The fourth episode of The Wheel of Time season 2 is here, which means that I can finally discuss my single biggest issue with the show. While I generally think this season has been a huge step up from season 1, there’s one plotline which I’ve really struggled to get behind: Moiraine and Lan adjusting to their new dynamic following Moiraine losing the ability to use magic in season 1.
I’m going to open the full can of worms below, which warrants a MAJOR SPOILER WARNING. The only way I can fully discuss my concerns with the show is by referencing things which happen in The Wheel of Time books by Robert Jordan, up through books 6 and 7, Lord of Chaos and A Crown of Swords. So if you haven’t read The Wheel of Time books and don’t want major plot points spoiled for you, proceed with caution.
The Wheel of Time and The Witcher made the same questionable decision
In Amazon Prime Video’s adaptation of The Wheel of Time, the Aes Sedai Moiraine Damodred loses her access to magic during a confrontation with the Forsaken Ishamael during the season 1 finale. In season 2, she’s dealing with what it means to be unable to touch the True Source and use the One Power.
In the novels by Robert Jordan, Moiraine never loses her magic. She remains a powerful sorceress for pretty much the entirety of the time we spend with her. So why did the TV show take away her magic?
The answer is that Moiraine doesn’t really appear much in The Great Hunt, the novel which forms the basis for this season. She mostly crops up a bit at the beginning and end, with a single chapter tossed in the middle. In that chapter, she and Lan are researching the Prophecies of the Dragon at Adeleas’ villa. We more or less see that adapted in the season 2 premiere.
Since benching the show’s lead actor Rosamund Pike for a whole season wasn’t an option, The Wheel of Time had to come up with something else to fill that time. They took away her powers, which gives her something to struggle with.
This is the same thing that The Witcher did with Yennefer in its second season, for pretty much the exact same reason. The Witcher season 2 adapted the book Blood of Elves, in which Yennefer does not feature heavily. The show had her lose her powers to give her something to do.
So two fantasy shows which highlight powerful women couldn’t find a way to develop those characters without taking away their powers, which isn’t the best look. In the case of The Wheel of Time, it’s also created some storytelling problems. The Wheel of Time is a much longer and more complicated book series than The Witcher, and this decision could create a butterfly effect that will make it difficult to adapt later events from the books. In “Daughter of the Night,” we started seeing what that could look like.
Lan’s plotline is all over the place in this season of The Wheel of Time
In Episode 202, “Strangers and Friends,” Moiraine threatens to have the Aes Sedai Alanna take Lan’s bond by force in order to get him to leave her alone. Moiraine tells Lan that he failed in his duty as a warder, that he is not her equal and that she wants him to go away.
Lan and Alanna never really spend time together in the novels, and Moiraine never sends Lan away like this. Instead, Moiraine tells Lan in The Great Hunt that she’s made arrangements for his bond to pass to Myrelle, an Aes Sedai of the Green Ajah, in the event that she ever dies. Lan doesn’t take this well, since Moiraine made the arrangements without his consent. But Myrelle has a reputation for rehabilitating warders who have lost their Aes Sedai, and Moiraine is adamant that she doesn’t want Lan’s skills to go to waste if the worst should ever happen to her.
The show is seemingly giving Myrelle’s story to Alanna, who is similarly a member of the Green Ajah with multiple warders. In “Daughter of the Night,” we see Lan actually go off and spend time with Alanna. She reassures him that she doesn’t think he’s going to kill himself, a common fate for warders who lose their Aes Sedai, because Moiraine isn’t dead; she’s just cutting him out of her life and masking their bond so they can’t feel one another anymore.
When I watched this episode for the first time, I shouted at my TV. Let’s get into why, and one more time: BIG SPOILERS are ahead.
So in the books, Lan does eventually have to confront what he would do if his bond with Moiraine was ever severed. In the fifth novel, The Fires of Heaven, Moiraine falls through a magical door ter’angreal while defending Rand from an attack by the Forsaken Lanfear. After that point, it’s assumed she’s dead since Lan can no longer feel her with his bond. It’s then that the Myrelle plotline really kicks in; Lan has no choice but to go to her since Moiraine already made arrangements for his bond to pass to her automatically.
On the show, the stuff about whether Lan might kill himself has its roots in that much later plotline with Myrelle. And in that context, it makes way more sense. Lan is in a situation that commonly causes warders to commit suicide, so it’s a pressing issue that can’t be avoided.
The show has shoehorned those ideas into the season 2 plotline with Alanna, where they make far less sense. Lan isn’t getting rehabilitation because Moiraine is gone, but because he can’t deal with her pushing him away. No one should even be remotely worried about Lan committing suicide in these circumstances. Moiraine is still around, so why would he? Just because she needs space?
Don’t forget: Lan is the last living king of a Borderlands nation that was swallowed by the Blight. In the novels, he very much has a personal mission to fight the forces of darkness. They address the idea of whether he would commit suicide because of the unavoidable mental backlash warders go through when their Aes Sedai bond is severed, not because he’s nothing without Moiraine. The idea that Lan would give up on life not because Moiraine was dead but just because she didn’t want him around feels like a disservice to the character. It’s also making the rules of magic in this world very confusing…
The Wheel of Time is making some confusing choices with its magic
The plotline with Lan and Moiraine also raises some big questions about the nature of the bond. As of Episode 4, the show hasn’t spent any real time exploring whether Moiraine is stilled (permanently severed from magic) or is just living under the influence of a long-term shield which keeps her from accessing the One Power as long as its in place. Both of these things happen in The Wheel of Time novels to different characters. We don’t know which Moiraine is dealing with.
We can assume the show is doing this for dramatic effect. It’ll be a big moment when and if Moiraine gets her powers back. But it doesn’t make any sense that the Aes Sedai in the series wouldn’t want to try and help Moiraine by answering this question. It’s a hugely important one, because if Moiraine is actually stilled, it would impact her bond with Lan; he would feel it as if she had died. And if she isn’t stilled, then why isn’t anyone talking about potential options for how to remove the shield on her? Is it just because it was woven with saidin, the male half of the One Power, and therefore female channelers can’t see it?
Making things even more confusing, The Wheel of Time runs with the idea that Moiraine is masking the bond from Lan, “taking it” from him, which doesn’t make any sense. Moiraine doesn’t have access to magic, so how can she mess with the magical bond connecting her and Lan? Is it just some meditative trick she’s using independent of the One Power? And if that’s the case, shouldn’t warders be able to do it too, rather than just Aes Sedai?
Perhaps the mask between Moiraine and Lan’s bond is stuck as a result of her showdown with Ishamael in season 1? Moiraine had already masked the bond with Lan when Ishamael cut her off from her magic. In the season 1 finale, Moiraine tells Lan that she cannot unmask their bond because she can no longer touch the source. So maybe she and Lan are just lying about the nature of their problem to other Aes Sedai like Alanna in season 2?
The Wheel of Time TV show isn’t really digging into any of these questions, at least not yet. It’s very possible that the back half of the season will bring more clarity, but right now the logistics of the magical issues facing Moiraine and Lan feel muddled.
How The Wheel of Time changing Lan and Moiraine could affect the future
Even as The Wheel of Time has improved this season, the way it’s navigating Lan’s plotline has me worried for future seasons. Will Moiraine still fall through the door? I hope so; the show would give up a great moment if it skips that. But at this point, even if it does a great job with that scene, it’s hard to imagine it pulling off Lan’s subsequent problems with the bond being severed well since season 2 is already covering it.
There are other causes for concern. If Moiraine gets her magic back in the near future there’s still time for the show to bring her closer in line with the source material. However, seeing how liberally The Wheel of Time is pulling material from different novels in the series to service this plotline has me worried that they could pull even more stuff from other books…or even other characters.
A big question that crops up later in the series is whether stilling can ever be healed. This is a crucial plotline that intersects with multiple characters, most of whom have already been introduced in the TV show. Now that Moiraine has lost her powers, part of me worries that the show might move up parts of that plotline for her. That would not only take it away from the characters who would otherwise have that material later, but the main healer involved in that story is nowhere near the ability they need to be at for any of it to make sense, even if it happened in season 3 or early season 4.
The Wheel of Time TV show is projected to last about eight seasons. There are 15 novels including the prequel New Spring to adapt. That’s a lot of material, so it’s unavoidable that some things are going to be combined or cut down. However, the stilling plotline is crucial and isn’t likely to end up on the cutting room floor; the show even put a bit of foreshadowing for it in this week’s episode.
At this point The Wheel of Time has backed itself into something of a corner. It either keeps that stilling storyline, which would by necessity retread some of the same emotional ground we’ve already seen covered in Moiraine’s story this season, or it mixes things up in some big ways. Either way it feels like the potential for problems is high.
Why is The Wheel of Time building up these side characters?
I’ve done a lot of moaning about ways The Wheel of Time is potentially making missteps here, but I also need to acknowledge some of the good calls they’re making. One of those is that Alanna is getting a lot more character development.
Alanna has a very important thing to do, which we’ll likely see happen in the fourth or fifth season (provided the show keeps that part, which I believe it will). She’s a very minor character in the books who suddenly becomes a much bigger piece of the puzzle, so developing her ahead of time makes total sense. So does jettisoning Myrelle from the show and giving her material to Alanna. We already have a lot of great Aes Sedai actors on this show, and The Wheel of Time is already struggling to distribute screen time evenly among them, to say nothing of the Emond’s Field Five, the main characters of the saga, some of whom have only appeared in a handful of scenes this season.
Developing Alanna and her warders, as well as other characters like Liandrin and Logain, are all solid choices. They all have important parts to play at different points in the series. But the way the show is navigating Lan and Moiraine’s story is much harder to wrap my head around. Even as The Wheel of Time gets better, the changes to these characters have me more worried about the show as an adaptation overall. I’m still not totally sold on its ability to coherently navigate complicated magical concepts, of which there will be many.
This is a different turning of the Wheel than we got in the novels. Things are bound to be different. I just hope they also make sense.
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