The Wheel of Time Season-Premiere Recap: The People of the Dragon

There are two kinds of writers, according to Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon demiurge George R.R. Martin. Some, like Martin’s idol and inspiration, J.R.R. Tolkien, are architects, meticulously planning out their intricate worlds and the hundreds of characters and story lines that exist within them. Others, like Martin himself, are gardeners, planting seeds and knowing what they’ll eventually blossom into, but without any knowledge or control of what shape they’ll take along the way as they grow. The gardener’s job isn’t to draw and execute blueprints; it’s to prune and cultivate the blossoms into a pleasing shape.

I haven’t read The Wheel of Time, the 15-volume epic-fantasy saga by the late author (and close friend of Martin’s) Robert Jordan and, following Jordan’s death, his collaborator and chosen successor, Brandon Sanderson. A cursory search indicates Jordan, at least, was more of a gardener type — he labeled himself a “discovery” writer — and it stands to reason: A planned trilogy doesn’t wind up a dozen books longer than expected if you’ve got it all mapped out in an outline in a notebook or hard drive somewhere.

After watching the season-three premiere of The Wheel of Time — one of three episodes debuting this week — I’m not convinced that creator-showrunner Rafe Judkins and writer Justine Juel Gillmer are architects or gardeners. They’re more like Abstract Expressionist painters, dipping their brushes into big cans of epic-fantasy stuff and just splashing them all across the canvas. It may seem random or haphazard, and it’s definitely overwhelming to look at at first. But eventually, a picture emerges, one that clearly communicates the artist’s ideas and emotions. Even if it’s difficult to make them out now, hey, that sure is a lot of bright-colored paint they flung at the wall, isn’t it?

Directed by genre-TV veteran Ciarán Donnelly, the premiere begins with mayhem in the White Tower (think of this as having the same basic energy as David Bowie’s “Panic in Detroit”) headquarters of the order of magic-wielding women called the Aes Sedai. It’s months after the climactic events of season two, during which young Rand al’Thor (Josha Stradowski) revealed himself to be the messianic reincarnated warrior and sorcerer called the Dragon Reborn. Together with his posse of supernaturally gifted and very good-looking friends, he slew Ishamael (Fares Fares), the chief lieutenant of the satanic Dark One, and repelled an invasion by the Seanchan, an overseas empire that enslaves magic-wielding women while wearing armor that looks like Eiko Ishioka designed it. So far, so good, right?

Wrong! Unlike women, men in this world are not permitted to “channel the One Power” — i.e., use magic— because it invariably corrupts them and drives them insane enough to slaughter those close to them, along with anyone else who stands in their way. The Aes Sedai were formed with this in mind. The thinking goes that the coming of the Dragon Reborn is necessary to stave off the darkness, but if the DR happens to be a man, a legion of powerful women is necessary to control him before he goes berserk while wielding the magical equivalent of a full nuclear arsenal. Two very important Aes Sedai — Moiraine (Rosamund Pike), who’d made finding the Dragon Reborn her life’s work, and Siuan (Sophie Okonedo), Moiraine’s sometime lover and the head of the order — knew this was happening and failed to bring Rand under Aes Sedai control. This is a grievous crime.

But not so grievous as the one Siuan, who’s known as the Amyrlin Seat after the throne she occupies, reveals to the Aes Sedai’s assembled luminaries. Liandrin (Kate Fleetwood), the Über-intense head of the inquisitorial Red Ajah division of the order, is secretly a dark friend — she’s broken her oaths and sworn allegiance to the Dark One, enabling her to violate the Aes Sedai’s magically enforced rules against lying and using the One Power as a weapon. (It seems to me that magically enforced rules don’t do much good if they only apply to the good guys, but that’s where respecting norms gets you every time.)

Anyway, all hell breaks loose. Liandrin’s acolytes in the so-called Black Ajah, pulled from every color-coded division of the Aes Sedai, reveal themselves and wreak havoc. They escape the Amyrlin Seat and her star witness, Nynaeve (Zoë Robins), a magic-wielding friend of Rand’s who was sold into captivity by Liandrin and has since become so afraid of her power she can no longer use it. Killing off several supporting characters, Liandrin and company loot the White Tower’s library of magical artifacts and escape. Naturally, Rand, the Dark One’s nemesis, is tops on their hit list.

Now the question of what to do next is more pressing than ever. In addition to the Black Ajah, Rand and his friends have the Forsaken — think of the Ringwraiths from LotR, but with individual personalities and sexier outfits — on their trail. Moiraine desperately wants him to take the next step in his path to messiahdom: travel to the great fortress known as the Stone of Tear and pull Callandor, the legendary magical sword that can kill Forsaken, from the rock in which it’s been sealed since time immemorial.

Moiraine has an unlikely backer in this plan, too: Lanfear (Natasha O’Keeffe), the sexy domme Forsaken with whom Rand has had an actually pretty sincere romance. She’s probably up to no good in some way, as that’s her nature, but she really seems to want him to get the sword just so he can protect himself from her evil buddies.

The problem is, as always on this show, that Rand is too dedicated to his friends to Do What Must Be Done. Tough to blame him, too, considering how many friends he’s now accrued. A post-battle scene in which Moiraine, Rand, and the rest of the gang debate their next steps slowly reveals a hilariously large posse, which includes (deep breath):

(I truly apologize for the massive text/info dump, dear reader, but if you can think of a more succinct way to sum up the show’s core cast of 15 or so characters, be my guest! I’m grabbing a beer; this is hard work.)

To force Rand’s hand, Moiraine and Lanfear concoct a plan. Lanfear will use her powers to stage an attack on Rand and all his friends while they’re shacked up with each other in various configurations one night, deliberately using the trademark spells of other Forsaken to deflect suspicion. What neither woman counts on is, well, other Forsaken. Specifically, Moghedien (Laia Costa) the creepy little goth Forsaken who looks and talks like Dark Björk, sends in one of her Gray Men, virtually imperceptible and unstoppable undead assassins only she can manufacture, apparently. The Gray Man nearly kills Nynaeve before all is said and done. (Like virtually everybody on this show who gets stabbed or zapped, she gets better. Magic is a hell of a universal health-care system!)

Nevertheless, Moiraine and Lanfear’s conspiracy works … sort of. The big group does break up. Nynaeve and Elayne stay in the city of Tar Valon, where all this has taken place, to continue their training in the White Tower. Mat stays behind with them in hopes that Nynaeve can re-harness her powers and use them to heal his brain, which now thinks in ancient tongues and is plagued by memories that aren’t his own. Perrin sets out for the group’s old hometown, the Two Rivers, with Loial as a guide and Bain and Chiad in tow. Rand will strike out on his own, more or less: Aviendha cannot be parted from him, and his girlfriend Egwene vows never to leave his side again.

But when Moiraine and Lan start talking to him about the path to Tear, he reveals he’s played them. He won’t go to the ancient stronghold to retrieve his big sword of destiny unless and until he has an army at his back. That means traveling to the Aiel Waste, where he hopes to convince Aviendha’s countrymen that he is, in fact, their hoped-for Car’a’carn, then lead them into battle against the Dark One and his servants as his own elite force, the People of the Dragon.

I believe there’s a technical term for all this: “a lot.”

To be honest, the show, which I enjoy quite a bit, suffers from it. Even in the opening battle, 15 minutes or so of CGI lasers and force fields and blood and property destruction, there are simply so many people, many of whom you only know by sight, if at all. I swear that like 20 characters have speaking parts before Rand and Egwene and them even show up, at which point things get more convoluted, not less. Keeping up with it all feels like trying to watch a 60-year-old soap opera by catching a random episode on a Wednesday when you’re out sick from work.

This is a generous way of saying, “This episode is incoherent.” But it’s incoherent like a fox, or at the very least it’s incoherent on purpose. I don’t think anyone involved in it labored under the delusion that this is a great entry point for new viewers or a simple way to ease existing fans back into the action. It’s a full-fledged old-school big-budget genre-show season premiere is what it is. It’s not designed to explain or elucidate its massive collection of characters and concepts; it’s designed to flex on having them all at its disposal. The chaotic riot of information and sensation that follows from this is not a bug, it’s a feature.

At least that’s the idea, I think. That said, it may or may not be your thing. Hell, it may or may not be my thing! I enjoyed watching this episode, sure, but not in the way I enjoyed the highlights of season two: Nynaeve’s trip into a heart-wrenching alternate reality via the magical Arches used as an initiation rite by the Aes Sedai; Egwene’s breaking by and escape from the Seanchan; Rand’s romance with Lanfear and bromance with Ishamael, two suave and seductive villains. The tightness and focus were what made those story lines work; there’s nothing nearly so solid on offer here. I mean, Egwene goes through the Arches just like Nynaeve does, but we only get one glimpse of what’s going on in her mind in there before it’s over. That’s an apples-to-apples comparison in which the earlier apple is clearly superior.

But there are two more episodes left in this opening salvo alone, let alone the rest of the season. And it’s the job of a premiere like to catch you up with every character it can, as quickly as possible, even if there’s like 40 of them, several of whom perish from being CGI’d to death. Give the show a couple more episodes, then a couple more weeks, and then look at that splashy canvas again. I bet you there’ll be something to see.