After some minimal protocol is observed, the Tuatha’an welcome Egwene and Perrin into their camp with open arms.Īll things considered, Egwene and Perrin are relatively fortunate compared to their companions, though at first it appears Rand and Mat are making out okay too.
Also known as “the traveling people” or “tinkers,” they’re a barely veiled analog for the Romani. The tracks lead them to an encampment of Tuatha’an. (Perrin has a nightmare in which a wolf eats his dead wife, and that dark man with fiery eyes appears, further complicating things.) But when they run into wagon tracks in the middle of nowhere, they start to wonder if the wolves were, in fact, guiding them. Alone on a barren, windswept plain, they at first think a pack of wolves is hunting them. Led by a woman named Liandrin (Kate Fleetwood), this red-clad group has another male prisoner who claims to be the Dragon Reborn. Their best bet, it seems, is connecting with the Aes Sedai group we saw killing a guy during the premiere. But there’s only so much she can do, given her lack of experience with Trolloc poison. Lan quickly outfoxes Nynaeve and ties her to a tree, freeing her when she offers to help treat Moiraine’s poisoned wound. At the end of the last episode, Two Rivers wisdom Nynaeve caught Lan off guard in the forest to which they’d fled and demanded to know where her friends are it turns out she escaped from her Trolloc captor when he stopped to cannibalize one of his fellow creatures (there’s actually a darkly funny bit where it at first looks like the cannibal was going to tend to his buddy’s wounds, before eating him alive), then killed him when he made the mistake of wading into the village’s sacred pool in pursuit of her. Will this ploy be successful? Only (the Wheel of) time will tell.įirst of the breakaway groups is Moiraine, more gravely ill than ever, and Lan, her concerned warder. What it lacks in recognizable human emotions and drives, it makes up for - or tries to, anyway - in sheer storytelling scope. No sooner are our heroes split up in that shadow city in the last episode than they wind up in three completely different landscapes, facing completely different threats and encountering completely different allies. Wheel is also marching us through a lot of exposition about many different lands and cultures in very short order, as opposed to the comparatively easy-to-grasp “Seven Kingdoms governed by Great Houses” world-building of early GoT. While GoT’s initial cold-open sequence featured a White Walker, that was pretty much it in terms of magical stuff until the dragons hatched in the season finale Wheel has already shown us more of the admittedly awesome-looking Trollocs than we’d see of the White Walkers in, like, three seasons. But Wheel is an unapologetic and effects-heavy epic fantasy from the jump. The Wheel of Time will be compared to Game of Thrones for as long as it lasts, and for good reason: It wouldn’t exist without HBO’s blockbuster serving as a sort of proof of concept for Jeff Bezos’s bottomless pockets.