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canyonwalker) wrote2024-02-04 05:02 pm
canyonwalker) wrote2024-02-04 05:02 pm
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WoT S2E1: The Darkfriend Social!
Just recently Hawk and I resumed watching the Wheel of Time TV series with season 2. Here are my thoughts as we watched S2E1, "A Taste of Solitude". Originally I started structuring this as Five Things but then realized it was getting way too long, with 4-5 paragraphs per Thing. Thus I'm splitting it up into a few pieces. The first one is the infamous Darkfriend Social.
The episode's cold open portrays the scene from the prologue of The Great Hunt, the second book of the series. That tracks with season 1 lining up with the first book of the series. At a mysterious location a dozen or so powerful darkfriends gather secretly to be given instructions by Ishamael, the most powerful of the Forsaken and the Dark One's right hand.
As a note, the term darkfriend comes directly from the story. It's an epithet characters across multiple cultures use to describe those who secretly serve the Dark One, the evil power trying to destroy the world. Calling this scene the “Darkfriend Social”, though, was coined by a net.friend of mine in 1993. Yeah, that's a long time ago now! I'm glad to see it's caught on pretty widely across fandom.
In portraying this scene the TV show writers once again make a change from the books I don't entirely like. They change the viewpoint character.
In the books the viewpoint character is "Bors", one of the darkfriend influencers invited to the gathering. We find out later he's Jaichim Carridin, a Whitecloak officer. The TV show switches the viewpoint character to a young girl, who's terrified when she sees trollocs rushing at her. She's comforted by Ishamael, who shows how diabolically sweet evil can be when it's trying to fool people into trusting it.
One thing we miss in this change of viewpoint character is understanding who the other darkfriend influencers are. They're all disguised, though little clues about each of them reveal their identities to some extent. In the books we're given Bors's astute (if also smug) observations about who these other fellow darkfriend influencers are. Among them are at least one Aes Sedai, a Shienaran warrior, and a Seanchan noblewoman. These people occupy positions of power in the world; they are leaders. Thus the fact that they're also key influencers for the Dark One portends the risk the world faces. With Bors's narration we learn all that. With a terrified little girl as the viewpoint character we viewers are left to figure that out from a quick pan of the camera past disguised figures in the background.
This is one of those situations where the change seems good for the short term, making the TV scene emotionally powerful in the moment, but bad for the story in the long term, depriving us viewers of important foreshadowing that's essentially buried in the scene.
The episode's cold open portrays the scene from the prologue of The Great Hunt, the second book of the series. That tracks with season 1 lining up with the first book of the series. At a mysterious location a dozen or so powerful darkfriends gather secretly to be given instructions by Ishamael, the most powerful of the Forsaken and the Dark One's right hand.
As a note, the term darkfriend comes directly from the story. It's an epithet characters across multiple cultures use to describe those who secretly serve the Dark One, the evil power trying to destroy the world. Calling this scene the “Darkfriend Social”, though, was coined by a net.friend of mine in 1993. Yeah, that's a long time ago now! I'm glad to see it's caught on pretty widely across fandom.
In portraying this scene the TV show writers once again make a change from the books I don't entirely like. They change the viewpoint character.
In the books the viewpoint character is "Bors", one of the darkfriend influencers invited to the gathering. We find out later he's Jaichim Carridin, a Whitecloak officer. The TV show switches the viewpoint character to a young girl, who's terrified when she sees trollocs rushing at her. She's comforted by Ishamael, who shows how diabolically sweet evil can be when it's trying to fool people into trusting it.
One thing we miss in this change of viewpoint character is understanding who the other darkfriend influencers are. They're all disguised, though little clues about each of them reveal their identities to some extent. In the books we're given Bors's astute (if also smug) observations about who these other fellow darkfriend influencers are. Among them are at least one Aes Sedai, a Shienaran warrior, and a Seanchan noblewoman. These people occupy positions of power in the world; they are leaders. Thus the fact that they're also key influencers for the Dark One portends the risk the world faces. With Bors's narration we learn all that. With a terrified little girl as the viewpoint character we viewers are left to figure that out from a quick pan of the camera past disguised figures in the background.
This is one of those situations where the change seems good for the short term, making the TV scene emotionally powerful in the moment, but bad for the story in the long term, depriving us viewers of important foreshadowing that's essentially buried in the scene.