They killed the shock for me, by putting so much of a spotlight on her. The only options were revealing she's a Darkfriend, or expecting us to be upset by her death at the hands of Rand's & Mat's pursuers.

You have a good point, but needing a scene as a bandage for missing stuff as a result of your shitty choices isn't much of an excuse. That's the problem with so much original material, it's purpose is dubious and forces this sort of writing economy. Keeping Ba'alzamon dream appearances over fire-face CGI jump scares or multiple discussions of feelings and relationships (why do they think they need MORE conversations with Tinkers than we get on the page, but FEWER confrontations with the enemy, whether Ba'alzamon, Myrddraal or Darkfriends? )

Thanks.

Yep.
Me, either. You know what might make that stick? Repetition through multiple encounters.

But, that's probably why Jordan did not have them face off with a pseudo-swordswoman, instead having a quick surprise attack they could handle with a stroke of apparent luck, or in hindsight, dagger-induced paranoia.
It's an idiot confrontation - one that requires everyone to be stupid to get the outcome the writers want.

Not the failing to speculate, just that her words didn't have much effect, so why build up a whole scene to give weight to them? Rashid The Dark One telling them stuff in multiple episodes in dreams could be more efficient, since you don't need to constantly introduce new characters, or even set up scenes much, since you can jump into a dream with no set up. He could do conversations with each "candidate" to reinforce their potential, instead of laboriously having to seed clues about each character, Nynaeve glowing like the sun, Perrin's eyes, Mat's "madness", Egwene's indestructibility... he could even hint about Rand getting through the door, suggesting Abdul the Dark One had somehow opened the door for him. with the implication that Rand et al are vessels he can act through without their awareness or consent.

But it could have been handled better, and I think multiple encounters with Darkfriends would have been better in that regard. Have different Darkfriends each thinking they are on the track of the right targets. Have a Tinker Darkfriend get caught whispering to a raven, so they have to flee the caravan and run into the Whitecloak's arms. Have one of Logain's followers suddenly recognize Nynaeve and try to grab her and drag her away from the battlefield, muttering something about "forget killing the caged Dragon, I'll turn in the real thing," and she can show her gumption in escaping, or Lan can be wounded saving her so her Healing blast is more about responsibility than a crush.
But there seems to be no payoff to the Darkfriend threat.
Much better served in conversations with Ba'alzamon, or knowledgeable people talking about it. Maybe a debate between Liandrin and Moiraine, where the Red position is more of a "gentle the Dragon to prevent his turning to the Dark One." That might improve on the book characters' groundless fears of the Reds panicking and gentling Rand.
A vastly inferior opportunity to what the equivalent scene in the books gave.
But the show's position thus far has been to depict Rand as an asshole for not trusting Moiraine more. And teaching him to be more suspicious of people is a bad lesson for Rand to learn, thematically speaking. He was never too trusting in the books, but there were generally payoffs to him trying to treat people decently. I.e. Ingtar, who has been cast for season 2, so that's going to be a thing.
Did they need this, when they utterly failed to establish the Myrddraal's danger, and Thom will only ever encounter on screen a doomed farm family after killing Dana?
Was this either necessary or served? IMO the book handled it fine, the people who had a problem with it wanted more pandering and all Dana did was treat it like a joke, which doesn't really service that. The way to do it is not by having characters commenting on how homosexuality is fine with them, but by showing homosexual characters that no one noticed, which the show almost did properly with Alanna's warders, and then screwed up with the discussion of the implications if she added Stepin to the crew. Just imagine the dialogue with homosexual characters reacting to heterosexuality as in Rand & Dana's talk or Stepin's final chat with Lan. "Oh, well. I'm going to be mystically linked to a couple of women and end up in a sexual relationship with them, even though I'm gay and am mourning the loss of a friend and partner."

Given the choices they made is pretty damning anyway, since the same people necessitated those boxes by making those choices.

I think that's possibly a flaw Jordan fell into as well, given that a lot of people seem to think the first book or two did not do enough to get them invested in Mat, and he did not emerge as a fan favorite until Book 3. But for people so bound and determined to fix the series, you'd think they'd have been all over that, instead of the nonsense with is horrible family, which, BTW, they clearly did not think through any more than they did the idea to give Perrin a wife and friendly-axe her at the outset. Supposedly his "selfish" inclinations are redeemed by the implication that his primary concern is getting home to take care of his sisters, but then you have to ask why he doesn't actually go home. If he's being held back by the dagger from going into the Ways, that's Moiraine's fuckup. They didn't think through what a commitment to their change entails. It's like selecting a wife because she's got a great rack at 21, without thinking about how living with her over the next 70 years is going to be, when that initial attraction no longer applicable for most of that time. Perrin's dead wife and Mat's dependent sisters ARE really big deals, but they are not things you can get rid of when it's no longer convenient or easy or it demands the characters act in ways that don't serve your story.

It's like Game of Thrones, wanting to give Robb Stark a love story. A 16 year old jumping into bed with a girl his age because of hormones and emotions, regardless of the political implications is not only more understandable, but pretty much par for the course. As is the idealism that would motivate him to rectify the situation as he did. But for a man in his 20s (the actor was 27), who has been raised to hold a position of power and trained in the realities and necessities since childhood, to blow off political arrangements because of his longer-developing romance is criminally, almost unforgivably stupid.

It's the same pattern of poorly thought-out choices. It's not that I object to the content as the motivation, or rather the fact of a motivation. It's exactly the same as Christianizing the series, which has plenty in there for Christians to appreciate as it is, but no, we have to make it EVEN MORE Christian and overtly so. We don't have the patience to play out the whole story, so people can see the reality of the setting and story with some perspective, we have to get the message across in episode 1. The bible-thumpers are too lazy, impatient or zealous to wait to see the big picture, they want their God fix in episode one, so we have to spend most of our efforts in Emond's Field on Egwene's confirmation and the celebration thereof, and how impressed all the people are that she's taken this step on her faith journey. In the book Egwene getting her brain was just "I'm an adult now and it's time for some choices about my life," whereas there isn't much point to the womanhood stuff aside from Egwene porn. Like, it is literally only there for fans of Egwene to enjoy watching her one the screen, like a slice-of-life fan fiction story.