If the two episodes that formed Legend of the Seeker’s pilot avoided the inevitable Hercules comparisons that Sam Raimi’s name would bring up, Legend of the Seeker 1x03 Bounty delivers a heaping bounty of those with a guest starring appearance by Ted Raimi, hopefully the last one, as a wacky mapmaker who makes maps of the Seeker’s location and sells them to different bounty hunters, resulting in more wacky antics.

Meanwhile Richard gets involved in helping a young girl free her brother from a mythical monster, only to discover that the girl is really another bounty hunter, albeit amateur, who shoves Kahlan into a monster’s pit and tries to hand over Richard to the D’Harans. When captured though she admits that she was simply trying to make a deal with the D’Harans to free her brother who was being held for stealing food. Naturally Richard selflessly agrees to rescue him anyway, and the gang manage to imprison and disarm numerous guards without actually killing them, while Zedd traps the rest with the monster, leading to a happy ending all around. Toward the end Zedd even says the words, Addictive Magic.

Now I’m not Richard Goodkind’s biggest fan, but he had to be kicking things right around the time that Richard begins preaching selfless altruism to Kahlan. Goodkind’s writing is hardly consistent in that regard and his potluck dinner of Ayn Rand meets World of Time isn’t all that well thought out, but his Richard might make sacrifices, but neither was he this relentlessly stupid or senselessly altruistic. By keeping Richard immature and giving him generic hero ideals, the show is throwing away whatever uniqueness it might have taken from the novels for a completely generic fantasy fare.