I don’t think you were supposed to recognize Tam from his face but from his sword. It was super obvious that when the guy went to pull out his sword that the very first thing you saw was the heron on his blade. Considering that Rand spent most of the episode walking around with the very same blade it felt pretty obvious to me.
The problem with your race thing is it’s not a pre industrial world. It’s a post apocalyptic world. 3000 years ago everyone lived in a global megalopolis where it was considered routine to commute for work to other continents. Then sure they apocalypse happened and it all got sent to hell, but the background like that really doesn’t make sense to have this world spanning civ and then try to racially separate them in a relatively short genetic time. The reason in our world that people from different areas look like that is because they were split off well over 3k years. Really everyone in WoT should have dominant genetic genes and should have brown hair and eyes for the most part.
I think they’re doing a fairly good job of showing different cultures by their dress. Andorans look different than people from Tar Valon or Sheinar and we also see different dress for tinkers and Aiel and whitecloaks. The scene on dragon mount there is odd since it doesn’t show the watcher why the Aiel are there, who they’re fighting, why Tam is there and so on. Ofc telling the show that it was all about a tree might not make sense.
