king of nowhere

I wondered that about the books too. How are the hunters supposed to recognize the actual horn? Sure, it's supposed to have a writing on it, and i can bet you in every city you could buy a dozen "authentic" horns of valere

i missed the detail, thanks for pointing it out

good point. it's not much about alanna getting healed, as much as showing that regular whitecloaks are a real threat to a channeler

no, for two reasons: 1) they were already in melee range, due to the hall being relatively small. in that context, the staff is an effective weapon 2) she was also fighting with the power. the staff was something extra. it's like using a knife in modern warfare, actually. yes, sometimes it's done. sometimes you are in a trench and an enemy comes out from a corner and stabbing is faster than shooting - and less impeded by narrow confines. but going out of your trench to stab an enemy when you could have just shoot him is stupid. leane in the tower is the first case. sammael is the second. demandred wanted to beat rand in a sword duel to prove himself best, because he was an egomaniac. that was boasting. for actually fighting, he was throwing around balefire. ishamael wasn't trying to kill rand, but to turn him, which required breaking rand first.

is that even a serious question? you have the power to blow up stuff on a large scale from a distance, and you use it to make a cudgel and bludgeon someone. it would be like going in melee with a tank and trying to hit the enemy with the barrel of the gun instead of just shooting.

i didn't like the fight myself either. but i can accept it from aviendha; she's barely trained in the power, but she has a lot of experience with the spear, so making spears of flame may make sense to her. i don't accept a foresaken using a weapon, though. that's just silly.

make room for me on the "no way two untrained girls can heal so easily" train well, except that nynaeve has been doing it forever. and other wilders also had healing tricks. but that's a sort of talent, not something learned, healing is extremely difficult. they could have greatly improved the scene by having alanna show healing first: "i can't use this on myself, and i'm too weak to channel more than a trickle, but you have to weave the flows like this". would have been less of a stretch. i hope they didn't just kill sammael like that; lanfear regenerated from a slit throat, and ishamael dissolved into dust when killed, sammael can't just lie there dead. by the way, why nobody is paying attention to the foresaken? moiraine should be cold enough to keep an eye on him, maybe try to finish him off. the alsera scene worked well, though. aside from that, i liked that episode a lot. we know that book!elayne would listen attentively to those kind of songs whenever she could, and as a princess she could reasonably have taken singing lessons, so i don't have any issue with her knowing the song and having the skill to sing. i'm glad to see thom back in the show, and even gladder (is that even a word?) that the andoran court bard part of his backstory is kept. nice how he helped elayne, glib hero as always. i was hoping we'd have also mat gambling spree. maybe next episode. moghedien interrogating the girls was magnificent. moghedien killing ispan? why? she wouldn't waste a useful pawn. wait, probably she didn't kill her, and she'll wake up all right? perrin and faile felt natural. the scene where they are telling their deepest secrets to each other worked for me. too bad her changed backstory means we'll never see davram and deirdre; they were minor characters easily cut, but they were fun. but the scene that most surprised me was rand and egwene. i was fully expecting rand being an idiot and egwene being all nice and perfect and innocent and rafe's favourite flawless character, but rand correctly points out that egwene was always ready to leave him when something more interesting came up. in the end, the blame was split. i wasn't giving rafe enough credit. EDIT: oh, i forgot to squee about the aiel farm. i always complain that we never see farmland, we see large cities in the middle of mountains or forests that could never sustain them. i love that we get to see an aiel farm

The first two books had problematic endings with stuff coming up from nowhere outside of the normal boundaries of the magic system. Subsequent books have better endings. Shouldn't be too hard to adapt alcair dal, the two river battle and the showdown in tanchico

yes, but the trailer of egwene asking rand "do you love her", plus the fact that the two of them have to break up, and rafe wouldn't want his precious egwene to do anything wrong like dumping a boyfriend who is only pretending to love a foresaken so that she will be their allies, point to rand being genuine.

after the relationship upgrade they gave elayne and aviendha, and the story of alanna and her warders, and the comments on lan taking part, and some comments made by ishamael... at this point, if they wanted to "bury their gays", they'd have to kill half the main cast

You seem to forget that, by the book, being sisters is a strict requirement for a double marriage. The two girls must take each other as sisters before they can propose to the same men. It's not incest, they are not blood related Actually, tgey could be blood related, the aiel would not care

It's probably part of character development and showcasing the warder relevant for when alanna will take lan's bond. If it's not, it's a poorly conceived scene. I'll suspend judgment until later. The books devote a lot of time to tower politics. Besides, you don't want elaida's coup to come out of nowhere. I would agree, but the show being "desperately short on time" may force to cut some training montage. The lessons on channeling in the tower also were cut short. I still would agree on this point, though.

No, they are showing tension with the bond. They promoted alanna to a much more prominent character than she was in the books, so they are giving her some personal story arcs. And she will probably take up lan's bond after moiraine dies. So, i do believe that scene will be part of something. Maybe ivhon will ask to release the bond eventually. If nothing is made with it, instead, i'd agree it was a poor change. Speaking of change, i understand why they had rand make out with lanfear - he and egwene have a much stronger relationship than in the books, where egwene was ignoring rand half the time and being abusive the other half. So they wanted to set up something stronger to justify the break up. And of course, since egwene is rafe's favourite character, she must be shown as supportive and the break should be totally rand's fault. But rand knowingly consorting with a foresaken? That's too much

i also liked this episode. minus the thing i was complaining about btw, i never thought bode cauthon would be anything but an extra to the show. but now that she channeled, they need to do something with her

i can't help seeing all the many ways rafe is fanboying over egwene. she had many unpleasant sides in the book, here they were scrubbed clean. her break-up with rand is just the last. in the book, they both lost interest after a long separation. not that she ever showed much interest in rand, even when they were together. here, rand is consorting with lanfear. and egwene never dallied with aram, nor did she act jealous at the mention of the name elayne. she wasn't freed from the a'dam, she freed herself. i was expecting her to find bair disguised as a monster for disobeying, but she's not. i hope they at least keep the "i have toh" scene, though that will probably be for next season

Well, they have taken over their whole continent, and they took over a third of the westlands in a couple years

maybe she does, but i doubt she can remember her servants all that well after 3000+ years. even if she did, a resemblance wouldn't be anything noteworthy.

faile gets captured in the last chapter of book 8. then book 9 has 6 chapters on perrin and faile, out of 35 total chapters plus prologue. book 10 has 7 chapters out of 30 devoted to perrin and faile. then 7 more chapters out of 37 in book 11, at the end of which faile is freed. thanks for wot-encyclopaedia for having that data neatly organized. in total, the whole kidnapping arc took half a book. people always remember that story arc as longer than it really was. me included. it has character development in that both perrin and faile grow into their leadership. i suppose, though, that they could start doing it in the two rivers and through dumai wells, and that arc could be excised completely. the fact that the show introduced sevanna, though, make me think they will keep part of it.

Faile kidnapping can and must be shortened, but it was 6-8 chapters in most books. Nothing big happened in book 10, but all those plots were advanced somewhat. Still, all those plots will need to be shortened

Not really. Books 5 to 11, rand goes from the aiel waste to taking cahirien and caemlin, fighting the seanchan around ebou dar, founding the black tower, having adventures in far madding. There are all the arcs with the shaido, the andoran succession, the bowl of winds, mat escaping ebou dar, the tower split... Some people like to pretend those books don't exhist, but all the main characters have major story lines and development. You can't cut them and start with book 12. Even if you wanted to condense, you'd have to invent new plots to justify the differences in the characters. I'm sure you guys would LOVE an entire season of made-up material to cover everything from books 5 to 11. As for all the arms folding and sniffing, it only takes 1 line of text to write that. Remove all such instances from the books, you cut maybe 5 pages. Remove flowery descriptions, you remove another 100 pages for each book, maybe 150. Stilll a lot of plot. If you dismiss half the books as "nothing really happens besides hair-pulling", you don't realize how big the story is

This must be stressed out. Time is a huge issue, and a lot of cool stuff has to be sacrificed for it. If we get 8 season for 14 books + new spring, that's almost 2 books per season. At 800 pages per book, an episode must adapt 200 pages. Rhuidean was what, 50 pages in the books? Something like that? And they had to spend a full episode on it. And they still had to cut half the visions.

Will be almost impossibile. We are approachimg the slog, and we have 5 seasons left for 10 books. The writers will have to cut more plots. And then they will have to invent new plots to give the main characters something to do and convey the same major plot points. It won't be possibile to follow the books closely. At best, they will be able to keep the occasional pivotal scene, like they did with rhuidean

is it just me seeing what i want to see, or is the show coming closer to the books? the rhuidean episode is taken very closely from the books, and the whole first half of the season bears a lot more similarity to the fourth book than the other season.

i don't see much room for confusion. many people die without children. whole families are erased. meanwhile, with growing number of generations everyone is related to everyone else if we move back far enough. so the idea that blood relation would be needed for reincarnation wouldn't work. it doesn't justify anything. any sane person would think nothing of an oath your ancestors made 3000 years ago. but those are aiel. they are the definition of honor before reason.

in the books, the lake is created when a subsequent fight cracks the ground. there's plenty of groundwater underneath the waste.