Since Thursday is a rather heavy day for TV coverage and my Catching Up segment on Arrested Development concluded last week, I'm shifting the remainder of my Legend of the Seeker articles to Wednesday until the Season 2 premiere in November when new episodes will be covered over the weekend when they air. There are six episodes left to review in Season 1, so the timing should be nearly perfect.

With that bit of business out of the way, let's dive into "Deception". I really like this episode, but I wish it had aired earlier. For one thing, much of it feels rather non-specific regarding the chronology of the series so far. Everything that happens in this episode could have happened before the endgame, which began in last week's episode "Bloodline". I would have rather seen the final four or five chapters of the season hew close to a tense, unbroken concluding battle instead of tiptoeing around it with mostly good but ultimately canned plots.

"Deception" finds our heroes trying to save the Midlands from Darken Rahl's latest terror tactic. He's been sending Whisperers, the magical medieval equivalent of WMD's to any village that gave refuge to the Seeker, killing everyone within the device's radius. Disguising himself as a D'Haran soldier, Richard infiltrates the fort from which the Whisperers are being distributed.

At its best, this episode examines the way military oppression breeds outright terrorism. Legend of the Seeker isn't really a smart enough show to drive this one home with any degree of sharpness, but the overtones are there and they serve the series better than the usual swords and sorcery. In this episode, the D'Harans are depicted as people occupying a wide spectrum in an imperialist society. Some are generally good people forced to become monsters by circumstance, others are weak-willed followers who don't know any better, still others are sadists who take the opportunity provided by military service to inflict pain on others.

On the other side, we get our first in-depth glimpse into the way the anti-Rahl resistance operates. In short, they're basically terrorists who have dehumanized their enemies to the point that they harbor meaningless cruelty of their own. It's made plain that if the resistance gets its hands on the Whisperers, they'll do just as much damage to the civilian population as the D'Harans.

I think it's pretty interesting how much of Season 1 has reinforced how alone our central heroes actually are. Every time they find someone who ought to help them, villainy and treachery wins out anyway. There's a bleakness to Seeker's worldview that, if the writers took advantage of it, would undercut the transparent goody-goody trajectory of the protagonists. I have hope that the second season will explore these matters further, especially considering how the Season 1 finale plays out.

I'd also like to make a note of the chemistry between Craig Horner and Bridget Regan. I wasn't entirely convinced of their rapport early in the series, but later episodes show a kind of comfort between them that seems to have evolved over time. They handle comic scenes surprisingly well, like when Kahlan rescues Richard from the fort by pretending to be his angry wife. Next week's episode relies on that comic partnership almost entirely, so it was nice to get a little reminder of how it works when it works.