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| Photo by Mac McDade on Unsplash |
Hello! It's that time of year again - the week between Episodes four and five of Wheel of Time. If you're new (in which case, Hi, hello, how did you even find me?), here at Mint and Brambles we observe this occasion with a list of what I liked, and what I have reservations about, in the show so far. I suggest you take a look at Season One's midseason and final lists, because this one is gonna be in five sections: What I liked, what I have reservations about, what from last season I feel better about, what from last season I'm more concerned about, and what from last season has so far gone completely unaddressed.
As always, this post will contain spoilers for all episodes of the show to date (A/N: that's episodes 1-4 - this post contains no spoilers for episodes 5, 6, or 7), and potentially the entire book series.
Stuff I Liked
- Merging Verin and Vandene. Of all the character merges I didn't see coming but fully support, this sure is one of them. We saw moves last season to cut down on the number of characters who have similar-sounding names (changing Owein to Maksim so we don't get him confused with Owen), and while I don't think I'm in much danger of getting Vandene and Verin confused, I could see it being harder for show-onlys, given that they need to be introduced at nearly the same time, and in any case I do routinely confuse Vandene with Adeleas, which for what book readers will recognize as obvious reasons I'm not gonna do with Verin Mathewin. I don't know if this means we're skipping the part where Adeleas gets murdered and Vandene gets really weird about it. I hope we're not. It does at least mean we're probably skipping one of the most pointless off-screen deaths of a named Warder. (In favor of a pointier off-screen death, admittedly, but still).
- Nynaeve hanging out with Maksim and Ihvon. I'm a skosh ambivalent about Nynaeve learning the sword, but I am one hundred percent here for her hanging out with Warders socially, and these two especially. Last season, we were given to understand that Nynaeve kinda vibes better with Warders than with Aes Sedai, and I like that that's getting reinforcement here, and by extension confirmation that it was not just Moiraine's absence, or Lan's presence, that drew her to the Warders' fire in S1:E4. I also want to draw particular attention to "That's Alanna Sedai, to you" and Nynaeve's response. Forced to take like, a second to reflect, by someone she's currently angry at, she correctly identifies that her problem is not with Alanna, specifically, but with the Tower. I honestly can't decide if this is a departure from her characterization in the books, but I'm here for it either way. I do wonder if Maksim's joke about Nynaeve being bonded is like, foreshadowing. The bilateral bond from the books was neat, but including Androl and Pevara in the show would be, in my opinion, too much time and effort for the potential payoff. We haven't seen bilateral or unilateral bond between two women who can channel, so that could be cool, but... Nynaeve is the only person Rand completely trusts, and that's true all the way through the books. So I actually think that if Nynaeve as a Warder us a real thing we're doing, I'd like to see Rand bond her. Rand never getting a damn Warder is one of my biggest complains about the books, and while I think that in that context Min was the most natural candidate (even though it would disrupt the precise equality of including her in Elayne and Aviendha's bond), I don't think that would work with the show!Min we've seen so far, and it might work with show!Nynaeve. (To be clear, I don't think the, uh, peculiarities of the Ashaman bond are inherent to bonds created with saidin, but even if they were, it would be easy enough to change it for the show).
On the subject of Nynaeve and Warders, her fanboy from Episode 4. I don't have a lot of like, thoughts here. I like Warders, regular Warders who aren't also main characters, having agency. I like people being duly impressed by Nynaeve. "I hope you don't choose Red!" A+, no notes.
Painting by John Everett Millais
Photo provided by Birmingham Museums Trust
on Unsplash- Last season, when it vaguely looked like they might be combining Alanna with Myrelle, I was in a very wait-and-see place about it, 'cause show!Alanna is likeable, and book!Alanna and book!Myrelle... aren't. I have (extremely grudging) respect for Myrelle, but gah. However, they seem to be making Alanna the Warder rehab specialist and adding none of Murelles other traits. They also improved on her techniques by having her Warders involved. They've clearly done this before - they have a routine. And since Alanna only has the two Warders right now, it looks as though they've actually been passing recovered Warders along to other sisters, which is something Myrelle did not seem to have done before and clearly struggled with in the books. I'm nontrivially obsessed with the Warder rehabilitation process, so I'm very excited to see it expanded upon in the show.
- I think this is my last one about Warders, but they actually talk to each other now?! We got some of that last season, but Stepin's arc was so isolated from the rest of the plot that it was hard to know what to expect going forward. But here we've got Lan talking to Tomas (also Tomas talking, didn't see that in the books), Maksim and Ihvon talking to each other, talking to Lan, the Warder trainees apparently talking amongst themselves. I hope Alric and Arinvar can eventually join this party as well.
- Min and Mat hanging out. This is so good and important. Mat doesn't care about Min's visions. Min doesn't immediately write Mat off as an irresponsible fuckup. They're both in desperate need of a fucking break. This does great things for Mat's early characterization, letting him have a friend who's a woman, letting him have a friend who hasn't been stuck with him since early childhood. Giving Min an important relationship of any kind of someone other than Rand does a lot for her early characterization as well. It also opens up some possibilities for when they're both dragged into late-books Seanchan plot, since they'll already know and like each other.
- The show's less...oblique relationship with alcoholism. This is another one from the "I mean, it came up in episode 5..." list. We've go Stepin's backstory there, but also Kerene's reaction upon their first meeting including buying him a drink, despite his already having been "piss drunk before [he] even got to the bar" does not indicate that that she had a particularly healthy relationship with alcohol either. Now, we've got Min making offhand reference to "a Red who loves a drink". If we're doing the character combining it looks like we're doing, this was very probably Liandrin, and if not, it was likely Elaida, since she develops something of a drinking problem in the later books. We've got Adeleas, whose introduction in the show is her being hung over ad Verin being casually exasperated, like this is inconvenient but pretty much to be expected, and who I don't think we see entirely sober at any point. We've got Elayne setting up her under-the-bed-still practically the second she moves in, confirming, as the books only hint at, that she did, in fact, get the Trakand alcoholism genes. I also have a whole complicated theory about Gitara Moroso, but I think that's gonna have to wait for the wrap up post.
Competent Selene. Lanfear apparently succeeded in playing it cool, or cool enough anyway, for months between seasons. It does very much appear that she's using compulsion to get around Rand saying "no" when it would interfere with her plans, but my impression is that for the most part she's been patient and provided a passable facsimile of actual emotional support. The veneer doesn't even really start to crack until she's at the party with Rand, able to dress him up how she wants and reminded acutely of what actually worked, and didn't work, in her relationship with Lews Therin. And then we get to episode four and oh my fucking God the artistry of how she set up that scenario with the Myrddral. The way she managers to "accept" Rand's being able to channel while leaving him with just the tiniest sliver of guilt that he might be taking advantage of her insecurities. I'd love to know where she was going with that "I'm a monster too" business, before she was interrupted.
Photo by Cheolmin Kim
on Unsplash- Elayne. She's perfect. I like that they're emphasizing the elegance and noblesse oblige over the petulance here, because it means they can keep her young, sheltered, even naive, without running a serious risk of making her annoying. Which he was, sometimes, in the books. And it's the prerogative of 16 year olds to be annoying sometimes, but the show has a lot less space, so I think it was a good call, giving her a smoother path from smishy daughter heir to Aes Sedai queen. She's a different kind of perfect from Nynaeve. The show's Nynaeve is like, the entirety of book Nynaeve, just leveled up a little from her EotW counterpart. This Elayne is...one specific version of her, but I think they chose the right version.
- Rand's job. And Errol. I love Rand just having like, a job. I love how many different purposes this is serving for him simultaneously. Like, he needs a job 'cause he's living in a city, renting a room. He's spending time around mentally ill people, trying to learn more about more about madness, about what's going to happen to him, about how to tell when it's starting. He's trying to get access to Logain, but he seems to have been waiting for like, adequate justification to beat up that other orderly. I don't know if that's an internal thing or if he wanted anyone who looked into it to find a clear motive that had nothing to do with the false Dragon. Or both. It could very much be both, that's kind of the thing here. It's so good and important that we see Rand taking care of people here. It's important that he's good at it. He's also very much taking the opportunity to learn sword forms from Errol, and he obviously feels super weird about it, but he's doing it anyway, and this is such a soft, smooth entry point to the whole "I'll use everyone, I have to" thing. Also though, Errol (for as long as Rand has this job, since he seems to lose track of things day to day), is basically in a version of reality where there are just Aiel living and working in Cairhien now, and one of them is learning the sword from him. Like, cultural exchange is happening here. And that's a big of an adjustment for him, sure, but he seems to be basically here for it, and I just, I have so many feelings about this.
- Hopper is great. Hopper is friend shaped. He jump. Also I'm pretty into the combination of actually showing us the images wolves used for mind-to-mind communication and rendering a lot of what Perrin would have picked up by scent in the books as visions instead. It forms a cohesive, comprehensible whole and it's not like they could really have Perrin stop and describe scents all the time.
On that note, Elyas is here. Elyas is great. I'm glad the show didn't get dazzled by the mysterious werewolf thing and forget to make him weird and off-putting. He's kind of an asshole - it's perfect. I am looking forward to seeing more of him, and seeing what they did with his backstory in this version..jpg)
Photo by Michael LaRosa on Unsplash - They're introducing Ingtar's Sympathetic Darkfriend status a little differently here. Instead of starting with geography lessons and working inward to "Better the Shadow, I thought", we're starting with "Perhaps Fain had a reason". This is a reasonable choice for a show, since it doesn't require multiple exposition deliveries to set up. But also, he's no longer the only darkfriend before The Gathering Storm who's sympathetic. Liandrin's got her son, and while there are a lot of ways the show could mishandle that, I'm basically hopeful. Dana, in season one, was clearly having a bad time. We don't know yet if Barthanes is a darkfriend in this version, but he is Just Smol. The Forsaken, the ones we've seen, aren't sympathetic, exactly, but they are nuanced. They're people. Suroth is awful, obviously, and the show hasn't done much to make me like Sheriam yet, but there's gotta be balance there - some people do just suck.
- Alanna's family. The thing where she has one and sees them when she can and there's no weirdness about the age thing. (Contrast Anvaere's extreme weirdness about Moiraine's age). This is actually a detail borrowed from Kerene's implicit characterization in New Spring, and I'm so glad Rafe is paying that kind of attention. Kerene has a row of miniature paintings of her parents and siblings. Moiraine, with the world-weary sophistication of a twenty-one year old, thinks about how they, and their children, and their children's children, "and more" must all be long since gone to the grave. Kerene is 185 in New Spring. Certainly her parents and siblings are all long dead, unless one or both of her sisters could channel. Likely, their children are as well, although it's possible that if one of her siblings was considerably younger, and had a child late in life, she could have a living niece or nephew. Their kids? Could be alive or not, and while most of them are probably pretty old, they needn't all be old, and the ones that are dead likely haven't been so for very long. Their kids, meanwhile, are not only almost certainly still alive but could conceivably still be children. Most Aes Sedai, even older Aes Sedai, have living relatives, they're just not in touch with them because the Tower discourages it, because coming back about 20 years of nothing but letters (if you found the time to send letters) is a bit awkward, and because the age thing gets weird after a while. I also can't think of any Aes Sedai except Egwene Al'Vere, who was raised under exceptional circumstances and in such conditions as to prevent her going home any time in the foreseeable future, who was raised to the shawl while her parents were known to still be alive. Even if that doesn't cause interpersonal issues around visiting, it would create logistical issues in a lot of families. So it does make some sense that most Aes Sedai don't really see their relatives, but it also makes sense that there would be exceptions. And a Green from the borderlands, whose family are unlikely to have a problem with Aes Sedai, and can kinda get their heads around what a Green does, and and Aes Sedai with multiple Warders, who is thus a little less separated from ordinary humanity, and to whom the realities of how people age are less likely to become uncomfortable through unfamiliarity, who spends much of her time in the world, out of the Tower, who spent nearer ten years than twenty as a Novice and Accepted, like Kerene, like Alanna, makes perfect sense as our example of that.
Also, Alanna's family itself is great. They're so chill about her, and seem to have settled on treating her as the age she looks, rather than navigating treating her like she's 80 when she still looks like she's in her 30s and will probably continue doing so for another hundred years. But they know her. They know her Warders. I think I'm still processing the part where one of her family members asked, at the dinner table, where the third Warder goes. - This is a small thing, but while I'm appropriately upset about Uno dying, I am so glad he got to say "fuck" on his way out.
Rand isn't good with a sword yet. In the books, he was something of a natural. Not implausibly so- he still had to practice before he was like, actually good at it, but he was able to use it comfortably almost from the first, as Lan said in TGH, and he defeats a blademaster later that same book, like nine months after getting his sword. Here, he straight up drops his weapon, fighting the Myrddral. He's not just not good yet, he's not confident. He doesn't feel like he should be good yet. The book version was super valid too, but I'm looking forward to seeing how this changes his relationship to both swordwork and channeling.
Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash - Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of Moiraine's own actions. Seriously. Close examination of the early books will reveal that Moiraine Damodred is...kind of an asshole. That's magnified in the show, with one of the most glaring examples being in Season 1 Episode 7, when she threatens Min even though it literally would have been faster to accomplish the same thing by asking nicely. We now know that in Episode 6 of last season, she threatened Liandrin's son. Here in Season 2, she's continuing that pattern with Lan, with Anvaere, with the random stable keeper in Episode 4, and people are, understandably, pissed. They don't want to help her, they're willing to work with people who oppose her, or at least take small steps to inconvenience her. Min is working with Liandrin over this. Obviously, "Moiraine is kind of a jerk" was gonna need to be either dropped or scaled up some for a shorter format where we can't see in people's heads, and I think either would have been valid, but they chose the latter and I appreciate that the practical and interpersonal consequences have been scaled up to match.
- The visual design of the arches for the Accepted test and, according to my partner, a lot of the design details inside the Tower, were taken from the 1999 Wheel of Time computer game. I think that's neat. It lets Rafe show off for all six of the people who both notice and care, and saves creative time and energy, which is likely to be particularly important in light of the show's largely physical sets.
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Stuff I Have Reservations About
- I cannot make the math work on this time skip. Like, it's been six months since the end of Season 1. Okay, sure, can't argue with that, but it's somehow Bel Tine again? Unless the timelines were wildly out of sync, the first four episodes take place over the course of about six days. Then we have a one month time skip. Episode 5 is a single day and night, and the next morning. Technically there's room for time to have passed unremarked between episodes five and six, but since Siuan is "coming back from Caemlyn" the night of S1:E5, that doesn't realistically add more than a week, and that's pushing it. Episode 6 is a day. They sleep twice in Episode 7 so let's call that two days. Episode 8 is like, 16 hours. That's 40 days. If we really stretch, we can maybe make the 6 days before the time skip, the week between Episodes 5 and 6, and the 5 days after that somehow each be a Wheel of Time week - 10 days. That puts our total at 58 days. 70, if we assume they got confused with a Wheel of Time month being four of our weeks and made it 40 days instead of 28. That's it. I cannot find anywhere to put extra days and believe me I have looked. I cannot account for the other three or four months necessary to make a six month time skip put us back at Bel Tine, and if they weren't going to take the trouble to make sure it made sense, why spend so much time establishing how long it's been for everyone?
- Aging up the Aes Sedai. Obligatory reminder that this is the Reservations section, not the Stuff I Think Is Bad section. So far, nothing they've done with this is a problem for me. Barthanes being Moiraine's nephew, rather than her unspecified cousin is kinda neat. I'd love to know where this puts Taringail, and by extension whether and how Moiraine and Elayne are related, but I'm not really worried about that. My thing is, this changes how nearly all of the central Aes Sedai relate to...every major historical event of the past 50 years, including the Whitecloak War and the Aiel War, and I don't know how that's gonna be handled. For an easy example, during and in the immediate aftermath of the Blood Snow, almost every sister was out of the Tower, which raises one of the following two questions: why was Moiraine at the Tower if not waiting on the Amyrlin as an Accepted, or Where were Siuan, Moiraine, and Gitara when it happened, if not in the Amyrlin's study? Also, the Aes Sedai who were Novices and Accepted during the Aiel War consistently display a greater sense of urgency, a greater willingness to take action, than older or younger Aes Sedai do, and I'm uncertain whether that will still be the case under these circumstances.
Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash - What is actually going in with Moiraine? Is she stilled or just under a tied off shield? More to the point, can she lie? Stuff is getting weird and everyone's being weird and I'm finding the caginess around it the bad kind of stressful. Like, when she told Lan "You failed me", did she mean that? I'm aware that she could have, within the bounds of the Three Oaths, been talking about how he didn't bring her dinner that night, or any other random little thing, but if that's how we're meant to be using the Three Oaths, they may as well not be in play, and that wouldn't be great either.
- On that note, the hell is going on with Lan's bond? Alanna seems to think Moiraine actually released him, but we have nothing to corroborate that. We've been largely taking Lan's failure to display a bond-break reaction as evidence that Moiraine isn't stilled, but we don't know if it works like that in the show. Given Season 1 Episode 8, in which Lan couldn't even tell what direction Moiraine was in with the bond masked, I don't know if he could tell the difference between continued masking and the bond actually being released. It's entirely possible that Moiraine can't unmask while shielded, but there's no good reason for her not to tell Lan if that's the case. Again, the... coyness is getting to be the bad kind of stressful.
- Min's aunts. Look, I'm not the right person to make this call, but did that feel kinda racist to anyone else? When we heard about them being cast, I was expecting the beginnings of Min's backstory in terms of growing up in a lesbian household as a girl, or possibly a nonbinary person, who's attracted to men, and the specific weirdnesses of that and how it plays out differently in a setting with a very different relationship to gender. Instead we got 15 rather uncomfortable seconds of...whatever that was.
- In Season 1 Episode 6, Siuan told Logain that he would live out his days watched and studied, never free, until he lost himself entirely to the madness. I'm...not sure how his current situation qualifies as "studied". Moiraine indicates that the Brown and Yellow Ajahs wanted to study him, which tracks with Siuan's initial declaration, but if this was the plan, when and, more importantly, how was it changed? It doesn't seem like Moiraine's been in contact with anyone at the Tower, least of all Siuan, so how the hell was this orchestrated?
- So we, the audience, know that what happened at the Eye of the World was not the Last Battle, that the Dark One wasn't defeated and Rand is still alive. Perrin and the Sheinarens? They don't know any of that. As far as they know, the Last Battle already happened, and Rand died defeating the Dark One, so what is the hurry about getting the Horn back?
Elayne talking about getting expelled from the Tower. I mean, it would explain a few things, but what the fucking fuck? As far as we know, there is one certain way to get put out of the Tower, and maybe two ways that you can be. Refusing the test for Accepted three times, or refusing to continue once you've started, is the only certain way. Flirting with men, or more than flirting, can get you sent away, but the only confirmed instance of this in the books was a girl who didn't have the spark inborn and had not yet touched the source. At least one other Novice who was farther along notably isn't kicked out for doing the same thing a few books later. Presumably, doing something that would be a stilling offense in a full sister could get a Novice or Accepted thrown out, but given the number of girls who arrive knowing some kind of off-brand compulsion, there's clearly some flexibility there as well. If the Aes Sedai are expelling girls for harmless rules violations (taking too much interest in min is not, from their perspective, harmless - in addition to its being an immense distraction and a possible strain on their loyalty to the Tower, a pregnancy would stop their training for six months, and carries an unacceptably high risk that the child would be a man who can channel), that would account for their being even more underpopulated in the show than in the books, but it's....stupid. It's very bad policy, and I can't see any reason for it.
Photo by Stefano Zocca on Unsplash - What does Ihvon think a god is? The word "god" does not appear in the Wheel of Time series except in a single dedication (incidentally, the only instance of the word "heather" in the series is in the same dedication). Even the Forsaken, who use several words not known to the other characters (including "addictive") do not appear to have the concept. That it exists in the show raises Questions about the worldbuilding to which I'm sure there are interesting and satisfactory answers, but which I'm very concerned will never be addressed.
Stuff From Last Season That I Feel Better About
- The handing of black characters whose names are not Nynaeve Al'Meara. They're letting Ihvon talk, we've got three more likeable black background characters, Nynaeve's parents are great, even if we only got to see them the once, and we've got Elyas now. Still holding out hope for a black Aes Sedai besides Siuan who both gets a name and doesn't die, though.
- Where the hell is Elyas? There he is. He's here.
- The man Liandrin meets in Northharbor. Apparently it's her son. That does kind of imply that the Reds have a strong enough policy against having children that they'll kill the child, or something, even if he's a grown adult, and that's fucked up, but it's considerably less draconian, less unhinged than if they do that do every man a Red has a relationship with. It's not even a wholly unreasonable policy. Any sister having a child has a too-high chance of producing a man who can channel, to whose gentling she might naturally be resistant, but this would be much more of a problem for a Red, who would have to be personally involved in the process.
Apparently they only sent eight Aes Sedai to deal with Logain because that's how many you need to cut someone off from the True Source. I'm still not sure why they weren't using circles to maintain the shield, but this at least establishes that the mission wasn't mishandled, or sabotaged, from the start.
Photo by gryffyn m on Unsplash - Where is everyone? There they are. I said I was prepared to overlook the bizarre emptiness of the White Tower if they fixed it in Season 2, and they did, so we're good.
- Nynaeve, at least, apparently remembers that Stepin existed. 'cause she quotes him during her test when she's talking to Egwene. This makes me feel a bit less concerned about the recreation of the troubling Warder disposability from the books.
Stuff I Feel Worse About
- The Seanchan being more unambiguously evil. They sure are still doing that. I think it's partly the nature of the medium. It's harder to get their point of view here. But also from the first four episodes it looks like they're way ore willing to, for example, take people captive even when they aren't marath'damane and aren't any particular threat. At least one of the characters from this culture is gonna need to be at least humanized later, and as of Season 2 Episode 4 they have not set the groundwork for that.
- Aes Sedai classism. Mostly no further news here, but what under the Light made Elayne think she wouldn't be put in with the other Novices? Liandrin says she's from a small village, like Nynaeve, but she could be lying. I don't even know, this feels screwy as hell, although it matches up with the expulsion policy as far as expanding upon the Tower's...rigidity.
Things I Had Reservations About On Which We Have No New Information
- Whitecloaks - we haven't seen them.
- How do circles work in the show? No one has used them so far this season.
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