Jaysen Gore

Yeah, I think we get the "yes, I know the Council of Illian, and the great house representatives, and all the Lords of Tear, and I've never heard of Lord Brend" speech substituted with Lord Gaebril

Seconded - If Moggy thought this half trained chit of a girl was a threat, she would have ended her quicker than she did Ispan

Okay - try Egwene being drawn towards Gawyn's dream, and then sucked in for happy time. a stretch, but not a big one, if a scared little girl was calling out for power and revenge in her dreams, that would draw him

At this point, my expectation is we're getting Alcair Dal, the Battle of the Two Rivers, and the Palace duel in Tanchico over the next two episodes. Big, special effects budget eaters all of them. Alcair Dal is the cliffhanger for the season, unless it's Bayle getting pulled over by Egeanin and Suroth as a cold close. While it's possible we see a Redstone doorway this season, I don't think anyone goes through it. We'll see the white Tower plot advance, but not climax Someone mentioned that the audience are going to disregard the outcome of one of those door scenes, but a certain character's reaction will go a long way to making think that the deaths are permanent And I think the poke ball of glowing light goes with them when it happens, thereby moving the retrieval up from ToM timeline to pre-cleansing. Then it could be played as a surprise for the audience when Mat goes back in to retrieve the glowing poke ball from someone's cold dead hand.

No prize answer - Ishy was searching with need in T'A'R, searching for women with the ability to channel and a willingness to turn to the Dark. I did catch the dream flicker that said he found her in her dreams

While I agree that Rafe and / or Amazon executives were pushing a progressive agenda,. I can also understand the rationale for increasing the emphasis on the girls earlier in the series. In the first few books, it very much is Rand and his Amazing Friends, and not the first among equals view that he himself espouses with the "still fights" speech in AMoL For a modern TV audience, I could even support the shift off the traditional hero's journey to one of dual his / her journeys Unfortunately, these writers did not have the talent to pull this off except in the most tropey of Hollywood writing. The failure was not one of intent, but of execution.

I'd probably go 6.5 out of 10. Random thoughts: - minus 2 points for the healing by the Cauthons. Just...so...stupid. Making it look like healing is this easy is going to wreck 2 really impactful battle scenes later on; and it could have been an easy fix by having Alannah link with them, and then guide their weaves using their power. But nope; Wonder Twins power activate... - minus 1 point for the blatant telegraphing of the dead aiel child. While I know everyone is born to die, it was just obvious; it's Hollywood melodrama / plotting 101. It's obvious to me Rafe's writing room are full of professional writers; that's not a compliment - minus .5 for Sammael's involvement in the raid. I guess it's a way around the draghkar, but the scene makes little sense from his POV, unless Lanfear spun the Mirror of Mists as a means of letting Rand know Sammael is loose. - minus 0 points for the random guy finding a thousand year old artifact in less than a day in some random junk shop for Mat. Hard to believe, but so was Bayle Domon having 2 of the seals in the books; Ta'veren gonna Ta'veren Now, in general though, I liked the episode, and especially liked: - Getting Thom back, and him revealing he knows Elayne right off; makes it more believable to attach him to the group quickly, and get that fixed. I'm kind of okay with Grimdark Thom instead of epic fantasy Thom. - the relationship dynamics with the Tanchico crew; all very good. Ceara has a better voice than I would have thought, but the actress doesn't match Elayne's attributes in other areas for that performance, the straw headed cow (Elayne, not Ceara). - everything except the scratch in the Moggy interview scene. That tells the girls someone with a lot of control with compulsion was in the room, and likely took the bracer, not some random thief. So they may not remember who specifically, but if Nyomi's comment re compulsion subtlety is known in the tower (did they see Adeleas?), then the know the thief is likely Forsaken. - I already like Faile in the show a lot more than the books; not sure I like the DF story about her mom, but not sure I believe it, either - Good to see Padan Fain back; need to see more wolf involvement with Perrin but almost everything else with him is at it should be, and we can close the book on the wife once and for all. - I was quite happy that Rand got some back on Egwene during the breakup scene. They didn't play the straight cad angle, which surprised the hell out of me. there is a real dig in the "I'm the DR, and still not enough for you". I'm just not sure the meta message was intended; would seem out of character for this writing room. Rand is almost exactly where he should be, plot and character wise. - Mat still has one major event to get back on track, but more on that in the season thread...

I wouldn't worry about that - Liandrin, like Alannah on the side of the light - has been introduced as the fleshed out representative of that class of character, and a BA rep is needed until the Tower cleansing. So unless they beef up a logical replacement (get it?), I think she'll be around. Given the way Hollywood thinks, she also needs to stick around until she pays off the relationship with Nynaeve, and that can't happen until they have a power duel, so it won't happen until after the block is removed. I'm not saying that can't do the Ingtar thing with her - a much better outcome for her than in the books from her PoV - but it won't be this season.

This does raise an interesting point - given the relatively recent explosion of Romantasy (Sara J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros, et al.) do you think they're playing it up for that crowd? Or is this just the "adulting it up" for streaming audiences because sex sells?

The barber weaves as the barber wills...

I've been from one side of the Randland to the other, kid, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything make me believe there's one all powerful force controlling everything... Rand is Ta'veren and a young pig headed sheepherder, and Lanfear is the arrogance of power - they will refuse to accept the pattern forces them to their actions - Rand because it doesn't and Lanfear because she will be a slave to no one. I don't think they've gotten into what it really means to be Ta'veren yet, since in one way, the whole of reality hangs on their choices, and on the other, they are forced to their decision points like pigs to slaughter. Multiple AS in the show have used the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills, and I suspect they know more about influencing events than Rand. So I wouldn't worry about this.

Back in season 1, I speculated that one of the things they could do with Rand was completely exclude anything of his internal conflict from the camera, and it would all be about how other people reacted to him, effectively changing the story of WoT from "the price of carrying that mountain" to "pity the world that needs a hero". But this show running team very quickly proved they did not have the skill to do that without turning Rand into a tyrant. My current speculation - especially with the red door vision - is we're getting the Tower, taking the women off the board for a couple of seasons. I don't know if they'll do the whole release / rebirth / mind trap thing though. And while I expect Lanfear's outcome will be the same, the hand doing it will be different - I doubt they have time to build the "putting down a mad dog" thing. I don't think they'll give it to Rand because of Jon / Dany parallels, but I could see Meirin taking Mesaana's outcome. Cause Real Housewives of Randland

More Random thoughts based on the feedback - I know internally that a big chunk of time passed between Egwene's first foray into T'A'R and her trip with Moiraine, but they sucked at showing it; so again, Egwene looks overpowered and uber competent - Siuan's line that Elayne is out of the tower is not a lie - she's hunting black ajah, and was not given specifics how - the Amico / Joiya murder scene did take place in the books - only in the Stone, not the Tower, and with Egwene, not Elaida. And it does serve a story purpose - making it blatantly clear that Elaida is not Black. - time compression / storyline overlap has created a problem that none of the WG's are actually in the Tower to watch the collapse as due to production limitations, they need Egwene to be two places at once (the Waste and the Tower) - beefing Alannah's role up is beginning to feel like the "undercut the boys" complaints from Season 1 - once again, there is a woman in a much more prominent arc than was present in the books; this time in the battle of the 2R's - the Maxsim / Alannah scene is Frodo / Sam all over again. It was dumb then, and it's dumb now. But it's Hollywood fake drama - Natti getting barbecued, I suspect, is taking the place of murdering Perrin's family. That way, he doesn't get a second massive grief hit, given that they fridged his wife. - the interpretive dance approach for the Wave Mistress; I actually like that the Sea Folk channelers is a full body activity - this isn't exploding some dirt, or making a fire dragon; this is affecting the weather, and should be a massive effort. - I'll be curious to see how much of Egwene's vision was looking into people's dreams, and how much was her as a Dreamer Maybe more to come...

I thought it was a good, not great episode; too disjointed and exposition heavy to really flow as an episode, but it included a lot of book stuff, and I didn't hate all the newly created stuff. Random thoughts... - I was surprised at what happened to Natti, and disappointed that the horror of that moment was downplayed - yet again the Wolverine level of self healing ability in this show is robbing the Aes Sedai of any risk - Elaida and Siuan's interactions were great - Aviendha's few scenes were right out of the books, making me thing they'll go that way, and the Sister Wife thing makes me think we might get the Rand relationship after all - Elayne is so much more likeable in the show than in the books; stunned to see the Sea Folk, and thought the entire esthetic was great. - We got to see the proper destruction a warder can do; need to see Lan do this at least once before the end - the dream sequence was good; hate the fact that the intro of Egwene and Lanfear was forced beforehand, though. Could have done with a "who's the girl?" - Has Egwene failed at anything on the series yet? And final thought that I haven't seen anyone else call out, because it was a throwaway line, but years have passed since Moiraine's little chat about listening to the wind with Egwene in the Two Rivers. Man, I hate how bad TV is at conveying time's passage.

On the people scale thing, there was a fairly large push back during the later books phase of publishing about how out of control the army sizes were getting, and you can find pretty detailed breakdowns of the fact that the world couldn't support the number of people that were showing up - like Tarmon Gaidon accounting for 25% of the males in the Westlands or something, based on some calculations. And that there are hundreds of thousands of Aiel involved in the war. I think they could do with getting more extras involved - I'd like to see it get up to a couple hundred of people on both sides - but I don't think we need to see the Pelennor Fields scale battles until the very end. Even Dumai's Wells would be better served in the 4-5,000 combatants range, instead of the 40-50,000 they had.