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Andrew: Standard sci-fi/fantasy storytelling rules apply here as far as I’m concerned—if you don’t see a corpse, they can always reappear (cf. Thom Merrillin, The Wheel of Time season 3, episode 6).

For example! When the Cauthon sisters fricassee Eamon Valda to avenge their mother and Alanna laughs joyfully at the sight of his charred corpse? That’s a death you ain’t coming back from.

Even assuming that Loial’s plot armor has fallen off, the way we’ve seen the show shift and consolidate storylines means it’s impossible to say how the presence or absence of one character or another couple ripple outward. This episode alone introduces a bunch of fairly major shifts that could play out in unpredictable ways next season.

But let’s back up! The show takes a break from its usual hopping and skipping to focus entirely on one plot thread this week: Perrin’s adventures in the Two Rivers. This is a Big Book Moment; how do you think it landed?

Lee: I would call the Battle of the Two Rivers one of the most important events that happens in the front half of the series. It is certainly a defining moment for Perrin’s character, where he grows up and becomes a Man-with-a-capital-M. It is possibly done better in the books, but only because the book has the advantage of being staged in our imaginations; I’ll always see it as bigger and more impactful than anything a show or movie could give us.

Though it was a hell of a battle, yeah. The improvements in pulling off large set pieces continues to scale from season to season—comparing this battle to the Bel Tine fight back in the first bits of season 1 shows not just better visual effects or whatever, but just flat-out better composition and clearer storytelling. The show continues to prove that it has found its footing.

Did the reprise of the Manetheren song work for you? This has been sticky for me—I want to like it. I see what the writers are trying to do, and I see how “this is a song we all just kind of grew up singing” is given new meaning when it springs from characters’ bloody lips on the battlefield. But it just… doesn’t work for me. It makes me feel cringey, and I wish it didn’t. It’s probably the only bit in the entire episode that I felt was a swing and a miss.

Andrew: Forgive me in advance for what I think is about to be a short essay but it is worth talking about when evaluating the show as an adaptation of the original work.

Part of the point of the Two Rivers section in The Shadow Rising is that it helps to back up something we’ve seen in our Two Rivers expats over the course of the first books in the series—that there is a hidden strength in this mostly ignored backwater of Randland.

To the extent that the books are concerned with Themes, the two big overarching ones are that strength and resilience come from unexpected places and that heroism is what happens when regular, flawed, scared people step up and Do What Needs To Be Done under terrible circumstances. (This is pure Tolkien, and that’s the difference between The Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire—WoT wants to build on LotR‘s themes and ASoIaF is mainly focused on subverting them.)

But to get back to what didn’t work for you about this, the strength of the Two Rivers is meant to be more impressive and unexpected because these people all view themselves, mostly, as quiet farmers and hunters, not as the exiled heirs to some legendary kingdom (a la Malkier). They don’t go around singing songs about How Virtuous And Bold Was Manetheren Of Old, or whatever. Manetheren is as distant to them as the Roman Empire, and those stories don’t put food on the table.

So yeah, it worked for me as an in-the-moment plot device. The show had already played the “Perrin Rallies His Homeland With A Rousing Speech” card once or twice, and you want to mix things up. I doubt it was even a blip for non-book-readers. But it is a case, as with the Cauthon sisters’ Healing talents, where the show has to take what feels like too short a shortcut.

Lee: That’s a good set of points, yeah. And I don’t hate it—it’s just not the way I would have done it. (Though, hah, that’s a terribly easy thing to say from behind the keyboard here, without having to own the actual creative responsibility of dragging this story into the light.)

In amongst the big moments were a bunch of nice little character bits, too—the kinds of things that keep me coming back to the show. Perrin’s glowering, teeth-gritted exchange with Whitecloak commander Dain Bornhald was great, though my favorite bit was the almost-throwaway moment where Perrin catches up with the Cauthon sisters and gives them an update on Mat. The two kids absolutely kill it, transforming from sober and traumatized young people into giggling little sisters immediately at the sight of their older brother’s sketch. Not even blowing the Horn of Valere can save you from being made fun of by your sisters. (The other thing that scene highlighted was that Perrin, seated, is about the same height as Faile standing. She’s tiny!)

We also close the loop a bit on the Tinkers, who, after being present in flashback a couple of episodes ago, finally show back up on screen—complete with Aram, who has somewhat of a troubling role in the books. The guy seems to have a destiny that will take him away from his family, and that destiny grabs firmly ahold of him here.

Andrew: Yeah, I think the show is leaving the door open for Aram to have a happier ending than he has in the books, where being ejected from his own community makes him single-mindedly obsessed with protecting Perrin in a way that eventually curdles. Here, he might at least find community among good Two Rivers folk. We’ll see.

The entire Whitecloak subplot is something that stretches out interminably in the books, as many side-plots do. Valda lasts until Book 11 (!). Dain Bornhald holds his grudge against Perrin (still unresolved here, but on a path toward resolution) until Book 14. The show has jumped around before, but I think this is the first time we’ve seen it pull something forward from that late, which it almost certainly needs to do more of if it hopes to get to the end in whatever time is allotted to it (we’re still waiting for a season 4 renewal).

Lee: Part of that, I think, is the Zeno’s Paradox-esque time-stretching that occurs as the series gets further on—we’ll keep this free of specific spoilers, of course, but it’s not really a spoiler to say that as the books go on, less time passes per book. My unrefreshed off-the-top-of-my-head recollection is that there are, like, four, possibly five, books—written across almost a decade of real time—that cover like a month or two of in-universe time passing.

This gets into the area of time that book readers commonly refer to as “The Slog,” which slogs at maximum slogginess around book 10 (which basically retreads all the events of book nine and shows us what all the second-string characters were up to while the starting players were off doing big world-changing things). Without doing any more criticizing than the implicit criticizing I’ve already done, The Slog is something I’m hoping that the show obviates or otherwise does away with, and I think we’re seeing the ways in which such slogginess will be shed.

There are a few other things to wrap up here, I think, but this episode being so focused on a giant battle—and doing that battle well!—doesn’t leave us with a tremendous amount to recap. Do we want to get into Bain and Chiad trying to steal kisses from Loial? It’s not in the book—at least, I don’t think it was!—but it feels 100 percent in character for all involved. (Loial, of course, would never kiss outside of marriage.)

Andrew: All the Bain and Chiad in this episode is great—I appreciate when the show decides to subtitle the Maiden Of The Spear hand-talk and when it lets context and facial expressions convey the meaning. All of the Alanna/Maksim stuff is great. Alanna calling in a storm that rains spikes of ice on all their enemies is cool. Daise Congar throwing away her flask after touching the One Power for the first time was a weird vaudevillian comic beat that still made me laugh (and you do get a bit more, in here, that shows why people who haven’t formally learned how to channel generally shouldn’t try it). There’s a thread in the books where everyone in the Two Rivers starts referring to Perrin as a lord, which he hates and which is deployed a whole bunch of times here.

I find myself starting each of these episodes by taking fairly detailed notes, and by the middle of the episode I catch myself having not written anything for minutes at a time because I am just enjoying watching the show. On the topic of structure and pacing, I will say that these episodes that make time to focus on a single thread also make more room for quiet character moments. On the rare occasions that we get a less-than-frenetic episode I just wish we could have more of them.

Lee: I find that I’m running out of things to say here—not because this episode is lacking, but because like an arrow loosed from a Two Rivers longbow, this episode hurtles us toward the upcoming season finale. We’ve swept the board clean of all the Perrin stuff, and I don’t believe we’re going to get any more of it next week. Next week—and at least so far, I haven’t cheated and watched the final screener!—feels like we’re going to resolve Tanchico and, more importantly, Rand’s situation out in the Aiel Waste.

But Loial’s unexpected death (if indeed death it was) gives me pause. Are we simply killing folks off left and right, Game of Thrones style? Has certain characters’ plot armor been removed? Are, shall we say, alternative solutions to old narrative problems suddenly on the table in this new turning of the Wheel?

I’m excited to see where this takes us—though I truly hope we’re not going to have to say goodbye to anyone else who matters.

Closing thoughts, Andrew? Any moments you’d like to see? Things you’re afraid of?

Andrew: For better or worse, Game of Thrones did help to create this reality where Who Dies This Week? was a major driver of the cultural conversation and the main reason to stay caught up. I’ll never forget having the Red Wedding casually ruined for me by another Ars staffer because I was a next-day watcher and not a day-of GoT viewer.

One way to keep the perspectives and plotlines from endlessly proliferating and recreating The Slog is simply to kill some of those people so they can’t be around to slow things down. I am not saying one way or the other whether I think that’s actually a series wrap on Loial, Son Of Arent, Son Of Halan, May His Name Sing In Our Ears, but we do probably have to come to terms with the fact that not all fan-favorite septenary Wheel of Time characters are going to make it to the end.

As for fears, mainly I’m afraid of not getting another season at this point. The show is getting good enough at showing me big book moments that now I want to see a few more of them, y’know? But Economic Uncertainty + Huge Cast + International Shooting Locations + No More Unlimited Cash For Streaming Shows feels like an equation that is eventually going to stop adding up for this production. I really hope I’m wrong! But who am I to question the turning of the Wheel?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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).

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?!