Legend of the Seeker: Light

It’s been extremely quiet on this blog lately, so let’s get back to Legend of the Seeker.

This was very much a Sequel Episode to its immediate predecessor, picking up right where Resurrection left off, but it also tries to pack a lot into its runtime: splitting Richard up from the rest of the group, introducing a large number of new characters, allowing Kahlan and Cara to do some bonding, and giving one of the show’s most important guest stars a bittersweet send-off.

It opens with Denna crashing a household of nuns who are quietly stitching a quilt, giving them a look that means most if not all of them are going to die. Our heroes catch up, only to see her escaping on horseback, still in her white catsuit, and chase after her (though not before Richard suggests that Kahlan confess Denna in order to discover the location of the compass, apparently forgetting that Mord Sith will die painfully and pretty much instantaneously if they’re confessed. Come on show, you’re usually better at continuity than this!)

Also worth saying at this point is that Kahlan has undergone a notable costume change: the white confessor robes have been replaced with an outfit that means business, complete with “don’t fuck with me” eyeliner.

Honestly? I don’t love it. The massive slits up the side of her dress mean she’s got flappy-flaps to contend with while she’s trying to walk, run and fight, and it’s obvious they’re a pain in the ass to operate in. Not that the long flowing sleeves of the Confessor robes would have been a walk in the park, but the exposed thighs of this getup? Oof.

Denna has slaughtered all the nuns, much to the consternation of Richard who is suddenly suffering from severe headaches in a new development that definitely could have been seeded across the last handful of episodes. Zed stays behind to tend to the dead, only for the others to catch up to Denna and realize it’s actually a dead nun dressed in her clothing.

(Let’s take a moment to ponder just how long it would have taken Denna to get out of her dominatrix gear and lace a dead woman back into it. I mean, you could be an expert at getting in and out of this ensemble, and I guarantee it would still take you at least half-an-hour).

Denna has disguised herself as one of the nuns, and by the time the others realize her trick and arrive back at the cottage, both she and Zed are gone, with a message left in blood on the wall. Technically on the quilt hanging on the wall. Because it’s not enough that she killed all those innocent women, she has to desecrate their handicrafts as well!

In a cute piece of continuity from way back in Listener (which makes Richard forgetting that Mord Sith can’t be confessed even more grating) Zed leaves a path for his friends to follow by magicking a trail of white flowers behind him.

And then, in this episode’s “okay then, I guess” scene, Richard is approached by three women who randomly wander in from off-screen and introduce themselves as the Sisters of the Light: Verna, Katharine and Elizabeth. I guess the writer who usually comes up with all the fantasy names was taking the day off when this episode was pitched.

They explain they’ve been searching for Richard for twenty-four years, that they were looking for a child of immense power prophesied to have been born in Brennidon, that they’ve spent most of the intervening time in a D’haran prison, and that the reason behind his headaches is that the wizard in him is awakening.

Wow ladies, you’re pretty late to the game. As Richard will snark later in the episode while they’re trying to hurry him back to the Old World: “it took you twenty-four years to find me” and now they’ve apparently achieved it by sheer dumb luck, without any horses or supplies, in outfits that look utterly pristine. This is such an Asspull I can’t even. Couldn’t they have at least tried to make these ladies look like they’d been on the road or in a dungeon for literal years?

They come with some patented exposition: Richard is the union of two important bloodlines, Rahl and Zorander, which makes him super-powerful (have I mentioned recently how much I hate the whole “you’re special because of your blood/ancestry” trope? *glares at Rise of Skywalker for the millionth time*) and offer to teach him about his abilities at the Palace of the Prophets which is situated in the Old World (the what now?) and only accessible through a magical gateway.

Holy Exposition Dump, Batman! This is all brand-new information, and it’s just been conveyed to us in a matter of seconds by three complete strangers who have just strolled in out of nowhere. Surely all this could have been delivered more elegantly, or seeded properly across the preceding episodes, and I suspect that the writers knew they had to give these women a bit of street-cred, since one of them steps forward to magically alleviate Richard’s headaches... and promptly dies of the power overload.

Naturally Richard is horrified and asks Cara to administer the Kiss of Life on the dead woman, but they’re told that this would only kill Cara as well. How convenient. Verna insists on taking Richard to the Palace of the Prophets so that he can properly harness his power, though there’s still the problem of the kidnapped Zed.

A split-up is in order, and in two breath-taking displays of emotional manipulation, we not only get Verna imploring Richard not to let her friend’s death be in vain, but Kahlan pulling the “if you love me, you’ll do this” card. As in, that’s literally what she tells him. I feel they’re putting an astounding level of trust in two women they’ve only just met, and so in order to cover for Richard acting out-of-character (are we really meant to believe he would abandon Zed like this?) the writing forces Kahlan out-of-character with her ultimatum (she would never leverage their love like this).

Not to be left out of this mischaracterization, Cara barely puts up a fight when Richard orders her to stay with Kahlan instead of accompanying him, right before he gives Kahlan the Sword of Truth and urges her to name a new Seeker to find the Stone of Tears. I still don’t know how any of this works. How does one choose a new Seeker? Can anyone be a Seeker? Is it the sword that makes them the Seeker, or the bestowment of the title?

Kahlan gives Richard a dagger in return, and the two of them kiss each other goodbye.

So did they bury Elizabeth, or is she just lying dead off-screen somewhere?

Meanwhile, Denna reveals her plan to Zed: she doesn’t care in the slightest about the compass or what it leads to, and instead plans to put him through the Mord Sith training regime. Once he’s broken, she’ll have a pet wizard to do all her bidding. Just to rub salt in the wound, she pulls out all the white flowers he’s been leaving for the others, though how she’s managed to retrieve them without Zed noticing can be chalked down to another skill in the Mord Sith repertoire.

We check back in with Kahlan and Cara, and – hey, it’s that scene that was in every single fan-made YouTube music video back in the day! As Kahlan kneels to inspect the destroyed stem of one of Zed’s flowers, Cara comes up behind her and pushes her out of the way, seconds before an arrow flies between them. The women take on a group of D’haran mercenaries that have clearly been sent after them by Denna, and to the sounds of an electric guitar, we watch the two of them fight in slow-motion. It’s actually pretty cool seeing Kahlan wielding the Sword of the Truth for the first time, but just to balance the scales, the sight of a Mord Sith fighting with two little sticks in slow-motion is... well, somewhat less cool.  

It was all very cool until this happened...

Two of the men make a run for it once the others have been slain, but Kahlan is injured due to the fact her thigh is exposed. Again, this is an awful costume. A survivor is confessed, and duly gives up the rendezvous point where they expected to receive payment from Denna.

From this point on, there’s a lot of flitting between the A and B plots: Richard’s adventure with Verna, and Kahlan/Cara attempts to track down Zed, so we’ll go through them both one at a time.

Denna’s hired goons catch up to her, anticipating their money, and it’s a surprise to absolutely no one (except them, I suppose) that Denna pulls a You Have Failed Me For The Last Time and promptly kills both men. But it turns out she had another reason for acquiring two dead bodies: now Zed can prevent any further pursuit by turning the corpses into facsimiles of himself and Denna.

Trying to leverage some sort of advantage out of the situation, Zed requests that Denna leave the compass for the others to find – if not, they’ll just keep searching for it, whether or not they believe she’s dead. Seeing the logic of this, and perhaps having learnt a few lessons about the nature of loyalty and commitment to a cause in her dealings with Richard, Denna agrees.

Cara and Kahlan are hot on their trail, with the former refusing to leave the latter due to her leg injury. Instead, Cara comes up with the idea to cauterize the wound with her agiel, which really doesn’t feel like something the agiel should be able to do based on what we’ve seen of its abilities.

But hey, why avoid a subtext-laden scene in which the two women hold each other’s gazes while one inflicts deliberate but consensual pain on the other, in what amounts to a dick-measuring competition of the kind you usually only ever get to see between male characters?

Kahlan withstands the pain... until she can’t, and promptly faints. Still, she got the desired response from Cara, who is impressed. It’s a fun scene, with the two clearly testing each other’s limits and inching ever-closer to a genuine friendship.

But the upbeat vibe doesn’t last, as the two soon come across the fake corpses of Zed and Denna, with Cara drawing the conclusion that they each killed the other (makes you wonder if Richard, super!tracker, would have fallen for this ruse).

Having retrieved the compass, Cara tries to console Kahlan as best she can, saying that at least Zed went down fighting. As the two women wearily trudge back to Richard, Cara swallows her pride and says she needs rest for Kahlan’s sake (it’s clearly a lie so that Kahlan will take a breather) only for Kahlan to spot a tracer cloud and realize that Zed is still alive.

I haven’t really done it all justice, but Zed has been using his alone-time with Denna to attempt an inverse Stockholm Syndrome situation, offering a very tentative olive branch to his captor as they’re climbing up a mountain path.

But in the moment when he finally seems to reach her, after he’s pointed out she’s able to start a new life anywhere she wants, in which she finally considers the simple possibility of becoming a better person – she’s struck by the arrow Cara has aimed from on-high and goes plummeting over the cliff, swiftly lost to the depths below.

I’m not entirely sure how to feel about this. Denna was the show’s biggest and most popular supporting character (IMDB has Denna as its highest-ranked episode) and this is a somewhat anti-climactic end to her profound influence on the story. But then, one gets the feeling that this was the point? The writers give themselves a little bit of wriggle-room in making sure the Never Found the Body rule is in effect, though surviving an arrow to the stomach and a fifty-hundred metre drop off a cliff is absurd, even by the standards of fantasy shows. Plus, I’m pretty sure this was Jessica Marais’s last episode.

If the writers felt Denna’s arc had gone as far as it could have, and her uses as a character depleted, then perhaps the idea was to get her as close as she realistically could have gotten to redemption (which to her, is simply pondering the idea) before she’s killed. The question therefore lingers: could she have become a better person?

Overcoming her brainwashing and reclaiming her true self is the journey Cara is currently on, and she’s doing pretty well for herself all things considered. But there are several mitigating factors to Cara’s Heel Face Turn. She underwent that post-apocalyptic field trip with Richard, her beloved sisters stabbed her in the back and left her for dead, and even when she was at her worst, one got the sense that she didn’t wield as much “administrative power” in the D’haran Empire hierarchy as Denna did.

Perhaps the starkest difference between the two women is that Denna clearly enjoyed torturing and maiming others, whereas for Cara, it was always the means to an end (and more linked to her personal interest in sex – in other words, we’ve seen Cara use pleasure to get what she wants, whereas Denna’s default weapon was always pain).

So maybe Denna wasn’t capable of going through with an internal upheaval like the one Cara is undergoing; perhaps she was too immersed in power games and cruelty to ever really let it all go... which means that making her final moment one in which she at least considers the possibility of a different life for herself is perhaps the kindest note the writers could have ended this character on. I can’t say for sure what exactly they were going for, but there’s an odd sort of poignancy to it all.

***

And now back to what Richard’s been getting up to...

He and his companions come across an overturned cart and a dead horse, and we get a very Deanna Troi moment when Katharine comments: “whatever did this was very powerful.” Ya think? This dire line is followed by the equally bad: “we have to get out of here now,” which is further accentuated by the fact that nobody moves at all. Richard notices the massive tracks of a creature disappearing into thin air, and when Katharine is yanked away by an unseen force, Verna identifies their foe as a Mriswith. “They’re invisible!” What is up with this awful dialogue?

Naturally Richard wants to go after Katharine, but Verna springs another guilt-trip and tells him that she’s willing to give up her life for Richard’s, that she’s already wasted half of it in a D’haran prison – and if they all die out here, it’ll have been for nothing.

Richard and Verna make it to a stronghold that she describes as belonging to the Majendie people, allies of the Sisters of Light. Richard wants to borrow some of the stronghold’s men in order to go searching for Katharine, but Captain Takoda tells them that will only lead to more death, as the Mriswith’s numbers have increased in recent years.

Verna believes this to be impossible, as the Mriswith were once wizards who volunteered to be turned into mindless monsters in order to win something called the Great Wizard’s War. To ensure such bloodthirsty creatures would never multiply, they were made incapable of reproducing (just go with it; they’ll explain the significance of this later). The big problem is that the Mriswith are currently blocking the pass to the Palace.

Richard isn’t impressed with these new allies, who are not only uninterested in going after Katharine, but suggest that a possible solution to reaching the Palace is to deliberately draw out the Mriswith by offering them a few Baka-Ban prisoners (some quick dialogue tells us that these two tribes have been warring for a while, that the Majendie locked up the prisoners for raiding their villages, but that the captives – led by a young woman called Du’ Challu – had actually arrived to petition for peace).  

Despite the fact that his headaches are back, there’s no way Richard will ever agree to this plan – in fact, on learning that the Majendie have prisoners in the first place, his new plan is to simply free them and try his luck getting through the pass.

Verna has no choice but to help him, and the prisoners are sprung.

He introduces himself to Du’ Challu, who bestows upon him yet another prophesied title: the Cahairn. Give it a rest, show! To his credit, Richard laughs this off, and learns the Baka-Ban people were deliberately lured to the Majendie village with talk of peace before they were arrested. As it happens, Du’ Challu is played by familiar kiwi actress Miriama Smith, though in yet another questionable costuming decision, she’s wearing little more than a bikini with a sari wrapped around her. Come on show!

Richard promises to lead them all home, but since the bridge leading to their village was destroyed by the Majendie, Du’ Challu tells him they’ll have to cross the river at the mudflats – which naturally, is right where they’ve been told the Mriswith are nesting.

The travellers are stopped by Captain Takoda and his men, attempting to reacquire their prisoners but ironically becoming the very distraction the Baka-Ban were to serve as. A few of them are taken by the invisible monsters, and – after stopping to have a stationary discussion about how they should avoid the same fate – Richard and his crew decide to make a stand against the Mriswith.

He, Verna, Du’ Challu and the other escaped prisoners make it to a river, where the muddy banks give them the advantage of being able to see the footprints of the Mriswith. Despite this, Du’ Challu is almost immediately snatched, though Verna and Richard manage to kill one of their opponents and realize two things in the immediate aftermath: that their invisibility is due to magical cloaks, and that Katharine has become one of the Mriswith (Verna identifies her due to the distinctive scar on her face). Richard orders Verna to get the rest of the people to their village while he dons the cloak, climbs to the caves in the nearby cliffside, and attempts to rescue Du’ Challu before she’s also turned into a Mriswith.

It's at this point the whole thing starts feeling very much like a Doctor Who episode, what with the alien-like prosthetic masks on the villains, the pseudo-scientific explanation for their existence (they’re not reproducing, but they’re still multiplying by transforming their prey, an answer to the question nobody was asking) and the very cheap-looking sci-fi set where the Mriswith are holding their captives in pods.

Seriously, show these screencaps to anyone and
I guarantee they'll say they're from Doctor Who.

We get another tedious Stock Phrase when Richard releases Du’ Challu and tells her “we have to get out of here” (seriously, what is WITH the dialogue in this episode?) but she proves her heroic credentials by telling him there are other people – Mejandie – still trapped in the caves. They free a few of them, but Captain Takoda has already been fully turned into a Mriswith and attacks. A fairly standard swordfight ensues, but Du’ Challu’s selflessness in helping her enemies (and Takoda’s inevitable demise) is apparently enough to bring about a tenuous peace between the two people, with Richard duly credited by the Mejanie, Du’ Challu and Verna as the man who saved them all.

As the episode closes, the trio of Zed, Kahlan and Cara decide it’s now their responsibility to find a new Seeker and have him continue the quest for the Stone of Tears, while Richard commits himself to learning more about his wizarding abilities with the Sisters of Light. So with some rather dodgy in-and-out fades of Richard and Kahlan superimposed next to each other to signify they’re thinking of one another, we head into the next phase of the seasonal arc.

***

This write-up comes across as very snarky, and I suppose it is, though I enjoyed this episode well enough. The main problem is that they simply bit off more than they could chew, as Richard’s plot is considerably more convoluted than Kahlan’s, what with him being abruptly thrown into the company of three complete strangers who have apparently been searching for him his entire life, and then negotiating a truce between two groups of people we have little reason to care about in a conflict involving monsters borrowed from Doctor Who.

It's a bit of a stretch to get him to the place he’s in by the end of the episode (there’s no way he would abandon Zed in danger, or that Kahlan would use his love for her as leverage to get him to leave) but the Denna subplot was more compelling, especially with her making the slightest brush again the possibility of redemption before Cara takes her out, to the relative nonchalance of her companions.

And they’ve set up a fairly compelling arc going forward: Richard is away from his most trusted circle of friends, and Kahlan is being forced to look for a new Seeker. It feels like they’re each in the subplot that would be better suited to the other (Kahlan is seeking, while Richard is learning) and I’m looking forward to Jolene Blalock turning up in the next episode. She’s playing Nicci, who I know absolutely nothing about beyond the fact she’s a fairly significant book character.

Miscellaneous Observations:

I almost laughed on seeing that Denna was using a white agiel to match her white Mord Sith outfit. You had to respect this woman’s commitment to accessorizing.

Haven’t we seen Zed turn into a bird in prior episodes? Or disappear into thin air? Is there a reason he didn’t try either of those tricks while he was on his forced march with Denna?

This episode threw so many new terms and concepts at the viewer that it was difficult to keep track of it all. The Great Wizard’s War? The Old World? The Palace of the Prophets? The Sisters of Light? I understand the world-building technique of dropping names that the characters are already familiar with and letting the viewer/reader catch up with contextual clues, but you have to actually GIVE those contextual clues at some point. The Old World in particular desperately needed some raw exposition, especially as it’s apparently so special that it’s been filmed through a golden filter to differentiate it from the Midlands.

And as I’ve pointed out many times before, I still have no idea how this whole “choosing a Seeker” thing is supposed to work.

Loved that Cara could feel Elizabeth’s pulse (or lack thereof) not only through her leather gloves but also the woman’s head shawl. Those must be some sensitive fingertips.

I also got a chuckle out of Denna accusing Cara of growing “soft” due to her new companions, only for Cara to shoot her without breaking a sweat and following it up with the line: “We’ll never find her body. [takes a breath, turns away]. So, what now?”

I forgot to mention that the Sisters of Light are armed with things called “dacras”, which are essentially large ninja stars. They somehow manage to look both stupid and cool, and like Xena’s chakram, they defy all laws of physics.

Verna was played by kiwi actress Alison Bruce, who is probably best known to Legend of the Seeker audiences from Xena Warrior Princess, where she played at least half-a-dozen different characters. 

The most compelling element of Denna’s character was always that her coldness and ruthlessness were hidden behind the angelic visage of Jessica Marais, so it was a great ironic touch that she spent the greater part of this episode dressed in the simple garb of a murdered nun. And kudos to the costume designer who made sure it was splattered with the blood of said nun for the episode’s duration – I hope she got a nice tip for that little detail.

If this is the end of Denna, then I suppose I’m okay with it. She was always a force of nature, that sense of uncontrollable derangement simmering beneath the constraints of the dominatrix corset and the tightly wound braid, and Jessica Marais sank her teeth into the role like nobody else could have. To end her story with that quiet, poignant moment of reflection was a choice I can understand and may even grow to love, and I hope the actress was happy with how it played out.

Her last moment, in which she ponders a better life.

Glancing over the episode titles of the rest of the season, it appears Denna is the only character in the entire show to get an episode named explicitly after herself, and she definitely deserves that honour.

Now, onto Nicci...