe with dark magic, but also because of the place Rand seems to go in his head when he’s doing it. It’s been an oft-repeated axiom that male channelers inevitably go mad—is this it? (Fortunately, no—not yet, at least. Or is it? No! Maybe.)

 

We close the episode out on the place where I think we’re going to probably be spending a lot of time very soon (especially based on the title of next week’s episode, which I won’t spoil but which anyone can look up if they wish): back at the Two Rivers, with the power-trio of Bain and Chiad and Faile scouting out the old Waygate just outside of town, and watching Trollocs swarm out of it. This is not a great sign for Perrin and friends.

 

So we’ve got two episodes left, all of our chess pieces seem to have been set down more or less into the right places for a couple of major climactic events. I think we’re going out with a bang—or with a couple of them. What are you thinking as we jump into the final couple of episodes?

 

Alsera fell victim to one of the classic child character blunders: being too precociously adorable to live.

Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: I am going to reiterate our annual complaint that 10-episode seasons would be better for this show's storytelling than the 8-episode seasons we're getting, but because the show's pace is always so breathless and leaves room for just a few weird character-illuminating diversions like "The Hills of Tanchico," or quiet heart-to-hearts like we get between Rand and Moiraine, or between Perrin and Faile. The show's good enough at these that I wish we had time to pump the brakes more often.

 

But I will say, if we end up roughly where book 4 does, the show doesn't feel as rushed as the first two seasons did. Not that its pacing has settled down at all—you and I benefit immensely from being book readers, and always being rooted in some sense of what is happening and who the characters are that the show can't always convey with perfect clarity. But I am thinking about what still needs to happen, and how much time there is left, and thinking "yeah, they're going to be able to get there" instead of "how the hell are they going to get there??"

 

How are you feeling? Is season 3 hitting for you like it is for me? I know I'm searching around every week to see if there's been a renewal announcement for season 4 (not yet).

 

Lee: I think it’s the best season so far, and any doubts I had during seasons one and two are at this point long gone. I’m all in on this particular turning of the Wheel, and the show finally feels like it's found itself. To not renew it at this point would be criminal. You listening, Bezos? May the Shadow take you if you yank the rug out from under us now!

 

Andrew: Yeah, Jeffrey. I know for a fact you've spent money on worse things than this.

 

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