The Wheel of Time Recap: The Red Wedding

It feels good when a show rewards you for paying attention. In the previous episode of The Wheel of Time, we were introduced to Lord Gaebril, the kindly prince consort of Queen Morgaise of Andor. There was no reason to believe he was anything but what he seemed to be, a nice guy who was slightly out of step with the rest of the royal family … except for one small detail. Over and over, there’d be a brief but pregnant pause on the part of everyone who was introduced to them, until they quickly caught themselves and gave him a warm welcome. Something was clearly up, but much like the characters themselves, I was content to push it to the back of my mind. I mean, the guy was so charming!

Now we find out why. Gaebril is, in fact, Rahvin, one of the evil Forsaken freed from their millennia-long captivity. Through magic, he’s warped the memories of everyone in the world, pretty much, convincing them he’s been Morgaise’s significant other for a decade even though he only escaped his magic prison a few months ago. And he’s already playing his fellow Forsaken against one another, secretly an item with creepy Moghadien even as he plots with sexy Lanfear and gruff, battle-scarred Sammael (Cameron Jack) to take Moghedien down. He also mentions being in contact with Semirhage and Graendal, two other Forsaken who’ve been freed without Lanfear’s knowledge. With any luck they’ll be as suave, sophisticated, sexy, and vaguely foreign as all the other Forsaken so far.

In a show as packed with plot as The Wheel of Time has been during this first three-episode drop of season three, focusing on the little moments makes a big difference. Take Perrin’s storyline, for instance. The main thrust is that the people of his hometown, the Two Rivers, refuse to hand him over to the vicious Whitecloaks, even though failing to do so could cost them dearly. For his part, he refuses to let the townsfolk disperse and be picked off farm by farm by either Whitecloaks or their Trolloc quarry. He proposes they make a stand where they are, en masse — even as he prepares to raid the Whitecloaks’ encampment to rescue his buddy Mat’s family, who’ve been taken prisoner in hopes of drawing Perrin out.

That’s all very nice and very reluctantly heroic. But I know I’ll remember the vertiginous view of the valley where he grew up from the apple blossom grove where his wife is buried before I remember his big rah-rah speech. I’ll remember his spear-maidens Chiad and Bain flirting with basically any male thing that moves, from Loial the Ogier to Maksim, the obviously grieving Warder for Alanna Sedai. I’ll remember how Maksim and Alanna are trapped in different stages of grief — how, despite literally wearing their fallen lover’s ashes as makeup, she’s ready to move on, while Maksim can only wallow in the misery, and how the difference is tearing them apart.

Over in the Aiel Waste, we’ve got a similar situation on our hands. From a plot perspective, we learn that Egwene is an ultrapowerful “dreamwalker,” like the Aiel “Wise One,” Bair, whose dream she accidentally entered. We learn that there’s an Aiel tribe called the Shaido locked in a feud with the Taardad, the group our heroes have hooked up with; they may even be willing to kill the Tuatha’an, the pacifist wanderers who split off from the rest of the Aiel ages ago.

Most importantly, we learn that with the right combination of magical MacGuffins, Rand might be able to actually kill the Dark One, freeing his evil girlfriend, Lanfear, from her oaths to him forever. But what lingers is the emotional intimacy between Rand and Lanfear, two people who have all the reason in the world to kill each other, except for the fact that they’re either in love or in a lust so deep-rooted it’s indistinguishable from love.

What really lingers is the scene in which Moiraine and Lan glisten and gleam half-naked in a sweat lodge, once again establishing the profound platonic intimacy that exists between the Aes Sedai and her Warder. When a beautiful but noticeably blonde woman (Aiel are redheads until they go white as they age) named Melindhra gives them the eye, they playfully debate which one she’s interested in, and how badly Moiraine in particular needs to get laid.

Ultimately, it’s Lan that Melindhra’s after, and not for the reasons you suspect. The crane tattoo on her back gives her away: Like Lan, she’s one of the few survivors of the fall of the kingdom of Malkier to the supernatural Blight, and she wants Lan to use his father’s sword for its true purpose: taking back his kingdom. This high-fantasy speechifying goes down a lot smoother when everyone is gorgeous and mostly topless, I’m not ashamed to admit.

A sort of ostentatious glam sexiness is the order of the day this episode, actually, from the debonair Forsaken and the steamy sweat tent of the Aiel to the debut of Faile (Isabella Bucceri), the flirtatious goth warrior Perrin encounters in the Two Rivers, to the return of Liandrin and her deadly Black Ajah assassination squad to her tropical hometown, Tanchico. Resplendently draped and veiled in red lace, with her sisters all looking equally fabulous, she strides into her ancestral home — actually the place where she was molested as a child, resulting in the son she cared for as an old man in Tar Valon until Lanfear killed him — and slaughters everyone present for the marriage of her rapist’s heir to another child bride. It’s fantastically vicious.

But Leandrin being Leandrin, she takes it too far to be fun. In order to spare the poor girl the pain of her memories, she has her comrade Nyomi (Rachel Denning) lobotomize the kid completely. After completing a ritual in honor of her son, involving the painting of a certain sigil at the sites of both his birth and death, she goes to work with the rest of her sisters in trying to complete their true mission in the town. They’ve stolen an ancient bracelet from the White Tower that works like the Seanchan’s anti-magic manacles did, but which is older and more powerful. Once they find the collar that matches it, they can tame the Dragon himself. (Please note that Moghedien is spying on all this while posing as a servant. Always with a scheme, that one!)

This is a task Elaida, the scheming Red sister from Andor, wants the legit Red Ajah to accomplish themselves. Through some political scheming and a little luck, she appears poised to grab a seat in the Aes Sedai’s government, from which position she hopes to stage a palace coup placing the Red Ajah in charge and refocusing the Aes Sedai’s mission on caging the Dragon Reborn. In the meantime, she maneuvers to have her rivals dispatched to do the same to a new False Dragon wreaking havoc in some other part of the realm.

Elaida also forms a bond with Min, as a fellow seer of the future. Elaida’s foretellings are way less frequent and foreboding than Min’s visions, which in this very episode include Mat hanging from a noose. Honestly, it’s hard to see Mat’s doom as set in stone when he’s now able to channel his warrior spirit and absolutely whip the asses of Elayne’s posh brothers when they try to bully him. (There’s some more of that ostentatious glam sexiness you ordered!)

Mat and Minh wind up following Nynaeve and Elayne on the next stage of their quest to root out the Black Ajah once and for all. Though they interrogate two captured members of the Shadow-sworn secret society, they don’t get any actionable information, just a bunch of conflicting lies. Nynaeve deduces that Liandrin is the key to it all, and she and Elayne find the sigil that marks her as an Tanchico expat. They know she’s making a play for the collar and what she’ll do if she gets it.

Whatever she does, I hope she does it quickly. The Wheel of Time is a show I enjoy, but I still feel that every recap ought to begin with “Okay, how much time ya got?” There’s just so much going on, involving so many people in so many places with so many quests for so many objects because of so many prophecies. I find this fun, more or less, but I can understand people who land on “less.” Clearly, its memorable standalone sequences and moments of passion and sensuality are the show’s real power, the way it delivered its knockout blows during season two. I’m waiting patiently to be coldcocked.