Legend of the Seeker: Reckoning

And we come to it at last, the final episode of season one and the reason I started recapping this series in the first place. At the risk of sounding over-the-top, this is genuinely one of my favourite hours of television: not only a great story in and of itself, but a fantastic culmination of the last twenty-one episodes, one that pulls together all the narrative arcs that have been carefully woven throughout the season.

It’s an ode to Richard and Kahlan; their love for each other and their individual heroism, as well as a strong introduction to Cara (who fits in so well it’s like she’s been here all along), a subversive send-off to Darken Rahl (turns out he’s bitten off more than he can chew) and a Set Right What Once Went Wrong time-travel story that taps into the best this particular subgenre has to offer.

Although it’s a largely standalone episode, it harvests so many of the seeds planted earlier in the season: not only massive plot-points such as the power of the Confessors, the Book of Counted Shadows and the Boxes of Orden, but things such as the Rada'Han (introduced in Cursed) and the concept of a male Confessor and its inherent dangers (Sacrifice). Shota (first seen in Identity) is a major player here, and even Alina the Mord Sith from Mirror is involved.

The pacing is impeccable: it seriously does not waste a second, and every scene adds something important to the whole. Richard’s ultimate plan in resolving the crisis is as ingenious as it is elegant, and takes into account all the magic-related worldbuilding that’s been established over the season, from the nature of being confessed to the mind-controlling power of the Boxes of Orden to the horrific implications of a male Confessor.

It manages to explore the love story between Richard and Kahlan, but also to build a rapport between Richard and Cara – one strong enough that you can believe she would shuck off an entire lifetime of conditioning for having spent time with him. Likewise, Kahlan has only three brief scenes in which to establish a bond with a one-off servant girl that we’ve never seen before, and thanks to the power of Bridget Regan’s acting, she pulls it off.

Okay, let’s get to it...

We open with Darken Rahl summarizing the situation to a circle of Mord Sith: they’re on the backfoot considering the Seeker has the Boxes of Orden and the Book of Counted Shadows. For all intents and purposes, they’ve already lost. But Cara (briefly mentioned for the first time in the previous episode) steps up and points out that Richard is clearly not prepared to use these devices, as none of them are grovelling at his feet.

There’s already a nice bit of character work here: not only that Rahl is flummoxed by why Richard hasn’t used the power at his disposal (Evil Cannot Comprehend Good, so it makes no sense to him that Richard doesn’t want to rule over everything) but also that Cara is not remotely cowled by Rahl. Like, even a little. Even Denna was more obsequious in his presence, but Cara downright talks back to the man when he gives her the order to find and destroy Richard.

(I haven’t seen season two yet, but I’m aware that these two have a history together, if that wasn’t made obvious by the way he touches her mouth).

Having come up with their plan in the last episode, our heroes aren’t wasting any time putting it into effect. According to the Book of Counted Shadows, the power of the Boxes of Orden and the touch of the Confessor will negate each other, allowing Richard to harness the power of the Boxes without their overwhelming influence going to his head. I mean, sure? It’s not all that well explained, but there’s a neatness to that explanation that prevents it from feeling totally random. Plus it gives us this lovely visual:

All seems to be going well... until a flock of dodgy-looking CGI birds turn up and transform into the Mord Sith. Alina deflects Zed’s magic, and he’s down for the count. Just to drive the point home, we get a closeup shot of his burnt corpse. Dude is dead. Cara steps up and attacks Richard with her agiel, resulting in flashing lights, supernatural wind and an explosion of power: when things settle, both Richard and Cara are gone.

In another nice character beat, Rahl doesn’t turn up until after the Mord Sith have done his dirty work (once again the CGI bird looks dodgy, but the smoke effect as he strides forward in slow-motion is good) and he introduces Kahlan to her new reality: Zed is dead, Richard is gone, the Sword of Truth lies abandoned, and there’s nothing she can do about it. All this within the first five minutes!

We cut to Rahl’s palace, and he’s doing what he does best: manipulation. He’s in good cop mode, which means he’s soft-spoken and reasonable, complimenting Kahlan while giving her the “gift” of a more attractive Rada’Han, introducing the threat of sexual violence in the same breath that he assures her she’s safe from it, and calling her “selfish” for not taking him up on his offer to become his queen and so have the power to change things for the better.

Let it be said that it’s not just about conquest through strength of arms for Rahl: if an easier and more persuasive way of exerting power arises, then he’ll try to take it. It somehow makes him more evil rather than less.

He once again uses the argument that he used on Jennsen: that Richard is the one responsible for the war, before pulling out the old “I want to quell the people’s anger through the power of your love” line. I dread to think how many fanfics this dialogue inspired, but Kahlan isn’t falling for any of his bullshit. “I would rather die than be your puppet.”

But she’s alone and out of options and barely holding it together, and he throws her in the dungeon: “where your love and compassion will be of no use to anyone.” He knows exactly what he’s doing: turning Kahlan’s desire to help others and her pragmatism in serving the greater good against her.

And now we check in with Richard: he’s (obviously) not dead, but has seemingly been transported to a dystopian world – you can tell by the ugly grey filter that’s lighting everything. Cara and the Boxes of Orden are with him, and the whole thing is framed as a vision glimpsed by Shota in her seeing pool, which is a good way of drawing her into the action and reminding us of her foretelling abilities (she’s glimpsed the future before, remember).

Cara’s first move is to immediately try to kill Richard, and he’s no real match for her. Clearly she wasn’t kidding when she told Rahl at the start of the episode that if she’d been given the task to kill him earlier, he’d be dead by now (does make you wonder why Rahl held back on her for so long). But Richard is temporarily saved by the arrival of several zombie-like villagers, one of whom takes out Cara before promptly turning on the grateful Richard.

Seeker and Mord Sith find themselves fighting against a common enemy, though one their assailants takes off with the Boxes of Orden. For a moment there, we think Richard’s Chronic Hero Syndrome has taken over when he decides not to immediately chase the man in favour of approaching an unconscious Cara – but don’t worry, he’s just taking her agiel so he has an extra weapon with which to get back the Boxes.

He overpowers one of these men long enough to ask him where Kahlan and Zed are, only to learn that the guy serves “no master but the Master – Master Rahl.” Thankfully a gang of ragged-looking wanderers have watched the fight unfold, and approach Richard to give him all-important exposition. One old man recognizes him from the time he drove the D’Harans from Brennidon (nice bit of continuity, though it’s a shame they didn’t identify the guy as Mark from that very episode) but informs him that that day was nearly sixty years ago.

Yup, he’s been flung into the far-distant future. Richard quickly gets filled in: the Master the confessed men spoke of was the son of Rahl and Kahlan, who is a male Confessor and has pretty much turned everyone in the world – excepting a few handfuls – into his mindless slaves. Richard tries to absorb all this, especially the news that “Queen” Kahlan died some years ago.

Thanks to the plot of Sacrifice, we know the dangers of a male Confessor, but because Richard is our hero, he quietly agrees to kill Master Rahl, thereby freeing the confessed. Back in the present, Shota is taken captive by the Mord Sith (so easily it’s a wonder they didn’t do it sooner, but never mind) which elegantly puts her in place to share details with Kahlan of what’s happened to Richard through their adjourning dungeon cells.

And so begins this episode’s Two Lines, No Waiting plot-structure: as Richard negotiates the Bad Future and attempts to put an end to the new Master Rahl, Kahlan is stranded in the past with no way to get Richard the information he needs to return, forcing her to play the long game in the intervening years. Shota fills her in with the facts: Richard is fifty-six years in their future, and in order to get back to the moment he disappeared he’ll need exactly what sent him there in the first place: the unique combination of magics provided by the Boxes of Orden, the touch of a Confessor, and the Mord Sith’s agiel. He’s got the first two, but where’s he going to get a Confessor? Shota doubts Kahlan will live that long, and informs her that Dennee and the other Confessors on Valeria were been killed by Rahl’s forces sometime between Sacrifice and this episode.

Okay, just hold the phone here. This is a pretty awful case of a Bus Crash, in which established characters are not only unceremoniously killed off, which not only occurs entirely off-screen, but who are given no space or time for the other characters to mourn them properly. I realize we’re on a tight schedule here, and that the demands of the plot mean that Dennee and the other surviving Confessors of that episode have to be taken off the board but... yeesh. Couldn’t they have built an earlier episode around this?

It also leaves the lingering question of what happened to Dennee’s baby? He was a much-coveted male Confessor, making it seem unlikely that Rahl would have deliberately ordered his death, so... what happened to him? Perhaps next season we’ll get some answers?

The plan that Kahlan comes up with is pretty harrowing: she has to take The Slow Path through the years, preparing the tools and information Richard will need in order to eventually defeat Master Rahl nearly sixty years hence, knowing that she probably won’t live long enough to see its fulfilment. Essentially, she’s setting up a massive Thanatos Gambit, and one of its crucial requirements is the presence of a Confessor – which she can only provide if she gives birth to one herself.

It’s difficult to really grasp the magnitude of this plan in such a short space of time, or to do justice to the sheer sacrifice that Kahlan is willing to make: taking Rahl up on his marriage offer and cleaving herself to a life of misery with a man she hates in the desperate hope that it will lead to Richard being able to set things right over fifty decades into the future. Just take a moment here guys.  

In that very future, Richard buries the Boxes, races to the middle of a burned-out village, and promptly gets hit in the side of the face with a rock. That’s Cara, having just caught up with him. It’s actually pretty funny.

But just as Rahl knows what buttons to press when it comes to emotional manipulation, Richard is good at laying down facts and arguing from the perspective of his opponent. In this case, he hurriedly tells Cara that they’ve been transported to the future, that there’s a new Master Rahl running the show, and (this is the coup de grace, as he knows there’s no chance of an alliance between them just yet) that this new guy might want Richard confessed, not dead, since that’s clearly what he’s been doing to the rest of the population. This is enough to make Cara pause in consideration.

But she’s no idiot either, and demands confirmation of Richard’s claims. They head for the Mord Sith tower and discover it’s not only been abandoned for many years, but filled with Mord Sith skeletons. Cara sees one and identifies it as “Triana” (I have a sneaking suspicion she’ll feature in season two) and Richard reads out a very Khazad-dûm-esque inscription on the floor that informs them the new Master Rahl has been systematically destroying all the Mord Sith. In this moment it becomes clear that Cara truly loves her sisters, and a deal is made with Richard: she gives him back his sword and agrees to work with him to kill this new Master.

In Kahlan’s time, it’s revealed she’s several months pregnant with Rahl’s child, and Bridget Regan proceeds to pull off the performance of her career. It’s a shame that fantasy and other genre fiction will never be as respected as more serious dramas, because what she does here is just extraordinary. We’re essentially watching an alternate-history version of Kahlan telling a young girl we’ve never seen before that she’ll have to pass on instructions after Kahlan’s death to her time-travelling lover that’s stuck in the future involving various types of magic which is dependant on the baby she hasn’t yet given birth to in a scene that will be completely erased from the show’s continuity by the end of the episode... and she sells the hell out of it.

You totally believe the rapport she’s established with the young handmaiden Alice, her awareness of the near-futility of the task she’s just passed on to her, the quiet hope and desperation in her eyes, and the knowledge she’ll never live to see the desired outcome. Her instructions are clear: Alice has to survive no matter what the cost, to raise Kahlan’s daughter with knowledge of her mother and Richard, so that she can pass on the required instructions to Richard when the time is right for his reappearance. That they pull the emotional intensity of this scene off is just incredible.

Because when we return to Kahlan’s story (I’m not recapping this episode in the exact order of events; the story flits between her and Richard’s plotlines and it’s easier to group certain scenes together) she’s given birth to a son: Nicolas. We don’t get the exact explanation behind how this happened, as male Confessors are incredibly rare and Dennee already gave birth to one earlier in the season, but Kahlan is convinced that Rahl manufactured it somehow.

And it’s here that Rahl makes his big mistake, for it’s clear that he doesn’t grasp the full dangers of what a male Confessor means. Kahlan certainly does, and she’s all business: she bluntly offers to kill this boy and give Rahl a daughter instead, but Rahl knows what heartstrings to pull and discreetly pinches his newborn baby son. Kahlan can’t help but be moved by his crying and silently acquiesces to motherhood – damn, he’s good.

There are some interesting choices made by Craig Parker in this and subsequent scenes, for it appears that Rahl is sincere in his enjoyment of newfound domestic bliss. He calls Kahlan “my love” without sarcasm, and seems actively excited at the prospect of fatherhood... which ironically, turns out to be his undoing, for Kahlan is right about the nature of the monster he’s holding. (But it’s also notable that Kahlan was wrong – Rahl doesn’t have her killed immediately after Nicolas’s birth, but genuinely wants her involvement in the raising of their son).

Fastforward another few years and Kahlan and Alice are tentatively hopeful that maybe young Nicolas will turn out alright – after all, “he has you as a mother.” Again, I dread to think of the fanfiction that all this inspired, as the idea of a good mother and a corrupt father having a redemptive baby together is what fandom dreams are made of – even though you know this particular kid is going to end up evil either way.

Still, you really get the sense of the bond between Alice and Kahlan in this scene: these two women are each other’s companions and confidants; the only two people in the world who know the truth about what’s really happening. It’s a shame that by the end of the episode, this relationship no longer exists!

Then comes the big moment in Kahlan’s arc: Nicolas is a pre-teen and seems a pleasant enough kid, so when Alice comes to tell her that Rahl has plans to send his son to study far away, Kahlan takes it as a sign her influence over him is considered a threat. Alice urges her to tell Nicolas about what they have planned for the return of the Seeker and Nicolas’s role in his quest before it’s too late... but just as Kahlan musters her strength to divulge the secret, a little boy scampers in, calling Nicolas “master” and presenting him with the finger he’s just cut off his own hand.

Kahlan is appalled, and Nicolas confirms that he confessed little Ethan because he didn’t want to play the same games as he did. Now all of Kahlan’s hope for the future crumbles, and even as she encourages Alice to live on and tell Richard what’s happened, it’s obvious she’s given up hope of a Confessor being there to help guide him home. Again Bridget Regan blows it out of the water when she says with hopeless, tender resignation: “tell Richard his Confessor will be waiting for him, in the underworld, forever.” My heart shatters into a million pieces. She’s prepared to do what she should have done the day Nicolas was born, and kill him.

Years later (kind of) Richard and Cara are crossing the country to the People’s Palace in the hopes they’ll find Master Rahl there, and in what is perhaps the episode’s only superfluous scene, exchange in a dick-measuring contest based on how many maggots they’re willing to eat from under a rock. Cara wins, by the way.

Later comes a very deliberate scene in which the two have to share body heat in order to fend off the cold, and narrative takes the opportunity to test Richard’s loyalty to Kahlan. Cara propositions him, and he refuses since: “I’m in love with someone else.” Cara mocks him for this, pointing out that Kahlan has been dead for a very long time, and the audience is no doubt meant to get queasy over the fact that while Richard has remained true to Kahlan, she hasn’t necessarily done the same for him. Even in such understandable circumstances, is there a chance this will cause a rift between them?

We’ve seen so many variations of this salacious plot play out across the years: a woman is sent by a man to Go Seduce My Archnemesis or she succumbs to the Scarpia Ultimatum and it always ends badly – especially for the woman. Is Legend of the Seeker taking the same route?

After taking matters into her own hands and then advancing on her sleeping son with a dagger, Kahlan is all primed to take him out when little Ethan sounds the alarm, realizing that she’s about to kill his Master. She’s brought before Darken Rahl, Alice’s throat is slit in front of her, and then – despite teasing the possibility of Nicolas requesting a reprieve – her son asks his father if he can have the honour of killing Kahlan himself.

We’re at least spared the scene in which this happens (it’s not even clear if Rahl granted this request) but so much time and effort has been spent on building up Kahlan’s plan – the discussion with Shota, the need for a Confessor child, her recruitment of Alice – that it genuinely hurts to watch it all come to naught. Father and son stand before her tomb, but Rahl Senior has completely miscalculated the evil and cruelty of his own son. With his mother dead, Nicolas wastes no time in finishing off his father as well, having confessed Egremont and ordered him to stab Rahl in the back.

It’s an anti-climactic but essentially fitting end to that character: literally dying at the hands of the embodiment of his own ambition. Only now Richard has no way of knowing what to do next...

Except that Shota has managed to stay alive all these years, and Richard and Cara find her when they arrive at the deserted People’s Palace. Now played by the older actress that Shota disguised herself as back in Identity, she tells him all the magic of the place has disappeared, leaving her free to wander the place in search of the key to unlock her Rada’Han. Which sorta undermines the entirety of Kahlan’s plan (did she think Shota was dead? Did they not converse during the rest of Kahlan’s lifetime? Why was Shota not executed?) but never mind.

Shota is a little mad at this point, but tells Richard everything he needs to know, particularly that Master Rahl never comes here because “he’s afraid of his mother – her ghost”. I love that line. We cut to Richard at Kahlan’s tomb, mourning her as Rahl and Nicolas once did, only this time it’s by someone who truly loved her (nice contrast). Shota lays down what Richard needs to get home: a convergence of the three magics that threw him through time in the first place: the agiel, the Boxes of Orden, and a Confessor’s touch. Richard can retrieve the Boxes easily enough, and Cara agrees to be involved... so that leaves the Confessor, of which there is only one: Master Rahl.

But Richard comes up with a truly ingenious plan, which is realistically the only course of action they can take at this stage: to simply tell the truth.

Shota gives herself up to Master Rahl’s men, telling them that she knows the location of the Boxes of Orden, whose power would complete his dominion over the world. Now a creepy bald middle-aged man, Master Rahl promptly confesses Shota, who is compelled to tell him the absolute truth: that Richard needs the power of the Confessor as he puts together the Boxes of Orden in order to go back in time and ensure that Nicolas is never born in the first place.

The rub of it is that Master Rahl has to confront him, since Richard will use the Boxes to imbue himself with their power if he doesn’t appear, thereby granting Richard the ability to rule over even Rahl. He HAS to seize the chance that he’ll be able to confess Richard before the Boxes of Orden take hold and so exert the power of confession over him instead, making Rahl’s domination complete.

There’s only one way to get what he wants: to prevent the last Mord Sith from adding her magic to the equation, thereby destroying Richard’s chance to return to the past. It’s a risk each man is going to have to take, with Cara as the one variable upon which everyone’s fate depends...

...who Richard is currently giving something to chew on when he points out that if she continues to serve Darken Rahl, this very may well be the future they end up in anyway.

The big showdown is pulled off with relatively little fuss. In fact, it happens in the space of a few seconds. Richard puts the Boxes together, Rahl tries to confess him in the exact same way Kahlan once did, and despite Cara getting shot by a few arrows (surely they could have done something cleverer than this? Like make us think she’s somewhere in particular before she appears somewhere else to complete the ceremony?) they’re successfully thrown back in time.

Kahlan reappears in place of Rahl, and Cara makes her move – preventing Alina from killing Zed and holding back when Darken Rahl the First appears. As soon as he sees what Richard and Kahlan have done he grabs the Sword of Truth and plunges it into the Boxes, which starts a conflux of magical energy that eventually overpowers and consumes him. Okay, so that was a little random, and Richard’s prophesised role in his death seems a little arbitrary, but once again Rahl ends up being the author of his own demise.

Despite being accused of treachery by her sisters (and I’m pretty sure this becomes a major plot-point in season two), Cara takes control of the Mord Sith, telling them she’s just saved all their lives. And as she departs, she gets a pretty good parting shot at Richard: “I’m sure we’ll meet again Seeker, sometime in the future...”

We get a nice little group hug between our three heroes, and thanks to the Reset Button it’s clear that Kahlan has no memory of anything she did in the now-defunct timeline – it’s a future that’s never going to happen. But Richard fills her in, and there’s the lingering remembrance of the fact she married Darken Rahl and gave birth to his child – something that almost made matters worse in the long run. So how is Richard going to respond to that? Haven’t we been given reason to worry about his reaction?

Kahlan has a similar fear, only for Richard to tell her: “when we first met, you told me you would give your life for the Seeker, and that’s what you did. Even when it looked like you had no hope – you loved me across time.”

And that’s why he’s our hero. Not because of all the other exploits he achieved across the course of this episode: killing Darken Rahl, surviving a post-apocalyptic future, denying Cara’s proposition, even coming up with the plan to defeat Master Rahl, but because he had absolute faith in and understanding of Kahlan.

You’ve all heard my rants on how frustrating it is to see fandom dismiss unselfish love as “boring” and to wish the most godawful dudes onto female characters so that they might be “fixed” by her love (usual disclaimer: it’s just fiction, don’t be an anti, let people fantasize about what they want, etcetera) so in this case it was deeply validating to see Rahl explicitly give Kahlan the responsibility of “healing” him and the entire realm with her love, but also expect her to raise a child that she knew was going to turn out evil (“with the loving guidance of his mother he will grow to be a great ruler”), plying the guilt-tripping on thick when she initially refuses.

Whatever went on in fanfiction back in the day, the show makes this very clear: that Kahlan never stood a chance in hell of achieving any of these things, as a woman’s love isn’t a magical power that can change another person’s nature and/or choices.

Rahl’s manipulation of her throughout their life together stands in stark contrast to Richard, whose only concern is getting back to her. I remember watching this years ago and feeling the build-up of dread that he would react with disgust and anger at what she’d done to save him – only for that to dissolve into profound relief when he’s allowed to maintain his hero status. He’s not angry about her life with Rahl, or even conflicted – he’s just in awe of what she achieved.

The episode feels like it contains the plot of an entire movie, and ends on the note you’d expect: Zed gives his final speech and makes it clear that this could be the dawn of an age of peace (if the show gets cancelled) or that there might be many more adventures yet to come (if it gets picked up for season two). Of course, we know that there’s at least one more season to enjoy; but even if there hadn’t been, this would have been a perfect send-off: Rahl defeated, Richard and Kahlan together, and the sun setting over the tideline.

Miscellaneous Observations:

Maybe I’ve just seen a lot of horror lately, but that opening shot of Rahl with the Mord Sith kneeling in a circle around him very much reminded me of a Black Sabbath between the devil and his witches. It will be super interesting to see where the Mord Sith go next season, now that their leader (and jailor) has been disposed of.

On her way to the dungeons, Kahlan tells Rahl: “you still have powerful enemies,” which makes me wonder what happened to the likes of Queen Corah and the Resistance and other allies in this alternative timeline.

There’s a crack in Shota’s voice when she says “even if the great Zeddicus hadn’t perished” which is a nice touch.

The handmaiden Alice was played by a very young Rose McIver, who is now best known for played Liv Moore on iZombie! She and Bridget Regan played off each other so well, and in just three scenes they manage to sell a very deep bond. It’s a pity this character never turned up again in the “real” timeline (I checked IMDB and this is McIver’s only appearance) and a part of me wonders if this role could have somehow been filled by Jennsen, but it works just as well as-is.

Kahlan had a miserable time as Rahl’s queen, but damn it if her looks weren’t ON POINT. This red maternity ensemble? 

THIS queenly robe? 

The matronly look with the high collar? 

Dayum.

I think we inevitably blanche at the idea that a child’s nature is set in stone from the day they’re born, but this is precisely the narrative path they chose for young Nicolas Rahl. As the Confessors warned, it’s simply too much power for a male child to handle, and Kahlan says at one point: “I knew what he was the day he was born.” It would have been nice to explore this further, but you can’t say the events of Sacrifice didn’t set us up for this outcome.

Another omission is that there’s no talk of the fact that if Kahlan’s plan worked, her child with Rahl would be wiped from existence. In this case it’s obviously a good thing, but back when she still believed he was a good kid, you’d think it would be a cause for some consideration. (Hey, Tony Stark refused to endanger Morgan’s existence when the Avengers started playing around with time-travel). Again, with more time there could have been a scene in which she expressed her doubts before Nicolas’s behaviour made it morally acceptable to consign him to non-existence.

And it is kind of strange that that’s his ultimate fate, as he packed quite a punch for a one-shot character. I mean, the guy successively enslaves almost the entire human race. That’s terrifying!

But the toddler playing Nicolas in his infancy must have really loved Bridget Regan, as he genuinely kisses her face when she picks up him. Aww. I wonder where he is now...

I LOVE this gorgeous shot of Cara looking at Kahlan’s tomb. I know the two of them strike up a friendship in the next season, so it’s fascinating to realize that this is the first time she “meets” her – by staring at a stone effigy, some years after the woman has already died. The poetry! It’s full-on The Time-Traveller’s Wife levels of poignancy.

I also loved Richard’s line to Nicolas: “I’m an old friend of your mother’s.” He could have said: “I’m the Seeker” or “I’m the man that’s going to destroy you”, but instead the line demonstrates he’s here for Kahlan’s sake, that he knows hers is the name that will strike fear in Nicolas’s heart, and that he identifies himself as her friend above all else.

As impressive as it is that this rather epic story took place in under forty-five minutes, it’s a shame that it didn’t unfold over the course of two or more episodes, just to explore more ramifications in the wake of Richard’s disappearance. I imagine Kahlan wasn’t a hugely popular queen given that she would have been considered a sell-out who married Rahl, even after she bartered for amnesty, orphanages and places of healing, and it would have been interesting to get more than just glimpses of her life during this time. How did she handle the day-to-day life of being married to Darken Rahl? How exactly was she executed? What was happening to all of the Resistance allies during this time? With more time, characters such as Jennsen, Dennee and Queen Corah could have been integrated somehow.

And it’s always a little strange when characters are given development in alternate-timelines which are rendered null-and-void by the time the credits roll. Alice was a great character who technically never even existed, while we get some rather intriguing insight into how Darken Rahl operates throughout this episode, making it rather anticlimactic when he ends up dead twice over.  

It’s not perfect: we deserved to learn more about how Dennee died and what happened to her baby, and the final showdown with Nicolas is wrapped up far too quickly, and yet it’s an incredible achievement that so much plot and characterization is squeezed into just forty-five minutes with the amount of emotional resonance that it has. Every time I watch this episode I’m amazed at what it manages. Most of all it sells the love story between Richard and Kahlan: they spend most of this episode separated by nearly sixty years (“the granite wall of time” as Shota calls it) but still manage to communicate with each other through their actions and choices, having boundless faith that the other will know what to do.

So that’s season one of Legend of the Seeker. I’m about to embark on season two for the very first time, something I’m excited for since I’ve been putting it off for over a decade, and have very little knowledge of what happens next. I will attempt to write up a review for each episode once a fortnight, but can make no promises on that score given the unpredictability of life at the moment. Suffice to say: I’m looking forward to it.