The Wheel of Time (2x06): Eyes Without Pity
Art can (and should) unsettle us, but when does it cross a line—is WoT good enough, or important enough art, to tell such a harrowing tale of torture and enslavement?
I’ve been dreading this episode since I first learned that the Wheel of Time was going to be adapted for television. I didn’t know when it would come, or quite how it would be depicted onscreen, but I knew how intensely I reacted to the savagery of those chapters when I first read them in The Great Hunt. I’ve read parts of the series several times over (as new books were published and released), and, in my 2016 reread—the one where I finally completed the series—I was shocked by how little space it took up. Egwene is captured, but we only experience the content of this episode across maybe two or three chapters (with only a portion of it told from her point of view).
My memory of Book 2 going into my 2016 reread was that most of the story was from Egwene’s perspective, and that it focused heavily on her time with the Seanchan. In reality, Rand has by far the most POV chapters (a full 40% of the novel).1 And so, I was surprised to find the show focusing an entire episode on Egwene’s capture, torture, and breaking—not to mention the heartrending scene where Ryma is collared.2 The horror of what they do to women looms so large; I don’t know if all this was necessary.
I still can’t quite articulate out how I feel about Eyes Without Pity. It was easily one of the most unsettling hours of television I have ever witnessed, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing. As Sean T. Collins wrote for Vulture, “Obscenity in art is a powerful thing.” Stories help us to examine and understand the horrors of the world around us, even if the world is some kind of magical allegory for ours. The Handmaid’s Tale, a show with similar themes of control/domination over the bodies and lives of women, is another harrowing example, one that arrived at a time when many of us were reeling from the relentless onslaught of global democratic backsliding and attacks against the rights of women and queer people. Again, understandably, some viewers could not stomach having to engage with a show that contained these depictions.
But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t well done, or well received, or understood to be a kind of necessary horror expressed through art. Part of the feelings I’m left with, part of why I’m so unsettled here, is that I don’t know if WoT is a good enough show to tell this story. That’s not to say that Madeleine Madden didn’t give a tour-de-force performance here. For someone who has had so little to do this season beyond pout, it’s a huge shift and she absolutely nails it (the body horror, the twisting, the fury, the fear). Still, as I (and many others) have discussed , while S1 was generally fine, it also had at least one huge problem (i.e., Perrin fridging his wife) that left me nervous about if I could trust the writers to handle this specific story with the sensitivity it requires.
Indeed, for all my complaints about how WoT has done little to address Perrin killing his wife (and again, ugh, the S1 love triangle)—that the show must give more weight to such a weighty experience—shouldn’t I be happy they’re giving this the weight it deserves? They aren’t hiding the gruesomeness of what Egwene is experiencing, and, clearly, they’ve learned lessons from Game of Thrones—WoT passes the (very low) bar of ‘at least the torture isn’t sexually exploitative.’3 But the question remains of what it means to depict and consume extreme images of torture and enslavement. Was this unnecessary torture porn, or was it Important Art telling an Important Story about humanity’s potential for evil?4 I’m not alone in grappling with questions about the nature of this content. As Sylas K Barrett writes for Tor (the publisher of WoT):
“I found much of the torture and violence in this episode gratuitous, and I can only imagine how unprepared a viewer who hadn’t already read the books might have felt when faced with such a dramatic and sudden increase in the intensity and volume of violence, both physical and psychological… I expected some… but the volume of it, and the outwardly visceral way Egwene’s torture is depicted, surprised me. If I’m being honest, if I hadn’t been watching it to review I probably would have turned it off halfway through.”
Ultimately, I’m not sure how viewers should understand the series now that we have witnessed such cruel and dehumanizing acts. It’s not as if the show has been sunshine and rainbows up to this point, but it was more hopeful and optimistic, and a sense of the underlying YA hero’s journey remained. For me, this is the moment that the books revealed themselves to be something more than just a typical hero’s journey. It’s not grimdark like the world of Game of Thrones, where a child is thrown from a building at the end of the pilot, but there is still a before we witnessed Egwene’s torture and now an after—or, well, during. Let’s talk about how the episode ended.
The episode ends on a desperately hopeless shot, after Egwene has been broken down. In the books, while all this happens, there are key differences. Min is part of the crew spirited away to Falme by Liandrin. She’s captured by the Seanchan with Egwene and, as she cannot channel, she is not made damane. In that version, Min serves as a source of hope and punishment for Egwene. For example, the Seanchan want to take Egwene across the ocean to their homeland (she can detect and distinguish ores, which makes her valuable beyond her power), but Min speaks of prophetic visions of Egwene and insists she won’t be taken away. Although the hopelessness is palpable on the page (especially inside Egwene’s head), there is more hope than where we are left on TV.
And while some might compare this ending to a book chapter with a cliffhanger, we do find out Egwene’s fate by the end of Book 2. TV viewers are left to wonder, week-to-week, what might happen, what horrors await, how much more Egwene (and us) will have to endure. Today, or perhaps in a week for the season finale, we might learn more. But the episodic nature of this show means that the writer’s chose to close out this chapter knowing we would have to wait. Of course, the books exist, and you are free to spoil yourself if the waiting is too much. But there’s something off to me about the story contained inside this one episode and what kind of anticipation it builds.5
In the end, I think the show did what it aimed to do, and the unsettling was, of course, intentional. I just wonder if there was (or ever is) a better way to tell this kind of story.
So, how did John’s non-book-reading6 partner react to this episode?
She’s not a fan! For now, she may be done with WoT. She felt Egwene’s plot amounted to gratuitous torture porn, and that the writers didn't need an entire episode to get the message across. She would love to know if anyone counted (minute-by-minute) how much screentime Egwene received prior to 2x06. She suspects the torture scenes may lap Egwene’s entire prior onscreen presence (but would love to be proven wrong).
It seems to her that the writers have sidelined Egwene for much of the series, giving us only glimpses of her power between being Rand’s love interest and jealousy of Nynaeve. It seems odd to her that the writers would take the time to emphasize the breaking of her character, when she has received so little characterization to date. Ultimately, she doesn’t know how much she can trust them going forward.7
Stray Observations
It’s hard to believe that other things happened this episode.
The theme of powerlessness undergirded much of the episode—not just Egwene’s torture or Ryma’s collaring as damane, or Loail and Ingtar’s enslavement as da’covale (property), but Moiraine and Logain continuing to reflect on having been stilled/gentled (and how they can contribute); Rand being unable to help Egwene (and not being able to travel the World of Dreams without Lanfear); Lan feeling like he can do nothing to protect Moiraine; even Liandrin has her agency removed in some sense, as the thing that caused her to swear to the dark (keeping her son alive) is taken away from her by Lanfear, in an act of quasi-pity/cruelty.
I’m not sure this was the right episode to feature this key scene between Lanfear and Liandrin, whose arc has been building in this direction since S1. Liandrin, a fascinating and complex ‘love-to-hate’ villain (much moreso than in the books, where she is fairly one-note), has now lost what has driven her for so long. The weight of that cannot be felt in an episode this heavy/focused elsewhere.
I completely forgot that so few characters know that the Dragon Reborn has been found. Lan revealing this to Alanna, Ihvon, and Maksim was played up as a huge deal, but I had sort of assumed Alanna already knew. Lan’s plot has not been working for me (and I’m shocked Maksim and Ihvon thought Lan a Darkfriend).
I love how Ishamael jerks around unnaturally in Tel'aran'rhiod, and how (until this episode), I wrote it off as an attempt to spook his victims. As it turns out, Lanfear is way more proficient in Dreamland, and so maybe Ishy is just doing it badly.
Mat! He gets to hang out with Rand! People smiled briefly this episode!
I’m increasingly impressed by Josha Stradowski, who is absolutely nailing Rand.
Thank you all for going on this journey with me, as I sort through my feelings about Art.
Season 2: Spoiler Corner (with Book Spoilers through to the endgame)
DO NOT CONTINUE. You have been warned. Again again.
Book spoilers follow a line of dashes. Also, there are dashes at the end if you want to footnotes.
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To add to the discussion of disempowerment, helplessness, and cruelty, there is more yet to come. Siun and Leane (two more women of colour) will be stilled (I assume) by season’s end. The optics increasingly begin to look pretty terrible. We know what’s to come (Book 11 and Egwene’s rise to power may be my favourite novel in the series, and is certainly my favourite climax to a character arc), but viewers won’t have any idea that we may be moving in that direction by S2’s end.
I’ve always found Jordan’s focus on domination and submission in WoT to be fairly disturbing. Many authors write kinks into their stories (see: Outlander), and while I don’t know Jordan’s intentions, we see threads of this theme across all aspects of the story—not just the obviously disturbing parts, like Egwene’s collaring. From the many conversations about breaking people, to the varied punishments women receive (across cultures), to Perrin spanking Faile for hitting him, to Tylin raping Mat (and the book not seeming to understand the incident as rape), to questions of compulsion and bonding (initially men, later women), to the magic system itself! Female Aes Sedai submit to the source (the river metaphor from the pilot), while men who channel must take hold of Saidin, violently. We are told women control the weaves more deftly, while men are more powerful. Not only is the magic system gendered, but men and women engage with the magic system in ways that emphasize stereotypes. Men are brutish, direct, and dominating, while women submit, manipulate, wield power subtly, etc.
I forgot to do Forsaken Watch last week. As I argued, I think we’ll get 8 Forsaken. We now have Ishamael, Lanfear, Moghedien, Graendal, and The Boys confirmed. Not sure if we are therefore getting all four (Rahvin, Sammael, Demandred, and Asmodean); I had expected half of The Boys to be cut. Maybe we’ll get some cool gender-bending here, tackling trans* identity in a world of rigid gendered magic?
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I’m not making this statistic up (though, technically, it’s 40.7% of the book). I won’t share the spoiler-filled wiki link, but suffice it to say, every book has been analyzed for POV, % of POV, word count, and % of word count. Rand actually takes up 53% of the novel by words. Egwene only has 10 POV chapters (i.e., about 10% of the chapters or 13.5% by word count).
This is not in the book; Ryma is one of the Aes Sedai who has already been captured. For a show so good about casting people from so many backgrounds, it’s really not great that two women of colour feature so prominently in the enslavement and torture plot.
Beyond The Handmaid’s Tale, the only scenes that have disturbed me more than Egwene’s torture are insensitive depictions of sexual exploitation (i.e., Game of Thrones, Outlander).
In the novels, the Seanchan are described as having what we might imagine to be a Texas drawl. I don’t think the choice of American accent is an accident in the books or onscreen.
The trailer for this episode included the scene of Egwene beating the shit out of Renna. My heart plummeted when it was revealed as a dream sequence this episode. And then the ‘next time on’ for the episode airing tonight doesn’t include a single shot of Egwene…
I have been informed that I am legally obligated to clarify that ‘non-book-reader’ does not mean ‘does not read books,’ but rather, that she has not read these specific books.
And recommends any book fans watching with non-book fans provide a content warning.