Tel‘Aran’Rhiod at last—the Wheel of Time reveals the world of dreams

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?