The Wheel of Time (2x07): Daes Dae'Mar
Daes Dae'Mar suffers from penultimate episode syndrome; while it tries hard to root the story in Moiraine's S2 struggles, it's mostly an exercise in getting pieces into place.
A Penultimate episode has to balance the challenge of telling a coherent story on its own (instead of being some kind of mushy, indistinguishable string of Serialized Content™) with setting up a far more explosive finale.1 Many (most?) shows don’t often rise to the challenge, so it’s not a unique weakness of The Wheel of Time. And yet… trying to smash multiple, lengthy epic fantasy novels into an eight-episode season—combined with major production challenges that informed and changed a planned narrative—seems to have finally caught up to WoT in 2x07. Daes Dae'Mar was probably my least favourite episode of an otherwise pretty good season of TV.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of Daes Dae'Mar worked for me—I wouldn't be mad if most of the series was just Lanfear and Ishamael doing their thing in great outfits—but I did feel like the made up for the show parts, mostly tied to production challenges (like no Siuan all season and Mat leaving last season), have led to weaker storytelling.
A certain contingent of a fandom will never be happy with an adaptation that deviates even a millimetre from the original plot, but that’s not me. As I have argued before, many of the adaptation choices are excellent, bringing the show into the 21st century and providing a 2023 lens on a 90s series with weird gender stuff. I love Siuan and Moiraine’s relationship being explicit and feminist Rand al’Thor. Not everything has worked for me (the Perrin’s Wife of it all being a particularly egregious example, as well as my mixed reaction to Egwene’s torture in Eyes Without Pity2), but S2 has been a significant improvement over S1 in almost every way. It’s just too bad that some forced choices at the end of S1 have led us to this specific point.
I get it, everyone has to get to Falme—but why’d they have to make it so convoluted?
The Mat of it All: Mat is the elephant looming over the show. Whatever Barney Harris’ reasons, his S1 exit from WoT has had serious ripple effects—I suspect that S2 would have been significantly different if the actor hadn’t left. In the novels, the boys stay together during The Great Hunt, emphasizing both the importance of the Horn of Valere and their friendship; however, with Harris/Mat not going to the Eye of the World, we needed a different story to get the band back together. A reluctant Mat, a self-hating Mat, a Mat motivated by the idea that he’s not worthy, a Mat born to the Dark (as Ishamael suggests)—all that might have worked, except… the show gave Mat basically nothing to do in S2! It never really made sense to me that Moiraine warned the Red Ajah of Mat’s decision to stay behind; I mean, why Liandrin, of all people? Why not Siuan, or Verin, or Alanna, or any number of other Aes Sedai that Moiraine trusts more than the Reds? Worse, WoT hasn’t dealt with the fallout of that choice. Mat was trapped in a dungeon for months, manipulated by Liandrin to go to Caihrien with Min, something something Ishamael and a dream long con to convince him to abandon Rand, and then, after all that, headbonked to Falme by Lanfear, anyway.3
And then we get one of the most confusingly filmed moments of S2—Mat kind of maybe seeing his past lives, or being tricked by Ishamael, or something about his mom, I dunno. The point seems to be that the show wanted to motivate his S1 choices, but they just didn’t do a good job. S2 for Mat has felt like an exercise in course correction. I wish we had spent more time with him, instead of what we got up next.
Lan and Moraine: Lan and Moiraine are notably absent from a lot of Book 2. Choosing to tell a story so centrally focused on the two of them makes sense for TV, in terms of real life actors existing and the writers not wanting to waste their time and talents. And yet, Moiraine’s grief at being cut off from the power (something invented for TV) never really connected with me. I don’t feel like the show did a good job giving us much to work with emotionally around Moiraine regaining her ability to channel. Despite her sadness all season, how she alienated everyone around her in her grief, and her joy at being unshielded—which Rosamund Pike delivers super well—it was all just very sudden. Lan's leaps of logics were wild, despite being correct, and it also felt like he was arguing that her grief wasn’t serious enough (since she did not want to die, only be really horrible to the people she loves most). It felt like it was all in service of an infodump about the power of the Forsaken, rather than an earned storybeat. And that leads us to the other problem with centring this story at the expense of others.
Siuan and Moiraine: None of this worked for me. Or, well, the flashback worked for me (I was happy to see Happy Moiraine and Happy Siuan happily together), and it was certainly an effective contrast to the complete break of their relationship in the present,4 but I just don’t understand or buy Siuan’s complete turnabout here. The two of them, lovers, allies in the cause of finding and protecting The Dragon Reborn, are torn apart because… Moiraine doesn’t know how to tell Siuan she can’t channel? I could maybe understand it if Siuan is arguing that Moiraine has spent 6 months incapable of protecting Rand without telling her (arguable, since she did stab Lanfear in the chest that one time), but that has nothing to do with their shared 20-year labour.
I’ve read (though I can’t place where) that Sophie Okonedo (Siuan) was unavailable for a period of time during the filming of S2. I find that to be the most convincing reason for why Moiraine failed to confide in her—which is unfortunate, since that means that the show didn’t motivate their actions coherently or effectively enough. I loved Siuan in S1, but just didn’t buy the way they (and Lan) came together (pieces in place) in S2.
Perrin, I Guess, And Aviendha: The Aviendha & Aiel Friends content seemed really out of left field to me. It kind of felt like a crash course in Aiel Culture, rather than good storytelling/worldbuilding. Perrin has mostly been wandering around aimlessly since 2x03, and, again, it feels like it was all in service of getting him to Falme for the finale. At least he still gets to hang out with the goodest boy of all, Hopper.
So where does that leave us? Well, there’s a lot I’m still excited about moving into the finale. Nynaeve and Rand in particular have had excellent arcs this season, as have both Lanfear and Ishamael, and Egwene seems to be moving toward some kind of well-earned confrontation with the Seanchan. So, there’s a lot of room for 2x07 to be an unfortunate case of spinning plates crashing at the wrong time and 2x08 to succeed. But I’m still not sure if I can trust the showrunners. I guess we’ll find out!
Game of Thrones was often the notable exception, with a season’s climax occurring in Episode 9 and a calmer (well, calm for GoT) epilogue of sorts in Episode 10.
Although this episode did go a long way toward clarifying what’s going on with Egwene. I argued last episode that it ended on a particularly bleak and hopeless note (a bad choice, given having to wait a week—now two weeks—without resolution), but some have argued that her slightly ambiguous final closeup shot was actually filled with defiance. That seems to have borne out this episode, with Egwene telling Renna she’s going to kill her. Others have also pointed out that Egwene’s focus on her braid is a callback to the pilot, when Nynaeve explained that braids mean that the women of the Two Rivers are with her always.
Another good example of ‘getting the pieces/players into place ahead of an endgame.’
Beyond having just seen what the Seanchan do to women who can channel, I can’t imagine something more horrible than being magically compelled to follow an order. What a rupture of trust that I don’t think can ever possibly be rebuilt. This is a broken relationship now, and unless they gloss over it like Perrin’s wife and his crush on Egwene (which was bad, please don’t do this), I don’t see what kind of reconciliation, if any, they can ever have.