Confirmed: The Wheel of Time season 2 finale cut key Ingtar scene

The Wheel of Time received a lot of love this past weekend at New York City Comic Con, where people like showrunner Rafe Judkins and VFX supervisor Andy Scrase were on hand to discuss the magic that went into creating Prime Video’s epic fantasy show. Based on the beloved book series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, The Wheel of Time is a series with a sprawling cast of characters, vibrant locations, and stunning battles.

There are 15 Wheel of Time books total, but the show is only planned to run for around eight seasons. That means that no matter how you slice it, Judkins and his team have to make hard choices about which elements to include and which to leave out.

Take the season 2 finale, “What Was Meant To Be.” While it had many great scenes relevant to Jordan’s books, others were unfortunately left on the cutting room floor. Judkins confirmed during a Q&A at Comic Con that an iconic scene from the second Wheel of Time book, The Great Hunt, was filmed but left out of the final cut: the Darkfriend reveal for Lord Ingtar Shinowa.

The Wheel of Time filmed a Darkfriend reveal for Ingtar

In The Great Hunt, Ingtar reveals to Rand al’Thor that he actually has a secret allegiance to the Shadow. However, the Shienaran lord has regrets. As the battle for Falme gets underway, Ingtar changes sides once again at the eleventh hour, sacrificing his own life to help Rand and his friends. It’s an extremely memorable part of the book.

In the show, Ingtar seemingly starts to reveal that he’s a Darkfriend to Perrin Aybara (Marcus Rutherford), even using some exact bits of dialogue from The Great Hunt. However, the scene then quickly cuts to Ingtar fighting off Seanchan without him ever actually revealing his secret to Perrin onscreen. If you thought that there was more to Ingtar’s story than what we saw in that moment, you were right: Judkins confirmed that Ingtar’s Darkfriend reveal was filmed, but ultimately cut from the finale.

The reasoning for this was that with everything else going on, Ingtar’s big turn didn’t mesh well with the rest of the episode, which is already packed to the gills with huge emotional moments. “I think you have to look at it that way because it is so big and so complicated, and you never want the audience to lose emotional track of the characters,” Judkins explained. “Or at least, for me that’s the main thing I’m looking for, is I feel like audiences in television are connected when they’re connected emotionally.”

"In this finale, there’s a really important sequence from the books where Ingtar, who is the guy who was captured with Perrin and Loial, is revealed to be a Darkfriend. And it’s a big story in the books, it’s something I love in the books. And we shot it. And it just… you couldn’t emotionally connect to it with the number of other things that were going on in the finale. So we ultimately had to pull it in the cut process because it disrupted your ability to follow our lead characters through it. Although I think… that will be a deleted scene that we release eventually so you can see it, ’cause Greg [Greg Chilligirian] who plays Ingtar is fantastic and it’s a great scene. And it’s wonderful from the books and I think it should be in the canon of the world, but it just didn’t make sense in the finale."

This explanation makes a lot of sense. Part of why Ingtar’s Darkfriend reveal hits so hard in The Great Hunt is because we spend so much time with him and Rand. There are also fewer large moments to juggle in the book version of the battle; Egwene doesn’t kill Renna, Perrin’s wolf friend Hopper isn’t involved, and Mat doesn’t need to reunite with his friends since they never separated like in the show, for a start. All of those are more important than Ingtar, especially since we already got big reveals that Liandrin, Lanfear and Barthanes all serve the Shadow in earlier episodes.

All that said, I like that Judkins still wants Ingtar being a Darkfriend to be considered show canon. It means that all those hints about his secret agenda hold more weight, like getting the Horn of Valere with the help of a “Lady from Cairhien” (Lanfear) and his conversation with Perrin about understanding Padan Fain’s motives.

Here’s to hoping that we get to see the deleted scene of Ingtar’s Darkfriend reveal sometime in the near future! Until then, we can always go back and pick out all the little clues about his true allegiance sprinkled throughout season 2.

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