The Wheel of Time Recap: Cities in Dust

The Wheel of Time is at its best when it lets the wheel stop spinning. During season two, when the show finally found its footing, it did so with the help of strong stand-alone episodes or lengthy segments: Nynaeve’s heartbreaking journey through the alternate realities of the Aes Sedai’s Arches, Egwene’s breaking at the hands of her Seanchan captor Renna. Historically, the show has always benefited from narrowing its focus.

Though I haven’t read it, I’ve certainly gathered from speaking to fans that the repleteness of author Robert Jordan’s source material is its main attraction. There’s simply a lot of stuff going on at all times, involving a lot of people from a lot of cultures in a lot of places following a lot of quests to achieve a lot of things, and if you have a certain kind of fantasy-nerd mind-set (as I do!), this is a ton of fun. So, I understand why that’s the show’s baseline approach. But boy, is it nice when The Wheel of Time stops to … I was gonna say smell the roses, but not on this show. No, this show only stops to rub its characters’ faces in the thorns.

So it is with this week’s episode, hands down the best of the young season so far. Its task is simple. After some initial business that further fleshes out Aiel society and culture, Rand al’Thor and Moiraine Sedai travel to Rhuidean, the Aiel people’s sacred “city in the clouds.” It’s actually a psychic crucible of sorts, a fog-enshrouded no-place where crystal columns rise up into the sky to guide the men who brave the empty city through their ancestral past, while three massive linked rings beckon female seekers to witness literally 1 million possible futures. Those who survive the ordeal exit as either clan leaders or Wise Ones, respectively.

One day, the Aiel prophecy goes, a man will enter and exit not just with one magical dragon tattoo, the customary marking the city doles out to those who have weathered it, but two, one on each arm. He is the Car’a’carn, the Aiel messiah, destined to be both the destroyer of these people and the savior of those who survive the calamity he brings about. You can guess how Rand’s arms look when he exits, I’ll bet.

But as with all such tests — reminiscent of everything from Frodo looking into the Mirror of Galadriel to Atreyu’s ordeals in The NeverEnding Story — it’s the journey, not the destination. Moiraine’s journey is comparatively simple to explain. When she arrives at the rings, she finds Aviendha floating there; the spear-maiden has secretly been a Wise One in training all along, one who wished to shirk her duty but has now been forced to lay down her weapons and follow her destined path. Moiraine follows Aviendha’s footsteps and finds herself suspended in midair amid the rings, which is one of the most striking and memorable visuals this show has yet served up.

While she hangs there, she’s forced to witness a thousand spins of the Wheel, showing her glimpses of her possible futures. In some, she is Rand’s servant. In some, Rand is hers. In some, she subdues him. In some, she kills him. In some, they are lovers. In some, she and Lanfear are lovers. And in many — many, many, many — Lanfear kills her, over and over and over. Moiraine knows that none of these futures are set in stone, but this one, at least, seems more likely to come to pass than the others.

Rand’s journey, by contrast, takes him backward through time. With each time warp, he’s thrown back further and further into the bodies of his most influential ancestors. His father, who killed the king of Cairhien, who dared cut down a sacred tree to make his throne. The first Aiel chieftain to set foot in Rhuidean, a city built by the Aes Sedai to show the Aiel their shameful past as oathbreakers. The young man who broke the Aiel taboo against killing and established the violent Aiel ethos as we know it while his pacifist countrymen, forever after known as the Tuatha’an, continue their wanderings. The old man who, with his grandson, kept that wandering tradition alive that left many of the Aiel ready to abandon the path laid out for them.

The loyal servant of the Aes Sedai who led the Aiel, originally a servant class in the capital before the Breaking of the World, into exile, each of them carrying a magic sapling in their wagon; his own contained a special magical item, a crystal ball called Sakarnen, a more powerful sa’angreal (or One Power-forged item) even than the legendary sword Callandor. The original Aiel man who worked for Mierin Sedai, the original identity of Lanfear before she freed the Dark One and became Forsaken, who returns to the fields to work with his people at her encouragement — to be spared from the destruction and collapse of the massive floating Death Star–size sphere that served as the capitol building before Mierin destroys it and cracks open a hole in the sky, from which the Dark One presumably emerges.

This is, obviously, A Lot. But it doesn’t feel that way — not the way the first three episodes felt, piling subplot on subplot and supporting character on supporting character until it felt like the whole thing might collapse under the weight. But I had faith in creator/showrunner Rafe Lee Judkins because he earned it during the last go-round. It was with some surprise and delight that I saw his name pop up as the writer of this episode, specifically, because it feels like a small triumph. How do you cram literally millennia of backstory and a million iterations of prophecy into a show without killing its momentum dead? You pack these infodumps into episode-long physical ordeals. You make those ordeals as telegenic as possible, borrowing from science fiction and video games to create haunting mist-enshrouded images, like Moiraine and Aviendha floating in the rings, or like a potential rival to Rand clawing his own eyes out rather than face the past the glass columns have forced him to confront.

In short, you make the infodump bitchin’.

There are many ways to skin this particular cat, mind you. Back in the heyday of Game of Thrones, creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss realized you could get away with some pretty dry dialogue regarding characters’ lineages or motivations if the characters involved were either naked themselves or watching naked people do naked things together. This approach was widely maligned at the time; the term sexposition was even coined as a derogatory marker of moments when backstories and backsides collided. Personally, I never understood the aversion to it. We’re watching an epic fantasy — there’s gonna be a gigantic history lesson delivered by somebody at some point, as surely as there will be sword and sorcery. Why not make those lessons more entertaining by delivering them while someone is getting their junk rubbed?

So it is here with The Wheel of Time. This isn’t sexposition, obviously, even though Moiraine’s visions of the future are notably randy at times. But it follows the sexposition playbook, simply substituting surrealism for nudity. The glass columns, the three rings, the anti-gravity suspension in midair, the man clawing his eyes out, the uncanny repetition of actor Josha Stradowski’s physiognomy throughout time, the sense that we’ve been sent hurtling forward and backward through time at a juncture point where the future could change on a dime — to say all this adds some pizzaz to what is essentially a Wiki entry on the history of the Aiel and of Rand’s family tree is to understate the case considerably. But that’s exactly what it does, as surely as if all this information had been delivered by Littlefinger as he watches prostitutes eat each other’s asses.

What I’m saying is that this is television, baby. Enjoy it while it lasts.