Andrew: Maybe I’m exaggerating but I think Shohreh Aghdashloo’s actual voice goes deeper than Hammed Animashaun’s lowered-in-post-production voice for Loial. It’s an incredible instrument.

Meeting Morgase in these early episodes means we also meet Gaebril, and the show only fakes viewers out for a few scenes before revealing what book-readers know: that he’s the Forsaken Rahvin. But I really love how these scenes play, particularly his with Elayne. After one weird, brief look, they fall into a completely convincing chummy, comfortable stepdad-stepdaughter relationship, and right after that, you find out that, oops, nope, he’s been there for like 15 minutes and has successfully One Power’d everyone into believing he’s been in their lives for decades.

It’s something that we’re mostly told-not-shown in the books, and it really sells how powerful and amoral and manipulative all these characters are. Trust is extremely hard to come by in Randland, and this is why.

Andrew: It’s just one of quite a few book things that these first few episodes speedrun. Mat has weird voices in his head and speaks in tongues! Egwene and Elayne pass the Accepted test! (Having spent most of an episode on Nynaeve’s Accepted test last season, the show yada-yadas this a bit, showing us just a snippet of Egwene’s Rand-related trials and none of Elayne’s test at all.) Elayne’s brothers Gawyn and Galad show up, and everyone thinks they’re very hot, and Mat kicks their asses! The Black Ajah reveals itself in explosive fashion, and Siuan can only trust Elayne and Nynaeve to try and root them out! Min is here! Elayne and Aviendha kiss, making more of the books’ homosexual subtext into actual text! But for the rest of the season, we split the party in basically three ways: Rand, Egwene, Moiraine and company head with Aviendha to the Waste, so that Rand can make allies of the Aiel. Perrin and a few companions head home to the Two Rivers and find that things are not as they left them. Nynaeve and Elayne are both dealing with White Tower intrigue. There are other threads, but I think this sets up most of what we’ll be paying attention to this season.

As we try to wind down this talk about three very busy episodes, is there anything you aren’t currently vibing with? I feel like Josha Stradowski’s Rand is getting lost in the shuffle a bit, despite this nominally being his story.

Andrew: Not a ton of dislikes, I am pretty in the tank for this at this point. But I do agree that some of the prop work is weird. The Horn of Valere in particular looks less like a legendary artifact and more like a decorative pitcher from a Crate & Barrel.

There were two particular scenes/moments that I really enjoyed. Rand and Perrin and Mat just hang out, as friends, for a while in the first episode, and it’s very charming. We’re told in the books constantly that these three boys are lifelong pals, but (to the point about Unavailable Men we were talking about earlier) we almost never get to see actual evidence of this, either because they’re physically split up or because they’re so wrapped up in their own stuff that they barely want to speak to each other.

I also really liked that brief moment in the first episode where a Black Ajah Aes Sedai’s Warder dies, and she’s like, “hell yeah, this feels awesome, this is making me horny because of how evil I am.” Sometimes you don’t want shades of gray—sometimes you just need some cartoonishly unambiguous villainy.

Andrew: The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills.