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

Showdown on the Tower

We end at the tower where Rand and his friends face off against Ishamael. Sanderson had a lot of problems with this scene, though he seemed aware enough to acknowledge that some of them could be due to his own personal connection to the source material:

"This is totally just a book complaint: I’ve been waiting for 30 years to see Rand in the clouds fight in one of the best scenes that Robert Jordan ever wrote…and I don’t get it. And that’s okay, right? This has to be its own thing. I’m still allowed to be sad, I think."

I think we’ve all experienced that feeling of watching a show leave out a scene we loved from a book series at one point or another. It’s easy to understand where he’s coming from there, even if it also makes sense that the seeing two people sword fight in mid-air might not have been as tenable on a live-action TV show as what we saw in “What Was Meant To Be.”

Still, some things about the scene piqued Sanderson. “Nynaeve didn’t do anything. Perrin has a shield…Rand didn’t need to be there. Egwene just needed a sword…I don’t want to downplay how good the stuff that’s good in this episode was good. But it still bothers me that so many of the characters didn’t have to be there, and so much of it doesn’t seem to mean anything.”

Sanderson has a reputation for having complex magic systems in his books with very clear rules. The Wheel of Time also has a complex magic system, though Jordan fudged the rules more often than Sanderson does in his own work. This is something the author is concerned about with The Wheel of Time TV show. For example, Moiraine attacking the Seanchan ships seemingly violates the unbreakable oath Aes Sedai swear to never use the One Power as a weapon except against shadowspawn or in defense of their own life or that of their warder.

"I’m worried that they’re gonna start contradicting their own rules real quick…I’ve warned about that…They’re already doing it with channeling. They’ll say one time it has to be a certain way and then other times it isn’t. I warned them about that with teleportation…If [Ishamael] can teleport, why isn’t he behind the shield, the moment she brings it up? The moment you start breaking Jim’s metaphysics, then suddenly you have some big problems every step of the way."

One last criticism of the final scene: Sanderson wished that we had gotten a bit more of a philosophical conflict between Rand and Ishamael on the tower. “How does who Rand is present a contrast in philosophy to who Ishamael is, and why does he deserve to win more than be capable of winning?…I wish the ending had presented a philosophical concept. I wish it had been [Ishamael] vs Rand all through the season, and then a victory for Rand.”

"Either the whole show should lean into the Moiraine drama stuff, or all it’s doing is preventing you from having the time to set up Perrin’s arc, and even Egwene’s arc. Like, Egwene has the strongest arc, but Egwene does so much in this season, and nobody else really gets to do anything. Rand gets to stab [Ishamael], but what does that mean? Like, earlier he wasn’t even using the sword; what does the sword mean to him? He doesn’t draw it to fight the Blademaster, but he draws it to fight the Forsaken? Why?"