Personally I sympathize with Moridin. The way RJ set up the wheel of time, everything seems so pointless. Ages repeat over and over with the same result. Free will is most definitely an illusion, considering the nature of ta'veren and how the wheel makes course adjustments.
... couldn't Moridin have simply balefired himself, or taught the weave to someone else and had them do it to him? Wouldn't that remove him from the pattern? If that's all he wanted, what was stopping him?
And for that matter, why did he never just balefire Rand? He had several opportunities through the course of the series. I always assumed before that there would be some reason that Rand's presence at the Last Battle was necessary for the Dark One to escape, which was why Rand was supposed to be left alive. But instead it seems as though they left Rand alive out of some hope that they could corrupt him. If they had simply killed him, wouldn't the Dark One have gotten free at the end? Or did I miss something where Rand's presence was needed to set him free?
If the Wheel has self-correcting mechanisms, maybe the inherent unintelligence of the bad guys is one of them.
Weren't the forsaken at one point ordered not to kill Rand? I always assumed the DO actually needed Rand to be the one to fully open the bore or something. But now...yeah it doesn't make sense. Why not just kill Rand?
Because the Pattern always found a way to course correct the ramifications of Moridin's actions to complicate his ability to follow through on his beliefs. The streams of balefire crossing and forging a connection between the two souls and etc. In retrospect, Shaitan seems more like the player of a videogame going up against the programming of the underlying game system and using tools that are a part of that system to do it. It found ways to 'cheat' or backdoor it's way into ignoring the code, but couldn't fully beat the system.
