The Wheel of Time Recap: You Can’t Go Home Again

The good news is that due to one of those cockamamie streaming-service release schedules, the first three episodes of The Wheel of Time’s third season have all dropped at once. Chances are, therefore, that you didn’t have to wait much longer than an hour and ten minutes in real time between starting the premiere and arriving at the deliciously nasty opening scene of episode two. The bad news is that you probably shouldn’t have had to wait even that long. I get that the battle with the Black Ajah in the heart of the White Tower is probably the necessary starting point for this segment of the WoT saga, but 15 minutes of characters whose names you only sort of remember shooting digital fingertip fire at each other can be a little off-putting as a welcome back. A brand-new evil-queen character, played by Olivia Williams, with a Robespierre-type Red Ajah Aes Sedai adviser, played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, executing a bunch of rival nobles even after they literally bend the knee? Brother, I’ll take all of that ya got.

Director Katherine B. McKenna understands the assignment, in the parlance of our times. Like Williams as the Aes Sedai–trained Queen Morgaise of House Tarkand and Aghdashloo as Elaida, her right-hand woman, McKenna treats this scene as high camp as much as high fantasy. It works marvelously well, especially once you get a chance to compare and contrast the perkily vicious Morgaise with her daughter, whom we’ve come to know and love as Elayne. Indeed, the entire purpose of the sequence, set 40 years before the present day, is to set up Morgaise for the present-day plotline: Despite the fact that she’s secretly much friendlier with Siuan than either of them can let on in public for political reasons, she comes to the White Tower to take Elayne home.

And being a queen, she rolls deep. Elaida is with her, of course, and as a former rival of the Aes Sedai’s current honcho, Siuan, for the Amyrlin Seat, her presence is fraught. She’s also brought her hunky sons, the insufferable Prince Galad (Callum Kerr) and and the comparatively charming Prince Gawyn (Luke Fetherston), whose display of shirtless swordplay in the White Tower’s courtyard leaves not a dry seat in the house. It’s the brothers who tip Elayne off that the true purpose of their visit is to bring her with them when they return.

It falls to Lord Gaebril (Nuno Lopes), the queen’s consort, to tell her why. Note that Gaebril’s presence in the retinue seems to surprise almost everyone who meets him, giving the impression he was probably just some rando who got lucky in love rather than the result of Morgaise forming a strategic romantic alliance with a preexisting power player; maybe this is why he and the relatively down-to-earth Princess Elayne are so comfortable with each other.

Gaebril tells Elayne that things are going poorly for Queen Morgaise back home. It’s not the other noble houses that are giving her trouble following her dismissal of a popular general, though — it’s the people and the military themselves, which is even worse. Morgaise has already made clear her displeasure at finding out Elayne had been kidnapped by Liandrin, head of the Black Ajah; with the royal family itself now in jeopardy, they can’t afford to lose the heir to the throne. Elayne listens to all this with an open mind.

But she still chooses to stay in the White Tower and even convinces her imperious mother of its wisdom. Siuan has called upon Elayne and Nynaeve to be her “hounds,” rooting out any remaining Black Ajah presence within the White Tower; since Liandrin kidnaped them, sold into slavery, and ultimately aided the Dragon Reborn, the Amyrlin knows she can trust them like no one else. Having already fought a Forsaken, Elayne knows the Last Battle is coming, and her homeland’s as much at risk in that conflict as anyplace else. Here’s her chance to make a difference.

But it’s not only a desire to see the job done that motivates Elayne. She feels that if she’s to hold the kingdom of Andor’s Lion Throne, she has to earn the job like her mom did, not just have it handed to her. Her next stop will be the Arches so she can take the final test and become Accepted like Egwene and Nynaeve before her. Persuaded by the wisdom of all this, Queen Morgaise relents with a smile — but also leaves Elaida at the White Tower to monitor the situation. (Hopefully while delivering quite a bit of dialogue with one of the best voices in Hollywood.)

The whole royal visit cramps Mat Cauthon’s style. As a male guest in the women-only White Tower and the owner of a magical, ahem, horn you can blow, he’s the toast of the novices — until the sexy princes arrive, at which point his social life dries up and theirs is splash waterfalls. It may be for the best, though — as the Amyrlin explains to him the way you’d talk to a truculent ten-year-old, he’s the only person who can blow the Horn of Valere unless someone kills him, at which point it’s up for grabs. Going around showing it off so a bunch of 19-year-olds will fuck you is, therefore, stupid on an almost cosmic scale. Chastened, Mat gives her the horn, although given the White Tower’s recent track record with magic-artifact security, I’m not sure she’d have been my first choice.

In the midst of all this is Min, the gang’s psychic on-again off-again acquaintance — bartender, psychic, occasional rat for the Forsaken Ishamael since he promised to silence the telepathic voices in her head. She apologizes to Mat for having sold him out back in season two, and she’s trying to make up for it by secretly working for Siuan, posing as a White Tower servant while actually gathering intel on the Aes Sedai and their future. That future looks bleak: Yet another deadly battle within the tower’s walls is coming, she says, though she can’t say when or why or with whom.

Meanwhile, the two breakaway groups who split up from the White Tower gang head for their destinations across sweeping natural vistas that merit comparison to Peter Jackson’s similar wide shots in The Lord of the Rings. Perrin, his Ogier companion Loial, and his Aiel spear-maidens Chiad and Bain arrive at his hometown, the Two Rivers, only to be quickly rushed into hiding by Egwene’s mother, Marin (Rina Mahoney). The town, she explains, has been suffering from sporadic raids by isolated pairs or trios of the monstrous Trollocs, the orc-like foot soldiers of the Dark One. They’ve now been scared off by an invading force of the Children of the Light, a.k.a. the Whitecloaks, religious radicals who aim to exterminate all magic-wielders, from the evil Forsaken to the mighty Aes Sedai to humble wolf-men like Perrin.

Indeed, Perrin is their actual target in the town. He’s wanted for the killing of their commander, Geofram Bornhald (Stuart Graham), during the massive battle that ended season two. He’s willing to surrender himself to spare the townsfolk further suffering.

But he and his companions aren’t the only supernaturally supercharged people Mrs. al’Vere is hiding in her attic. (A pointed metaphor, that.) To Perrin’s surprise, Alanna (Priyanka Bose), one of the Aes Sedai allies of our main character Moiraine, and Maksim (Taylor Napier), the surviving member of Alanna’s Warder throuple, are squirreled away there too, recovering from wounds they say were inflicted by the Trollocs. It’s weird, though: Tracks from the nearest Waygate — basically the Warp Zones from Super Mario Bros., but they’re ornate doors instead of sewer pipes — indicate they traveled through that extradimensional portal without an Ogier guide, something only the evil dark friends do. Perhaps they fled the battle under duress, but by now they’ve been missing a long time. What have they been up to?

Halfway across the world, the other group marches on. Rand al’thor, the Dragon Reborn, and his posse — Moiraine; Lan, her Warder; Egwene, Rand’s girlfriend and a powerful magician in her own right; and Aviendha, their Aiel spear-maiden guide — head through the crags and hills to the Aiel waste. But along with Renna, her Seanchan torturer, who’s a recurring presence in her nightmares, and Lanfear, who can control the dream world and make Egwene’s nightmares even worse than they already are, there’s another interloper inside Egwene’s head. Bair (Nukâka Coster-Waldau), an Aiel seer of some kind, infiltrates Egwene’s dreams and learns of her squad’s plans, intercepting them when they arrive at the Waste with the help of a huge Aiel dude named Rhuarc (Björn Landberg) and a whole platoon of warriors. They welcome Rand as the prophesied figure who will save them — and destroy them in the process.

Indeed, the idea that no homecoming is truly possible for these characters is a running theme, and has been ever since Moiraine told Rand this in so many words during the premiere. Elayne can’t return to her mother’s troubled kingdom without risking the larger mission against the Black Ajah and their master. Perrin can’t go back to his hometown without running afoul of the radicals who’ve already tortured him once before, back in season one. Aviendha has brought her messiah back to “the Three-fold Land,” as the Aiel name their own country, but does so knowing it means that country’s downfall. It’s like Elayne tells her royal mother: “There’s no going back to a cloistered life … Far too much is at stake. Safety is a luxury the world no longer affords us.” Someone please call Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and the administration of Columbia University — they need to hear this!

But it’s the little things that make this episode superior to its predecessor. Costume designer Sharon Gilham, for example, is clearly having a whale of a time, from Queen Morgaise’s Lewis Carroll finery to Moiraine’s Radagast hat. The glory shots of the big country between the various realms as our heroes traverse it go a long way in selling the sheer scale of the epic fantasy genre. Williams and Aghdashloo class up the proceedings by their mere presence alone; Williams in particular is a hoot as her much younger, somewhat sociopathic self in the cold open. Donal Finn, the most unpredictable actor in the core cast, does delightful comic work as Mat, especially in his awkward meeting with Siuan. Elayne’s boozy chat with her stepdad, Gaebril, feels realistic and warm. Add up enough of these small victories and you can defeat the Dark One of mediocrity hands down.