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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.

Lee: Wow. That was an episode right there. Before we get into the recapping, maybe it’s a good idea to emphasize to the folks who haven’t read the books just what a big deal Rand’s visit to Rhuidean is—and why what he saw was so important.

At least for me, when I got to this point (which happens in book four and is being transposed forward a bit by the show), this felt like the first time author Robert Jordan was willing to pull the curtain back and actually show us something substantive about what’s really happening. We’ve already gotten a couple of flashbacks to Coruscant The Age of Legends in the show, but my recollection is that in the books, Rand’s trip through the glass columns is the first time we really get to see just how advanced things were before the Breaking of the World.

Andrew: Yes! If you’re a showrunner or writer or performer with any relationship with the source material—and Rafe Lee Judkins certainly knows all of these books cover to cover, because you would need to if you wanted to navigate a show through all the ripple effects emanating outward from the changes he’s making—this is probably one of the Big Scenes that you’re thinking about adapting from the start.

Because yes, it’s a big character moment for Rand, but it’s also grappling with some of the story’s big themes—the relationship between past, present, and future and how inextricably they’re all intertwined—and building a world that’s even bigger than the handful of cities and kingdoms our characters have passed through so far.

So do we think they pulled it off? Do you want to start with the Aiel stuff we get before we head into Rhuidean?

Lee: Well, let’s see—we get the sweat tents, and we get Aviendha and Lan having a dance-off over whose weapons are more awesome, and we get our first glimpse at the Shaido Aiel, who will be sticking around as long-term bad guys. We learn that at least one of the Wise Ones, Bair (played by Nukâka Coster-Waldau, real-life spouse of Game of Thrones actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) seems to be able to channel. And we also briefly meet aspiring Shaido clan chief Couladin—a name to remember, because this guy will definitely be back.

I appreciate that we’re actually spending more time with the Aiel here, allowing us to see a few of them as people rather than as tropey desert-dwellers. And I appreciate that we continue to be mercifully free of Robert Jordan’s kinks. The Shaido Wise One Sevanna, for example, is as bedecked in finery and necklaces as her book counterpart, but unlike the book character, the on-screen version of Sevanna seems to have no problem keeping her bodice from constantly falling down.

On the whole, though, the impression the show gives is that being Aiel is hard and the Three-Fold Land sucks. It’s not where I’d want to pop up if I were transported to Randland, that’s for sure.

Andrew: I’ve always liked what the story is doing with Rhuidean, though. For context, it’s a bit like the Accepted test in the White Tower that we see Nynaeve and Egwene take—a big ter’angreal located in the unfinished ruins of a holy city that all Aiel leaders must pass through to prove that they are worthy of leadership. But unlike the Accepted test, which tests your character by throwing you into emotionally fraught hypothetical situations, Rhuidean is about concrete events, what has happened and what may happen.

Playing into the series’ strict One Power-derived gender binary, men have to face the past to see that their proud and mighty warrior race are actually honorless failed pacifists. Women are made to reckon with every possible permutation of the future, no matter how painful.

It’s just an interesting thought experiment, given how many historical errors and atrocities have repeated themselves because we cannot directly transfer firsthand memories from generation to generation. How would leaders lead differently if they could see every action that led their people to this point? If they could glimpse the future implications of their current actions? And isn’t it nice to imagine some all-powerful, neutral, third-party arbiter whose sole purpose is to keep people who don’t deserve to hold power from holding it? Sigh.

Anyway, I think the show visualizes all of this effectively, even if the specifics of some of the memories differ. We can get into the specifics of what is shown, if you like, but we get a lot of Rand and Moiraine here, after a couple of episodes where those characters have been backgrounded a bit.

Lee: I agree—I was afraid that the show would misstep here, but I think they nailed it. I’ve never had a very concrete vision for what the “forest of glass columns” that Rand must traverse is supposed to look like, but I dig the presentation in the show, and the tying together of Rand’s physical steps with stepping back through time. (I also like the trick of having Josha Stradowski in varying degrees of prosthetics playing Rand’s own ancestors, going all the way back to the Age of Legends.)

Your point about leaders perhaps acting differently if forced to face their pasts before assuming leadership is solid, and as we see, some of the Aiel just cannot handle the truth: that for all the ways that honor stratifies their society, they are at their core descended from oath-breakers, offshoots of the “true” pacifist Jenn Aiel who once served the Aes Sedai. Some Aiel, like Couladin’s brother Muradin, are so incapable of accepting that truth that death—along with some self-eyeball-scooping—is the only way forward.

The thing that I appreciate is that the portrayal of the past succeeds for me in the same way that it does in the books—it viscerally drives home the magnitude of what was lost and the incomprehensible tragedy of the fall from peaceful utopia to dark-age squalor. The idea of sending out thousands of chora tree cuttings because it’s literally the last thing that can be done is heart-breaking.

Andrew: “Putting a wig and prosthetics on Josha Stradowski so he can play all of Rand’s ancestors” is more successful in some flashbacks than it is in others. He plays an old guy like a young guy playing an old guy, and it’s hard to mistake him for anything else. I do like the idea of it a lot, though!

But yes, as Rand says to Aviendha once they have both been through the wringer of their respective tests, he now knows enough about the Aiel to know how much he doesn’t know.

We don’t see any of Aviendha’s test, though she enters Rhuidean at the same time as Rand and Moiraine. (Rand enters because he is descended from the Aiel, and they all think he’s probably the central character in a prophecy; Moiraine goes in mainly because an Aiel Wise One accidentally tells her she’ll die if she doesn’t.) At this point we have pointedly not been allowed glimpses into Aviendha or Elayne’s psyches, which makes me wonder if the show is dancing around telling us about A Certain Polycule or if it plans to downplay that relationship altogether.

I feel like the show is too respectful of the major relationships in the books to skip it, but they are playing some cards close to the chest.

Lee: Before we push on, I want to emphasize something to show-watchers that may not have been fully explicated: Yes, that was Lanfear in the deepest flashback. She was a researcher at the Collam Daan—that huge floating sphere, which was an enormous university and center for research. In an effort to find a new Power, one that could be used together by all instead of segregated by gender, she and a team of other powerful channelers create what the books call “The Bore”—a hole, drilled through the pattern of reality into the Dark One’s prison.

I loved the way this was portrayed on screen—it perfectly matched what I’ve been seeing in my head for all these years, with the sky crinkling up into screaming blackness as the Collam Daan drops to the ground and shatters.

Good stuff. Definitely my favorite moment of the episode. What was yours?

Andrew: Oh yeah that was super cool and unsettling.

As we see from both Moiraine and Aviendha, the women’s version of the test isn’t the glass columns, but a series of rings. You jump in and spin around like you’re a kid at space camp in that zero-g spinny thing. I am sure that it has a name and that you know what the name is.

Andrew: Everything we see of Moiraine’s vision is presented in a way that mirrors this spinning—each flip is another possible future, which we get to see just a glimpse of in passing before we flip over to the next thing. Most of the visions are Rand-centric, obviously. Sometimes Moiraine is killing Rand; sometimes she’s bowing to him; sometimes things get Spicy between the two of them.

But the one thing that comes back over and over again, and the most memorable bit of the episode for me, is a long string of visions where Lanfear kills Moiraine, over and over and over again.

Both Moiraine and Rand have been playing footsy with Lanfear this season, imagining that they can use her knowledge and Lews Therin lust to get one over on their enemies. But both Rand and Moiraine have now seen firsthand that Lanfear is not someone you can trust, not even a little. She’s vengeful and brutal and as close to directly responsible for the Current State Of The World as it’s possible to be (though the flashback we see her in leaves open the possibility that it was accidental, at least at first). What Rand and Moiraine choose to do with this knowledge is an open question, since the show is mostly charting its own path here.

Lee: Agreed, that was well done—and was a neat way of using the medium as a part of the storytelling, incorporating the visual metaphor of a wheel forever turning.

You’re also right that we’re kind of off the map here with what’s going to happen next. In the books, several other very important things have happened before we make it to Rhuidean, and Rand’s relationship with Moiraine is in a vastly different state, and there are, shall we say, more characters participating.

Pulling Rhuidean forward in the story must have been a difficult choice to make, since it’s one of the key events in the series, but having seen it done, I gotta commend the showrunners. It was the right call.

Andrew: We wrote about this way back in the first season, but I keep coming back to it.

The show’s most consequential change was the decision to center Rosamund Pike’s Moiraine as a more fully realized main character, where the books spent most of their time centering Rand and the Two Rivers crew and treating Moiraine as an aloof and unknowable cipher. Ultimately an ally, but one who the characters (and to some extent, the readers) usually couldn’t fully trust.

Lee: I feel like we should leave it here—maybe with one final word of praise from me for Rand’s dragon marks, which I thought looked fantastic. And it’s a good thing, too, because he’s going to keep them for the rest of the series. (Though I suspect the wardrobe folks will do everything they can to keep Rand in long sleeves to avoid what is likely at least an hour or two in the make-up chair.)

It’s a pensive ending, and everyone who emerges from Rhuidean emerges changed. Rand marches out from the city as the dawn breaks, fulfilling prophecy as he does so, carrying an unconscious Moiraine in his dragon-branded arms. Rand has the look of someone who’s glimpsed a hard road ahead, and we fade out to the credits with a foreboding lack of dialog. What fell things will sunrise—and the next episode—bring?!