The Wheel of Time - 1.02 Shadow’s Waiting
Sep. 15th, 2023 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessContinuing with having the opening scene feature others, here people who I thought were idiots for wearing white in a camp in what looked like autumn. Also, they weren’t so good on the child labour front, but then we got the reveal that the Questioner was quite the sicko, torturing witches (a bit like actual history, although in this world, don’t they both claim to be on the sight of the light?)
Mainly we were with the four potentials, Moiraine and Lan as they had a thing at a ford that reminded me of The Fellowship of the Ring, only with an added whirlpool and a ferryman who hadn’t faced up to the fact that his son (and family) were probably dead. Rand was a brat about this, and indeed everything, so I liked that pragmatist Mat called him out on it. Honestly, Egwene, I know you’re grieving and seeking comfort, but Rand doesn’t seem worth it.
Moiraine was determined to make Egwene her apprentice or tap into her abilities, because even if she wasn’t the Dragon, she definitely had magical potential, being a woman. And I respected Egwene for basing her decisions on something more empiric than Rand’s big sulk that life was not turning out like he thought it would. (We also saw Perrin not tell anyone about his wound and discover that a wolf was happy to lick said icky wound? This was after the nightmare Rand had – that they all had - which seemed to feature something worse than we’d already seen. I’m going to call it a Batkiller until we get another name.)
We got some backstory about where the kids had come from (how does old blood work with a reborn Dragon, then?) which showed that Rosamond Pike, Oscar nominee, can tell compelling stories while riding a horse. The story that Lan told about the evil/abandoned city he took them to (had always been in favour of taking them to to stop the monsters) mainly made me think it was a bad idea even before Moiraine recovered enough to tell him as much. I mean…what was his plan? Best case scenario was they stayed there till they starved.
Hard to know if Mat getting woken up and going walkies in the middle of the night and finding a fancy weapon (when he’d been told not to touch nowt…) was what woke up the black stuff, which separated the party into three.
Cliffhanger with Lan and a half-dead Moiraine being surprised by the Wisdom (but promos for s2 had spoiled me that whatever Egwene thought, she wasn’t dead.) Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but it means the gender balance of main characters is three to five.
In between our party had met with the camp in white, where the witch-killing Questioner was pretty hateable and Egwene got to learn the art of telling the truth misleadingly, giving us an idea of some of the complexities of the world.
I did keep thinking everyone was idiotic for going off alone. But what with the warning about dreams and Moiraine becoming increasingly weaker, it felt that their journey was getting increasingly harder as they faced worse and worse less strength and on less sleep.
The landscapes of fake abandoned architecture continue to be stunning.
Mainly we were with the four potentials, Moiraine and Lan as they had a thing at a ford that reminded me of The Fellowship of the Ring, only with an added whirlpool and a ferryman who hadn’t faced up to the fact that his son (and family) were probably dead. Rand was a brat about this, and indeed everything, so I liked that pragmatist Mat called him out on it. Honestly, Egwene, I know you’re grieving and seeking comfort, but Rand doesn’t seem worth it.
Moiraine was determined to make Egwene her apprentice or tap into her abilities, because even if she wasn’t the Dragon, she definitely had magical potential, being a woman. And I respected Egwene for basing her decisions on something more empiric than Rand’s big sulk that life was not turning out like he thought it would. (We also saw Perrin not tell anyone about his wound and discover that a wolf was happy to lick said icky wound? This was after the nightmare Rand had – that they all had - which seemed to feature something worse than we’d already seen. I’m going to call it a Batkiller until we get another name.)
We got some backstory about where the kids had come from (how does old blood work with a reborn Dragon, then?) which showed that Rosamond Pike, Oscar nominee, can tell compelling stories while riding a horse. The story that Lan told about the evil/abandoned city he took them to (had always been in favour of taking them to to stop the monsters) mainly made me think it was a bad idea even before Moiraine recovered enough to tell him as much. I mean…what was his plan? Best case scenario was they stayed there till they starved.
Hard to know if Mat getting woken up and going walkies in the middle of the night and finding a fancy weapon (when he’d been told not to touch nowt…) was what woke up the black stuff, which separated the party into three.
Cliffhanger with Lan and a half-dead Moiraine being surprised by the Wisdom (but promos for s2 had spoiled me that whatever Egwene thought, she wasn’t dead.) Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but it means the gender balance of main characters is three to five.
In between our party had met with the camp in white, where the witch-killing Questioner was pretty hateable and Egwene got to learn the art of telling the truth misleadingly, giving us an idea of some of the complexities of the world.
I did keep thinking everyone was idiotic for going off alone. But what with the warning about dreams and Moiraine becoming increasingly weaker, it felt that their journey was getting increasingly harder as they faced worse and worse less strength and on less sleep.
The landscapes of fake abandoned architecture continue to be stunning.
