The Wheel of Time boss excited that “the whole world is…in love with Lanfear”

There’s only more episode left of the second season of The Wheel of Time before we settle in to wait for season 3. This second season has been a pretty big upgrade on the first, in part because we got to spend a lot of time with a pair of compelling new villains: Ishamael (Fares Fares) and Lanfear (Natasha O’Keeffe).

Ishamael and Lanfear are both members for the Forsaken, an elite group of channelers bound in service to the Dark One. They were both alive 3,000 years ago and fought against the original Dragon, Lews Therin Telamon (Alexander Karim), who defeated them and imprisoned them for millennia. Now they both want to find Rand al’Thor, the Dragon Reborn, and turn him to the Dark Side.

“I’m excited that the whole world is now as in love with Lanfear as the writers’ room of The Wheel of Time has been for the last few years since we started working on her,” showrunner Rafe Judkins told Decider. “She’s such an incredible character in the books.”

How The Wheel of Time improved on the villains from the books

There are 14 The Wheel of Time books in all, and they are not short. Since author Robert Jordan made up a fair amount of stuff as he went, we don’t learn all there is to know about characters like Lanfear and Ishamael until fairly late in the game. Judkins and his team wanted to bring some of that stuff forward.

“I do think that Lanfear and Ishamael, we really tried to infuse the characters with a lot of what you learn about them from the end of the books right at the beginning so that their characters feel complete,” Judkins said. “You know, Rand only gets these kind of bare glimpses of them in the early books and you as a reader aren’t able to fully understand how complex and how real these people are and that’s what makes them interesting to us as writers. They’re not just capital ‘E’ Evil. Like they’re doing what they do for a reason and they’re extremely human faces of evil in The Wheel of Time.“

For instance, we’ve seen Ishamael pontificate about the endless cycles of pain that make up human life, which is his inspiration for wanting to break the wheel of time and release himself from the cycle of reincarnation. That’s not something we learn early in the books. “And, you know, so really infusing both Ishamael and Lanfear with the most human aspects of their characters that you realize by the end of the book series right in the beginning was really important to us,” Judkins concluded.

We’ll learn even more about Lanfear and Ishamael in The Wheel of Time season 2 finale, which airs tomorrow on Amazon Prime Video.

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