Yes, there's a set up and a middle-act scenes clearly missing. Instead we got a prequel to the setup scene, and a flashback epilogue that should have been the climax.

We got a shabby intro (the TGS prologue scene), then a complete absence from Graendal, which was a very un-Jordan like thing to do.



Not really to me, as I don't believe anyone did. Moghedien makes no sense to me, and Mesaana wouldn't either. This would imply Moridin wanted Delana to be taught Compulsion. Why would he? That leaves Aran'gar wanting Delana to know compulsion, but he could have no Forsaken (but Graendal) do it, so... Nah... that's a detail Brandon thought he could get away with, and with most he will. To me it's a minor continuity flaw that needs to be brushed off.



So far, it's all we ever seen, and this even from Graendal. We saw her use "personality wiping" compulsion before (come close, she restrained herself). It's not about subtlety or intricacies, it's about strength. The strength of her nets on Cyndane and Moghedien was such she was nearing the point of wiping their minds and making them useless. And yes, they were agonizing with adoration for Graendal in that scene.

I guess I have to disagree with you: it's not the weave which is Graendal's strength, it's all her knowledge of the human psyche. She is so good at Compulsion because she knows which mental obstacles/taboos to remove, which weaknesses to exploit, which triggers to use etc. She can use Compulsion crudely like a hammer, and reprogram someone like a robot. It's what she does with her pets. She can also be extremely subtle, barely altering the mental "construct" of a person. It's not her OP skills with the brain - we know her speciality was the treatment of mentally ill patients the OP could not nothing for (everything that isn't a physical malfunction of the brain, like some chemical unbalance... Graendal treated matters of the pure psyche, the soul etc.)...



Actually, she tells Delana it's what she wants, but Delana just weaves silently, as if she could implement all this through her weave.



Perhaps your satisfaction at the outcome of the scene color your judgment of it.




No, this would imply he intended to show us a confrontation of Rand with two Forsaken without ever showing us the Forsaken. That was never his style, and there's no way he would have shown the counterpoint scene as a flashback later. Jordan was extremely careful to respect the coherence and integrity of each story line. He never screwed up with the timeline like this. Graendal's escape scene clearly belonged right after Rand's scene, as second POV in the same chapter. Changing that, Brandon wasted Aran'gar and the "using Graendal's people" foreshadowing, wasted the raising of the stakes for Rand's early storyline that an Aran'gar/Graendal prologue scene would have done, deprived us of the proper TGS climax with Graendal. It's a real shame, because this was the first and maybe last time a Forsaken outwitted Rand in a climax. Those confrontations have always gone Rand's way before, and this was his first major failure. This failure was important to highlight his judgement was no longer what it was in TGS. It's too late now to make that element effective. All that remains of the Graendal's scene is the pleasure at her survival. The rest was wasted, dramatically speaking. We don't care anymore about Arad Doman, Rand's gone. We know NB is a goner. The second you see other channellers are present, you know Graendal will survive.

I feared a lot this would happen with the book split (I'm patient, and I would have preferred Brandon progressed chronologically through the story to avoid stuff like this, which forcibly changes Jordan's intents for how the story evolves), and even more after Brandon started saying he focussed mostly on Rand and Egwene and pushed side events to TOM, and observing that many expected connected scenes seems to have gone down the drain. The Perrin scenes for instance were useless, but we got deprived of side scenes from the Rand-Egwene story lines we normally would have gotten from RJ (the minor players almost all got pushed to the sides, even Brandon admitted it was too much). Graendal's "send off" was the worst for me (major disappointement in TGS, and now I'm not more satisfied just because what I thought happened didn't...), and although I never thought Brandon would have turned a planned climax into a lame duck cliffhanger, I had always been convinced Graendal still had pre-death apparation(s) to make in TOM. With Aran'gar.

Graendal's not alone... Mesaana is another who was all too absent from TGS in Egwene's story line, and I'm pretty sure she has at least one "Graendal-like" flahsback scene coming. Another story line we are currently missing is the Alviarin vs. the BA hunters, and the build up to the BA escape. That too ought to come in TOM but should properly have come in TGS, to flesh out Egwene's rise, which was too simplistic and evacuated too much the side plots.

And yes, I guess the way Brandon handles the timelines is now officially a major gripe with me. A scene with Graendal weeks after the Perrin scene in the same prologue and so far away from the scene with Rand that happened at the same time is a problem for me. It's not that this should never be done, it's that this is not the WOT style, and this is an aspect of WOT I enjoyed (made for good theorizing) and that I think Brandon should have aimed to respect more. I don't want to have to spend another WOT book confused about the timeline. I don't want to be distracted in my reading again wondering at stuff like "Wait... Perrin is still at Malden, does it mean Masema is already dead or that scene will happen later?). I don't want anymore scenes like Tylee's set 20 days after Malden only to return to Malden with Perrin chapters later (clearly, the Perrin scenes in TGS are "prequels", and Jordan intended to show Masema's death than jump ahead 20 days in Perrin's storyline... which appears to where he will start in TOM... His dream scene seems written by Jordan). That's the worst aspect of COT, acknoweldged by Jordan, and with his insistance to switch POV so often (more than the book demanded, really) Brandon managed to make it worse in TGS.

As for the plot twist effect, I don't care for that. It's a cheap effect, and once the surprise is over all you're left with is ackwardly structured drama.

People forget "I am you father" wasn't the greatest plot twist of cinema, that Lucas found it the least disastisfying way to handle the retcon he was forced to make because he had decided not to include this in ANH (his other option was Yoda, but he decided against it because it highlighted the fact Ben didn't tell Luke too much), too uncertain was he to be able to continue the story. He always regretted not putting this in ANH. Plot twists often cover up bad dramatic construction, and for me Graendal is such a case. I can't believe Jordan would have handled it this way. Not his style, not all all.