More power to her

Lower Hutt's Zoë Robins takes a prominent role in the second series of fantasy epic The Wheel of Time.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

The first episodes in the second season of Amazon Prime's other fantasy world epic, The Wheel of Time, deliver some revelations.

First, Rima Te Wiata is in it. She's Sheriam Bayanar, the "Mistress of Novices", a mother superior figure to the young women aspiring to become Aes Sedai. They are channellers of the One Power, the cosmic energy having proved problematic to males with a spark for channelling. Generally speaking, it drives them mad, bad or both. The Aes Sedai, though, bring a female balance to the Force, sorry, the One Power.

It's Te Wiata's first northern hemisphere screen role in the production, which shoots in Prague and the Canary Islands. Dressed in blue, she looks very regal.

Second, the show has got better. The first series based on Robert Jordan's 14 books, which have sold some 90 million copies, certainly may have pleased his many readers, or entertained those with a forgiving love for mildly violent and occasionally sexy though still slightly YA high-fantasy telly. But it wasn't exactly the new Game of Thrones.

It felt like a curtain-raiser for the platform's bigger fantasy deal, The Power of the Ring. Though where that Tolkien extrapolation had Orcs, The Wheel of Time has the not-at-all-related-but-just-as-ugly Trollocs.

Third revelation? Our very own Zoë Robins, possibly Lower Hutt's biggest acting export since Anna Paquin, has a lot to do in this one. More so than the first. If this was another world, her character's surname would be Skywalker or Stark. Which isn't bad considering her character, Nynaeve al'Meara, almost died in her channelling efforts in the big showdown at the end of season one. She was at the middle of a very big, very long One Power-surge.