The Wheel of Time Recap: Party Hard

A rowdy, bawdy drinking song is always gonna win me over. I’m too big a fan of Les Misérables and ZZ Top to feel otherwise. So when The Wheel of Time stopped short — more or less, I mean, this is The Wheel of Time and they had to cram a few other storylines in there just to be safe — to watch Ceara Coveney’s princess-in-waiting, Aes-Sedai-in-training, Black-Ajah-hunter-in-bad-disguise character Alayne perform a little ditty about the quality of the local titties with the double-entendre title “The Hills of Tanchiko”? My notes read, in bold caps, “IT’S VERY WICKER MAN AND IT RULES.”

It’s also revealing, I think, of the bind The Wheel of Time finds itself in. For one thing, it’s filmed as yet another airless and unconvincing blue-and-orange night falls on the world of the Wheel, leeching much of the glamour and danger out of the inherently glamorous, dangerous, bustling, seedy city-after-dark setting. (I know I said last week that I’ve given up on getting a good-looking nighttime scene out of this show, and that’s true, but I haven’t given up complaining about it.)

But more importantly, it’s stranded neatly between the show’s two more or less incompatible strengths. On the one hand, it’s undeniable that Wheel’s charm lies in its preposterously sprawling canvas and the multitude of characters and storylines splashed across it. At this point, I look forward to being hacky-sacked around from one group of heroes and villains to the next, learning new prophecies, and trying to identify character names phonetically since I don’t have a prayer of figuring out how they’re spelled without the subtitles. (Critics’ screeners don’t have subtitles, in this case, but subtitles are the way of the coward at any rate.)

On the other hand, the show’s standout episodes and sequences are invariably the ones that really stand alone. These recaps have made much more out of season two’s Nynaeve and Egwene spotlight episodes and celebrated season three’s one-and-done journey through the mystical city of Rhuidean with Rand and Moiraine. But you don’t need to be a full capsule episode or a 20-minute cold open to pop like that. All you need to do is bring the whirlwind-tour rhythm of the show to a halt for a few minutes at a time.

Alayne’s song does that. Technically, it’s Mat and his old friend Thom Merrilin (Alexandre Willaume) — a “gleeman,” as minstrels are called in this world, who’s also a swordsman-adventurer of some type and who saved Mat’s ass a couple of seasons back — covering for Alayne, whose status as a royal is a lot easier to suss out than she thinks. Thom claims she’s his apprentice, she plays along more ably than they’d imagined she’d be able to do (her hours of studying the local customs paid off!), and that’s that.

But what it really does is, to quote Barton Fink, burst into joyous song. It’s a full-fledged musical number in the middle of the high-fantasy saga about the power of polyamory or whatever. It gives everyone — Mat and his reluctant friend Thom, a drunken Nynaeve and Min, and especially Alayne, who shakes what her mama gave her in a fashion that’s simultaneously sexy and very endearing — a chance to lay the quest aside and cut loose. It does so for the show at the same time.

It doesn’t have to be lighthearted, the whole shack shimmies! kinda stuff to achieve this same welcome effect, of course. After returning home from their night out, for example, Nynaeve and Alayne are jacked by Moghadien, the Forsaken who’s been posing as a servant of Liandrin’s Black Ajah coven. That coven, it should be noted, is getting smaller by the day: Liandrin her lieutenant Nyomi for secretly working for the Forsaken Ravan instead of Lanfear, while Moghadien kills another to learn that Liandrin plans to make a play to become a Forsaken herself. At any rate, Moghadien effortlessly hypnotizes the two young women into becoming her giggling schoolgirl confidants, disclosing everything they know about their quest, its purpose, and its biggest success so far: procuring the second of two bracelets required to operate the ancient magic-suppressing collar that Liandrin and her pals are trying to find so they can collar Rand, the Dragon Reborn.

(A lot of this information was immortalized in a colossal bit of statuary that has now largely crumbled into the sea, leaving behind only the Shackled Man; this seems like something Alayne should have learned in her research, as Thom himself points out, but it’s kind of up to the writers to decide whether or not she did, so I’m giving her a pass.)

After all, we’ve heard about how powerful these two women are, it’s unpleasant in the extreme to see them reduced to childlike doofuses who’ll tell Moghadien anything she wants to know in exchange for one of the Forsaken’s toothy smiles. I found myself waiting for the moment we learn that it’s all a trick, a trap, that Alayne and Nynaeve are simply playing along and are going to take the sorceress down when she least expects it, but that moment never arrives. That sense of anti-catharsis and the stark difference between the tone of the scene and the effect of its characters here versus anywhere else in the episode leave a lasting impression.

Along with Nynaeve and, to a lesser extent, Alayne, Egwene is one of the most naturally powerful channelers the Aes Sedai have ever seen. But like them, that hasn’t stopped her from getting punked out by a Forsaken — in her case, Lanfear, who’s also very literally her boyfriend Rand’s dream lover. With the help of the Aiel Wise Ones, Egwene faces Lanfear in dreams and learns that Rand has known all along he’s been sleeping with a Forsaken.

So Egwene pulls a very, very shrewd maneuver if you’re approaching things from a wronged girlfriend perspective. She confronts Rand about his infidelity and his stupidity in falling for a Forsaken. He condescendingly tells her she couldn’t possibly understand and petulantly asserts that when push comes to shove, she’ll always choose her own pursuits — becoming a Wisdom, becoming an Aes Sedai, becoming a Wise One — over having anything to do with him.

It’s only after he thusly breaks up with her that she confronts him with her real concern: that he’s known Lanfear was physically torturing her in her dreams all this time. If he thought he could effortlessly rebound from Egwene into Lanfear’s arms, now he knows he’s wrong — whatever his romantic inclinations toward Egwene, he loves her fiercely and has never put up with Lanfear’s insults towards her, much less assault. But he’ll have no way to walk back his rejection of Egwene now, no matter what.

For the time being, however, he’s just angry at Lanfear — so angry that his Dragon Reborn powers shake the earth, as they’ve done before. This is when the Forsaken called Sammael chooses to launch an attack, but the battle-scarred bad guy and his evil Aiel followers are quickly mowed down, not just by Rand but also by Aviendha, who bursts in wielding magic flaming spears. (At least, I think.)

Sammael falls to a huge blast of power by Rand, which rains down lightning and rubble atop the Forsaken. Is he dead? I wouldn’t hold my breath on this show. But Alsera (Julie Van Leeuwen), the adorable little girl Rand has befriended, isn’t so lucky. She dies in the collapse of the building Rand brings down on top of Sammael, and not even the incredible power he wields as the Dragon Reborn can breathe life back into her. This is another portion of the episode that pops out from the rest, simply because Josha Stradowski’s crazed affect here is as much at odds with his normal reserved demeanor as his fully mad self was in Moiraine’s visions of the future. And no matter how much he rages, it’s to no avail. Death is the one thing no one can use the One Power to heal.

Everything short of death, though? It’s cool, they’ve got this. Back in the Two Rivers, the Cuthon sisters, Bode and Eldrin (Litiana and Lilibet Biutanaseva), use their barely-tapped ability to channel to heal the badly wounded Alanna Sedai as she walks them through the procedure. (Aes Sedai can’t heal themselves directly.) Alanna, in turn, heals Perrin, though, by that point, he’s recovered enough from his wound to start making out hardcore with Feile, with whom he exchanges painful, traumatic backstories. Her mom was a dark friend who killed her brother; he accidentally killed his wife while trying to defend her from trollocs — a tale as old as time.

Speaking of trollocs — which, by the way, hooray, it’s been too long since we’ve seen these orc-minotaur monstrosities — a whole bunch of them show up, led by dark friend Padan Fain (Johann Myers). He and his human allies pose as a posse of Whitecloak reinforcements in order to infiltrate their Dain Bornhald’s forces and, one presumes, lead a massacre of the people of the Two Rivers that they’ll then allow the trollocs to finish. As Perrin’s spear-maiden pals put it to Feile, ol’ Goldeneyes is gonna have to lead an army against these guys, whether he wants to or not.

I think the thing that seals this episode for me is the appearance of the debonair Fares Fares as Ishamael, chieftain of the Forsaken and the first to be slain by Rand. He shows up in a flashback revealing how a young Liandrin killed her rapist in order to spare her infant but he couldn’t find anyone to help her out until Ishmael himself paid her a visit. How exactly he was out and about 90 years or so prior to the start of the series is something I can’t quite figure out — the show was very fuzzy, even self-contradictory, about how and when Ishamael got out of his prison — but his cameo shows how deep a bench of fun characters this show is working with. Thom Merrilin’s return serves much the same purpose later on. You may not be able to keep track of them all without an Excel sheet, but when Wheel deploys them in the right way, it’s hard not to have a good time. Cue “The Hills of Tanchiko”!