Catching Up: Legend of the Seeker- Sacrifice

Dramatic irony is a tricky thing. It's not an end in itself and placed in the wrong context it can do more harm than good. The surest way to waste dramatic irony is to end your story in the most predictable way possible. While "Sacrifice" isn't a bad episode of Legend of the Seeker, it certainly does waste that irony.

This episode opens as so many in the series do, with a tense encounter in the woods. This time it's a battered group of Confessors on the run from D'Haran death squads. Among them is the Mother Confessor, their leader. The big shock is that a man once confessed by Kahlan's sister Dennee (who was assumed dead at the beginning of the pilot) is still under her spell. For those who have been paying attention to the mythos of Seeker, this means that Dennee is still alive.

Though I do enjoy the battle scenes in this show, I'm always happy with the clever plans our heroes concoct to avoid an unnecessary fight, especially when those plans involve Bridget Regan in a skin-tight leather outfit. Disguised as a Mord'Sith, Kahlan leads Richard into the prison where Dennee is being held. The rescue thankfully doesn't break out into swordplay and we get to enter into one of the darker plots in this series.

Dennee, it turns out, is pregnant by the same confessed fellow from the start of the episode. Since Rahl's forces have been committing Confessor genocide, she took it upon herself to ensure the survival of her kind. Things get ugly fast when Dennee goes into labor and delivers a male child. Male Confessors are rare and they have a seemingly irresistible proclivity for evil. As such, the Confessors have made it a habit to kill all their male infants in a drowning ritual. Naturally, Richard "I'm gonna save every bunny in the forest" Cypher is having none of it.

This is where the dramatic irony failure begins. The episode quickly posits the Mother Confessor as the sudden antagonist. After all, she wants to kill a defenseless baby and she even confesses Zedd. But as I've pointed out before, Legend of the Seeker is not the kind of show that kills babies. It's always perfectly clear who is and isn't expendable. Main characters never die, kids never die, central antagonists never die.

So, when the rebelling Confessors and Richard confess a squad of D'Haran soldiers in order to confront Mother and Zedd, the near-postmodern jumble of who's good and who's bad doesn't really make a difference. We know Zedd isn't going to stay confessed, so we know the Mother Confessor is going to die. Dennee and her man escape to a magic island where they can raise their potentially evil son away from the corrupting forces of the world and the last surviving Confessors name Kahlan the new Mother Confessor.

Adventure stories need at least an illusion of risk. Something has to be on the line. Even if we don't believe our protagonists will fail in their larger mission, we can still have concern for the loss of their selves in the process. That's where the tension in Lord of the Rings comes from, the risk of corrupting good, pure things even if the big bad dies in the end. So far, Legend of the Seeker has only tiptoed around this concept and blatant non-progress like "Sacrifice" doesn't help. Thankfully, as the first season progresses it does go a little deeper into the real risks our heroes face.