I actually thought this was done reasonably well, by the standards of the show.
Legolas Send a noteboard - 09/01/2022 04:10:38 PM
I liked it on the whole - the shock reveal of her being a Darkfriend worked well for me, at least. And in a show that already had way too little focus on the overarching plot to the extent that they didn't even bother having Moiraine give any remotely plausible reason for leading them to the Eye of the World, and with only the one Ba'alzamon dream appearance, definitely a scene like this was much needed, as they clearly weren't going to take the time to have several smaller scenes like in the books.
View original postIn the books, after several scenes interacting separately with Dana, the bartender or proprietress of a hospitality establishment, where she gives them shelter in exchange for work, she shows Rand to the rooms they have earned, where she teasingly suggests his and Mat's relationship is sexual, and then after a slightly more sincere conversation, tries to kiss Rand. When Rand pulls away, she apologizes for coming on too strong and closes the door with an ominous noise, while asking if she made a mistake in styling her hair like Egwene’s. She says she likes him and orders him to get back on the bed, from which he stood at the mention of Egwene’s name. She does this by brandishing a small knife at him.
Typing mistake in the first sentence, you mean in the show.
View original postRand lunges for his sword by the foot of the bed, next to where she is standing, she seems to shove him, there is some indeterminate physical contest with a slashing sound and the knife falls to the floor. She draws Rand’s sword as he takes in his slashed palm. She holds him at swordpoint saying she’s waiting for Mat because she needs him, too. She goes to watch at the window.
View original postDana tells Rand “You know, I didn’t think you’d be this sweet. Makes it harder.” Rand shouts and begins slapping at the door she locked with both hands. We cut to Mat befriending Thom and then back to Rand still slapping the door and shouting for help. Dana tells Rand she brought him to this room specifically because the door is too tough for “three men your size” to break and no one can hear a thing outside, referencing her earlier suggestion that he and Mat could use the room for discreet sex. Despite her protests, he begins throwing his shoulder at the door, smashing it down and running off.
I figured this was one of the cases of him subconsciously channeling - didn't this moment also get a quick reference later in the season when they reveal he can channel?
View original postRand encounters Mat in the village streets, Dana spots them and they take off running, because she has Rand’s sword. She chases them through the village until she uses a shortcut to get ahead of them. When Mat questions her actions, she says that she sees “all five of you” in her dreams at night, but only one of them can be the Dragon. She revels in her imminent promotion for bringing them to the Dark One and says they still remember Ishamael, because he was the last one to bring a Dragon to the Dark One 3000 years ago (bOoK KnOwLeDgE, FTW). She claims the Dark One does not want to kill them, but the Aes Sedai do, and the Dragon has a chance to end all bad things, from murder to natural disasters, by breaking the wheel. Rand tells her they’re going to leave, she flourishes his sword and tells them a Fade is on its way answering her summons.
I just watched it again - not too terrible as exposition goes, though I doubt casual viewers would have remembered the details several episodes later when they become relevant.
View original postThom’s knife then dramatically penetrates her neck from behind. When Rand is astonished at Thom’s action, he asks “Didn’t you hear? her She’s a Darkfriend, boy!” and that they need to leave. Rand doesn’t want to go with him, but Mat follows when Thom says he’s going east. Rand retrieves his sword and seems troubled by her body, as her blood flows into a puddle to set up a scene transition.
View original postThe show, on the other hand, tries to do the work of all three Darkfriend encounters, or at least the first and last, deciding the second one was unnecessary since there was no combat or channeling or bloodshed involved. Rather than the mounting tension and horror of Rand and Mat being trapped in a hostile place as the walls close in, with threats from multiple angles, the show tries to go for shock, having the previously snarky and condescending Dana become friendly, seemingly won over by Mat’s charm and Rand’s work ethic, to flirtatious and suddenly flip to threatening. It is not immediately apparent what threat a heavyset woman poses to two young healthy men at least 6’ tall, so the show chooses to tell us she’s a threat by having them sprint desperately away from her. Rand actually dives for his sword to protect himself against a woman with a small knife. And fears her too much to try for a physical confrontation once she makes it clear they are locked in together, but does not fear what she’ll do to him when he turns his back on her to try forcing the door. Rand’s actions indicate an inconsistent level of fear, but objectively, it’s never clear why she should be a threat to any but a modern fuzzy thought process that equates all weapons as equally lethal and a physically unimpressive woman with a sword as dangerous as if she had a gun (There is a reason guns were called “equalizers” in criminal slang).
I'd agree after rewatching that some of this, especially outside when they both stand there while she's waving the sword and talking about Ishamael, seems to be based on the idea of a sword being basically equivalent to a gun - and moreover, she has already admitted that she doesn't want to kill them, but hand them over to the Dark One alive. Then again, Rand and Mat aren't exactly supposed to be trained fighters at this point, nor to have a warrior mentality, and it's plausible that it doesn't even occur to them to close on her and try to take the sword away, with her unwilling to use lethal force to prevent that. But yeah, for a plan prepared in advance, it's pretty thin - she didn't count on Rand breaking through the door, but she did count on holding both Rand and Mat at bay for however many hours it would've taken for the Fade to arrive and take over. Even if Rand had been amenable to her sexual advances, things would still have gotten awkward fast once Mat arrived.
View original postBut there is really nothing else with the Darkfriends in the whole rest of the show. Rand and Mat meet a farm family, but there is no real fear of them brought up, rather they have to persuade the family of their good intentions so they will be allowed to earn their keep for the night. After leaving the farm, there is a one month time jump and Rand and Mat have made it to Caemlyn Tar Valon with no other reference to Darkfriends. They barely interact with anyone else, aside from Loial and the innkeeper who charged them a lot. The crowds of the city are presented a wonder, rather than some sort of sinister threat and there is no concern about how trustworthy their innkeeper might be. They even choose to stay in an inn among strangers rather than go to the White Tower in hopes of getting aid from Moiraine’s colleagues if they can’t find her there. Dana’s comment about having seen five targets in her dreams gets exactly as much speculation from our protagonists as her claims of compatriots’ pursuit.
Yeah, when it comes to them failing to speculate, that's bad but far from the most implausible one... how about Rand turning out to have known about the adoption since the night of the Trolloc attack, yet nobody ever putting the pieces together about his birth? The whole 'secret Dragon' thing is a failure and seriously hindered the overall storytelling - regardless of what motivations they may or may not have had for it.
View original postWhat even was the purpose of their encounter with Dana, if she represents the entirety of the Darkfriend threat and is eliminated in the same episode? Maybe her final monologue suggesting an ideological motive that the books never felt the need for, showing Darkfriends as solely interested in power and advancement and the Dark One’s promise of immortality. I suppose they needed another incident they could later reveal to have been a channeling moment, but it didn't have to be Dana's trap. In fact, it's distinctly underwhelming and less effective than Rand's moment in the book. If the reaction of the readers-turned-viewers is "Oh how clever to hide that's what they were doing" instead of "They did a great job of depicting that moment on the screen" you have epically failed as an artist. It's like congratulating a magician on the effectiveness of his technique, rather than the seamlessness of his illusion.
I definitely think it's better to have this encounter than not to have it at all - yes, it would've been better if they had been more consistent about the Darkfriend threat and Ishamael's plotting, but better this than nothing. All in all, the whole sequence still serves a fair number of purposes for the show (which is more than one can say about all the funeral scenes...): establishing the Darkfriend threat and the notion, which comes later and more subtly in the books, of turning the Dragon rather than killing him; an opportunity for Rand to channel and to learn a valuable lesson about not being too trusting; Thom turning out to be more dangerous than he seemed at first sight; a reference to the show having updated Randland's societal views on homosexuality; continuing Rand and Mat's increasingly difficult relationship under influence of the dagger; and so on. Obviously some of those you would probably not think were necessary at all, but given the choices they've made, they were important boxes to check.
View original postThe initial encounter between the boys and Dana seems casual, and she gives no sign of recognition. Combing through her dialogue at best we might say that she’s being very accommodating to their desire to work for lodgings so as to keep them at the inn, but she also mocks Mat and holds him up to ridicule. She leaves Rand unattended for apparently hours, evincing surprise at the amount of work he has done and that he’s still at it. So what was her plan if caught wind of another opportunity and left, or Mat got pissed at the mockery and took off? When Mat says he’s going to do whatever he has to earn enough money to go home, she suggests that’s not a good idea, because she wishes she could escape her lame small town. There is nothing in her portrayal to indicate she’s anything more than the sole employee of the inn, for all she spends a disproportionate amount of her time on a couple of customers who can’t pay. She’s distracted and busy when the plot calls for it, and has all the time in the world to show them around otherwise. She also warns Mat not to steal unless he wants to be executed by exposure, despite a thief who was caught stealing from him walking around free of consequence, so maybe she’s trying to scare Mat to prevent him from quickly acquiring the resources to leave her inn. But I have to stretch for that. There’s no supporting information and the context really suggests that it was there as a reminder of the Aielman occupying the punishment cage so Mat can later go out to rob his corpse and befriend Thom. Why would he do this? Because Thom is in the books.
View original postThe whole interlude at Dana’s inn is an odd mixture of “we don’t need no stinkin’ book material” and including plot points and characters for no other reason than their occurrence in the books. Thom really does not need to be in the show given his contributions, and given the ass-backward chronology of Thom and the Darkfriend menace, there isn’t really a need for the other element. We learn nothing from Dana, she tells us nothing about Rand and Mat we do not already know. Had they gone to sleep in the inn and left the next day for another reason it would not have appreciably changed the story. My best fan-splanation is that Dana’s revelations persuaded Mat that it’s not safe to go home to his sisters, as he claims is his intention in this episode. What I really think is that, as with Thom, the writers felt the need to have Rand and Mat encounter a Darkfriend and be told they are being hunted, and so they stuck both things into the episode, hooking them up with Thom, and combining elements of a couple of Darkfriend encounters and letting it go at that. They probably thought that by hitting the plot points in a single encounter and introducing Thom was being more efficient than the books, when in fact, all they did was demonstrate they don’t understand the characters or incidents at all, and having excised the need for them in the story, still felt compelled to show them.
Of course they were trying to do a whole bunch of things at once, and did them less convincingly than in the books once you start looking at it closely - all of that is pretty much the essence of a screenwriter's job when adapting a long novel to the screen. And yeah, it wasn't all that great, I've probably seen better versions of comparable scenes in Game of Thrones or The Witcher. But I don't think it was that bad, either - and definitely something like this was needed.
View original postWhat’s more, as I look at these comparable incidents, I am observing a recurring pattern, where most of the characters’ competence and small moments of accomplishment are being written away. Instead of handling themselves in solo encounters and staring down Darkfriends and Whitecloaks alike, Rand and Mat only get to do chores and run away. Their loyalty toward one another is nowhere in evidence, with Mat intending to head home without Rand after leaving Rand to chop the wood to earn a bed alone. Rand mocks Mat for having his pocket picked and jokes about not sharing his money. Most of their plot progression in the episode in question is separately, as each has his own chat with Dana and Mat with Thom. At best it seems like they are trying to highlight Rand’s lovable qualities, by making him nice, caring about his girlfriend, hardworking and honest, so as to make it hit harder when he is revealed as the Dragon, but they are doing it at the expense of Mat, in spite of their efforts to make him sympathetic through the little sisters he is overwhelmingly concern for. Sometimes.
In fairness, Mat has the Shadar Logoth dagger affecting him - and given that everything needs to be sped up from the books, that also goes for the effects of the dagger. I don't really have a problem with Rand and Mat's relationship becoming increasingly strained here - but it would've been nice if it had been established more, earlier on, how they interacted normally. Like with more time spent in Emond's Field, prior to the Trolloc attack.
But I agree that, even though the characters have supposedly had their ages increased, they aren't generally shown to have the competence in various things that even their younger selves in the books did have - one of several ways in which they feel more like 21st century young adults from our world and less like young adults from the sort-of-medieval setting of the books. I suppose that's a common Hollywood trick to increase the appeal of movies/shows for a wider audience, despite annoying history buffs or people who are really looking for more authenticity.
View original postI can't help but notice how Dana the Dumpy Darkfriend, played by a woman of possible color, was the dominating feature of the episode, while the boys essentially were stripped of any heroic qualities. I also can't help but notice how the clear intention (even if the writing does not always succeed) with Moiraine and Egwene is to enhance their portrayals and power over and above their book counterparts. Rather, scenes are invented or altered to give them chances to shine. If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck...
I'm not bothered by the more 'woke' aspects of the show except when they actually harm the overall story, like their choice to pretend the Dragon could be any of the four, or even any of the five, or when they are handled so clumsily that they backfire, like Nynaeve's and Egwene's respective ludicrous Healing feats. In the context of this particular post, though, I don't see it being an issue anywhere.
Rand and Mat meet a lady Darkfriend "Eye of the World" vs "Wheel of Time Season 1"
- 09/01/2022 12:41:10 AM
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I actually thought this was done reasonably well, by the standards of the show.
- 09/01/2022 04:10:38 PM
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Re: I actually thought this was done reasonably well, by the standards of the show.
- 09/01/2022 10:24:59 PM
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Re: I actually thought this was done reasonably well, by the standards of the show.
- 10/01/2022 09:46:42 PM
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Re: I actually thought this was done reasonably well, by the standards of the show.
- 11/01/2022 01:06:20 AM
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