Legend of the Seeker: Creator

Ah, it’s a good old clip show episode. This should be an easy one.

With the advent of short-form television, in which a season gets approximately eight to ten episodes at most, the use of the Clip Show has pretty much disappeared. Their purpose back in the days of twenty-two-episode seasons were obviously to fill in a bit of time and save a bit of money by showcasing footage of the show that had already been shot, usually under the guise of catching the audience up on events, or demonstrating how much a character has grown.

For my money, the best justification for a clip show was “Past Imperfect” from Xena Warrior Princess, in which the story involves Gabrielle literally revisiting her memories leading up to a particular life-altering choice, with a twist on what was actually occurring in that moment.

In this case, Legend of the Seeker goes for more of a Courtroom Drama, where our characters are forced to defend Richard’s integrity as a hero to a mysterious figure who confronts him with the prophecy that he’ll end up helping the Keeper by giving him the Stone of Tears.

It starts with Richard, Kahlan, Zed and Cara coming to a shrine to the Creator, where people have come for healing after being stricken by an illness called Keeper’s Blight. It’s being spread by the Banelings, and even Zed isn’t powerful enough to help them.

But who should appear but a young woman in white, who effortlessly heals the afflicted and introduces herself as the Creator: God incarnate.

Yes folks, we’re meeting the character who purports to be the most powerful being of this universe in a clip show episode. And she’s played by none other than Keisha Castle-Hughes! It’s nice to see her in this role, which aired eight years after she starred in The Whale Rider, the movie that saw her nominated for an Academy Award. Browsing through her IMBD page, she’s had an odd career all things considered. Having been in the running for an Oscar for her very first role, she’s done nothing particularly noteworthy in the years since. Her most mainstream role since her debut has been playing the least-interesting Sand Snake in Game of Thrones, though she’s apparently been in seventy-three episodes of something called FBI: Most Wanted since 2020.

And it’s a shame, as she’s proven herself as a good actress, capturing this particular character’s beatific confidence in her own claims, with just a touch of uncertainty when she’s challenged on certain elements of her backstory.

The young woman knows things about the characters that she logically shouldn’t, but then drops the reason why she’s there: to destroy the Keeper’s most powerful servant – Richard Rahl. According to her, his actions prove him to be an enemy of the Light. She wants to convince Kahlan and Zed of her claims, for Richard to name a new Seeker, and to take Kahlan to a safe place to ensure the fulfilment of her latest prophecy: “as long as the Mother Confessor’s pure heart beats, the Keeper is doomed to fail.”

Unfortunately for her, there’s no way Richard’s friends are buying any of this. What ensues is a public debate that presents evidence for and against Richard’s commitment to the Light, wherein everything Richard has ever done to work towards the greater good is revealed to have had dire consequences. Destroying Rahl with the Boxes of Orden led to the cracks in the underworld and the emergence of the Banelings, his plan to seal the Rift with the Stone of Tears is directly contradicted by one of the Creator’s prophecies, and he has a scar on his chest that marks him as the Keeper’s servant.

Furthermore, every time he kills his enemies he only ends up creating more Banelings, he gave his magical Han to Nicci in order to escape the Palace of the Prophets, and clearly had some anger management issues when it came to the events of “Fury.” Yeah, it’s not a good look.

Obviously, this is where all the clips come in, which make up a substantial part of the run-time, though to the show’s credit, they’re framed by a fairly meaty original story concerning the veracity of the Creator’s claims. At one point the girl’s mother turns up and calls her “Maya,” explaining that the Creator made sure she would be born to a woman at just the right time, so that her coming-of-age would coincide with when the world would need her the most.

But her mortal mother also drops the fact that Maya once ran off with a boy from her village, and Cara goes in search of him for more information. After all, eloping with a boy isn’t really something that a God incarnate would do.

When she finds him, Jason fills in some important details of Maya’s story – that the two of them were happy together living the simple life, only for the Sisters of the Light to turn up at their door. We’re privy to a flashback to Maya’s abduction, which reveals that her incredible power was derived from all the available Sisters of the Light giving up their Hans to her (a technique which has very elegantly been set up in previous episodes, most recently with the Sisters of the Dark teaming up against Nicci).

It was the Prelate who put Maya on this path, who we already know is a true believer in the prophecy that Richard will find the Stone of Tears and deliver it to the Keeper. As Cara declares: “the Sisters of the Light created you.”

But while Cara was gathering this information, she ended up killing two Sisters of the Light who were protecting Jason (or rather, keeping him under house arrest). Once they’re dead they end up in front of Darken Rahl, and tell him that the Creator has returned in mortal form. After a quick conference with the Keeper (have we heard his voice before this episode?) Rahl sends Banelings to the shrine to destroy Maya.

It wraps up pretty quickly after that: our heroes now believe that Maya was created by the Sisters of the Light in order to kill Richard to avert the prophecy, but when a rift to the underworld opens beneath their feet, Richard saves Maya’s life. She announces Richard is innocent and promptly disappears, leaving us with a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane scenario, in which much of what the Creator was capable of achieving is explained through logical means, but the rest is still ambiguous.

Miscellaneous Observations:

We get the Genesis myth of this particular universe: the Creator and Keeper made the world together, only for the latter to grow jealous of humankind and turn them mortal. Bringing suffering and death to the world, the Creator’s grief took shape as the Stone of Tears, which she then used to trap the Keeper in the underworld.

But for someone who purported to be the most important person in the entire world, the use of the Creator here was a little anti-climactic, not helped by the fact that her true identity is still up for grabs. Was Maya the incarnation of the Creator? I’m not even sure if Keisha Castle-Hughes appears in any more episodes (I get the feeling she was a one-off) which means that we haven’t really learned anything about the Creator or the mission she’s supposed to be on.

This very much played out like an episode in which the writers carefully gather together all the major themes and plot-points of the season thus far, and lay them out like playing cards so the audience can get a refresher before heading into the final stretch of episodes. We’re reminded of Richard’s bloodline and its corruptive effect, the various prophecies regarding his loyalties, and plenty of events that might throw his hero status into doubt.

Naturally, the writers have an imperative to make us believe that Richard could end up (mistakenly or otherwise) delivering the Stone of Tears to the Keeper, and they’ve been successful in sufficiently muddying the waters in that regard. As he says to Kahlan: “maybe I’m an agent of the Keeper and I don’t even know it.”

I don’t believe for a second that Richard is going to turn evil, but I also have no idea how any of this is going to pan out. It’s the golden rule of storytelling that all prophecies must come true, even if a twist on expectations mean that they’re not as dire as first appears (think of the prophecy that foretold Buffy would be killed by the Master, only for Xander to resuscitate her, or how Rose Tyler was doomed to die in battle, only for her to be declared dead when she ends up in a parallel world, or how “MacDuff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped”).

Clearly something along those lines is going to play out here, though how is still a mystery.