Knots are untied as The Wheel of Time season two approaches its end

Lee: We’re rounding the bend to the end of the season with episode seven of eight here, and there’s a lot of ground to cover before we get to that giant battle in the sky that nobody seems to be able to shut up about. (It’s not spoilers if all the characters on screen are talking about it!) This episode involved a lot of moving pieces around on the board—a big chunk of the scenes exist in order to get all of our characters in Falme for next week, including and especially whatever the hell is going on with Mat right now.

But before we get to any of that, we have to talk about the opening for at least just a moment. Last season, we got to see Rand’s birth on the slopes of Dragonmount as the Aiel War stumbled to a close, but now we’re given a peek into the other important event that happened at the same time: the Aes Sedai Gitara Moroso (Hayley Mills) and her “Foretelling.”

Foretelling is apparently a rare talent that does not show up in Aes Sedai very often, and Gitara Sedai was apparently one of the strongest at it—or at least one of the most accurate. Proving that prophecy often comes at the most inconvenient of times, we’re shown a flashback where a much younger Moiraine and Siuan enter Gitara’s rooms in the White Tower, and Gitara almost immediately collapses under the weight of her vision of the Dragon’s return to the world. The Aes Sedai seems to feel what Rand’s mother is feeling during her battle, and we’re led to believe that both Gitara Sedai and Rand’s mother expire at the same time.

We know from the books that this is the moment that kick-starts Moiraine’s and Siuan’s secret-squirrel club—the reason why they’re actively hunting the Dragon Reborn. The inconvenient bit, of course, is that no one else was there—no one else witnessed Gitara’s Foretelling. Would certainly have been nicer if she’d collapsed in the middle of the Hall of the Tower with more witnesses, but so goes history, I guess.

Lee: Yeah—I suppose it’s a side-effect of having the Forsaken be such major characters on-screen, rather than doing most of their movement in the shadows. And they’re just so damn likable—Fares Fares as Ishamael feels downright fatherly at times, and so far all Natasha O’Keeffe’s Lanfear has done is wear revealing outfits, have crazy sex with Rand, kill an old guy, and blow up the Foregate. She’s not exactly flaying children alive or defenestrating widows or anything.

Which I think is kind of doing the supposedly legendary status of the Forsaken no favors. Near the end of the episode, when Lanfear walks into the courtyard with Moiraine and Siuan and friends, no one freaks out at an actual living non-bound member of the Forsaken strolling into the courtyard—Moiraine is just like, “Oh damn, it’s Lanfear.” My impression is that Lanfear walking up into your meeting, even if you’re a supposedly all-powerful Aes Sedai, would be like actual-for-real Jason Voorhees unexpectedly shambling through the door to your house. The correct reaction is some kind of mix of “Oh my God wait Jason is real?!” and Scooby Doo-style cartoon panic-running in multiple directions simultaneously. Possibly with some pants-wetting tossed into the mix for good measure.

I also kind of want to talk about whatever the hell it is that Ishy was doing with Mat. I was kind of left feeling clueless by the scene with the tea, but my wife has kind of a theory.

Lee: I was a little let down by Ishy’s promise that he was brewing up some tea to let Mat see past lives—I thought the same thing as you, that we might be about to give Mat the shove he needs to start doing the things he does in the book, but instead of actual past lives, we just got more weird stuff with Mat’s (show-only) abusive mother and his (show-only) issues with his (show-only) abusive father. I’m genuinely not sure where it’s supposed to be going, other than to just abuse Mat some more on screen and get him to the point where he’s even more in thrall to the Forsaken.

My wife’s quick-n-dirty theory is that the tea was just a sleeping brew, and that the sequence was actually Ishamael screwing with Mat in the World of Dreams. I’d class that as a definite “maybe”—the thing that keeps me from fully agreeing with it is I just don’t see what the scene is for, whether it’s Magic Spirit Journey Tea or just plain sleeping tea and the Magic Spirit Journey is in Tel’Aran’Rhiod.

Okay, I’ve got like… paragraphs to drop in here about Moiraine, but only if you’re ready to turn to her, and to the resolution of one of this season’s biggest mysteries.

Lee: Exactly so. We learn that Moiraine was shielded this entire time, with the shield weaves tied off into knots and left to sit. But your point about the further-changed nature of shielding feels like it’s part of the larger set of changes that have been made to how the One Power works with men and women in the show.

It’s been kind of a mystery why Moiraine herself hasn’t done some more extensive troubleshooting to find the extent of her issue. When a certain set of characters (to remain nameless, to spare non-book readers) eventually figures out how to remove the Aes Sedai Three Oaths in a future book, one of the VERY FIRST things those temporarily-oathless characters do is start lying and giggling—because, let’s face it, being able to say “THE SKY IS GREEN!” for the first time in years is probably pretty exhilarating. Why wouldn’t Moiraine have simply started busting out with the lies, if for nothing else than to test whether or not she’s TRULY stilled?

There are two answers that I can think of. The first is the more in-universe one: few Aes Sedai have ever bothered studying the effects of being stilled. Stilling is simply too viscerally horrifying to confront, even for the knowledge-minded Browns. Stilled women tend to leave the White Tower so as not to be surrounded by reminders of their past and are thought to quickly die (as Lan makes evident when he asks Moiraine if she thought about ending her own life in the past few months). There are simply no records of what happens, other than that the women who DO survive the process tend to do so by thoroughly occupying themselves with important tasks that take the place of the One Power in their lives. Moiraine might simply have not known that stilling unbinds the Oaths, and having lived her life by them for decades, kept up the habits of living by them purely because she doesn’t know any other way to be.

(Though, I guess the REAL answer is even more obvious: “Son, the reason the good cowboys don’t just shoot the bad cowboys’ horses is that if they did, there’d be no movie.”)

Lee: Agreed—and there are even more of those contrivances popping up around how the One Power seems to function, especially around stilling and gentling and shielding. As you correctly point out, being shielded in the show does indeed seem to do more or less what being stilled does in the books—for women, at least. Male channelers, on the other hand, seem to have gotten some upgrades. Logain—gentled and definitely not-screwing-around cut off from the Source by Liandrin—apparently retains the ability to both judge another man’s strength with the One Power, and also to actually see weaves. The books make it very clear that being stilled or gentled is a permanent and total thing that transforms the channeler into a normal human with no more than normal human abilities, so this is a major swerve.

And why did they do it? So that Logain can teach Rand a few things, which has happened, and also so that Logain can do exactly what he did and tell someone that he sees Moiraine surrounded by weaves. That particular Chekov’s gun has now been fired.

Why couldn’t Rand see the weaves around Moiraine earlier? Horses, movie, etc, I suppose. It’s not how I would have done it, at least.

But! On the positive side of things, we actually get a scene that I think every single reader has been waiting for—Lan gives Rand a crash course on how to appear confident before the Amyrlin, and Rand then takes that knowledge and makes a good showing in front of Siuan.

Lee: Yes—and let’s cut over to Nynaeve and Elayne, doing their thing. They still have the a’dam snatched by Ryma (formerly of the Yellow Ajah, and now wearing a collar herself), and after some discussion with Loial, they ambush a lone sul’dam in an alleyway and snap the thing around her neck.

It’s a big moment in the show, since it’s the first real indication that the Seanchan are actually vulnerable in any meaningful way—their weapons can be used against them! But we lack the extra context—so far, at least—that the books are able to provide when the event happens. After all, an a’dam only works as a leash on a woman who can channel. So why does it work on a sul’dam?

Needless to say, there are potential implications for, oh, the entirety of Seanchan society—implications we’ll likely learn more about next week during the finale. (And if not, look to season three!)

The last bit I’d love to talk about is Perrin and Aviendha, who are also converging on Falme with fan-favorites Bain and Chiad in tow. I was a little confused about the geography—for a minute, it looked like the scene was starting off in the Aiel Waste (as evidenced by the Vince Gilligan-esque yellow color grading), but apparently there’s a desert surrounding Toman Head and Falme?

Lee: And, with a final scene of Egwene calmly informing her sul’dam that Egwene is definitely going to kill her at some point, we finish this week’s recap. The board is set, the pieces are moving, and we come to it at last—the battle in the sky where the Dragon is going to proclaim himself. I mean, I assume we come to it. We haven’t seen the last episode yet, but you’d need to go back in time and get yourself an actual-for-real telegraph to telegraph the finale any harder.

There are a few things unsettled, though—what about that Horn of Valere? The thing that all those hunters have been getting branded for in earlier episodes? And—and lots of other things I can’t really articulate because of potential spoilers!