after being very happy with all the season, here i am... less happy. actually, in keeping with the other seasons, the ending is the weakest part. this is still better than the endings of the previous seasons, so S3 is still a step up compared to the other two. and there were good things. i am very happy with mat. i knew the show had very little time for him, so i thought they'd either skip the portals anyway, or they would make a rushed, bad job of it. while the whole episode felt rushed, the portal was great. in a limited time, they managed to convey all the relevant stuff. including the whole hanging. they still didn't give him the luck, yet. on the other hand, i was deeply disappointed by liandrin and nynaeve. really? throw her in the water and leave her? pierce holes in the skull of the extras, but throw around the main characters and leave them? this was classic bond villain stuff. plus, we saw very little of balefire. and it was really poorly aimed when used against the main characters. we never see what happens with thom merrilin (again; they could make it his whole thing, every season ending with him left to uncertain fate). all in all, the whole tanchico part felt rushed. alcair dal was mismanaged. in the books, rand revealed what he saw in rhuidean, couladin also revealed what he thought he should have seen, and the wise ones and clan chiefs confirm that rand is the real car'a'carn. makes perfect sense. here, rand says what he saw. couladin makes vague promises. then rand makes rain. then the aiel kneel. so all you needed to do was channel some rain to be acclaimed? on the other hand, good that they brought down those army numbers to more realistic levels. one hundred thousand aiel warriors is already a lot. the worst part was moiraine. with such a powerful sa'angreal, she should have been able to easily overpower lanfear. it never felt like she was actually using such a strong weapon. had they shown lanfear cutting her weaves while remarking that it doesn't matter how strong moiraine is if she can't land a hit would have made the fight more believable. but hey, good thing we're told moiraine has to die. she may actually die of being impaled through the torso, the first instance in the whole tv show. the stuff in the tower was great. siuan sanche's last speech was moving. i was expecting she'd be killed for real in this retelling.

balefire. alcair dal. a likely showdown between lanfear and moiraine. good potential

i am not complaining. i was answering to another post claiming that wounding alanna to remove her from battle was a contrived coincidence and therefore bad writing, to which i replied that every plot in every story is a bunch of contrived coincidences

really, pretty much everything in writing is a contrived coincidence to allow the plot to unfold just right. sometimes, it's masked better than other times. for example, rand and moiraine are the most powerful group, and they are facing sammael and lanfear, the strongest foes. the girls are in tanchico, where they will face moghedien, who's just coincidentally at the same power of nynaeve. and perrin, without any channeler, will face trollocs without channelers. the main characters and the villains are split in such a way that it gives three very balanced fights. what are the odds? if a single dreadlord had come to the two rivers, the battle would have been very short. if egwene or nynave had, the battle also would have been short. of course, the book has the concept of ta'veren (i really blame rafe for not having used the word anymore after season 1; in season 1 it wasn't properly explained, and now that it would make sense, it's not used). how convenient that mat got a wall dropped on him when he needed to be separated by the other characters. how doubly convenient that he got separated from anyone who could travel. three books of his plot would have been avoided had any of the main character remained with him - or even had anyone bothered to contact him in tel'aran'riod. stories are built like that. sure, they could have had alanna pummel the trollocs for a good hour, then collapse from exhaustion and let the muggles defend. wouldn't it have been equally contrived that there were just enough trollocs to exhaust alanna, with those remaining being just enough to seriously endanger the villagers - but not enough to just roll over them? what i actually blame is the show's lack of consistency with the power. in the books, it was clearly stated that while verin and alanna could kill dozens, they weren't strong enough to hold on their own. in the show, we don't have any clear reference for that.

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

Many people have voiced this complaint, and frankly i don't get it. I mean, yes, i absolutely agree with everything written in the quoted paragraph. I just don't see it being a bad thing. Yes, in this world people can get healed from near death. Yes, this changes how a fight goes, at least when channelers are involved. You just have to accept that this world has different rules and expectations. Saying that healing cheapens the impact of wounds is like complaining, in star wars, that luke getting a mechanical hand cheapens the impact of him being made a cripple. Now whenever i see someone losing an arm, i expect them to be fine a few days later. Yes, the story works like that, and you can write the story around it.

Yes, i appreciated that. Though to be honest, hollywood has set my bar pretty low. Generally armies defend a castle by charging out of the main door, and they fight in front of the stakes so that someone can be pushed backwards and impaled. Anything better than that, i count at least a decent showing of the battle. Random things i loved: the way bain and chiad smiled before defending the waygate. They clearly love that they get to fight. Aiel are so unhinged. The tuata'an quoting the line about burying the dead and moving on, what else is there?

i have to point out, what happens to alanna is actually the realistic reaction. unless the arrow cuts some major blood vessel, it took hours or days for a gut wound to kill before modern medicine - but it would kill almost certainly. an arrow to the chest could take hours, and depending on where it hits exactly, it may even be survivable. regardless, it rarely kills fast. it's the people that go down like sacks of potatoes that are not realistic. but showing the realistic version of a battlefield littered with wounded beyond saving would be too harsh

I loved this episode, almost as much as rhuidean. It was strong, emotionsl, and it conveyed a good story. I can see why they made the changes from the books. My only regret is that they never mentiined ta'veren once. As for alanna, i doubt they impaled her again to create tension or a fake death. I think they simply had to remove her from combat, else she could have held the pass all by herself. I loved daisy congar. Her time was too brief

the biggest mistake people make in analyzing data is to draw a line and assume it will keep going forever to infinity. or, in this case, to zero. there will always be people interested in forums, and there will also be a niche for forums. the number is shrinking right now, but it won't go to zero, it's bound to stabilize eventually. some forums are abandoned while others are born, but the general concept of "forum" will stay. or be replaced by something close enough as to make no difference. that said, i agree that we can't extract meaningful statistical information from the number of posts in this forum

Just because more people use something else, it doesn't mean something is dieing. A great thing about the internet is that there is room for niche interests. I would never be able to have a discussion on a fantasy book with people i know in person. So, there is also room for those few who prefer forums

That goes for every character in every fiction. It's called plot. Some works of fiction mask it better than others. Some have a perfect in-world justification for it and turn it into a plot point

the next cold open will be a flashback to S1E3, when nynaeve stabs the trolloc inside the pool. it shows the trolloc getting healed. darkfriends ambush mat and stab him, leaving him for dead. "wait, what are we doing? everyone who got stabbed got healed just fine" "by the great lord, you're right. what do we do then?" "in episode 5, when they arrived in tanchico, they passed by a few hanged people. none of them was healed at the last second" "so, a 100% success rate as far as this show is concerned! you're a genius, let's do it" and that's how mat got hanged

there's a mistake: it's 9 books. even counting that they already included the relevant parts of new spring

tbh, with all due respect for robert jordan and his amazing work, that wasn't a very high bar to clear. that said, they did include and represent well a strong, non-sexual relationship. that between lan and moiraine. if not for that one, i'd also be in the "they seem to imply that people can't be intimate without shtupping" party

I wondered that about the books too. How are the hunters supposed to recognize the actual horn? Sure, it's supposed to have a writing on it, and i can bet you in every city you could buy a dozen "authentic" horns of valere

i missed the detail, thanks for pointing it out

good point. it's not much about alanna getting healed, as much as showing that regular whitecloaks are a real threat to a channeler

no, for two reasons: 1) they were already in melee range, due to the hall being relatively small. in that context, the staff is an effective weapon 2) she was also fighting with the power. the staff was something extra. it's like using a knife in modern warfare, actually. yes, sometimes it's done. sometimes you are in a trench and an enemy comes out from a corner and stabbing is faster than shooting - and less impeded by narrow confines. but going out of your trench to stab an enemy when you could have just shoot him is stupid. leane in the tower is the first case. sammael is the second. demandred wanted to beat rand in a sword duel to prove himself best, because he was an egomaniac. that was boasting. for actually fighting, he was throwing around balefire. ishamael wasn't trying to kill rand, but to turn him, which required breaking rand first.

is that even a serious question? you have the power to blow up stuff on a large scale from a distance, and you use it to make a cudgel and bludgeon someone. it would be like going in melee with a tank and trying to hit the enemy with the barrel of the gun instead of just shooting.

i didn't like the fight myself either. but i can accept it from aviendha; she's barely trained in the power, but she has a lot of experience with the spear, so making spears of flame may make sense to her. i don't accept a foresaken using a weapon, though. that's just silly.

make room for me on the "no way two untrained girls can heal so easily" train well, except that nynaeve has been doing it forever. and other wilders also had healing tricks. but that's a sort of talent, not something learned, healing is extremely difficult. they could have greatly improved the scene by having alanna show healing first: "i can't use this on myself, and i'm too weak to channel more than a trickle, but you have to weave the flows like this". would have been less of a stretch. i hope they didn't just kill sammael like that; lanfear regenerated from a slit throat, and ishamael dissolved into dust when killed, sammael can't just lie there dead. by the way, why nobody is paying attention to the foresaken? moiraine should be cold enough to keep an eye on him, maybe try to finish him off. the alsera scene worked well, though. aside from that, i liked that episode a lot. we know that book!elayne would listen attentively to those kind of songs whenever she could, and as a princess she could reasonably have taken singing lessons, so i don't have any issue with her knowing the song and having the skill to sing. i'm glad to see thom back in the show, and even gladder (is that even a word?) that the andoran court bard part of his backstory is kept. nice how he helped elayne, glib hero as always. i was hoping we'd have also mat gambling spree. maybe next episode. moghedien interrogating the girls was magnificent. moghedien killing ispan? why? she wouldn't waste a useful pawn. wait, probably she didn't kill her, and she'll wake up all right? perrin and faile felt natural. the scene where they are telling their deepest secrets to each other worked for me. too bad her changed backstory means we'll never see davram and deirdre; they were minor characters easily cut, but they were fun. but the scene that most surprised me was rand and egwene. i was fully expecting rand being an idiot and egwene being all nice and perfect and innocent and rafe's favourite flawless character, but rand correctly points out that egwene was always ready to leave him when something more interesting came up. in the end, the blame was split. i wasn't giving rafe enough credit. EDIT: oh, i forgot to squee about the aiel farm. i always complain that we never see farmland, we see large cities in the middle of mountains or forests that could never sustain them. i love that we get to see an aiel farm

The first two books had problematic endings with stuff coming up from nowhere outside of the normal boundaries of the magic system. Subsequent books have better endings. Shouldn't be too hard to adapt alcair dal, the two river battle and the showdown in tanchico

yes, but the trailer of egwene asking rand "do you love her", plus the fact that the two of them have to break up, and rafe wouldn't want his precious egwene to do anything wrong like dumping a boyfriend who is only pretending to love a foresaken so that she will be their allies, point to rand being genuine.

after the relationship upgrade they gave elayne and aviendha, and the story of alanna and her warders, and the comments on lan taking part, and some comments made by ishamael... at this point, if they wanted to "bury their gays", they'd have to kill half the main cast