View original post
01:27 Are we already getting a Forsaken audience with the Dark One? Way to shoot your wad, show. Jordan saved this for book 6, with lots of buildup so that when we got to see an exchange with the Dark One, it meant something. This show hasn’t been super clear on what the deal is with the Dark One or the Forsaken. It came following two of the best books in the series, with the most dramatic action and plot advancement, and at the start of the series shifting from plot-driven to character-exploration stories. It was both earned, and set up, and also positioned in the series where there would not be a need to top it. Given the sensationalistic nature of TV, and the inclinations demonstrated of the showrunners, they are going to want and need to keep topping stuff. So, you know, good luck with that.

2:31 Okay, disregard, looks like he’s just breaking a Seal to “wake the other Forsaken.” And apparently you do that by casting spells, with words.

I’m rather curious how that aspect of channeling works with regard to the Seanchan channelers, with their gags.

3:55 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.

4:44 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.

5:02 Are you not entertained!

7:09 Saying he is not good company “for anyone!” invites the assumption that Rand is referring to the danger of his channeling. Except he says that to justify his turning down an invitation to an isolated cabin in the mountains, to stay in a populous city! It could be that he’s afraid of hurting Selene, but that doesn’t fix anything, it just makes it seem like Rand is only interested in avoiding harm to people he cares about, and isn’t all that concerned with the safety of extras and redshirts strangers.

What an improvement on the book character, who cared about every casualty, and every peasant who suffered from his actions. But at least this one has had as many sexual partners as the show has had seasons, and he hasn’t even gotten together with any of his canonical love interests yet. This makes it mature.

And I am aware that a possible motivation for Rand to refuse Selene’s offered getaway is to stay near Logain, but in that case the excuse should be something like “the patients at the nuthouse need me.”

Also, 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?

7:23 They are doing a slightly better job of making the Tower look white this season.

7:54 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.

8:17 Two things – in character for Egwene to be fixated on the symbols or signs of others’ status rather than the personal cost entailed in obtaining them.

Secondly, they reused the footage, I think. At about 8:13, Egwene slowly tilts her head to look at Nynaeve’s ring, before they cut to the other angle as she reaches out to touch it, and we see Nynaeve’s reaction. Then, when the camera goes back to Egwene, it looks like the same image, and she starts to tilt her head in preparation to leaning to touch the ring. And the shot at 8:16 is identical, before cutting back to Nynaeve saying she should go.

Where we should have seen Egwene looking apologetic and Nynaeve defensive, we … don’t.

8:51 While the sentiment is well-intended, Egwene has no knowledge on which to assert that it wasn’t real. Book!Egwene was fond of running her mouth and offering ill-informed opinions, but she wouldn’t claim something like this that she had no way of knowing.

9:09 If he can’t be Moriaine’s warder, Lan is going to be a hippy. Never mind that he devoted his life to protecting the world from the Shadow and waging a one-man war against the Blight. That’s not the kind of vocation or lifestyle you become disenchanted with, or see in a new light, after a personal tragedy. It’s an actual problem with tangible consequences. They have not done the legwork to make us care about this new character and have stripped away just about anything that made cool or different from any generic swordsman.

9:33 All little girls are obsessed with combat and martial skills. What a progressive world. Of course, they would rather spar with warders than pay any attention to the exotic and beautiful Aes Sedai. And what are they even doing here?

10:18 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?

Hey, remember last season, when they spent most of a whole episode on the tragic warder who killed himself to avoid being raped by Alanna and her Warders? It was such an important story to tell that they left the future savior of the world hanging while Moiraine and Alanna discussed his fate and Lan wasted hours chatting with him and drinking and we had to attend multiple ceremonies pertaining to his tragedy. What was the point of all that? How was it necessary to set up this? The “previously on” bit suggests that this is all about saving Lan from the loss of a bondholder, but they haven’t shown him to be in anything like the condition Steppin suffered. Nor have they established the rules enough to understand this. Since Moiraine is alive and well, it gives the impression that the bond is some sort of addiction, which, way to go show. It’s addictive and rapey. Maybe if you want to portray a different concept, don’t leer over the (invented) sexual implications in just about every relevant scene.

And what is with all the families? Lan had a family back in Fal Dara, Liandrin has a dying son, Moiraine visits her family manor and sister, and now Alanna is bringing her newest warder home to meet the family. One of the adaptational choices Game of Thrones made was to de-emphasize all the elaborate aristocratic family connections, because there isn’t time for that on a TV show, even if it was pretty important to a lot of aspects of the books’ story. Why are they dragging all of this in, when it’s not important to the story and there are so many things they can’t be bothered to explain, and we are in the fourth of eight episodes and I still could not tell you what this season is about? We’re 20% of the way through the episode and we have yet to see Mat, Perrin or Elayne and Alanna’s family have had more lines sniggering about her sex life than Egwene and Nynaeve have spoken combined this week.

10:27 This scene of Lan peeing went on for 17 seconds before he spoke to Alanna.

11:06 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?

And why was it necessary to accost Lan while urinating to have this talk? It’s not like she needs to snatch a moment of privacy when she can, she’s an Aes Sedai, she can make the time.

11:34 Name dropping Cadsuane again. They really want to jam her into this ASAP. And for the record, Nynaeve was promoted to Accepted much faster than Cadsuane. Cadsuane took six years and Moiraine and Siuan both took much less, so it’s not even like she would be the standard anymore. If you want to name-drop her, just say “Not even Cadsuane made it that fast.”

12:20 Is that a concept Alanna has difficulty with, believing that ice was once water? Like, it’s generally wet, and located near water, and starts to melt as soon as you touch it…

More 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.

12:29 These characters are caught up in a mission to save the world from an apocalyptic war. Who gives a crap whether or not one of them is, or has ever been, happy? We have other things to be doing. Any time now.

12:42 What are our fantasy protagonists up to? Don’t know. Moiraine is moving back into her childhood bedroom and unpacking.

13:15 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?

13:59 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.

All of this was explicitly laid out in the text, for the slow-witted or script-writing portion of the readership. That I can quote the applicable principle from an unrelated TV show based on historical figures, that aired in Robert Jordan’s lifetime, means this is not just being picky about differences from the books, or WoT source material. This is how the world, how human beings and human institutions, function! You can’t just toss all this out and maintain verisimilitude and audience immersion.

14:53 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?

Again, this makes no sense from what they put on screen, forget the world building.

14:56 Congratulations on blowing Rand’s cover if Logain didn’t actually have his real name, and if he is feeling like revealing Rand out of spite or boredom or maybe to avenge himself on Moiraine for her role in his downfall, for which, he indicated at the outset of this conversation, he holds her responsible. For what it’s worth, in addition to being a perfectly rational expectation based on human nature, as well as his behavior and lines in this scene, it is absolutely in Logain’s wheelhouse in his book characterization, where he did, in fact, cheerfully spread stories to discredit the Aes Sedai and cause trouble. Even after regaining his abilities, he behaved like a spiteful jealous dick toward Rand.

15:40 This is sooo deep you guys! Moiraine has insights, you see, because she’s talking about herself, too!

15:49 Moiraine is backing away. That she is avoiding contact, when she can allegedly channel, and strongly, as Logain would know from trying to fight her shields, while also affecting an attitude of superiority, should be a flashing neon sign that she is not nearly as in control as she is pretending.

16:54 I have to say, they aren’t letting me down with Egwene. Even when legitimately concerned about her friend, she can’t help but be sensitive to the difference in rank, and what’s more, from the smile at this timestamp, Elayne has that figured out about her.

17:10 “She was there for me last year…” Two episodes ago, Egwene was whining that Nynaeve was never there for her, she was always sparring with warders or something.

17:15 Bzzt. Wrong. Egwene, in no medium, loves Rand “more than anything”. She was dumping him for the Wisdom job on the show and in the books, was ready to move to a whole new part of the world if that’s what it took to get such a job for herself.

18:00 Oh, give it up, already. Hopefully someone will put the kibosh on this because she’s an Accepted now.

18:20 Why does someone who can’t channel know this? Why is this the first thing we have heard of the reaction to Nynaeve’s test and its aberrations? Why does this guy care that Nynaeve channeled during the test? Did he read some irrelevant novel?

18:35 Warder backhandedly denigrating Aes Sedai to a student. Gotta love coherence and plausibility.

19:43 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.

They should have omitted the Three Oaths. These writers are not smart enough to handle them.

20:08 Leane’s reaction is just silly. What did Liandrin say that was so shocking or outrageous? She actually looks like Liandrin made an uncouth joke. What they should have been going for is troubled concern, not astonished disbelief. What is she astonished about? The idea of Siuan falling or Leane falling with her? That Liandrin would say so out loud? If the former, it could say something about the authority and presumed permanence of the Amyrlin Seat and authority structures. If the latter, about Aes Sedai customs and practices, and in turn, tell us something about Liandrin, that she would defy those customs. Or maybe about Leane’s naiveté that she is shocked at the idea. But they don’t develop this stuff enough, because it does not pertain to polyamory or homosexuality.

20:35 Perrin says “You’re the one leading us, not them,” to the man who is behind all of “them,” and “leading” only Perrin and that loser wolf behind him.

23:19 Perrin, the answer to your question about why Elyas hasn’t come until now, is that he was not cast, because he’s not important to Egwene, and that’s who was the protagonist of your adventures together and they are trying to manage the negative reaction of people who would have preferred Elyas to Steppin the Tragic Warder or Dana the Dumpy Darkfriend.

24:14 Why do we care about Hopper’s name, or at least enough to table the discussion of saving Ingtar, Loial and the Badass Shienaran from captivity? That aside, it was not a bad introduction to the whole wolfbrother thing, proving that they could easily have put it in the first season, where Elyas belonged, instead of multiple scenes of trying and failing to explain the Way of the Leaf. An obscure ideology that doesn’t have much present day relevance to the story, versus the fantasy abilities of one of the three leading characters? Let’s have three different scenes where two different characters try (and fail) to explain the former, and leave the latter until halfway into season 2.

24:52 If you’re going to be all about the old-timeyness of this lifestyle, look up how long it takes to make bread and why it’s not something you start gathering the water for shortly before dinner. The yeast should have been rising long before this.

25:12 You don’t need to tell Lan about the first few weeks after the bond has been broken, because just last season, the two of them accompanied Steppin the Tragic Warder on a month-long journey following the death of his Aes Sedai. And because the prior scene with Lan established that his situation is not like the other ones and the same rules don’t apply to him. In fact, Alanna strongly suggested that there is no point to all this rehab bullshit.

25:25 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.

25:32 And Maksim says he thought he was the only warder who could go that long, suggesting that the warder is somehow afflicted or deprived by the Aes Sedai making the bond. When Moiraine admitted to masking the bond before going to Siuan, she joked that she thought Lan could use a break. That would be a highly inappropriate joke to make if Lan had something to fear from her masking for an extended period of time. Not to mention a highly inappropriate practice, subjecting your warder to that just to get laid. While multiple potential dragons reborn are scattered around the city with only Lan to watch him and no way for Moiraine to know if he’s in trouble until she decides she’s had enough nookie.

26:18 What is the big revelation here? Why would it be shocking and scandalous that Alanna masks Maksim’s bond continuously? How does this prove Lan can do whatever they have in mind? How does any of this fit with the difference between an Aes Sedai masking the bond with a warder, and the consequences to a warder when the bond is broken? Are they saying that Moiraine masking the bond before heading into the Blight shielded Lan from the effects of her being stilled? That might fit with how Alanna described it. But if that’s the case, why all the fuss since? Why are three people, two of whom should know better, treating Lan like she died and he’s in danger of going down Steppin’s Tragic Warder path?

30:08 The Lanfear brainwashing is awfully slow-paced. Can’t wait for the whiplash when Rand gets dragged into something interesting, with only four episodes left in the season, and lots of time to be spent on Moiraine’s relationship with her sister and Lan and the Pervert Trio.

30:13 Bet they’re so proud of this scene intro.

31:04 Min looks like a man.

31:17 How would Min’s visions tell her that someone she has never seen will come looking for a particular room in an inn?

31:57 We are approaching a point, if we’re aren’t already there, where Nynaeve has had more screen time with Liandrin than with all the other Two Rivers folk.

32:28 Why do Accepted dresses have a cutout in the front?

33:33 EVERYTHING Liandrin says about the Power is always backwards. Men who channel go mad, because the Dark has “cursed” the Power, they are not cursed because they go mad! And why would the Shadow curse them for killing people they love? Wouldn’t that be something the Light or the Creator would curse them for?

Given how the same shallow pseudo-feminist idiots this show panders to have seizures at the implications of the story that there are differences between the sexes, I would not be surprised if Liandrin’s version is correct, that men simply cannot handle the One Power and go mad as a result, and thus are susceptible to the Shadow because of their crimes.

34:13 This season, Liandrin claims to rule this world, speaking for the Aes Sedai & Tower. Last season, she said the world is cruel to women who try to rise up because men still control much of it.

34:27 This is not advancing the plot or telling us anything important about the characters. This is Aes Sedai fan fiction.
Edit from the future: Even worse, because it's a headfake. This is just more trying to make an evil character deep. Book!Liandrin wasn't deep, because becoming a Darkfriend is not a legitimate choice or point of view. You're just an asshole if you do.

35:24 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.

35:29 The conversational thrust of the last two scenes with Lan was that he could go where he wanted, even to Moiraine, or to the woman he loves. So why is he STILL sitting here with these freaks?

36:12 And in a trope-infested script, this would be time for a comment that Lan or Ihvon is also working on wisdom, or it is still eluding him. Given the adolescent sensibilities of this show, an equal possibility involves a sexual pun referencing Nynaeve.

37:55 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.

38:44 I’ve forgotten what that letter is. Was that the poem Moiraine cheated Domon out of?

39:55 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.

40:06 I am really trying to watch this scene with what Liandrin told Nynaeve just before this, so I can see the thematic through line and how Liandrin’s advice about coping with longevity is relevant to anything other than a WoT fan’s navel-gazing speculation about what it’s like being an Aes Sedai.

40:20 Yes,in fact, the Tower teaches that exactly of Aes Sedai. They are all about keeping calm no matter the provocation. Smiling at someone who spits in your eye might as well be in the test for the shawl.

40:25 It IS that kind of ruin! The head of the number two family in the kingdom should never have had to beg for leftovers. They brought Moiraine back into her family, and destroyed the meaning of her family, which is that she comes from a long line of tyrants, culminating in a man who brought the nation's destruction about through his pride, and Moiraine utterly rejects them, to the point of not even signing her family name on what she purports to be her last testament.

Now they are just a bunch of people who suffered some financial and social setbacks in her absence, but have succeeded in reclaiming their position and snagging the best marriage partner on the market.

The Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey fell asleep watching this.

41:07 I am sorry, but Moiraine’s dress looks absolutely ridiculous, and if that is the point they are trying to make, they are failing, because it does not look remotely like it belongs in the same setting as Anvaere’s clothes, or those of anyone else in Cairhien.

41:53 I don’t see it. There was nothing in all of that to correlate with the idea of Aes Sedai having to lose their own lives or becoming detached from the world. It doesn’t fit with anything. The way Anvaere is talking, Moiraine’s network of spies were something of her old life, before going to the Tower and she has taken over it in her absence. Except she was talking about having spies last season, in Tar Valon. Why would she give them up in a royal capital city, especially since Tar Valon is not home to her and she spends her life traveling around the world? Or does Anvaere’s coopting of her spy network relate to her stilling? Again, how?

I also suspect the writers know no more than the Kenobi writers about espionage and intrigue, because I don’t see how Anvaere is going to keep spies from sharing their information with Moiraine. These are not sworn operatives trained in a spy academy and devoted to their mistress. They are people who, by definition, are willing to trade their knowledge to people who are not supposed to have it. The most Anvaere should have come away with was that she had access to the take from Moiraine’s network. All she is doing here is warning Moiraine that if she wants to be secret, she’ll have to evade her old spies. Which she should be able to do. There’s also the question of spies Anvaere has employed in her absence, but her boasting could be a ploy to make Moiraine overlook that…

What 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?

43:12 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.

Curiously, in the BOOK, Egwene DID go to the Eye of the World and she did try to fight and failed to channel effectively, leading Rand to go back to stop her, drawing the eye of the Forsaken who pursued him instead of Egwene. This motivation would make a lot of sense for Book!Egwene. But it has no bearing on the show.

43:37 What’s Elayne’s motivation for following them that isn’t going to completely character assassinate her? ITB, she was drawn by the ta’veren pull of Rand, whom she has yet to meet. And heard lots of things through the spyhole between her and Egwene’s room that suggested this was a problem that needed all hands on deck and other rationalizations.
Edit from the future: Okay, to be fair, they accounted for that, and only that, problem.

44:49Now 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.

Just 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.

45:25 Min’s aunts exploited her viewings by making her work as a fortune teller! Wow. How many families and backstories can they destroy?

45:55 Here he goes again, claiming that the Father of Lies and the Betrayer of Hope are the same person.

46:21 Confirmed, Liandrin is your basic Black Ajah. But at least it’s not her viewings that guided her to the inn and the attic, it was Liandrin’s instructions, I guess.

Now tell me why we are supposed to be invested in this girl’s danger? Who is she to us? What relationship does she have to the main characters, aside from betraying Mat in their jailbreak?

And going off book knowledge of her role, I can imagine Mat saving her from Ishamael and something brings them to Falme where the other plotlines are converging and Rand shows up, and Perrin meets Aviendha, so each group of friends brings Rand a different girlfriend, isn’t that sweet?

48:29I 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.

49:29 “You know me, right?” is a dumb argument for a male channeler to make, just as it was dumb for the characters in the books to say that they did not believe Rand would hurt them, because the point of the madness is that it does not matter what you want to do, or how moral or trustworthy you are, you’re going to hurt people because of it. Book!Rand understood this very well. Yet another character they made more stupid onscreen.

50:17 If the first thing male channelers do when they go mad in this (and only this) version of the story, is kill the people they love, Rand has been criminally irresponsible starting a relationship. And he’s the one saying it. This is his understand of the situation and his actions in comparison.

52:06 Those were lines he should have got from his actual love interests. As it is, it will just be trite if Elayne or Min says them, too. And as the threat in the relationship, it’s not a position Rand can argue to them.

54:38 Calling Lanfear the most dangerous Forsaken is not being super feminist, because you could make a good case for Graendal or Moghedian, and Semirhage is grossly overrated. Lanfear was a psycho stalker chick, whom no one took seriously and got outsmarted by everyone she tried to manipulate.

55:18 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.

As 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.

55:19 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.

55:23 Liars!

Now 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.

No 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.

Perrin was enslaved, then rescued and you wouldn't know it this episode aside from a throwaway line. But at least we got an explanation of his powers, and were introduced to Hopper. A homicidal asshole and incompetent teacher ITB. Given their track record of making everyone worse, I'm a little worried about Hopper going forward.

Mat appeared on screen.

Just going from the books, I have to assume there is a confrontation with the Seanchan as the climax of the season, through this episode seems to have forgotten the Horn of Valere is a thing. Anyway, the major antagonists have appeared in a single episode and were alluded to in another. What in all the blather about Aes Sedai relationships did they think was better than moving that plot along at a more even and dramatic pace?