The Wheel of Time co-author Brandon Sanderson harshly criticizes season 2 finale

The Heroes of the Horn

At one point in the finale, Mat sounds the Horn of Valere and summons Heroes from the past to help him fight the Seanchan. Sanderson enjoyed a lot about this scene. His biggest issue with it is that he wished “the hunt and the horn had meant more.”

"A lot of the problems with this episode are actually previous episodes, in that the scenes are all good — a lot of them are good — but what you’re having happen doesn’t feel built to, character-wise, for a lot of the characters for me. And that might be me too clouded by the books."

He later expanded on this moment on Reddit. “It was filmed well, it was beautiful, and the music was great. It’s a wonderful moment. However, I feel it’s a completely defensible criticism that I feel it’s just not set up in the show properly. I felt from just watching episode eight that it had no relevance on the plot; it could have not happened.”

Brandon Sanderson fought to include the Heroes of the Horn in The Wheel of Time

Sanderson dropped some interesting facts about the sequence where Mat blows the Horn of Valere. For starters, he revealed that when he was giving notes for the season, he kept arguing that Uno Nomesta (Guy Roberts) shouldn’t be killed off. Uno sticks around for quite a while in the books but is killed by the Seanchan near the beginning of season 2 of the show. Later, he shows up as one of the Heroes of the Horn when Mat blows the Horn of Valere, something Sanderson suggests the showrunner inserted just to placate him:

"I did write, in a whole bunch of my replies to [Rafe Judkins], ‘#saveuno.’ I think he may have done this just for me. Because when I read the last episode and it was there, I was like, ‘Alright fine, you can kill Uno.’"

According to Sanderson, at first, the show wasn’t going to feature the Heroes of the Horn at all. “They weren’t gonna show the Heroes originally,” he explained. “I talked to Rafe about it, and he wasn’t sure they could get them in, he wasn’t sure they could do it. And if there was a thing I actually fought for the most, it was to get the Heroes in. And the thing about that is, when you hear me say that, don’t say, ‘Without Brandon, this wouldn’t have happened.’ That’s not how these things work.”

Sanderson explained that he got the impression that Judkins wanted the Heroes of the Horn in the show but was looking to get broader feedback on it. And we do have some confirmation that this was the case; Sarah Nakamura later explained on the site formerly known as Twitter that, “In writers rooms story beats usually will go up on a white board – you do a season broad strokes first, then story arc, then character development. The Heroes beat was up day 1.” She added that, “The Heroes beat never left the board and was always going to be part of the season 2 finale.”

So from the sounds of things, Judkins and his team probably wanted to do the Heroes of the Horn, and Sanderson also wanted it to happen. Nonetheless, Sanderson still doesn’t think their appearance was set up. “The problem is not the heroes not appearing. The problem is the Horn doesn’t matter. Maybe the Horn should’ve been cut, or maybe they should have done book 3 but ended in Falme.”