WoT on Prime episode 5 SPOILERS

[Thalia]

Oh absolutely, RJ did a poor job of their romance when it has all the ingredients of a FANTASTIC love story. There are some wonderful bits to it don’t get me wrong, but build up was not his forte when it came to the romances (like, any of them). The rejection scene came a bit out of the blue to me as I recall, and felt very much like Nynaeve just suddenly decided that Lan was the man for her. It doesn’t help that we get it filtered through the perspective of a character listening in to something private I think? I might be getting scenes mixed up, it’s been a while since I read it.

Still, seeing those two dance around one another is one of the things I’ve been looking forward to, and both actors are killing it. Nynaeve in particular does a fantastic job of showing the character being a complete tour de force while still somehow expressing her vulnerabilities. I can feel how everyone will be rooting for them. After ep 5 his bond to Moiraine feels a proper complication, and not only that, but the pull on Lan’s loyalties is going to be excruciating. 

I disagree in the sense that I don’t think it’s wrong for the main weight to be put on Moiraine and Lan this season. They are the driving force of book 1 and also the best vehicle to expedient worldbuilding as far as the show is concerned. The E5 should have a decent setup but they are also still babies with lots of growing to do, and I actually think we only need to see their first steps into embracing that. Where I agree completely with you is that the others have all had those first steps; all of them apart from Rand, who might as well still be herding sheep in the Two Rivers. He's sweet and loyal and resolute in his quest to find Egwene, but he’s still just the farm-boy waiting to go home. The others don’t have a way back now; they are changed by their experiences. Rand isn’t, and it's getting noticeable now. I can only assume its purposeful, but I can't imagine why. But maybe it feels like that because we know the story?

Rand absolutely isn’t the main character in the books imo. He’s the dragon and the plot revolves around that (and him as a result) but all of the E5 are the main characters and I think they should have equal weight overall. However ‘who is the dragon reborn’ is the crux of this season and what we're headed rapidly towards, which means even if he's not quite the focus yet he shouldn't be lagging so badly behind. Right now it feels like they’re doing Rand a huge disservice. But like you said, there are 3 hours left, and with Sanderson and most of the critics (the ones who stuck with it and enjoyed it at least) saying 6 is the best so far we can probably be hopeful that it'll work out well.

I absolutely agree that waiting until ep 7 feels too late for some Rand love though. I think we need to know he’s a channeler somewhere in ep 6 tbh. But I’m not convinced it will happen. It might just be because we've been primed for this to be the "Tower" episode though, so we don't know what else to expect in it.

I wonder if there was a scene between Nynaeve in the Tower and Nynaeve with the boys that ended up cut just to make the episode fit the hr time slot, or if they hadn’t intended to bookend them like that but for some reason had to in the final cut. It was completely jarring that they placed them together. I didn’t like it. But I also wondered if it was an attempt at the kind of implied off-screen action that I think they will make use of to obfuscate things in the future, and they just failed to execute it effectively.

Liandrin encouraged Nynaeve to the gardens, saying they were accessed beyond the library. From that I think we are supposed to assume that Nynaeve did head that way but never made it to the gardens because she encountered Loial in the library first. The xray trivia at that point is actually about Ogier loving libraries and the White Tower having the best in the world.

I’m not 100% sure it was intentional, but it seems like they expected us to fill in the blanks. Putting those two scenes back to back was a really bad idea though. It was a really rough time jump.