Legend of the Seeker: Brennidon

The one in which they try to make us interested in Richard’s secret biological family.

It’s a trope well-known to fantasy fiction: that the protagonist will have some sort of secret lineage that elevates him to a position of “specialness”, often compounded by a mystical prophecy surrounding the circumstances of his birth and detailing the great stuff he’s destined to do as an adult. Honestly, the number of fantasy heroes that don’t have this as an intrinsic part of their backstory are far outnumbered by the ones that do. From Luke Skywalker to Harry Potter, King Arthur to any one of the Greek heroes that were secretly sired by Zeus – a significant parentage and a great destiny go hand in hand.

And with that comes a tried-and-true method of trying to circumvent the above hero from rising: what TV Tropes calls Nice Job Breaking It Herod. The bad guy knows that a destined hero who poses a threat to his monopoly on power has been born somewhere in the vicinity, and so sends out his troops to make sure he never reaches manhood – and just to make sure the job is done properly, usually decrees that there’s no real need for accuracy. If there’s a baby, kill it.  

It’s a pretty popular story in the Bible, from Moses escaping the Pharaoh’s genocide of the slave children, to King Herod sending his men out to kill Baby Jesus, but it pops up across various times and cultures: Saturn devours his own children to prevent one of them from overthrowing him, Krishna narrowly avoids the same fate at the hands of his uncle Kamsa, and Greek mythology is veritably full of baby princes who are saved by helpful shepherds who find them left to die of exposure on various hilltops because they’ll one day overthrow their fathers.

Harry Potter was targeted by Voldemort because a prophecy stated he would be his enemy’s downfall, and Jon Snow had to grow up as a disgraced bastard because his true lineage made him too vulnerable to assassination attempts. In a rare case of a heroic character greenlighting this procedure, King Arthur once ordered the drowning of babies born on May Day in an attempt to avoid the destruction that Mordred would one day unleash on Camelot, and in an even rarer female example, Willow depicted Elora Danan being hunted down as a baby after she’s foretold as being the one who will defeat the evil Queen Bavmorda (that movie ended on a weird subversion of this trope, since she didn’t have any sort of direct hand in the destruction of Bavmorda. So… was she a normal baby the whole time, and it was just the efforts of good people to protect an innocent that was the true saviour? Unclear).

You could even make a case for The Terminator movies being based on this, though the titular Terminator goes back a step in time and targets the Chosen One’s mother.

My point in bringing all this up is that Legend of the Seeker also goes to the same well in drawing up a backstory for Richard Cypher – but for some reason, whether it’s because the trope is as old as time, or because the show adds no interesting wrinkles to the familiar setup – it’s as uninteresting as it is unnecessary. Like, seriously unnecessary. I’m not sure what they do with the remaining mystery of Richard’s father in season two, but by the end of this season the revelations of his paternity and family tree which are presumably meant to rock his world, have absolutely no bearing on his character or the resolution of the plot.

It’s really quite bizarre.

The most interesting part of this episode is the scene right at the very beginning, in which we see Kahlan in her role as a Confessor – not feared and hated as a witch, but revered and respected as the highest moral authority in the land. People in the nearby village come to her to seek advice and judgment, and she hears their problems and disputes before dispensing justice. It’s a great glimpse into the life of a Confessor as they would normally operate, and it manages to be way more interesting than all the inconsequential nonsense Richard gets up to.

Basically, while Kahlan is King Solomon-ing it up, Richard convinces Zed to let him accompany a couple of hunters on their chase for a stag, only for them to end up on the outskirts of the village of Brennidon – the place where Richard was born. Knowing this, he heads down to find out what he can about his biological mother. His first stop is a graveyard filled with the slaughtered infants of the massacre that was carried out twenty-three years ago with the object of eliminating him (heavy stuff), cared for by… the guy from the New World ads! Only fellow kiwis will get that reference, but it’s definitely him.

In one of many fantasy staples packed into this episode, Richard sneaks into the heavily fortified village via the old haybale cart trick, only to instantly get himself into trouble when standing up in defence of a woman who is about to get beheaded for sedition. Boy can’t help himself (that’s why we love him).

Chaos ensues, and Richard is hidden in the house of a woman who introduces herself as Brigid before dropping a bombshell: she’s his mother. There’s not much time to process this given the D’Haran soldiers are searching the houses for the Seeker, but anyone with a passing knowledge of how long-running episodic stories work will have already guessed that this woman is not in fact Richard’s mother. It’s too soon in the series to be confronted with a revelation of that magnitude, though we never actually get a clear reason as to why she’s lying about it.

As it happens, this is a story filled with women who chose to lie about issues of parentage, as back in the forest Zed is confronted by an old flame who insists that he’s the father of her son. This is proved to be false after Zed confesses something in private to Kahlan, and instead he helps the woman’s son overcome his fear of hunting. It’s a bizarre little subplot that has nothing to do with what’s going down in Brennidon, beyond the fact that Zed’s secret ties into Richard’s interest in his biological family. But still, bringing in a completely superfluous set of characters to draw out what is ultimately an equally superfluous reveal via a paternity battle while the hero is literally fighting for his life in a completely different part of the story is certainly a weird creative decision.

Meanwhile Richard is introduced to his so-called brother Mark, and having learned nothing from his extremely bad luck with brothers, is easily lured into a trap. Still, he escapes about three seconds later, so he’s not a total loss. There’s a lot of running around, all the potential mothers of the Seeker that are rounded up in the town square pull an I Am Spartacus, Mark and Richard reconcile long enough to come up with a plan to save them all, and Zed and Kahlan turn up just in the nick of time to help Richard save the day.

They’re helped by the villagers, who rally themselves long enough to fight back the armed D’Harans by throwing food or whatever, and yes – I realize this is only the fourth episode of the show and the stakes have to remain pretty low, but it’s a pretty big stretch to ask us to believe that not only are the villagers who lost an entire generation of children will have the fortitude to stand up to their oppressors on little more than a whim, but that there aren’t going to be any repercussions over their uprising. I mean, surely the D’Harans are going to come BACK with reinforcements over this.

But never mind, happy ending. Brigid tells Richard that she’s not his mother after all, but instead was the midwife that smuggled him out of the village the night he was born – but last she heard, his real mother was still alive. Rather than ask her some basic follow-up questions such as “what’s her name?” and “where can I find her?” Richard takes this on the chin and we’re privy to a final scene in which we learn Zed’s big secret: he’s Richard’s grandfather. Dun dun DUN. (Seriously though, it doesn’t really matter).

Miscellaneous Observations:

I hadn’t noticed before this rewatch that there are so many Maori actors among the supporting cast and extras. It’s really nice to see.

Much like Aang in Avatar: The Last Airbender, there are some lines of dialogue here that pass blame onto the Seeker for being absent for such a long period of time – unlike Aang, Richard more or less shrugs it off, perhaps realizing that it’s hardly his fault. Still, it’s a line of questioning that could have led into a greater understanding of what the Seeker actually DOES (as is hinted at here, it’s a title that’s apparently been around for much longer than Darken Rahl).  

I liked that each village so far has been given a subtle but distinctive style – this one was set apart thanks to the head-coverings of the women. They also managed a good physical match between Brigid and Mark.

To sum up: in most fantasy stories there’s always an emphasis on who your family is, largely because most foundlings end up being the children of princes and kings. In this case it’s perfunctory, because none of it lands well or has much relevance to the overarching story. By the end of this season (SPOILERS) Richard’s mother is discovered and killed off within the same episode, before he even gets a chance to speak to her – and he’s not even that upset about it. Zed’s identity as his maternal grandfather is eventually revealed with a mighty shrug of indifference, and the identity of his father (and by proxy, his relationship to Darken Rahl) is left ambiguous.

Anything to do with his family is just plain uninteresting, which in a Doylist sense becomes extremely fascinating. How many stories out there could have worked just as effectively, if not more so, if the protagonist was not in fact the last scion of some important bloodline or the object of a mystical prophecy? What if he or she was just a normal person caught up in events beyond their control and struggling simply to do the right thing?

Because most of the time, prophecies are just lazy ways to kickstart plots, and secret royal blood a way of re-establishing monarchies that no longer have any relevance with today’s readers. Inserting a bit of randomness in the way heroes are chosen (that is, they chose themselves) is not a bad direction to take.