Phew, [REDACTED] didn’t die on The Wheel of Time

Caution: This post contains SPOILERS for the season 1 finale of The Wheel of Time.

The season 1 finale of The Wheel of Time has officially come and gone on Amazon Prime Video, and it brought with it a lot of surprises both for newcomers to the series and those intimately familiar with the fantasy novels by Robert Jordan. Showrunner Rafe Judkins talked about a lot of them with CBR, but let’s start with the one we’re most concerned about: Is Loial dead?

Loial is the gentle-hearted giant who leads our group through the Ways. He is an Ogier, a non-human race who live many lifetimes longer than humans, and he’s simply the best. Truly, Loial may well be the sweetest, kindest, loyal character throughout all 14 novels, so when the wicked Padan Fain brutally stabbed him in Friday’s “The Eye of the World,” I was terrified the show might kill him off early.

Happily, Judkins confirmed that wasn’t the case — Loial will return for season 2 — although he did say some ominous things about the future:

"I can’t wait to kill surprising people that are going to really pain book fans in their deepest heart of hearts, but Loial is not dead in the finale of Season 1."

Talk about giving with one hand and taking with the other.

Why did The Wheel of Time take away Moiraine’s powers?

A big change from the books is that the first season ends with the Dark One (or the Man, or Ishamael, or whoever that guy was supposed to be) cutting Moiraine off from the One Power, meaning she can no longer use magic. The season made sure we knew what a horrible fate this was when the Aes Sedai cut off Logain from the One Power, or “stilled” him.

But this doesn’t happy to Moiraine in the books, at least at this point in the story. So why did Judkins and company go ahead with it?

“Looking at Season 2 and what’s to come for us, the characters who have almost nothing to do in Book 2 is Moiraine, and Lan, who are number one and two on the call sheet. You can’t really sideline Rosamund Pike and Daniel Henney in a season of television,” Judkins said. “So we talked about Season 2 and Season 3 and what they look like in the writers’ room while we were doing Season 1, so we could set it up correctly in the finale. That was the biggest story we had to figure out how to tell — what is the Moiraine and Lan story in Season 2? They don’t really have anything in the book.”

"So we looked at the chapter that they have, and it really is so much about their relationship. Digging into it, and asking, “What’s the core that exists there between the two of them when you really, really dive in?” Hopefully, we set them up in a place at the end of Season 1 that will really take that chapter of what they have to do in Book 2, and make you feel like there’s a whole season worth of story of their relationship in there, and Moiraine putting back the pieces of who she really is."

It’s true that Moiraine and Lan don’t have much to do in The Great Hunt, the second book in The Wheel of Time series. Taking away Moiraine’s powers seems like kind of a hacky way to get around that — it reminds me of what The Witcher did with Yennefer in its second season — but we’ll see how they handle things when the new episodes come out.

Romantic relationships in The Wheel of Time

Moiraine and Lan have a very close relationship, but it will be tested now that their magical bond has been severed. And then there’s Nynaeve, with whom Lan slept in the penultimate episode of the season. All in all, the show is being more frank about the romantic relationships on the show than the books are, which is by design.

“[S]ometimes the books of Wheel of Time do shy away from more from the romantic aspects of the characters’ relationships like you don’t see Lan and Nynaeve really together until… That scene we have in Episode 8 is at the very end of Book 1,” Judkins said. “You’re like, ‘Wait, are they together? Do they love each other? What’s happening?’ And so we’ve tried to take any of the kernels of romantic relationships that do exist inside the books and lift them for the show. So we haven’t created any relationships whole cloth, but we’ve taken whatever’s there and really tried to mine it to bring that to the forefront for TV.”

I completely agree with him, by the way; I remember reading the first book in the series, The Eye of the World, and being blindsided when Lan and Nynaeve revealed their feelings for each other. I was like, ‘Wait, was I supposed to pick up on something? When did these two ever act remotely interested in each other before now?’ I’m glad the show has brought these aspects more to the fore.

The show also drew out a bit of an attraction between Perrin and Egwene — or rather, an attraction Perrin has for Egwene that isn’t reciprocated. That’s not something I really sensed from the books, although I know fans who did.

"I think you do see in the books this idea of, “Did Perrin have feelings for Egwene?” We’ve milked that a little here. I think it will continue. Each of those characters goes on to have very important relationships, Egwene with Gawyn, and then Perrin with Faile. And so those relationships, we will also take those, those are two big relationships that are really foregrounded in the books, and so we’ll take them and really run with them too. I think any real romantic relationship that we do have in the foreground, we want to use."

Good to know we’ll be seeing Gawyn and Faile in the future!

And then there’s Min, who eventually strikes up a relationship with Rand al’Thor himself. “[W]e tried to give her, in Episode 7 actually, we wanted to make sure that — because Min and Rand is a really important relationship later in the books that we see — the two of them have a scene, just the two of them,” Judkins said. “And so we gave that in Season 1, Episode 7 so that you could see the kernels of this relationship that ends up being really important for both of them later in the books.”

Is Mat turning evil in The Wheel of Time?

Mat had a very interesting journey in the first season of The Wheel of Time. We were all surprised when he didn’t go to Fal Dara with the rest of the group in Episode 6, which I suspect had something to do with actor Barney Harris needing to be replaced; Mat will be played by Donal Finn in season 2.

Judkins didn’t comment on that, but did weigh in on that final shot we got of Mat in the finale:

"He’s headed into, you can see it probably more clearly in the finished cut, but he’s headed back to the White Tower and Tar Valon. It’ll pick up the story for him that he has in Book 3."

In Book 3, The Dragon Reborn, the Aes Sedai of the White Tower completely heal Mat of the corruption he picked up from the dagger he took from Shadar Logoth, since Moiraine was only able to slow it down. With Rand going into self-imposed exile, it also sounds like he’s skipping to his Book 3 plot, although I imagine they’ll mix some things from Book 2 in there, like him meeting Lanfear. Meanwhile, it looks like Perrin will hunt the Horn of Valere, which he does in Book 2. Egwene and Nynaeve spend chunks of both books training to become Aes Sedai at the White Tower.

Basically, it looks like The Wheel of Time season 2 will combine elements from Books 2 and 3 of the novel series. And speaking of things introduced in the second book…

Meet the Seanchan

The season 1 finale ended with a fleet of ships approaching the “western shore” and using channelers to create a tidal wave. These are the Seanchan, a civilization we will get to know well…although we wish we didn’t, because they suck a lot. Like, really, not to give away too much of Book 2, but I hated them in that novel, which means they’re great villains.

“The biggest challenge in depicting the Seanchan was trying to find something — we have so many different worlds in The Wheel of Time, you have the Borderlands, you have the Two Rivers, you have Tar Valon, you have Tear, you have all these places that are really different within our world, and have different clothes and costumes and makeup and all of this, that we built — because the Seanchan needed to come in and visually tell the story that they are apart from that world,” Judkins said. “They are from someplace that is very different than where any of our characters that we’ve met this season are from, but still feel like they exist within the world of The Wheel of Time, that they don’t feel like they’re from a different show, essentially.”

"So that took a lot of really careful modulation the whole way through, to get the aesthetic of the Seanchan correct so that they give to new audience members this flash of — we always talked about it as like the Spanish galleons coming ashore in the New World. Except our characters are the people living in the New World and seeing these ships arrive and go, “Oh, my God, what is this culture? They seem technologically advanced. They seem incredibly dangerous.” And so that’s what we were trying to really build with the Seanchan."

The Seanchan enslave Channelers to further their expansionist ambitions. I’m already dreading them…

The Age of Legends

Let’s end at the beginning. “The Eye of the World” opens with a flashback involving Lews Therin Telamon, the last guy who bore the title of “the Dragon” thousands of years before Rand was born. This is the dude whose attempt to defeat the Dark One led to the Breaking of the World, which basically shook civilization to its core. Did you see those flying cars out the window in this flashback? Rand and company would have no idea what to do with those.

“We wanted the Age of Legends,” Judkins explained. “What was important was that it felt more modern than our world, but also had timeless aspects to it. So we talk about it as like, futuristic Santorini, like bringing in some of these timeless Greek aesthetics that can feel simultaneously modern and ancient, so when you’re sitting in the nursery with them at the beginning, it does feel like 3000 years ago.

"But there are elements of it that feel almost futuristic still, in that real blend of like, “I don’t know if I’m in the future, [or] if I’m in the past,” until you finally go out the window at the end and realize, ‘Oh, this is actually like our world’s future.” This was a very futuristic society, and when these characters have been talking about the Breaking of the World, this is the world that was broken, and it was incredibly advanced."

So if Rand fails again could the world be broken so bad things go back to the Stone Age? The stakes are high.

We don’t know exactly when The Wheel of Time season 2 will air, but filming has already been underway for a while. We’ll definitely see it sometime in 2022; it’s just a question of whether it comes early or late.

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