Is Rand an Aiel in The Wheel of Time?

The Wheel of Time is now humming along on Amazon, and the reception has been pretty good. The show is taking fans on an adventure across a new fantasy world, introducing them to an appealing cast, and laying in mysteries for later on.

For instance, remember the moment in the third episode when Mat was thinking of looting a corpse before the gleeman Thom Merrilin stepped in to chat with him? The corpse was an Aiel, a race of people from the dry and barren Three-Fold Land, or as most people call it, the Aiel waste. The Aiel will play a large part later in the story, but right not the show is basically just name-dropping them.

Or is it? Thom mentions that one of the distinctive traits of the Aiel is their red hair. We even get a close-up shot of the dead Aiel’s hair. Clearly the show wants us to notice. Why?

Well, we’ll tell you, but beware SPOILERS below.

Rand al’Thor is actually an Aiel

The close-up shot of the dead Aiel’s hair was clearly to get us thinking about the other main character we’ve met with that color hair: Rand al’Thor, played by Josha Stradowski. Stradowski, by the way, does not have natural red hair, so you know they made it look that way on purpose.

In the books, after Rand and his father Tam are attacked by a Trolloc on Winternight, Rand puts a wounded Tam on a cart and wheels him into town. In his delirium, Tam hints that Rand isn’t a child of his body, but actually adopted. We learn later that Rand is in fact the child of the Aiel, and that Tam found him orphaned as a baby and took him home to the Two Rivers to raise as his own.

This section doesn’t appear in the show, but clearly Rand will learn about his true heritage sooner or later.

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