The Wheel of Time delivers on a pivotal fan-favorite moment

Because yes, it’s a big character moment for Rand, but it’s also grappling with some of the story’s big themes—the relationship between past, present, and future and how inextricably they’re all intertwined—and building a world that’s even bigger than the handful of cities and kingdoms our characters have passed through so far.

So do we think they pulled it off? Do you want to start with the Aiel stuff we get before we head into Rhuidean?

Playing into the series’ strict One Power-derived gender binary, men have to face the past to see that their proud and mighty warrior race are actually honorless failed pacifists. Women are made to reckon with every possible permutation of the future, no matter how painful.

It’s just an interesting thought experiment, given how many historical errors and atrocities have repeated themselves because we cannot directly transfer firsthand memories from generation to generation. How would leaders lead differently if they could see every action that led their people to this point? If they could glimpse the future implications of their current actions? And isn’t it nice to imagine some all-powerful, neutral, third-party arbiter whose sole purpose is to keep people who don’t deserve to hold power from holding it? Sigh.

Anyway, I think the show visualizes all of this effectively, even if the specifics of some of the memories differ. We can get into the specifics of what is shown, if you like, but we get a lot of Rand and Moiraine here, after a couple of episodes where those characters have been backgrounded a bit.

But yes, as Rand says to Aviendha once they have both been through the wringer of their respective tests, he now knows enough about the Aiel to know how much he doesn’t know.

We don’t see any of Aviendha’s test, though she enters Rhuidean at the same time as Rand and Moiraine. (Rand enters because he is descended from the Aiel, and they all think he’s probably the central character in a prophecy; Moiraine goes in mainly because an Aiel Wise One accidentally tells her she’ll die if she doesn’t.) At this point we have pointedly not been allowed glimpses into Aviendha or Elayne’s psyches, which makes me wonder if the show is dancing around telling us about A Certain Polycule or if it plans to downplay that relationship altogether.

I feel like the show is too respectful of the major relationships in the books to skip it, but they are playing some cards close to the chest.

As we see from both Moiraine and Aviendha, the women’s version of the test isn’t the glass columns, but a series of rings. You jump in and spin around like you’re a kid at space camp in that zero-g spinny thing. I am sure that it has a name and that you know what the name is.

But the one thing that comes back over and over again, and the most memorable bit of the episode for me, is a long string of visions where Lanfear kills Moiraine, over and over and over again.

Both Moiraine and Rand have been playing footsy with Lanfear this season, imagining that they can use her knowledge and Lews Therin lust to get one over on their enemies. But both Rand and Moiraine have now seen firsthand that Lanfear is not someone you can trust, not even a little. She’s vengeful and brutal and as close to directly responsible for the Current State Of The World as it’s possible to be (though the flashback we see her in leaves open the possibility that it was accidental, at least at first). What Rand and Moiraine choose to do with this knowledge is an open question, since the show is mostly charting its own path here.

The show’s most consequential change was the decision to center Rosamund Pike’s Moiraine as a more fully realized main character, where the books spent most of their time centering Rand and the Two Rivers crew and treating Moiraine as an aloof and unknowable cipher. Ultimately an ally, but one who the characters (and to some extent, the readers) usually couldn’t fully trust.