Yeah, I liked that Lan beat him and proved his badassery (not to mention doubling up on an crazy WoT-family-tie: "Your cousin and my uncle are combined into one dreamwalking assassin AND we each took a shot at killing Demandred with the same ter'angreal!" ), but of all the people who could have set up how dangerous Demandred was, and highlight the awesomeness of Lan's victory, Gawyn was the worst way to start it off, and Galad isn't much better, considering the introduction to their sword-fighting capabilities was seeing them both get bitch-slapped by a farm boy, and they followed it up by killing red shirts and dueling a guy established as a dumbass. Having more instances of being humilated, rescued or spared by Two Rivers guys more times than they've had on-screen badassery just kind of undercuts the capabilities of those two. With all the channelers and otherwise supernaturally-empowered individuals in this story, there is really only room for one normal guy to be larger than life and stand up with the superheroes, and that's Lan. Trying to shoehorn Gawyn and Galad into that category as well is like trying to add a couple more archers to the Avengers movie, or a couple more Omars to The Wire. It just makes things ridiculous.

I think it might have worked with just Galad, and if the idea is to get Gawyn to do something stupid and die, using the three rings should have been enough to do the trick. Having him go challenge the guy calling out the Dragon Reborn just undermines his whole arc from the previous book where he let go his apparent resentment and envy of Rand. And it doesn't make sense to elaborately set up Galad's whole "do what's right no matter what" motivation, and then give him an emotional reason to go after Demandred. It would have been a lot better to have him confront his own mortality, the certainty of the successful performance of his mission, weigh all the reasons he could justifiably didimao along side his brand new relationship with one of the hottest women in the world, and then say "Fuck it. Going after this guy is the right thing to do, even if my life expectancy will be comparable to a snowball's in the Blight." As it was, the man who killed his brother, against whom his inferior little brother put up a good show, minus the channeling protection, looked kind of doable, and gave him a less objectively selfless motivation.

And then we get the Logain attempt - "Whoa, he's tough! Screw this for a game of soldiers, I'm outta here!"

Lan's attack though? - Pure summer blockbuster awesomeness. Score that by James Horner or the LotR composer, have some white birds fly up from in front of Mandarb's slow-motion hooves, Shadowspawn dropping to the flamming arrows like the messenger scene from Last of the Mohicans. Awesome stuff.