Legend of the Seeker: Listener

The one with the annoying kid.

Sooner or later, every genre show or franchise will introduce a kid. Buffy/Angel had Dawn and Connor. Star Wars had Jake Lloyd’s Anakin Skywalker. The 100 had Madi. Charmed had a whole half-season with Jenny Gordon, the kid living next door to the Halliwell sisters who was apparently meant to get a witch-in-training subplot before the writers abruptly jettisoned it (and her).

It’s never a good sign, so Legend of the Seeker decided to get it over with quickly, deal with the kid and then never see or mention him ever again. Which hey, is one way of dealing with the problem. And okay, Renn isn’t actually that bad – I can understand that he’s a product of his upbringing, and he does improve as the episode goes on... but still, it’s best not to dwell too long on annoying kids.

It starts with Richard, Kahlan and Zed tracking an elite garrison of D’haran soldiers and wondering if they can follow them to Darken Rahl’s location – which is clearly not going to happen this early in the series, so the suspense is defused in the same moment it’s introduced. Instead we get a replay of last week’s moral question: does one put serving the greater good on hold for the sake of a person in more immediate need of help?

In this case the person is Renn, a little boy who is quickly established as a Listener: someone who can read minds. According to Zed, the last one existed about seven hundred years ago (which makes me wonder why there’s been such a sudden influx of things like Listeners and Shadrin in this world. Is Richard becoming the Seeker the reason for all this, kind of like how Daenerys’s dragons were credited as to why there was a magical resurgence in her world?)

Having established Renn’s abilities and role as this episode’s MacGuffin by having him point out a traitor in the Dragon Corps ranks, we get the expected discussion on whether our heroes should intervene or not (Kahlan wants to let the Corps lead them to Rahl, Richard doesn’t want to risk Rahl gaining possession of the boy’s powers), till Zed comes up with the amazing idea to join the Corps in disguise… by magically dying his hair black and growing a beard. Yup, he looks exactly the same, only now his hair is black and he has a beard.

Truly, no one would ever suspect him now, and he integrates himself into the Corps remarkably easily, first by faking an attack by evil spirits and then by “saving” the Corps from them. I mean, it’s nice to see the good guys pull off this ploy for a change, but how are an elite team of D’Haran soldiers this gullible?

Whatever, it’s enough of a distraction for Richard and Kahlan to run off with Renn. And so the episode divides into Two Lines, No Waiting, in which Kahlan and Richard attempt to get Renn to a safe home, and Zed carries along with the Corps in the hopes of freeing the soldier who secretly wants to assassinate Rahl.

Of course, the entire point of the episode is to see what Kahlan and Richard would be like as parents to a troubled child. As Renn leads them on a merry dance all over the countryside, manipulating them in to getting him certain foods and dragging his feet when it comes to their decision to take him to Thandor, which is essentially a hidden Hogwarts for magical kids.

And they do pretty well, all things considered. When Renn secretly blackmails Richard into hunting down a pheasant and gathering blackberries in exchange for not divulging certain naughty thoughts he’s had about Kahlan, Kahlan points out that Richard went to a lot of trouble and “was very kind” to go to such lengths. And when Kahlan has one of those haunted flashbacks to her own bad childhood, Richard listens to her objections and doesn’t end up binding Renn’s hands, on nothing more than her insistence that he doesn’t.

Meanwhile, Zed is amongst the Dragons Corps, hoping to be led to Rahl’s location while simultaneously trying to help the turncoat soldier who cannot bluff or bide his time to save his own life. Dude, when a kid accuses you of wanting to kill Darken Rahl, you could at least try to object. And when a wizard magically releases your restraints, maybe wait until dark before trying to make your escape? Ah whatever, this guy’s main purpose is to demonstrate that there’s dissidence among the ranks of the D’Haran (a theme that will be explored in much more nuance later in the season) and to pass on an important bit of exposition: Rahl has recently sent men on a mission of great importance to a city called Calabra, which seeds the next episode.

Renn eventually pulls off a long-con to make the D’Harans turn on each other, and by this point there was a real sense of poignancy in his portrayal. Being so jaded at such a young age makes sense considering what he’s seen in people’s minds and what they’ve forced him to find out on their behalf, so there’s a genuine sense of suspense throughout the episode that it might be too late for him. His line to Richard and Kahlan about their inherent goodness, asking: “why are you the only people in the world who are like that?” is genuinely heartrending.

So at the end of the day, Renn – and this episode – wasn’t that bad. The little actor was reasonably good (wherever he is now, he's all grown up), the subplots winded together nicely, the show carried on the theme of giving up the bigger picture for the sake of individual lives, and Kahlan promises that they’ll come back for Renn soon.

We never see him again.

Miscellaneous Observations:

Four episodes in, and Richard and Kahlan are already standing unnecessarily close to each other. Chemistry isn’t a make-or-break deal for me when it comes to shipping (or just enjoying an onscreen romantic relationship), but wow – when it’s there, it’s there. This lack of personal space is totally on Craig Horner and Bridget Regan.

And, despite a Listener being in their midst, it’s only after he’s departed that Richard says to Kahlan: “you’re thinking what I’m thinking.”

Zed leaves a trail for Richard and Kahlan: a trail of white flowers. It’s a little goofy, but I love it when a good person’s magic manifests as something beautiful and/or harmless (one of the few nice moments in the latter seasons of Merlin was when the titular regains his powers after losing them for a time, and the first thing he does is... make a butterfly).

I had totally forgotten about Kahlan’s dark backstory, so for posterity, here it is: her mother confessed her father to prevent him from doing harm against them, only for her to die when Kahlan and her sister were three and five. Freed from her control, he then claimed Kahlan and Dennee and forced them to use their abilities to control others until they were rescued by the Sisters of Light at Thandor.

I like the fact that the writers remembered Richard is a tracker, even when it doesn’t make a lot of sense. For instance, one of the D’Harans say of Renn’s kidnapping that: “whoever took him knew how to cover his tracks” even though all we see of this is Richard just running through the night with a struggling Renn in his arms. But at the end of the episode, we see him teaching Renn some of his tracking techniques. Aww.

The D’Haran turncoat promises to assist the Seeker in anyway he can, but after this episode, we never see him again either. That changing-into-a-bird effect that Zed does to save him was surprisingly good though.

Character wise, this episode is most important for its insights into Kahlan, and it gets surprisingly psychologically complex when Renn tells Richard: “she’s afraid to hurt you with her powers.” We won’t get the meaning behind this until the next episode, but it’s a neat gender reversal to have a female character worried about the wellbeing of her love interest in regards to her power.