Obscenity in art is a powerful thing. Not cussing and fucking, though they’re pretty great too, and thankfully in some abundance during this season of The Wheel of Time. True obscenity — the profaning of the sacred, the desecration of the holy, the soiling of the pure — is a powerful thing when you want to depict what evil really looks like.
Think of the Avatar movies and how gross and vile it feels when the human soldiers destroy that big Hometree or slaughter that poor mother whale. They’re not just committing a crime against some blue aliens but against life itself. They’re making a mockery of what we hold dear. It feels more than wrong — it feels filthy, like we’re seeing something disgusting that should never have happened. An obscenity.
That’s how I felt watching the Seanchan commander, High Lady Suroth, command her new Ogier slave Loial to “sing.” This is no mere command performance for the courtiers; this is profound magic, an obviously sacred and meaningful sonic ritual through which the Ogier can persuade the earth’s plants to grow before our very eyes. To Suroth and her cronies, it’s a party trick, like bringing a toddler out to recite the alphabet or making your dog sit with a Milk-Bone on his nose. It’s one of the most beautiful uses of magic we’ve seen so far, and they laugh at it like it’s a mere amusement. To Loial, it’s clear he couldn’t be more humiliated if they’d forced him to whip his dick out. It’s grotesque, shameful, and obscene.
That’s the through-line with the Seanchan, a culture that apparently is pure evil from top to bottom. (I suspect they’ll gain shades of gray over time; nearly everyone does in a series this long, but we’ll see.) Their cruelty is profound, a violation of so much that both we in the audience and the characters see as inviolable.
Nowhere is this clearer than with Egwene. She’s no longer a woman; she is informed by her sul’dam, or handler, Renna (a subtly horrifying Xelia Mendes-Jones). Indeed, she never was a woman. She is a damane, a magic-wielder, which makes her a dangerous animal to be tamed and worked until death, if it comes to that.
Egwene’s breaking by Renna, who uses the magical properties of Egwene’s magic-muting a’dam collar to abuse and torture her into submission, forms the spine of the episode, and it’s the show’s most disturbing material to date by a country mile. At times, it’s reminiscent of the breaking of Winston in the Ministry of Love in 1984, with a braided-hair MMA fighter in place of a wizened member of the Inner Party in the torturer slot. At other times there’s an unmistakable element of BDSM kink, erotic despite it all. (I’m not just blowing smoke here; according to official sources on series author Robert Jordan’s process, the very word sul’dam was inspired by the phrase “sole domme.”)
But the bottom line is simple. Unless and until Egwene truly gives up all hope of rebellion or escape, she will suffer and perhaps die. All of this is concentrated on the simple task of grabbing a pitcher of water and pouring it into a cup, something Egwene can’t do without feeling extreme physical agony as long as some part of her brain clings to the hope of using the pitcher to bash Renna’s brains in and get away.
Renna’s repeated demand, “Pour the water, Egwene,” has echoes of O’Brien asking Winston how many fingers he’s holding up, or Ike Turner telling Anna Mae to eat the cake, or Laurence Olivier asking Dustin Hoffman, “Is it safe?” It’s the kind of line that becomes a catchphrase if a show catches on. After an episode this strong, culminating in the horrible sight of Egwene actually pouring the water and then screaming in total despair over what has become of her, I think it just might.
The obscenity doesn’t stop there. In a last-ditch effort to save Nynaeve (and Elayne, though she’s clearly not the priority here), Ryma (Nyokabi Gethaiga), the Yellow Aes Sedai who’s been sheltering them, gives herself up — after a pretty brutal battle in which she turns a sul’dam into a human pretzel — to cloak their presence. Watching this great woman get collared and enslaved is, frankly, appalling, as it should be. But to her, it’s all worth it to preserve Nynaeve’s life and ensure that she lives to report Liandrin’s involvement with the evil, legendary Black Ajah to the Amyrlin Seat.
But she’s not the only one with big news for Siuan Sanche (Sophie Okonedo), the big boss of the Aes Sedai. Confronted by his friends, who suspect him briefly of being a Darkfriend, Lan is forced to admit that he and Moiraine have found the Dragon Reborn and that he’s still alive out there. But he was already on his way to tell the Amyrlin, which indeed he does.
This leads to the funniest bit in the episode, when Siuan and a whole phalanx of Aes Sedai and warders roll up to the city of Cairhien — where Moiraine, Rand, Mat, and Min are all currently located, with frequent visits from the Forsaken Ishamael and Lanfear to boot — to demand answers from their rogue sister Moiraine. Her look of surprise is one you don’t see on that porcelain face very often; you’ve got to wonder what her doting nephew Barthanes (Will Tudor), a sweet young guy slated to become the next king when he marries the queen, will think of all this.
Meanwhile, Lan, Alanna, Ihvon, and Maksim corner Rand on his way out of the city to rescue Egwene, whom he talked to in a lucid dream granted him by Lanfear and thus discovered her plight. He’d bumped into Mat and they’d planned to go together, but Mat’s psychic buddy Min warned him he’d kill Rand if he went — despite the fact that ensuring they go together was Ishamael’s command to her. Mat’s realization that Min has been working him all this time is actor Dónal Finn’s best stuff as the character yet, exuding the blend of admiration, vulnerability, and bitterness this natural con man feels at getting conned himself by someone he thought really cared about him. (She does, but try telling him that.)
There’s really only one thing that just doesn’t make emotional sense in this episode: If you’re Mat, why not tell Rand you can’t come because your psychic friend predicted you’d kill him rather than simply ditch him without a word? That way, he knows you’re a decent friend who’s looking out for him, and given his powers — which are all but blinding when he unleashes them while training with insane Logain — he might even be able to find a way out of the prophetic vision. As it stands, you’ve hurt his feelings for no reason.
But everything else provided by writer Rammy Park and director Maja Vrvilo is on point this week. The Seanchan are truly monstrous, an entire race of House Bolton people. (Their American accents are such a smart touch, immediately erasing the sense that this is some kind of “exotic” ethnic menace bearing down on the diverse but still decidedly Western European–ish, English-accented fantasy world.) Revealing that the collar-and-bracelet system is an almost sentient, ancient form of magic that literally feels broken and incomplete unless and until that collar is placed on a woman … yeesh, the misogyny is so profound it makes you feel almost physically ill.
Actor Madeleine Madden treats her assignment like a physical challenge, which, for her character, it actually is. Mendes-Jones is equally impressive in their role as Renna, exploiting every possible psychological, historical, and sexual element of master-and-servant interplay they can get their magic-braceleted hands on. Actor Sandy McDade adds a gut-punch grace note to the story line when her character Maigan, a powerful member of the Blue Ajah, shows up as just another placid damane slave, broken even faster than Egwene was.
And I find myself thinking other moments, too: Josha Stradowski as Rand, grinning an almost manic grin as he begs Lanfear to tell him where Egwene is before screaming at her to do it; Moiraine pulling rank on her younger sister and reminding her who really rules House Damodred, a note of imperiousness Rosamund Pike can play in her sleep; Elayne revealing she’s no one to fuck with when she tells Ryma in no uncertain terms that she and Nynaeve are not leaving unless Egwene comes with them, showing real fire from actor Ceara Coveney. Even the pop-inflected score by Lorne Balfe helps set the show apart from its high-fantasy counterparts.
What else can I say? This was a good episode of what is now a good show — a harrowing, upsetting, obscene episode, in fact. In my book, that’s all another way of saying “good.”
