S3E7 - Goldeneyes

[The_Watcher_And_Wanderer]

  On 4/11/2025 at 8:25 AM, DaddyFinn said:

 

I've seen mentions that the Hero of the Horn theme played during Loial's final moments.

 

Edit. I've not seen many mentions of the benefits of warder bond for both Aes Sedai and warder. Maybe that explains some of Alanna's survivability?

 

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Sure, so long as she didn’t turn the bond off. Seriously, what the hell is that?!!

[Mirefox]

  On 4/11/2025 at 2:35 PM, The_Watcher_And_Wanderer said:

Sure, so long as she didn’t turn the bond off. Seriously, what the hell is that?!!

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The only reason Nyn survived being stabbed 11 times was because of her warden bind.  The only reason Loial was immune to the Shadar Logoth dagger was his warden bond.  Landon shrugged off a sword through the chest because of her warden bond…

[DigificWriter]

After this episode, I'm going to agree that the show is starting to rely a little too much on 'temporary peril' (characters being put in mortal danger that gets quickly resolved) as a writing crutch.

[king of nowhere]

  On 4/11/2025 at 12:36 PM, notpropaganda73 said:

 

 I don't find the battles or injuries at all engaging. I find it incredibly boring, in fact, because anyone who is hurt will be fine within moments.

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yes, so what? people who die in the battle still die. whatever objective people are trying to achieve stay achieved.

from my perspective, what you say only makes sense if the only purpose of battle was to wound people and watch them die of their wounds. which it isn't.

 

  Quote

What story are they trying to tell, what are they trying to achieve by these moments? Why should we, the viewers, care if someone is stabbed through the gut, so long as a channeler is nearby? And I swear, if someone says "they're raising the stakes" I will tear the last remaining bits of hair out of my bald head. There are no stakes! Other than the ones impaling characters.

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again, the point is not to raise the stakes. again, you seem to reiterate the impression that the sole purpose of wounding a character in battle is to make the audience fear they are about to die. it's your expectation on the purpose of wounding that causes you distress. you see alanna impaled, you think "oh, they are trying to make us think that she'll die again! of course she won't, enough of it"

i see alanna impaled, and I think "oh, they are removing her from the rest of the battle because she was too powerful. that works".

though they did fool me a bit when they showed the sisters being unable to channel. but that got nothing to do with the impalement.

also compare loial death scene and alanna's. I can't describe it, but something in the atmosphere of the scene seem very distinct. the alanna scenes didn't feel like death scenes, and i wasn't expecting one. the loial scene did seem a death scene, and i'm not expecting him to come back - indeed, as others pointed out, he did very little for the future plot.

 

of course, it may just be that i am the biased one, and my own perception is skewed by "they can't possibly believe the viewers can be such morons, so they must have some other reason". or perhaps i'm already used to games with healing spells, so i'm already used to the idea that grievous wounds are only that much dangerous, and they will disappear as soon as it's the healer's turn.

regardless, it all comes down to the intent you ascribe to the scene

 

 

[Mirefox]

  On 4/11/2025 at 2:57 PM, king of nowhere said:

yes, so what? people who die in the battle still die. whatever objective people are trying to achieve stay achieved.

from my perspective, what you say only makes sense if the only purpose of battle was to wound people and watch them die of their wounds. which it isn't.

 

again, the point is not to raise the stakes. again, you seem to reiterate the impression that the sole purpose of wounding a character in battle is to make the audience fear they are about to die. it's your expectation on the purpose of wounding that causes you distress. you see alanna impaled, you think "oh, they are trying to make us think that she'll die again! of course she won't, enough of it"

i see alanna impaled, and I think "oh, they are removing her from the rest of the battle because she was too powerful. that works".

though they did fool me a bit when they showed the sisters being unable to channel. but that got nothing to do with the impalement.

also compare loial death scene and alanna's. I can't describe it, but something in the atmosphere of the scene seem very distinct. the alanna scenes didn't feel like death scenes, and i wasn't expecting one. the loial scene did seem a death scene, and i'm not expecting him to come back - indeed, as others pointed out, he did very little for the future plot.

 

of course, it may just be that i am the biased one, and my own perception is skewed by "they can't possibly believe the viewers can be such morons, so they must have some other reason". or perhaps i'm already used to games with healing spells, so i'm already used to the idea that grievous wounds are only that much dangerous, and they will disappear as soon as it's the healer's turn.

regardless, it all comes down to the intent you ascribe to the scene

 

 

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If that is the case, what a lazy, immature writing contrivance to use grievous injuries to remove someone from a situation.  “We have a problem, guys.  We wrote a powerful channeled into this story arc but now we need her to not be able to do what we’ve written her to do.  Any ideas?  Kill her?  Well, we can’t to that yet.  Maybe we ‘almost kill’ her.  Again.  Great, problem solved.”

 

It’s even worse that you have the built-in reason that channeling is physically draining.  Why not use that?  They showed it briefly in season 1 where thy couldn’t use Moiraine as a means of destroying their pursuit ad nauseum.  Then they seemed to forget about it.

[notpropaganda73]

Is having her impaled or riddled with arrows the only way to remove her from battle? Why is she too powerful and needs to be removed? There are no negative repercussions to a woman channeling non-stop apparently (even though as I already said, they established those dangers in the S1 finale, and with Moiraine unable to continue channeling when the Trollocs are chasing them before Shadar Logoth), so she needs to be severely injured to remove her from the battle.

 

These issues are all connected for me. If the only solution to remove her from battle that they can come up with is "let's impale her through the chest!" then I don't have much positive to say about that writing to be frank. 

 

Even if we give them the grace and say that that does work, it doesn't really explain the other ridiculous injuries and insta Heals. There is no purpose to having Liandrin stabbed like she was. It's faux drama and frankly ridiculous. My partner laughed out loud at it, like it was slapstick comedy. Nynaeve was stabbed how many times by Shadowspawn, and is fine? What purpose does that have? I would have believed the seriousness of that attack with a single wound! 

 

Maybe we just won't agree, and that's fine too. I can appreciate it doesn't bother other people as much and if I focus too much on it myself it starts souring things for me a little bit 😅 it's just one aspect of this season that has really annoyed me, but I like S3 overall so I'm just going to fast-forward through those scenes now like I said. 

[DigificWriter]

The narrative shortcut of 'temporary peril' is not in and of itself, 'lazy writing', but if it does start to be overused, it becomes a symptom of what could be construed/seen as 'lazy writing'.

 

I do want to clearly specify that WoT is not the first (or last) series to rely a little bit too heavily on 'temporary peril', but it's more common in Episodic/Procedural TV, and the pitfalls of it becoming a crutch can be more easily exposed in Serialized TV, as is becoming the case here. 

Edited April 11 by DigificWriter

[Sabio]

I mean Rafe already admitted Loial's "death" at the end of season 1 was a fake out to try and trick book readers in order to get them more emotionally invested.  To make them think that maybe no character might be safe.  Just seems like Alanna can't go a day without getting stabbed, it really must suck to be her warder.  It does come off as lazy and starts to lose all meaning. Just like they fell into the Hollywood action movie nonsense of the bad guy kills everyone until the good guy is captured then suddenly he wants to talk.  Only it was Perin who suddenly decided to speak to the evil man who just cut a lady's throat and smiled about it.  I'm going to kill you but first let's have a chat.

[Mailman]

  On 4/11/2025 at 2:34 PM, Gary Again said:

I kind of wonder if the healing and people coming back is a bit of a joke about how often it happened in the books.  Mat literally died and was brought back to life because Rand blew someone up so fkn hard that it reversed time. People not dying and coming back from crazy things is  canon. 

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Thats a specific ability with significant consequences attached to it.

[DigificWriter]

  On 4/11/2025 at 3:24 PM, Sabio said:

I mean Rafe already admitted Loial's "death" at the end of season 1 was a fake out to try and trick book readers in order to get them more emotionally invested.

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'Temporary Peril' is not the same thing as 'faking' death. Viewers were not meant to think that Loial and Nynaeve were dead at any point during/after the S1 finale, although the 'law of unintended consequences' ended up applying when that's exactly how people interpreted those two scenarios.

[Mirefox]

  On 4/11/2025 at 3:16 PM, DigificWriter said:

The narrative shortcut of 'temporary peril' is not in and of itself, 'lazy writing', but if it does start to be overused, it becomes a symptom of what could be construed/seen as 'lazy writing'.

 

I do want to clearly specify that WoT is not the first (or last) series to rely a little bit too heavily on 'temporary peril', but it's more common in Episodic/Procedural TV, and the pitfalls of it becoming a crutch can be more easily exposed in Serialized TV, as is becoming the case here. 

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Part of the problem here is that is isn’t even just an overuse of “temporary peril,” but it is virtually the exact same thing - grievous penetrating wounds that are seemingly shrugged off.  It’s the exact same “temporary peril.”

[Skipp]

  On 4/11/2025 at 2:43 PM, Mirefox said:

The only reason Nyn survived being stabbed 11 times was because of her warden bind.  The only reason Loial was immune to the Shadar Logoth dagger was his warden bond.  Landon shrugged off a sword through the chest because of her warden bond…

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To be fair we don't know how the Shadar Logoth dagger actually affects Ogier, especially since it was early on and the dagger got more powerful with time. 

 

No Ogier are stabbed with the dagger in the books if I recall.  The Ogier themselves are very hardy but more importantly they are Alien to this world and may not be affected the same. 

 

While the scene would certainly be confusing and I think it could have been shot better it is not some sort of crime against nature.

[SinisterDeath]

  On 4/11/2025 at 3:56 PM, Skipp said:

To be fair we don't know how the Shadar Logoth dagger actually affects Ogier, especially since it was early on and the dagger got more powerful with time. 

 

No Ogier are stabbed with the dagger in the books if I recall.  The Ogier themselves are very hardy but more importantly they are Alien to this world and may not be affected the same. 

 

While the scene would certainly be confusing and I think it could have been shot better it is not some sort of crime against nature.

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Wasn't Perrin also stabbed with it?

 

Regardless we have to separate out book knowledge from show knowledge.

At that point in the show, (season 1) I don't believe it was ever established that the dagger was as deadly as it was portrayed in Season 2.

 

So I think the only conclusion that can be drawn is thus:

 

If the dagger didn't instantly kill Perrin & Loial in Season 1 finale, but in Season 2 it instantly kills people and melts through doors, then the Dagger "grew" in power between Season 1 and 2.

 

 

[Skipp]

  On 4/11/2025 at 4:16 PM, SinisterDeath said:

Wasn't Perrin also stabbed with it?

 

Regardless we have to separate out book knowledge from show knowledge.

At that point in the show, (season 1) I don't believe it was ever established that the dagger was as deadly as it was portrayed in Season 2.

 

So I think the only conclusion that can be drawn is thus:

 

If the dagger didn't instantly kill Perrin & Loial in Season 1 finale, but in Season 2 it instantly kills people and melts through doors, then the Dagger "grew" in power between Season 1 and 2.

 

 

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No Perrin wasn't stabbed with it.  We saw Uno and Lord Yakota down but didn't see what actually injured them.  Perrin leaves that encounter with no injuries.

[Guire]

  On 4/11/2025 at 3:34 PM, Mirefox said:

Part of the problem here is that is isn’t even just an overuse of “temporary peril,” but it is virtually the exact same thing - grievous penetrating wounds that are seemingly shrugged off.  It’s the exact same “temporary peril.”

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Rafe and writing team seem to really appreciate deep and frequent penetration.   Yea I went there.  😁

[SinisterDeath]

  On 4/10/2025 at 3:50 PM, LTL said:

Who'd have thought Alanna would have more shafts in her after Ihvon's death than before.

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  On 4/11/2025 at 6:39 PM, Guire said:

Rafe and writing team seem to really appreciate deep and frequent penetration.   Yea I went there.  😁

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[Fiona_12]

  On 4/11/2025 at 4:53 AM, Mailman said:

Anyone want to have a chat about episode 1's battle in the tower now and how sitters could not produce shields because they were not trained to do so.

 

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I don't recall anyone saying that in the Ep 1 discussion. I only remember people saying they were too shocked at first to do anything, and that the BA was better trained in combat. 

 

  On 4/11/2025 at 4:53 AM, Mailman said:

Daise bloody Congar just produced a shield as her first channeling ability and it was insta cast as well!

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 That was really too much. As someone else said, why bother sending women to the Tower to be trained?

 

The problem of girls with the spark dying  if not properly trained is obviously not a thing in the show. It's never been mentioned, and it's much more convenient to have women channel whenever they want them to.

[Mirefox]

  On 4/11/2025 at 7:20 PM, Fiona_12 said:

 

I don't recall anyone saying that in the Ep 1 discussion. I only remember people saying they were too shocked at first to do anything, and that the BA was better trained in combat. 

 

 That was really too much. As someone else said, why bother sending women to the Tower to be trained?

 

The problem of girls with the spark dying  if not properly trained is obviously not a thing in the show. It's never been mentioned, and it's much more convenient to have women channel whenever they want them to.

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I also honestly don’t remember - was there a scene in season 1 where Moiraine first teaches Egwene to channel and the latter really struggles to do a very basic thing?  
 

That does not jive well with any untrained channeler, including children and elderly drunks, suddenly having abilities to rival all the trained channelers.

[Fiona_12]

  On 4/11/2025 at 8:25 AM, DaddyFinn said:

I've not seen many mentions of the benefits of warder bond for both Aes Sedai and warder. Maybe that explains some of Alanna's survivability?

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Actually, what many people don't seem to recognize is that you don't die from arrow wounds immediately unless they hit a vital organ and penetrate deeply enough. Even a gun shot wound isn't immediately fatal depending where you get shot, and gut wounds are an especially slow, painful death.

 

In the books, Perrin gets badly wounded by an arrow and the possibility of infection was the greater concern. 

 

I did like Maksim letting Alanna know it was time for her to do her thing through the warder bond. I know they can't communicate telepathically, but all she needed was to feel desperation from him. That's the only Alanna & Maksim scene I've liked.

[SinisterDeath]

  On 4/11/2025 at 7:34 PM, Mirefox said:

I also honestly don’t remember - was there a scene in season 1 where Moiraine first teaches Egwene to channel and the latter really struggles to do a very basic thing?  

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Yes, in Season 1 Episode 5, Egwene was being tortured by Valda, and was incapable of channeling.

 

  On 4/11/2025 at 7:34 PM, Mirefox said:

That does not jive well with any untrained channeler, including children and elderly drunks, suddenly having abilities to rival all the trained channelers.

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Later during that same episode Egwene was forced to watch Valda torture Perrin, and because of the stress and Need of that situation, she was finally able to burn Perrin's and her own ropes... I don't believe she was ever taught the weave of fire by Moiraine. It's also worth noting that she was only ever able to embrace the source, after Moiraine taught her the Technique.

 

From a power scaling perspective, those girls are right now doing more then Egwene did in season 1 in terms of raw power. But we also don't know how long those girls (in the show) have been doing that, and how long they've been hiding it.

 

Book wise.

Egwene is rated at 8(+5), and the Cauthon's are ranked at 9(+4).

Certifiably, they are supposed to be ranked just below Egwene.*

Edited April 11 by SinisterDeath
Edit* Fixed power ranking edit.

[Skipp]

  On 4/11/2025 at 7:48 PM, SinisterDeath said:

Yes, in Season 1 Episode 5, Egwene was being tortured by Valda, and was incapable of channeling.

 

Later during that same episode Egwene was forced to watch Valda torture Perrin, and because of the stress and Need of that situation, she was finally able to burn Perrin's and her own ropes... I don't believe she was ever taught the weave of fire by Moiraine. It's also worth noting that she was only ever able to embrace the source, after Moiraine taught her the Technique.

 

From a power scaling perspective, those girls are right now doing more then Egwene did in season 1 in terms of raw power. But we also don't know how long those girls (in the show) have been doing that, and how long they've been hiding it.

 

Book wise.

Egwene is rated at 8(+5), and the Cauthon's are ranked at 9(+4).

Certifiably, they are supposed to be ranked just below Egwene.*

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It does seem to be that the Cauthon girls and Daise Congar were both wilders where as Egwene needed to be taught to channel.  Then again the show has not fully distinguished between the 2 and might never do so.

[Fiona_12]

  On 4/11/2025 at 7:34 PM, Mirefox said:

I also honestly don’t remember - was there a scene in season 1 where Moiraine first teaches Egwene to channel and the latter really struggles to do a very basic thing?  
 

That does not jive well with any untrained channeler, including children and elderly drunks, suddenly having abilities to rival all the trained channelers.

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Moiraine did start training Egwene in S1, and she channeled 3 times afterwards that I can remember. First, to start a fire, second to free Perrin when they are captured by Valda, and third, to heal Nyaneave in the finale. The first 2 times it did not happen immediately and she had to really concentrate. 

 

Some untrained channelers doing small things is acceptable, but having the power to create a shield like Daise did? No way.

[JayceDa]

The number of times Perrin said "Maksim, now!" was a few too many.

[SinisterDeath]

  On 4/11/2025 at 8:07 PM, Skipp said:

It does seem to be that the Cauthon girls and Daise Congar were both wilders where as Egwene needed to be taught to channel.  Then again the show has not fully distinguished between the 2 and might never do so.

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That's technically consistent with the book.

 

I believe it's stated Egwene has the spark. She would have been a wilder, had Moiraine not found her and taught her.

Nynaeve also has the spark, and she is a wilder.

 

Per the linked article, it lists Egwene, Nynaeve, and Bodewhin Cauthon, as all people with the "spark" who would inevitably have channeled with or without training. 

 

But then you have people like the Sul'Dam, who can only learn to channel, if trained.

 

[Fiona_12]

  On 4/11/2025 at 8:07 PM, Skipp said:

 

It does seem to be that the Cauthon girls and Daise Congar were both wilders where as Egwene needed to be taught to channel.  Then again the show has not fully distinguished between the 2 and might never do so.

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No, Egwene was born with the spark. Moiraine tells her that she would eventually have channeled on her own. What the show has left out is the danger of not being trained if you have the spark - that 3 out of 4 of such women die due to the lack of training. I don't think that's going to be canon for the show. If it was, they would have introduce it by now, and it's much more convenient to have channelers be able to do complex weaves without training.