Tom Cruise is back for what may (or may not) be his final turn as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible—Final Reckoning.
After giving CinemaCon attendees a sneak peek last week, Paramount Pictures has publicly released the trailer for Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, the eighth installment of the blockbuster spy franchise starring Tom Cruise as IMF agent Ethan Hunt, and a sequel to the events that played out in 2023’s Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning.
This may, or may not, end up being Cruise’s last film in the franchise; everyone’s being pretty cagey about that question. But the trailer certainly gives us everything we’ve come to expect from the Mission: Impossible films: high stakes, global political intrigue, and of course, lots and lots of spectacular stunt work, including Cruise hanging precariously mid-air from a 1930s Boeing Stearman biplane.
(Spoilers for Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning below.)
For those whose memory of Dead Reckoning‘s plot is dim, Hunt and his team became embroiled in a global chase to find the two keys capable of controlling a rogue sentient AI dubbed The Entity. Both were needed to unlock a chamber aboard a Russian stealth submarine that contained The Entity’s source code, so the possessor of those keys could control or (preferably) destroy the AI. Hunt managed to acquire the two keys and fled by paraglider, reuniting with his BFF and fellow field agent Benji (Simon Pegg), intending to complete the mission and shut down The Entity.
Given that Final Reckoning is a continuation of that film, naturally Cruise and Pegg aren’t the only returning cast members. Also reprising their roles are Ving Rhames as IMF computer technician Luther Stickell; Hayley Atwell as thief-turned-IMF agent Grace; Vanessa Kirby as black market arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis (aka the White Widow); Esai Morales as Gabriel, an assassin who serves as The Entity’s liaison; Pom Klementieff as Gabriel’s fellow assassin who joined forces with Hunt after Gabriel betrayed her; Angela Bassett as former CIA director and now US President Erika Sloane; Henry Czerny as former IMF director Eugene Kittridge, who now heads the CIA; and Rolf Saxon as CIA analyst William Donloe.
An AI program enters the real world in TRON: Ares.
It’s difficult to underestimate the massive influence that Disney’s 1982 cult science fiction film, TRON, had on both the film industry—thanks to combining live action with what were then groundbreaking visual effects, rife with computer-generated imagery—and on nerd culture at large. Over the ensuing decades there has been one sequel, an animated TV series, a comic book miniseries, video games, and theme park attractions, all modeled on director Steve Lisberg’s original fictional world.
Now we’re getting a third installment in the film franchise: TRON: Ares, directed by Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil), that serves as a standalone sequel to 2010’s TRON: Legacy. Disney just released the first trailer and poster art, and while the footage is short on plot, it’s got the show-stopping visuals we’ve come to expect from all things TRON.
(Spoilers for ending of TRON: Legacy below.)
TRON: Legacy ended with Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) from the original film, preventing the digital world from bleeding into the real world, as planned by the Grid’s malevolent ruling program, Clu. He brought with him Quorra (Olivia Wilde), a naturally occurring isomorphic algorithm targeted for extinction by Clu.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Placko called the new policy “not just a policy change” but “a seismic shift.”
Rob Daviau, who helps run Restoration Games and designed hit games like Pandemic Legacy, has been writing on social media for months about the fact that every meeting he’s in “has been an existential crisis about our industry.”
Expanding on his remarks in an interview with BoardGameWire late last year, Daviau added that he was a natural pessimist who foresaw a “great collapse in the hobby gaming market in the US” if tariffs were implemented.
Gamers aren’t likely to stop playing, but they might stick with their back catalog (gamers are notorious for having “shelves of shame” featuring hot new games they purchased without playing them… because other hot new games had already appeared). Or they might, in search of a better deal, shop only online, which could be tough on already struggling local game stores. Or games might decline in quality to keep costs lower. None of which is likely to lead to a robust, high-quality board gaming ecosystem.
Stegmaier’s forecast is nearly as dark as Daviau’s. “Within a few months US companies will lose a lot of money and/or go out of business,” he wrote, “and US citizens will suffer from extreme inflation.”
The new tariffs can be avoided by shipping directly from the factories to firms in other countries, such as a European distributor, but the US remains a crucial market for US game makers; Stegmaier notes that “65 percent of our sales are in the US, so this will take a heavy toll.”
For games still in the production pipeline, at least budgetary adjustments can be made, but some games have already been planned, produced, and shipped. If the boat arrives after the tariffs go into effect—too bad. The US importer still has to pay the extra fees. Chris Solis, who runs Solis Game Studio in California, issued an angry statement yesterday covering exactly this situation, saying, “I have 8,000 games leaving a factory in China this week and now need to scramble to cover the import bill.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds returns this summer with ten new episodes.
Paramount+ has dropped a tantalizing one-minute teaser for the upcoming third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds., and it looks like the latest adventures of the starship Enterprise will bring romance, comedy, mystery, and even a bit of analog tech, not to mention a brand new villain.
(Some spoilers for S2 below)
We haven’t seen much from the third season to date. There was an exclusive clip during San Diego Comic Con last summer—a callback to the S2 episode “Charades,” in which a higher-dimensional race, the Kerkohvians, accidentally reconfigured Spock’s half-human, half-Vulcan physiology to that of a full-blooded human, just before Spock was supposed to meet his Vulcan fiancee’s parents. The S3 clip had the situation reversed: The human crew had to make themselves Vulcan to succeed on a new mission but weren’t able to change back.
The S2 finale found the Enterprise under vicious attack by the Gorn, who were in the midst of invading one of the Federation’s colony worlds. Several crew members were kidnapped (La’an, M’Benga, Ortegas, and Sam), along with other survivors of the attack. Pike faced a momentous decision: follow orders to retreat, or disobey them to rescue his crew. In October, we learned that Pike naturally chose the latter. New footage shown at New York City Comic-Con picked up where the finale left off, giving us the kind of harrowing high-stakes pitched space battle against a ferocious enemy that has long been a hallmark of the franchise.
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 three will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers episode five, “Tel’Aran’Rhiod,” which was released on March 27.
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?
“Let it go, let it goooooo…” A Sea Folk Windfinder, doing her thing.
Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
“Let it go, let it goooooo…” A Sea Folk Windfinder, doing her thing. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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.)
My eyes see Elaida Sedai, but my ears and heart hear Chrisjen Avasarala saying “Sometimes I f—ing hate being right.”
My eyes see Elaida Sedai, but my ears and heart hear Chrisjen Avasarala saying “Sometimes I f—ing hate being right.”
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?
Alanna Sedai’s intuition is right on the money.
Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
Alanna Sedai’s intuition is right on the money. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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.
Hey, it’s Faile, and I don’t hate her!
Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
Hey, it’s Faile, and I don’t hate her! Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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: Right, I seem to remember the dissembling about Egwene’s Sedai-ishness resulting in some kind of extended spanking session, that being the punishment the Book Wise Ones (and the Book Aes Sedai) were most likely to hand out. I think the characters’ pretending to be full Sisters and all the wacky hijinks that ensue are being dispensed with, and I am pretty okay with that.
The Sea Folk wear tops!
Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
The Sea Folk wear tops! Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
Andrew: That’s the thing, I’m not sure the characters pretending to be full Sisters is being dispensed with. The show’s just dropping breadcrumbs so that they’re there later, if/when they want to make a Big Deal out of them. We’ll see whether they make the time or not.
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!
The buddy comedy we didn’t know we needed.
Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
The buddy comedy we didn’t know we needed. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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.
There are constant reminders that Mat may be heading toward a dark fate.
Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
There are constant reminders that Mat may be heading toward a dark fate. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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: There are a whole lot of “the crew spends a bunch of time in a city you’ve never seen before, accomplishing little-to-nothing” plotlines I think you’re conflating. Tanchico is a Book 4 thing, and it’s also mostly resolved in Book 4; the interminable one you are probably thinking of is Ebou Dar, where characters spend three or four increasingly tedious books. Far Madding is later and at least has the benefit of being brief-ish.
Perrin dreams of peaceful times—and of hanging out with Hopper!
Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
Perrin dreams of peaceful times—and of hanging out with Hopper! Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
Lee: Ahhh, yes, you are absolutely correct! My Randland mental map is a bit tattered these days. So many city-states. So many flags. So many import and export crops to keep track of.
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?
Egwene, entering the “finding out” phase of her ill-advised nighttime adventures.
Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
Egwene, entering the “finding out” phase of her ill-advised nighttime adventures. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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.
Marching bands? Mammalian Nurturables? An ORTBO? Yup, Severance stays weird.
Severance has just wrapped up its second season. I sat down with fellow Ars staffers Aaron Zimmerman and Lee Hutchinson to talk through what we had just seen, covering everything from those goats to the show’s pacing. Warning: Huge spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 follow!
Nate: Severance season 1 was a smaller-scale, almost claustrophobic show about a crazy office, its “waffle parties,” and the personal life of Mark Scout, mourning his dead wife and “severing” his consciousness to avoid that pain. It followed a compact group of characters, centered around the four “refiners” who worked on Lumon’s severed floor. But season 2 blew up that cozy/creepy world and started following more characters—including far more “outies”—to far more places. Did the show manage to maintain its unique vibe while making significant changes to pacing, character count, and location?
Lee: I think so, but as you say, things were different this time around. One element that I’m glad carried through was the show’s consistent use of a very specific visual language. (I am an absolute sucker for visual storytelling. My favorite Kubrick film is Barry Lyndon. I’ll forgive a lot of plot holes if they’re beautifully shot.) Season 2, especially in the back half, treats us to an absolute smorgasbord of incredible visuals—bifurcated shots symbolizing severance and duality, stark whites and long hallways, and my personal favorite: Chris Walken in a black turtleneck seated in front of a fireplace, like Satan holding court in Hell. The storytelling might be a bit less focused, but it looks great.
So many visual metaphors in one frame.
Credit: AppleTV+
So many visual metaphors in one frame. Credit: AppleTV+
Aaron: I think it succeeded overall, with caveats. The most prominent thing lost in the transition was the tight pacing of the first season; while season 2 started and ended strong, the middle meandered quite a bit, and I’d say the overall pacing felt pretty off. Doing two late-season “side quest” episodes (Gemma/Mark and Cobel backstories) was a bit of a drag. But I agree with Lee—Severance was more about vibes than narrative focus this season.
Nate: The “side quests” were vocally disliked by a subsection of the show’s fandom, and it certainly is an unusual choice to do two episodes in a row that essentially leave all your main characters to the side. But I don’t think these were really outliers. This is a season, for instance, that opened with a show about the innies—and then covered the exact same ground in episode two from the outies’ perspective. It also sent the whole cast off on a bizarre “ORTBO” that took an entire episode and spent a lot of time talking about Kier’s masturbating, and possibly manufactured, twin. (!)
Still, the “side quest” episodes stood out even among all this experimentation with pace and flow. But I think the label “side quest” can be a misnomer. The episode showing us the Gemma/Mark backstory not only brought the show’s main character into focus, it revealed what was happening to Gemma and gave many new hints about what Lumon was up to. In other words—it was about Big Stuff.
Even when we’re outside, the show sticks to a palette of black and white and cold. Winter is almost as much of a character in Severance as our four refiners are.
Credit: AppleTV+
Even when we’re outside, the show sticks to a palette of black and white and cold. Winter is almost as much of a character in Severance as our four refiners are. Credit: AppleTV+
The episode featuring Cobel, in contrast, found time for long, lingering drone shots of the sea, long takes of Cobel lying in bed, and long views of rural despair… and all to find a notebook. To me, this seemed much more like an actual “side quest” that could have been an interwoven B plot in a more normal episode.
Lee: The “side quest” I didn’t all mind was episode 7, “Chikhai Bardo,” directed by the show’s cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné. The tale of Mark and Gemma’s relationship—a tale begun while donating blood using Lumon-branded equipment, with the symbolism of Lumon as a blood-hungry faceless machine being almost disturbingly on-the-nose—was masterfully told. I wasn’t as much of a fan of the three episodes after that, but I think that’s just because episode 7 was just so well done. I like TV that makes me feel things, and that one succeeded.
Aaron: Completely agree. I love the Gemma/Mark episode, but I was very disappointed with the Cobel episode (it doesn’t help that I dislike her as a character generally, and the whole “Cobel invented severance!” thing seemed a bit convenient and unearned to me). I think part of the issue for me was that the core innie crew and the hijinks they got up to in season 1 felt like the beating heart of the show, so even though the story had to move on at some point (and it’s not going back—half the innies can’t even be innies anymore), I started to miss what made me fall in love with the show.
Harmony Cobel comes home to the ether factory.
Credit: AppleTV+
Harmony Cobel comes home to the ether factory. Credit: AppleTV+
Lee: I get the narrative motivation behind Cobel having invented the severance chip (along with every line of code and every function, as she tells us), but yeah, that was the first time the show threw something at me that I really did not like. I see how this lets the story move Cobel into a helper role with Mark’s reintegration, but, yeah, ugh, that particular development felt tremendously unearned, as you say. I love the character, but that one prodded my suspension of disbelief pretty damn hard.
Speaking of Mark’s reintegration—I was so excited when episode three (“Who is Alive?”) ended with Mark’s outie slamming down on the Lumon conference room table. Surely now after two catch-up episodes, I thought, we’d get this storyline moving! Having the next episode (“Woe’s Hollow”) focusing on the ORTBO and Kier’s (possibly fictional) twin was a little cheap, even though it was a great episode. But where I started to get really annoyed was when we slide into episode five (“Trojan’s Horse”) with Mark’s reintegration apparently stalled. It seems like from then to the end of the season, reintegration proceeded in fits and starts, at the speed of plot rather than in any kind of ordered fashion.
It was one of the few times where I felt like my time was being wasted by the showrunners. And I don’t like that feeling. That feels like Lost.
Kind of wish they’d gone a little harder here.
Credit: AppleTV+
Kind of wish they’d gone a little harder here. Credit: AppleTV+
Aaron: Yes! Mark’s reintegration was handled pretty poorly, I think. Like you said, it was exciting to see the show go there so early… but it didn’t really make much difference for the rest of the season. It makes sense that reintegration would take time—and we do see flashes of it happening throughout the season—but it felt like the show was gearing up for some wild Petey-level reintegration stuff that just never came. Presumably that’s for season 3, but the reintegration stuff was just another example of what felt like the show spinning its wheels a bit. And like you said, Lee, when it feels like a show isn’t quite sure what to do with the many mysteries it introduces week after week, I start to think about Lost, and not in a good way.
The slow-rolled reintegration stuff was essential for the finale, though. Both seasons seemed to bank pretty hard on a “slow buildup to an explosive finale” setup, which felt a little frustrating this season (season 1’s finale is one of my favorite TV show episodes of all time).
But I think the finale worked. Just scene after scene of instantly iconic moments. The scene of innie and outtie Mark negotiating through a camcorder in that weird maternity cabin was brilliant. And while my initial reaction to Mark’s decision at the end was anger, I really should have seen it coming—outtie Mark could not have been more patronizing in the camcorder conversation. I guess I, like outtie Mark, saw innie Mark as being somewhat lesser than.
What did you guys think of the finale?
Nate: A solid effort, but one that absolutely did not reach the heights of season 1. It was at its best when characters and events from the season played critical moments—such as the altercation between Drummond, Mark, and Feral Goat Lady, or the actual (finally!) discovery of the elevator to the Testing Floor.
But the finale also felt quite strange or unbalanced in other ways. Ricken doesn’t make an appearance, despite the hint that he was willing to retool his book (pivotal in season 1) for the Lumon innies. Burt doesn’t show up. Irving is gone. So is Reghabi. Miss Huang was summarily dismissed without having much of a story arc. So the finale failed to “gather up all its threads” in the way it did during season one.
And then there was that huge marching band, which ups the number of severed employees we know about by a factor of 50x—and all so they could celebrate the achievements of an innie (Mark S.) who is going to be dismissed and whose wife is apparently going to be killed. This seemed… fairly improbable, even for Lumon. On the other hand, this is a company/cult with an underground sacrificial goat farm, so what do I know about “probability”? Speaking of which, how do we feel about the Goat Revelations ™?
This is Emile, and he must be protected at all costs.
Credit: AppleTV+
This is Emile, and he must be protected at all costs. Credit: AppleTV+
Lee: I’m still not entirely sure what the goat revelations were. They were being raised in order to be crammed into coffins and sacrificed when… things happen? Poor little Emile was going to ride to the afterlife with Gemma, apparently, but, like… why? Is it simply part of a specifically creepy Lumontology ritual? Emile’s little casket had all kinds of symbology engraved on it, and we know goats (or at least “the ram”) symbolizes Malice in Kier’s four tempers, but I’m still really not getting this one.
Aaron: Yeah, you kind of had to hand-wave a lot of the stuff in the finale. The goats just being sacrificial animals made me laugh—“OK, I guess it wasn’t that deep.” But it could be that we don’t really know their actual purpose yet.
Perhaps most improbable to me was that this was apparently the most important day in Lumon history, and they had basically one security guy on the premises. He’s a big dude—or was (outtie Mark waking up mid-accidental-shooting cracked me up)—but come on.
Stuff like the marching band doesn’t make a lick of sense. But it was a great scene, so, eh, just go with it. That seems to be what Severance is asking us to do more and more, and honestly, I’m mostly OK with that.
This man can do anything.
Credit: AppleTV+
This man can do anything. Credit: AppleTV+
Nate: Speaking of important days in Lumon history… what is Lumon up to, exactly? Jame Eagen spoke in season 1 about his “revolving,” he watched Helena eat eggs without eating anything himself, and he appears on the severed floor to watch the final “Cold Harbor” test. Clearly something weird is afoot. But the actual climactic test on Gemma was just to see if the severance block could hold her personalities apart even when facing deep traumas.
However, (as Miss Casey) she had already been in the presence of her husband (Mark S.), and neither of them had known it. So the show seems to suggest on the one hand that whatever is happening on the testing floor will change the world. But on the other hand, it’s really just confirming what we already know. And surely there’s no need to kidnap people if the goal is just to help them compartmentalize pain; as our current epidemic of drug and alcohol use show, plenty of people would sign up for this voluntarily. So what’s going on? Or, if you have no theories, does the show give you confidence that it knows where it’s going?
Lee: The easy answer—that severance chips will somehow allow the vampire spirit of Kier to jump bodies forever—doesn’t really line up. If Chris Walken’s husband Walter Bishop is to be believed, the severance procedure is only 12 years old. So it’s not that, at least.
Though Nate’s point about Helena eating eggs—and Jame’s comment that he wished she would “take them raw”—does echo something we learned back in season one: that Kier Egan’s favorite breakfast was raw eggs and milk.
Eggiwegs! I would like… to eat them raw?
Credit: AppleTV+
Eggiwegs! I would like… to eat them raw? Credit: AppleTV+
Aaron: That’s the question for season 3, I think, and whether they’re able to give satisfying answers will determine how people view this show in the long term. I’ll admit that I was much more confident in the show’s writers after the first season; this season has raised some concerns for me. I believe Ben Stiller has said that they know how the show ends, just not how it gets there. That’s a perilous place to be.
Nate: We’ve groused a bit about the show’s direction, but I think it’s fair to say it comes from a place of love; the storytelling and visual style is so special, and we’ve had our collective hearts broken so many times by shows that can’t stick the landing. (I want those hours back, Lost.) I’m certainly rooting for Severance to succeed. And even though this season wasn’t perfect, I enjoyed watching every minute of it. As we wrap things up, anyone have a favorite moment from season 2? I personally enjoyed Milchick getting salty, first with Drummond and then with a wax statue of Kier.
Lee: Absolutely! I very much want the show to stick the eventual landing. I have to go with you on your take, Nate—Milchick steals the show. Tramell Tillman plays him like a true company man, with the added complexity that comes when your company is also the cult that controls your life. My favorite bits with him are his office decorations, frankly—the rabbit/duck optical illusion statue, showing his mutable nature, and the iceberg poster, hinting at hidden depths. He’s fantastic. I would 100 percent watch a spin-off series about Milchick.
Mr. Milchick’s office, filled with ambiguousness. I’m including Miss Huang in that description, too.
Credit: AppleTV+
Mr. Milchick’s office, filled with ambiguousness. I’m including Miss Huang in that description, too. Credit: AppleTV+
Aaron: This season gave me probably my favorite line in the whole series—Irv’s venomous “Yes! Do it, Seth!” as Helena is telling Milchick to flip the switch to bring back Helly R. But yeah, Milchick absolutely killed it this season. “Devour feculence” and the drum major scene were highlights, but I also loved his sudden sprint from the room after handing innie Dylan his outtie’s note. Severance can be hilarious.
And I agree, complaints aside, this show is fantastic. It’s incredibly unique, and I looked forward to watching it every week so I could discuss it with friends. Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait three more years for the next season.
Anyone who has suffered the indignity of a splinter, a blister, or a paper cut knows that small things can sometimes be hugely annoying. You aren’t going to die from any of these conditions, but it’s still hard to focus when, say, the back of your right foot is rubbing a new blister against the inside of your not-quite-broken-in-yet hiking boots.
I found myself in the computing version of this situation yesterday, when I was trying to work on a new Mac Mini and was brought up short by the fact that my third mouse button (that is, clicking on the scroll wheel) did nothing. This was odd, because I have for many years assigned this button to “Mission Control” on macOS—a feature that tiles every open window on your machine, making it quick and easy to switch apps. When I got the new Mini, I immediately added this to my settings. Boom!
And yet there I was, a couple hours later, clicking the middle mouse button by reflex and getting no result. This seemed quite odd—had I only imagined that I made the settings change? I made the alteration again in System Settings and went back to work.
But after a reboot later that day to install an OS update, I found that my shortcut setting for Mission Control had once again been wiped away. This wasn’t happening with any other settings changes, and it was strangely vexing.
When it happened a third time, I switched into full “research and destroy the problem” mode. One of my Ars colleagues commiserated with me, writing, “This kind of powerful-annoying stuff is just so common. I swear at least once every few months, some shortcut or whatever just stops working, and sometimes, after a week or so, it starts working again. No rhyme, reason, or apparent causality except that computers are just [unprintable expletives].”
But even if computers are [unprintable expletives], their problems have often been encountered and fixed by some other poor soul. So I turned to the Internet for help… and immediately stumbled upon an Apple discussion thread called “MacOS mouse shortcuts are reset upon restart or shutdown.” The poster—and most of those replying—said that the odd behavior had only appeared in macOS Sequoia. One reply claimed to have identified the source of the bug and offered a fix:
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 three will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers episode four, “The Road to the Spear,” which was released on March 20.
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.
Sevanna’s hat is extremely fancy. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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.
Sometimes the make-up works, sometimes it feels a little forced. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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?
This is not a good sign. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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.
And unlike in the books, nobody has to do this naked! Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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.
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.
“Twice and twice shall he be marked.” Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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?!
It’s worth clarifying that AI models did not generate the images used in the study. Instead, researchers used popular, pre-existing meme templates, and GPT-4o or human participants generated captions for them.
More memes, not better memes
When crowdsourced participants rated the memes, those created entirely by AI models scored higher on average in humor, creativity, and shareability. The researchers defined shareability as a meme’s potential to be widely circulated, influenced by humor, relatability, and relevance to current cultural topics. They note that this study is among the first to show AI-generated memes outperforming human-created ones across these metrics.
However, the study comes with an important caveat. On average, fully AI-generated memes scored higher than those created by humans alone or humans collaborating with AI. But when researchers looked at the best individual memes, humans created the funniest examples, and human-AI collaborations produced the most creative and shareable memes. In other words, AI models consistently produced broadly appealing memes, but humans—with or without AI help—still made the most exceptional individual examples.
Diagrams of meme creation and evaluation workflows taken from the paper. Credit: Wu et al.
The study also found that participants using AI assistance generated significantly more meme ideas and described the process as easier and requiring less effort. Despite this productivity boost, human-AI collaborative memes did not rate higher on average than memes humans created alone. As the researchers put it, “The increased productivity of human-AI teams does not lead to better results—just to more results.”
Participants who used AI assistance reported feeling slightly less ownership over their creations compared to solo creators. Given that a sense of ownership influenced creative motivation and satisfaction in the study, the researchers suggest that people interested in using AI should carefully consider how to balance AI assistance in creative tasks.
Ana de Armas stars as an assassin in training in From the World of John Wick: Ballerina.
Lionsgate dropped a new trailer for Ballerina—or, as the studio is now calling it, From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, because what every film needs is a needlessly clunky title. There’s nothing clunky about this new trailer, however: It’s the stylized, action-packed dose of pure adrenaline one would expect from the franchise, and it ends with Ana de Armas’ titular ballerina facing off against none other than John Wick himself (Keanu Reeves).
(Spoilers for 2019’s John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum.)
Chronologically, Ballerina takes place during the events of John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. As previously reported, Parabellum found Wick declared excommunicado from the High Table for killing crime lord Santino D’Antonio on the grounds of the Continental. On the run with a bounty on his head, he makes his way to the headquarters of the Ruska Roma crime syndicate, led by the Director (Anjelica Huston). That’s where we learned Wick was originally named Jardani Jovonovich and trained as an assassin with the syndicate. The Director also trains young girls to be ballerina-assassins, and one young ballerina (played by Unity Phelan) is shown rehearsing in the scene. That dancer, Eve Macarro, is the main character in Ballerina, now played by de Armas.
Huston returns as the Director, Ian McShane is back as Winston, and Lance Reddick makes one final (posthumous) appearance as the Continental concierge, Charon. New cast members include Gabriel Byrne as main villain the Chancellor, who turns an entire town against Eve; Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Nogi, Eve’s mentor; Norman Reedus as Daniel Pine; and Catalina Sandino Moreno and David Castaneda in as-yet-undisclosed roles.
The directors adopted more of a colorful 1990s aesthetic than the haunting art that originally inspired their film. While some fans of Stålenhag’s work expressed disappointment at this artistic choice, the artist himself had nothing but praise. “When you paint or draw something, you can do anything,” Stålenhag has said. ‘There are no constraints other than the time you spend painting. To see a live action movie make something I painted and to see it so truthfully translated impressed me on all levels.”
Bringing a vision to life
The task of bringing that aesthetic to the screen fell to people like Oscar-winning production designer Dennis Gassner, whose many credits include Barton Fink, Bugsy, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Truman Show, Blade Runner 2049, Skyfall, Quantum of Solace, Spectre, Into the Woods, and Big Fish. (In fact, there’s a carousel featured in the design of the Happyland amusement park that Gassner first used in Big Fish.) He and Richard L. Johnson (Pacific Rim, The Avengers) led a team that not only designed and constructed more than 100 sets for the film, but also created a host of original robot characters to augment the ones featured in Stålenhag’s book.
On set during filming of The Electric State Netflix
All the robots featured in the film have their own stories, “distinct personalities and emotional arcs,” per Anthony Russo. The directors wanted the robots to “feel authentic to the alternate 1990s but still had roots in recognizable designs,” according to Joe Russo—the kinds of things one would see in vintage commercials, shopping malls, corporate branding, and so forth. “Everything is story,” Gassner told Ars. “Story is paramount. What story are you telling? Who are the characters in this story? What are their environments? How do they feel within the environments?”
Gassner’s team designed about 175 robots all told, selecting their favorites to be featured in the final film. “It’s like a great casting call,” Gassner said. “So we played a lot, there was a long time of development in the art department between myself and a vast team of artists. We worked very closely with the visual effects department, but what the characters look like are part of the art department, and our collaboration with Joe and Anthony Russo on the study of characters. That was the fun part, getting the shape right, the character right, the color right, the clothing right.”