That pretty much sucked from start to finish... so much for seeing some improvement.
Legolas Send a noteboard - 10/09/2023 10:05:50 AM
View original post3:55 Lindsey Duncan, you don’t belong here. I’d say your on-screen sister doesn’t either, but she appears to be a primary perpetrator of this nonsense.
True - many of the worst parts of this show, even more so in this second season than in the first, involve Moiraine.
View original post4:44 For the record, Moiraine was the youngest in the family, ITB, so I am guessing that this elderly retainer is announcing Lady Lindsey’s “older” sister with emphasis on “older”, so we can be shocked at the difference in ages between Rosamund Pike and Duncan (I will refer to her as Anvaere when they say it on the show). Because there is literally no reason for him to say that. He would say her name if he felt the need to clarify which of her sisters. Not because that’s the custom in Cairhien, but because that’s how normal people talk. This is written this way for no reason other than shock value.
As I was watching that bit, I went 'nope, she's the younger sister, not that I would've remembered that myself but Cannoli said so'.
But yeah, you're right, makes no sense to mention it at all.
View original postAlso, the episode is called “Daughter of the Night” and that Forsaken Ishamael freed had long hair. Are they doing some sort of fakeout with Selene?
For most of the episode, I had been thinking that the show's Selene actually wasn't Lanfear at all yet and that Lanfear would show up, kill her and impersonate her. Which I suppose isn't entirely impossible from what we see, but it seems more likely that they cheated a bit on the timeline by showing Ishamael's freeing Lanfear only now when actually it happened before the first episode and she was actually Selene from the start.
View original post7:54 That was not how I pictured a banded Accepted dress looking, but I suppose you don’t see hems much on camera, and the more colorful cuffs are easier to notice.
Yeah - reasonable enough change.
View original post10:18 And when they are at dinner with said Aes Sedai, the only thing anyone can talk about is the sexual aspect of her bonds. Now, that’s not necessarily an unrealistic thing for close friends and family to tease about, but this is a TV show with a limited amount of time to convey their narrative. In fact, one of the main defenses raised on behalf of the show’s lack of substance is that they didn’t get enough episodes or time to do it right. How much of the time they do have is going to be spent giggling over unorthodox sexual relationships?
Agreed, it's just getting sad now. I'm all on board with them being more open about sex than Jordan was and with changes like Siuan and Moiraine having an actual relationship (though where on earth IS Siuan in this season, and Moiraine certainly doesn't seem to be giving her any thought at all this season), but no need to keep harping on about it.
View original post11:06 OMG. Alanna has thoughts in her head beyond her sex life and making inappropriate jokes about the Power. Now what is the difference between Lan’s bond being ripped from him, and taken by Moiraine? How did Moiraine take it, if she can’t channel? Why have they spent so much effort to highlight the danger of Lan’s situation if it turns out that’s not actually his situation?
Much like the 'we'll hide which of the five is the actual Dragon until the end' decision wreaking havoc on the plot last season because the writers were nowhere near good enough to deal with all the direct and indirect consequences of it, Moiraine having been cut off from the Source is a factor behind a large part of the drivel in this second season. Though in the former case, at least there was a sort of understandable reason for that choice - I've still no idea what the reason for the Moiraine thing was.
View original postMore importantly, how are they fucking with Moiraine’s backstory? The big thing that happened to her 20 years in the past, shortly before bonding Lan was hearing the Foretelling of the Dragon’s Rebirth. Lan should know all about that. Because she told him when she bonded him, because that’s the kind of thing that would be criminally irresponsible to keep from someone in that situation.
I guess maybe the point of this was more to tell Lan how much more open and carefree Moiraine was prior to that moment, but indeed, poor writing again.
View original post13:15 That is the most ridiculous fake painting ever. It looks like someone photoshopped Pike’s face into a CGI-generated portrait with an “old painting” filter. The question is, is that supposed to be Moiraine and her mother, Moiraine and a heretofore unknown child she lost and got turned to ice as a result, or Moiraine and Lady Lindsey? Because she’s older than her sister, don’t you know?
I immediately took it for granted it was supposed to be Moiraine and Anvaere - unsubtly driving home the point about how slow Aes Sedai age.
View original post13:59 The nuthouse woman addressed Moiraine as “my lady” not “Aes Sedai.” So why is Lady Moiraine allowed to demand a private meeting with Logain? This is why it makes no sense for Logain to be anywhere but the White Tower. To quote a vastly superior show also starring Lindsey Duncan, Logain “may be broken like a Dacian catamite and still be dangerous…As long as he can be propped on a horse, he is dangerous!” The Tower should absolutely be keeping the tightest of controls on him, not leaving him in an asylum in another country, permitted to have noble visitors without supervision.
It seems like Logain is there because Moiraine personally arranged for him to be there and nobody else in the Tower knows or cares. Which, in fairness, the Tower in this show does seem to be pretty clueless and powerless in general so it's not as blatantly ridiculous as it would've been in the books.
The same reason why Moiraine can just continue to walk around looking every inch an Aes Sedai, at least to those who know what AS look like - which indeed you'd expect the supervisor of an asylum hosting gentled male channelers to know, even ignoring the Logain factor.
View original post14:53 They make it worse with every line. Set aside what we know about the White Tower from a book series apparently as equally unrelated to this show as “Rome” on HBO is to either version. Moiraine has just cited two factions with strong interests in having access to Logain, whose wishes she arranged to be thwarted, in addition to violating basic security and political tactics. How did this come to pass? How did Moiraine accomplish this? How did she get the Tower to do something against its own interests by real world rules, not just those of the setting, when she was basically in a lot of trouble during her last visit to the Tower, following Logain’s capture, and ended the visit with a sentence of exile?
Because she's the writers' Mary Sue, even more so than Egwene is in the books? This is getting completely pathetic.
View original post19:43 Leane implied with that absurd rationalization that she is not, in fact, in communication with Siuan. If she is, she does not need to split hairs like that. Which means she is lying about Siuan being aware, because she could not know this. If she did know that Siuan is aware, then she would have no need to come up with that ridiculous justification.
View original postThey should have omitted the Three Oaths. These writers are not smart enough to handle them.
Agreed. Nor are they creative enough to build up to something actually worthwhile with this 'Siuan is mysteriously absent' thing they're building up.
View original post25:25 What are the timelines again? What does Lan mean by the bond being masked for the last six months? Isn’t that about the time jump between seasons? That’s not masking the bond. The bond is gone, and there is nothing to mask. Did he mean before the Eye of the World? Because in the Tower, Lan confronts Moiraine about masking the bond right before her rendezvous with Siuan, and she says that it’s been two years since she masked it. Then, in Fal Dara, the morning Moiraine & Rand leave, Lan tells Nynaeve that she has masked the bond, to conceal her departure (Or possibly for the canonical reasons she would have masked it, because her warder was having sex in the same building). She was not masking it for any significant amount of time before she lost the ability to channel, so IDK where six months comes in.
I think the timeline is 'there is no timeline'.
View original post35:24 What kind of spy report mentions that stuff? How is this anything other than the most transparent attempt to wind Nynaeve up? In the books, she was very skeptical of Liandrin’s claims and was only willing to go along because Liandrin had to explicitly tell her the stakes, and also because Egwene kept interfering with her efforts to learn more. Because Book!Nynaeve was not an idiot. But hey, at least this one is black, which is important for all the young black women out there who need good examples to look up to.
Yeah, pretty hilarious to get that much detail from a 'spy report' when we've just seen how the Tower doesn't have the slightest clue of what is going on in Cairhien, one of the biggest cities in their world, which also happens to be rather a lot closer than Toman's Head and, you know, not actually under foreign occupation.
View original post37:55 So Ihvon says that warders remind the Aes Sedai they are not gods. How? Why? Then Lan comments that he doesn’t think Alanna needs help with that, to Ihvon’s amusement. The script seems to think that Lan just accused Alanna of having a god complex or being somewhat less than humble, but what he actually said was that he does not think she needs anyone to remain her than she’s not a good. In other words, she sucks so badly that no one could mistake her for one, or she is extremely humble and doesn’t need help recalling her true status.
I took it more as a reference to Alanna being very grounded in normal daily life - her family, her sex life, cooking food - as opposed to someone like Moiraine who is only thinking of the mission and how to manipulate people for her greater purpose.
View original post39:55 So the Damodred backstory is that “Uncle” ruined them. That tracks, but I feel like I am hearing a story about a Victorian or Edwardian family that lost their fortune and can barely afford the servants. Instead of a King leading a country into the most brutally destructive war in its history and the family lost the throne but remain the second most powerful house in the realm. Which is just a touch more interesting.
I'm guessing we'll still get the fuller story in a lot more detail, once the show gets around to discussing the Aiel (from the trailer, seems episode 5 will have Aviendha's introduction, taking Gaul's place in the books, and somehow happening in the vicinity of Falme because clearly geography is just as unimportant as the timeline).
View original postWhat the conversation boiled down to is that Anvaere built up her own power base in Moiraine’s absence, and now the tables have turned since Moiraine lost the one she had accumulated on her own. All it does is slow down the plot for an episode, without really giving us any character work on Moiriane or useful world-building. And does Anvaere know she’s unable to channel? Silly Cannoli. Why would establishing that very basic part of a character’s operating knowledge be important?
It seems clear that Moiraine is still going around acting like a full Aes Sedai and expecting people to think she can still channel. In fairness, a woman like, say, Setalle Anan in the books wouldn't have had any issues presenting herself as a still-channeling Aes Sedai to non-channelers either - it's the Aes Sedai (and the Kin) who would've put an almost immediate end to that and made her extremely sorry for the attempt. But as long as the WT doesn't care and lets Moiraine gets away with it, I wouldn't expect it to be an issue with anyone else. It's not as if Aes Sedai in the books actually have to demonstrate their channeling before they are shown deference.
View original post43:12 I don’t know if this is Egwene’s ego talking, or idiotic screenwriters. It was firmly established last season that anyone but the Dragon Reborn would have died if they had gone with Moiraine and Rand. I mean, it wasn’t established firmly, but the script acted like it was, treating anyone who questioned that point as obstructionist or idiots. So no matter how Egwene trained, she could not have helped a damn. A better way to put it might be that if she had been better, she might have saved Amalisa and those two other chumps the Lady of Fal Dara murdered with her incompetence, alongside all the men they abandoned to die at the wall.
Probably both.
View original post44:49Now how does she plan to haul their unconscious asses all the way to Falme? And why? I be this is all going to be for some reason the show pulls out their ass at the last moment, just like the Eye of the World last season.
Most likely.
View original postJust when it seemed like Show!Liandrin was on her way to being a fully-realized character with a new portrayal, she’s just same old Liandrin and all the other stuff was to throw us off the track. :slowclap: Well played, sirs.
I mean, if they want to give us Black Ajah / Darkfriends who aren't as onesided and boring as in the books, that wouldn't be a bad thing. Except going by the evidence so far, they really don't have what it takes to do that properly.
View original post48:29I was about to ask if the show actually knew what the Shadow’s plan was, if Ishamael is trying to manipulate stuff, but random Myrddraal are trying to assassinate Rand, but when he lost the sword, I realized Lanfear is probably doing it to get him to channel.
Makes sense.
View original post55:18 So the Forsaken are unkillable, now. Until the writers back themselves into a corner and have to come up with some exception. Whee. Can’t wait.
So terrible in so many ways.
View original postAs far as Moiraine’s Oaths still holding … I give up. I don’t know if she’s taking advantage of the ignorance about severing to give herself credibility or what exactly her channeling status is, or if the writers even remember which is which and what the rules are.
I'm going with, she has been stilled and isn't bound by the Oaths anymore - and in this version, is either too arrogant, too hyper-focused on her greater purpose, or both, to think twice about trying to keep living by the Oaths the way Siuan does in the books.
View original post55:19 Dave Hill wrote this one. Remember last season, when we discovered he was the guy who joined the Game of Thrones writing staff when it started to go in the toilet.
Hah. Isn't that a coincidence.
View original postNow I am wondering about the logistics of the damane plot. At this point, it makes more sense for Liandrin to just kill Elayne, rather than go through the effort to drag her to Falme with the other two, unless they are all going to wake up as damane. And I could see them doing that so their fave Egwene looks like less of a twit (her capture ITB was far from her best moment), and then extricating themselves from captivity. If they want to be legitimately smart, they have already established Elayne's tech skills, so they could incorporate that into an escape plan. I suspect they will not be smart, and will simply have the girls escape through Awesomeness, and possibly also some method that does not actually paint them in as good a light as the books did.
Since apparently Aviendha will be there too, odds are she might get involved in freeing them.
View original postNo telling where they are going with Superhero Moiraine, scoring an even more improbable victory over Lanfear than ITB, because the allegedly most dangerous Forsaken doesn't know how to set a ward when she is going to be vulnerable. The worst part is, as with her scene with Logain, she starts talking the badass voice and they think she's being epic and cool, but she's almost always saying something stupid and that voice makes her seem like a buffoon. I guess we're done with tragically suffering Moiraine and back to insufferable Moiraine. I wonder if they realize that her best moment this season was when she warned Domon to flee and gave him extra money, more than she had scammed, to help him do so? Because most of her "cool" moments come across as her being high on the smell of her own farts.
Agreed.
Season 2 Episode 4
- 08/09/2023 08:15:05 PM
359 Views
That pretty much sucked from start to finish... so much for seeing some improvement.
- 10/09/2023 10:05:50 AM
179 Views
Hmmmm......
- 10/09/2023 02:07:39 PM
133 Views
This episode was better, now up to the level of "not bad".....
- 10/09/2023 09:28:41 PM
141 Views
Is the series better or worse than “The Shannara Chronicles”?
- 11/09/2023 02:49:47 AM
159 Views