Lee : Many of the Aes Sedai with Lews Therin—and Lews Therin himself—have those little three-finger ring things that Ishamael and Lanfear have been wearing. I was thinking maybe they were some artifact tied to the True Power, but clearly not if Lews Therin has one. I suppose they're either some kind of focus, or perhaps a kind of angreal issued to all Aes Sedai, like a police officer being issued a service weapon. Or maybe they're just the Age of Legends version of Aes Sedai rings. (Though if so, I wouldn't think Ishy or Lanfear would still be wearing them, given how eager the Forsaken all seemed to be to cast off any associations with the Aes Sedai.)

We're shown this scene for a few reasons, but I think one of them is to emphasize that the Forsaken were all sealed away in individual prisons, which take the form of giant disks of unbreakable Cuendillar . This is definitely a different tack than the books, but it definitely simplifies things. I did find it a little weird that Ishamael had all six of the remaining seals propped up in his room, like he was hanging out with them or something—but I guess "weird" doesn't really apply when we're talking about the behavior of millennia-dead superhuman wizard people.

Lee : Indeed—I think in order to stick with the show after this season, one has to simply accept that things will be different. We're not going to stop talking about how different, but accepting that this is an adaptation and that those differences do not in and of themselves automatically mean the show sucks is just kind of a mental block that stragglers are going to have to get over.

Right, so, this episode brings us to kind of the fruition of Lanfear's plan, to the detriment of poor Ishamael. Ishy has—had!—a formal plan to bind the Dragon and his ta'veren friends. It involved moving them around on the chessboard of Randland, manipulating them into falling into the shadow, and then getting Rand to choose darkness to save them. (This also puts some more context around Mat's tea-driven vision quest last episode.)

Lanfear gives no effs. Lanfear's like a honey badger, and Lews Therin Telamon is the honey. She cares about Ishamael's plan only inasmuch as it gives her the opportunity to force Rand to proclaim himself, embrace his destiny, recall his past lives, fall back in love with her, and live evilly ever after. Anything else can burn.

You'd mentioned previously that the Forsaken often work at cross-purposes, and hoo boy, were they ever here. Classic Lanfear.

Lee : I wish Moiraine and Lan had used their words a little earlier, but honestly, having two characters do drastic dumb things when they could in fact have talked things out is a running theme in the books. Verisimilitude!

Everyone else is running around in Falme, and the Whitecloaks show up and kick off the giant battle. Geofram Bornhald (Stuart Graham) isn't necessarily a bad fellow—as he points out, the Children of the Light are in Falme to save people from the Seanchan invaders, and they proceed along that track with alacrity. But Bornhald is the classic Paladin archetype—he and his Children are incapable of bending the rules. See evil, must kill. And "evil" is whatever they say it is.

Aviendha, Bain, and Chiad roll up with Perrin and Hopper in tow, so they get added into the mix of battle. After that, we variously get a bunch of happy (if rushed) reunions between our prime characters, some of whom haven't seen each other in months. The episode is an absolute symphony of reunions, all over the place.

One of those reunions is Mat and village peddler/ultra-darkfriend Padan Fain—and, hey, there's the Shadar Logoth dagger! I don't think Mat is aware that Fain is a darkfriend at first, but him showing up and producing the dagger probably goes a long way to getting that message across.

And then, Mat makes a…well, it's not exactly an ashandarei , but it is kind of a, like, knifey-stick. And it cuts through things like a lightsaber! Does he keep it? Does he trade it in? … is it time to talk about Mat? There's so much Mat to talk about.

Lee : Yeah, Mat has gotten a significant early upgrade on his power level, if that is indeed what is going on—including a jump up to actual Hero of the Horn status, which is not from the books.

Though before I go on about Mat, I want to gush just a moment about seeing Guy Roberts back as Uno, who apparently kicked so much ass in life that upon death he was instantly upgraded to Hero of the Horn. Given that Guy Roberts is a self-professed fan who first read the series in the ‘90s , it gave me a lot of joy to see him get to inhabit the role of Uno with such obvious scene-stealing relish, and to know that he's living the actor's dream of bringing to life a character that he loves.

Artur Hawkwing (Adrian Bouchet) delivers some lines to Mat that he originally delivered to Rand in the book, which—well, I suppose it's all part of the new path the showrunners have put Mat on. The destination is getting a little clearer, but I'm still wondering if he's going to keep his knifey-stick, or if it's going to get upgraded at one point—after all, fully separating him from the dagger and its influence is a major deal in the first few books, and keeping it will have consequences.

We have our first on-screen utterance of Mat's "it's time to toss the dice" in the Old Tongue, and it's great. Show-Mat deserves it. After two seasons of grim purposelessness, he's finally given something good—and it's so good .

The Sounding of the Horn leaves book readers with more questions about Mat than answers—but my guess is these are questions that will be tackled in the front half of the next season. For non-readers, leading the charge of the Heroes of the Horn is a wonderful bow to tie around his two-season journey through crap. Hell, if I have a complaint about Mat's sounding of the Horn, it's that budget and cost of production necessarily limits what should be a Helms Deep-scale routing of the bad guys by a horde of legendary warriors whose deeds have elevated them to immortal demigod status.

Whew, okay. Any more Mat feelings from you?

Lee : I thought that Nynaeve had figured out her block by this point in the show, but apparently not—she's still flailing around with frustration but without the necessary anger to bust through it. To fix Elayne's knee, she has to fall back on her Wisdom skills (though even I know that you're supposed to break the arrow's shaft off before pulling it through, so you don't drag the fletching through your gaping puncture wound—get your head in the game, Nynaeve!).

Definitely agree with Elayne being underutilized—though as you say, healing Rand was a nice way to facilitate an introduction. The only problem is that Elayne is crap at healing. Don't expect her patch job to hold very long or very well. Moiraine will likely have harsh words for her later.

Okay, so—I greatly enjoyed almost everything about this episode, but there were two major book events we didn't get. The first was the blademaster fight with High Lord Turak, which in the books is used to shove Rand further along the path of getting used to channeling and embracing the One Power. However, given the Raiders of the Lost Ark fashion in which Rand sidesteps the fight, I just can't be mad. I literally laughed out loud.

But the other thing we're missing is much harder to overlook: the oft-teased proclamation of the Dragon in the sky above Falme. In the books, this is a giant epic flaming sword fight between Ishamael and Rand, projected like a Pink Floyd laser light show onto the clouds above Falme. In the show, Moiraine does a Final Fantasy VII -style summoning and calls up a large fiery dragon, which curls around the tower and makes some dragon noises and disappears.

I'm disappointed. It's fine, I guess, but it's not what I was hoping for.

Lee : If there's anything positive to be found in the oh-my-God-what-did-I-just-watch death of Hopper, it's—well, it's that those things are spoilers about the World of Dreams, and we'll learn more about them as Perrin figures out a little more about what it means to be a Wolfbrother. As you correctly point out, we should be getting a whole lot of him in the next season.

Oh, and speaking of people to keep an eye on—book readers know this, but non-readers may not: shortly before Mat sounds the Horn, during the little reunion on the streets of Falme between our main characters, Perrin makes it a point to give a quick hug to the other Shienaran present—a gentleman he calls Masema (Arnas Fedaravicius). We then see Masema again near the end, staring at the Dragon atop the tower.

Remember Masema. He was introduced at the end of season one, and this will not be the last time we see him.

Alright, we're down to the last little bits here. Season two ends with Lanfear encountering Moghedien, spinner of webs and plots. She seems… creepy.

Lee : Time to play Forsaken bingo, I suppose!

Out of the original book list, there are eight remaining Forsaken that have yet to appear or be mentioned in the show. If "the boys" can be taken to mean that all the remaining unnamed Forsaken are male, we can drop the two remaining Forsaken who are female. That leaves us with six candidates for our last three spots: Aginor, Asmodean, Balthamel, Be'lal, Demandred, and Rahvin.

We can dump Aginor and Balthamel immediately, as they were killed in the book version of The Eye of the World and didn't appear in the show. I'd also propose we can drop Demandred, given what he's doing in the books and how it works out—I think the show is going to nix his entire plot.

And that neatly leaves us with three dudes left, and my picks for the remaining Forsaken: Rahvin, Asmodean, and Be'lal. And out of those three, my guess is that we meet Asmodean first, in a manner similar to how he shows up in the books.

What do you think?

Lee : There is room for all eventualities in the turning of the Wheel.

And so, dear readers, we arrive at the end of our time together—but fear not, because we'll be back here doing this again for season three . Will Perrin come to terms with the wolves? Will Egwene be able to deal with her trauma? Will Mat avoid accidentally poking anyone with his evil toxic dagger-on-a-stick? Will Nynaeve ever figure out how the hell to channel properly? And what will the fallout be of the Dragon Reborn's public proclamation at Falme? How will Randland react, knowing that the Dragon is foretold to save the world—but also to break it anew?

We know the book answers to these questions, but folks, we are heading into uncharted territory with our Two Rivers TV show crew and their rapidly expanding list of friends. Unexpected things no doubt await us in season three.

Any final thoughts, Andrew?

Lee : There are no endings, and never will be endings, to the turning of the Wheel of Time—but this is an ending. Life is a dream from which we must all wake, and we wish you a pleasant dreaming until next season!

Lee : We're rounding the bend to the end of the season with episode seven of eight here, and there's a lot of ground to cover before we get to that giant battle in the sky that nobody seems to be able to shut up about. (It's not spoilers if all the characters on screen are talking about it!) This episode involved a lot of moving pieces around on the board—a big chunk of the scenes exist in order to get all of our characters in Falme for next week, including and especially whatever the hell is going on with Mat right now.

But before we get to any of that, we have to talk about the opening for at least just a moment. Last season, we got to see Rand's birth on the slopes of Dragonmount as the Aiel War stumbled to a close, but now we're given a peek into the other important event that happened at the same time: the Aes Sedai Gitara Moroso (Hayley Mills) and her “Foretelling.”

Foretelling is apparently a rare talent that does not show up in Aes Sedai very often, and Gitara Sedai was apparently one of the strongest at it—or at least one of the most accurate. Proving that prophecy often comes at the most inconvenient of times, we're shown a flashback where a much younger Moiraine and Siuan enter Gitara's rooms in the White Tower, and Gitara almost immediately collapses under the weight of her vision of the Dragon's return to the world. The Aes Sedai seems to feel what Rand's mother is feeling during her battle, and we're led to believe that both Gitara Sedai and Rand's mother expire at the same time.

We know from the books that this is the moment that kick-starts Moiraine's and Siuan's secret-squirrel club—the reason why they're actively hunting the Dragon Reborn. The inconvenient bit, of course, is that no one else was there—no one else witnessed Gitara's Foretelling. Would certainly have been nicer if she'd collapsed in the middle of the Hall of the Tower with more witnesses, but so goes history, I guess.

Lee : Yeah—I suppose it's a side-effect of having the Forsaken be such major characters on-screen, rather than doing most of their movement in the shadows. And they're just so damn likable—Fares Fares as Ishamael feels downright fatherly at times, and so far all Natasha O'Keeffe's Lanfear has done is wear revealing outfits, have crazy sex with Rand, kill an old guy, and blow up the Foregate. She's not exactly flaying children alive or defenestrating widows or anything.

Which I think is kind of doing the supposedly legendary status of the Forsaken no favors. Near the end of the episode, when Lanfear walks into the courtyard with Moiraine and Siuan and friends, no one freaks out at an actual living non-bound member of the Forsaken strolling into the courtyard—Moiraine is just like, “Oh damn, it's Lanfear.” My impression is that Lanfear walking up into your meeting, even if you're a supposedly all-powerful Aes Sedai, would be like actual-for-real Jason Voorhees unexpectedly shambling through the door to your house. The correct reaction is some kind of mix of “Oh my God wait Jason is real?!” and Scooby Doo-style cartoon panic-running in multiple directions simultaneously. Possibly with some pants-wetting tossed into the mix for good measure.

I also kind of want to talk about whatever the hell it is that Ishy was doing with Mat. I was kind of left feeling clueless by the scene with the tea, but my wife has kind of a theory.

Lee : I was a little let down by Ishy's promise that he was brewing up some tea to let Mat see past lives—I thought the same thing as you, that we might be about to give Mat the shove he needs to start doing the things he does in the book, but instead of actual past lives, we just got more weird stuff with Mat's (show-only) abusive mother and his (show-only) issues with his (show-only) abusive father. I'm genuinely not sure where it's supposed to be going, other than to just abuse Mat some more on screen and get him to the point where he's even more in thrall to the Forsaken.

My wife's quick-n-dirty theory is that the tea was just a sleeping brew, and that the sequence was actually Ishamael screwing with Mat in the World of Dreams. I'd class that as a definite “maybe”—the thing that keeps me from fully agreeing with it is I just don't see what the scene is for , whether it's Magic Spirit Journey Tea or just plain sleeping tea and the Magic Spirit Journey is in Tel'Aran'Rhiod.

Okay, I've got like… paragraphs to drop in here about Moiraine, but only if you're ready to turn to her, and to the resolution of one of this season's biggest mysteries.

Lee : Exactly so. We learn that Moiraine was shielded this entire time, with the shield weaves tied off into knots and left to sit. But your point about the further-changed nature of shielding feels like it's part of the larger set of changes that have been made to how the One Power works with men and women in the show.

It's been kind of a mystery why Moiraine herself hasn't done some more extensive troubleshooting to find the extent of her issue. When a certain set of characters (to remain nameless, to spare non-book readers) eventually figures out how to remove the Aes Sedai Three Oaths in a future book, one of the VERY FIRST things those temporarily-oathless characters do is start lying and giggling—because, let's face it, being able to say “THE SKY IS GREEN!” for the first time in years is probably pretty exhilarating. Why wouldn't Moiraine have simply started busting out with the lies, if for nothing else than to test whether or not she's TRULY stilled?

There are two answers that I can think of. The first is the more in-universe one: few Aes Sedai have ever bothered studying the effects of being stilled. Stilling is simply too viscerally horrifying to confront, even for the knowledge-minded Browns. Stilled women tend to leave the White Tower so as not to be surrounded by reminders of their past and are thought to quickly die (as Lan makes evident when he asks Moiraine if she thought about ending her own life in the past few months). There are simply no records of what happens, other than that the women who DO survive the process tend to do so by thoroughly occupying themselves with important tasks that take the place of the One Power in their lives. Moiraine might simply have not known that stilling unbinds the Oaths, and having lived her life by them for decades, kept up the habits of living by them purely because she doesn't know any other way to be.

(Though, I guess the REAL answer is even more obvious: "Son, the reason the good cowboys don't just shoot the bad cowboys' horses is that if they did, there'd be no movie.")

Lee : Agreed—and there are even more of those contrivances popping up around how the One Power seems to function, especially around stilling and gentling and shielding. As you correctly point out, being shielded in the show does indeed seem to do more or less what being stilled does in the books—for women, at least. Male channelers, on the other hand, seem to have gotten some upgrades. Logain—gentled and definitely not-screwing-around cut off from the Source by Liandrin—apparently retains the ability to both judge another man's strength with the One Power, and also to actually see weaves . The books make it very clear that being stilled or gentled is a permanent and total thing that transforms the channeler into a normal human with no more than normal human abilities, so this is a major swerve.

And why did they do it? So that Logain can teach Rand a few things, which has happened, and also so that Logain can do exactly what he did and tell someone that he sees Moiraine surrounded by weaves. That particular Chekov's gun has now been fired.

Why couldn't Rand see the weaves around Moiraine earlier? Horses, movie, etc, I suppose. It's not how I would have done it, at least.

But! On the positive side of things, we actually get a scene that I think every single reader has been waiting for—Lan gives Rand a crash course on how to appear confident before the Amyrlin, and Rand then takes that knowledge and makes a good showing in front of Siuan.

Lee : Yes—and let's cut over to Nynaeve and Elayne, doing their thing. They still have the a'dam snatched by Ryma (formerly of the Yellow Ajah, and now wearing a collar herself), and after some discussion with Loial, they ambush a lone sul'dam in an alleyway and snap the thing around her neck.

It's a big moment in the show, since it's the first real indication that the Seanchan are actually vulnerable in any meaningful way—their weapons can be used against them! But we lack the extra context—so far, at least—that the books are able to provide when the event happens. After all, an a'dam only works as a leash on a woman who can channel. So why does it work on a sul'dam?

Needless to say, there are potential implications for, oh, the entirety of Seanchan society—implications we'll likely learn more about next week during the finale. (And if not, look to season three!)

The last bit I'd love to talk about is Perrin and Aviendha, who are also converging on Falme with fan-favorites Bain and Chiad in tow. I was a little confused about the geography—for a minute, it looked like the scene was starting off in the Aiel Waste (as evidenced by the Vince Gilligan-esque yellow color grading), but apparently there's a desert surrounding Toman Head and Falme?

Lee : And, with a final scene of Egwene calmly informing her sul'dam that Egwene is definitely going to kill her at some point, we finish this week's recap. The board is set, the pieces are moving, and we come to it at last—the battle in the sky where the Dragon is going to proclaim himself. I mean, I assume we come to it. We haven't seen the last episode yet, but you'd need to go back in time and get yourself an actual-for-real telegraph to telegraph the finale any harder.

There are a few things unsettled, though—what about that Horn of Valere? The thing that all those hunters have been getting branded for in earlier episodes? And—and lots of other things I can't really articulate because of potential spoilers!