Wheel of Time recap: The show nails one of the books’ biggest and bestest battles
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 seven, “Goldeneyes,” which was released on April 10.
Lee: Welcome back—and that was nuts. There’s a ton to talk about—the Battle of the Two Rivers! Lord Goldeneyes!—but uh, I feel like there’s something massive we need to address right from the jump, so to speak: LOIAL! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!! That was some out-of-left-field Game of Thrones-ing right there. My wife and I have both been frantically talking about how Loial’s death might or might not change the shape of things to come. What do you think—is everybody’s favorite Ogier dead-dead, or is this just a fake-out?
NOOOOOOOOO
Credit:
Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
NOOOOOOOOO
Credit:
Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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 three, episode six).
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?
Fain seems to be leading the combined Darkfriend/Trolloc army.
Credit:
Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
Fain seems to be leading the combined Darkfriend/Trolloc army.
Credit:
Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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 one 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.
Darkfriends and Trollocs pour into Emond’s Field.
Darkfriends and Trollocs pour into Emond’s Field.
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.
Perrin is tall.
Credit:
Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
Perrin is tall.
Credit:
Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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.)
A calm moment before battle.
Credit:
Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
A calm moment before battle.
Credit:
Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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?
Perrin being led off by Bornhald. Things didn’t exactly work out like this in the book!
Credit:
Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
Perrin being led off by Bornhald. Things didn’t exactly work out like this in the book!
Credit:
Prime/Amazon MGM Studios
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?
Credit:
WoT Wiki
