The Wheel of Time boss wanted that snowy fight scene to be “realistic”

The most recent episode of The Wheel of Time, “The Dark Along The Ways,” opens with a key moment from the show’s mythology. We see a female warrior, credited as Tigraine Mantear (Magdalena Sittova) fighting a group of men in the snow. She’s pregnant, and when she’s not spearing dudes through the heads she’s doubled over in labor. At the end of the scene, Tam al’Thor (Michael McElhatton) comes along and helps her deliver her baby. Tigraine dies, so Tam takes the baby home to the Two Rivers to raise him as a son. His name? Rand al’Thor.

So this is a big moment for the show, but let’s focus on that fight scene for a minute. Showrunner Rafe Judkins had a very specific way he wanted to go about it. “We just felt like there’s something so iconic about this pregnant Aiel woman fighting off a group of men,” he told Decider. “Just seeing her when she’s actively in labor able to take down that number of guys but in a realistic way, that was the key.”

"I really didn’t want them to feel unrealistic, so everything they built for the fighting style was a) inspired by what’s in the books and the idea of it being the dance of spears. Obviously she would never touch a sword. And taking that and building it into something that when you see it on screen it doesn’t feel like [the Aiel are] magic ninjas, but it feels like this is a person who has trained their whole life. And so they are able to do things that others are not because their whole life is for [fighting this way]. So that was really important to me in the building of the Aiel fighting style is that it was something that people could actually achieve."

I get what Judkins was going for, and Decider writer Meghan O’Keefe eloquently describes how powerful she found the sequence. But I have to be honest: I had a different reaction.

The fight scene at the beginning of The Wheel of Time was absolutely hilarious

I hope I’m not offending anybody — this was just my honest reaction — but when I watched the pregnant Tigraine do kick flips off dude’s faces between labor pains, I laughed my entire ass off. Judkins wanted this scene to seem “realistic,” but…oh my god, this had to be one of the craziest fight scenes I’d ever watched. Even taking away the pregnancy element, the idea of any human being capable of pulling off the stuff Tigraine did is ludicrous. This is action movie nonsense; we left realistic behind several exits ago.

And mind you, I think that’s perfectly fine. I love ludicrous action movies! But it was the distance between what they were going for — grounded realism — and what they achieved — full-on magic ninja preposterousness — that I found so funny. This was pure camp nirvana, which is a precious and wonderful thing.

If it was me, I think I would have leaned into the absurdity of it all and gone full wuxia fight scene fantasy. But hey, at least I enjoyed watching. What did you guys think? Did you find this fight scene gripping and grounded or are you more on my side of the fence?

The season finale of The Wheel of Time, “The Eye of the World,” drops this Friday on Amazon Prime Video.

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