It’s unclear if she knows more about his past than she’s letting on when she asks him if his life has been better or worse since he first picked up an axe in anger - he accidentally killed his wife with one, after all - but either way, she leaves him with a lot to think about. Perrin, meanwhile, discusses the Tinkers’ pacifism with Aram’s grandmother Illa (Maria Doyle Kennedy). Egwene spends most of her time discussing spirituality and Tuatha’an culture with Aram (Daryl McCormack), who’s obviously smitten with her, but who finds her attachment to the far-away Rand just as obvious. They’re traveling with the nomadic Tuatha’an, or Tinkers, the show’s Roma stand-ins. In this week’s episode, at least, it’s a little less for Egwene and Perrin than it is for any of our other protagonists. To paraphrase I Think You Should Leave, suffice to say, The Wheel of Time is a lot.

For every recognizable moment of human connection - Rand struggling to communicate to his best friend Mat that he doesn’t need to keep any secrets, Nynaeve’s raised-eyebrow reaction to the polyamorous lifestyle of some of the Aes Sedai - there’s great gobs of exposition about the Way of the Leaf or the Song before the Breaking or the Kingdom of Minethrin or the will of the Amyrlin Seat or what have you. If you’re not into it, though, hoo boy, I can imagine this is quite a slog. If you’re a mark for that sort of thing - as, frankly, I am - then hey, great! World-building out the wazoo! In short, The Wheel of Time is a show that’s almost all fantasy world-building, at least so far. And so on, and so on, and so on, for 15 novels and however many seasons of those novels’ adaptations Amazon deigns to make. Each new enemy requires one of the heroes to tell one of the others what the enemy is and what its powers might be, and how best to defeat or defend against it. Each time a phrase from a lost language is uttered, someone has to explain what it means, who originally said it, and what context it was said. Every time a character sees another character praying, a conversation must ensue as to what the prayer means and to which deity or ancestor or metaphysical concept it’s directed. However, from the perspective of a television drama, it’s almost an obstacle because virtually every new development requires someone to tell someone else a story about it.

(Dip your toe in the book series’ wiki, I double-dog dare you - you might fall in and never come out again.) From an epic-fantasy perspective, this is an impressive feat. The world Rafe Judkins has brought to the screen feels boundless, replete with different cultures and subcultures, sects and sub-sects, thousands upon thousands of years of history, of wars won and lost, kingdoms risen and fallen, songs and languages learned and forgotten and learned again. In a way, storytelling is The Wheel of Time’s biggest storytelling problem.

The wheel of time dragon reborn