Why the climax of The Wheel of Time season 2 isn’t just about Rand

The season 2 finale of The Wheel of Time finds Rand al’Thor facing off against Ishamael, first of the Forsaken, those accursed channelers in thrall to the Dark One. Rand doesn’t stand alone: his friends from the Two Rivers are all there, and even one of them accidentally gored him with a homemade spear (get it together, Mat), the whole lot of them are here to help.

This is different from how things go down in Robert Jordan’s book The Great Hunt, the second of 14 Wheel of Time novels. There, Rand takes on Ishamael alone. But The Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins wanted to keep the spirit of the whole series in mind when breaking this scene.

“Yeah, one of the most famous quotes of the final book is it wasn’t a story about him, it was about all of them,” Judkins told Entertainment Weekly. “That’s what we’re trying to represent in that scene on top of the tower: This is not a Chosen One story just about him, it’s a Chosen One story that’s about all of them, and they each fit into it in their own different way. That makes it a much more interesting story. You don’t know where it’s going to go. Also it makes you think, was it about all of them last time? Were Lanfear and Ishamael similar or dissimilar to Mat and Egwene? That cyclical nature of time and how it repeats itself opens up really interesting ideas.”

I’m gonna say it: Is the real Dragon the friends we made along the way? Anyway, here’s that quote that Judkins was talking about, taken from the final book in the series, A Memory of Light:

"Here is your flaw, Shaitan, Lord of the Dark, Lord of Envy, Lord of Nothing, here is why you fail. It was not about me. It’s never been about me.It was about a woman, torn and beaten down, cast from her throne and made a puppet. A woman who had crawled when she had to. That woman still fought.It was about a man that love repeatedly forsook. A man who found relevance in a world that others would have let pass them by. A man who remembered stories and who took fool boys under his wing when the smarter move would have been to keep on walking. That man still fought.It was about a woman with a secret, a hope for the future. A woman who had hunted the truth before others could. A woman who had given her live, then had it returned. That woman still fought.It was about a man whose family was taken from him, but who stood tall in his sorrow and protected those he could.It was about a woman who refused to believe that she could not help, could not heal those who had been harmed.It was about a hero who insisted with every breath that he was anything but a hero.It was about a woman who would not bend her back while she was beaten, and who shown with a light for all who watched, including Rand.It was about them all."

The Wheel of Time grows “more sophisticated and deep” as it grows

The Wheel of Time is one of literature’s biggest book series, so it’s not easy to keep the whole thing in mind when writing episodes of the TV adaptation, but that’s what Judkins tries to do. “Yeah, I’m always viewing my job as adapting the entire series of Wheel of Time, not just each book individually,” he said. “Because the series is so massive — it fills my whole wall behind me — we have to think of it holistically. Especially in these early stages, we really have to set up correctly what people need to understand because the books start to go into storylines that more cleanly adapt to television the later we go on as well. ”

"Our job by the end of season 2 was making sure that when you see those five characters up on the tower at the end, you understand who each of them are and what the core crux of their character is. You may have favorites and lesser favorites amongst those five, but you know who they are and you know what they stand for."

Speaking just for myself, I think I liked all five of those characters more by the end of the season than I did at the start. Part of that is a function of just spending more time with them. Again, The Wheel of Time is a whopper of a big series, so if Judkins and his team are lucky enough to get to adapt the whole thing, we’ll be spending a lot of time with them indeed.

“When you read [The Wheel of Time books], you feel like you grow up with them, you feel like they become more sophisticated and deep,” Judkins said. “I hope the show does the same, so that by the time you get to season 3, you’re just rattling off things about the One Power and the Black Ajah. You just become fluent in the world of Wheel of Time the deeper you get into it.”

Why it was so important to get the Seanchan right in The Wheel of Time season 2

That said, it’s not all about big picture stuff. It’s important to be invested scene to scene as well, and in season 2, I’d argue that audiences were probably most invested in the story of Egwene al’Vere, who is kidnapped and tortured by the brutal invaders from Seanchan.

“We really wanted her personal journey this season to feel impossible to get out of,” Judkins said. “As a logical person, you’re putting yourself in her mind and you’re like, ‘There is no way out. We cannot escape from this.’ She feels like our sort of representation for the Seanchan writ large: How do our leads get out of this?”

"And I feel like the best finales that any movie or TV show have are something where you as the audience feel like your lead is up against impossible odds and you don’t know how they can overcome them. And then when they do, it’s surprising and amazing. The Seanchan really give us that story, where it’s really satisfying for the audience to follow Egwene on that journey and then see all of our characters overcoming the Seanchan in a similar way."

The Seanchan in general were a highlight of the season. Our heroes spent the first season mostly fighting against beast-headed soldiers of the Dark One, and now they’re going up against opulently costumed human beings with backwards beliefs about the rights of channelers? They came out of nowhere in the best possible way, which was the point. “I think for the show to really work, we needed the Seanchan to work because it could give that audience the feeling of, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen next in this show and I need to watch to find out,'” Judkins said.

Unfortunately, we’re in for a bit of a wait before we get to see The Wheel of Time season 2. It’s filming right now, so with any luck, we’ll get new episodes sometime in 2024.

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