Rosamund Pike bids farewell to The Wheel of Time in heartwrenching post

It's been over a month since Amazon Prime Video cancelled The Wheel of Time after its best season, and the heartache continues. Since almost the exact day that the series was given the axe, fans have been fighting tooth and nail to save it, waging a coordinated campaign that has seen more than 185,000 people sign a petition to save the show, letters sent to TV execs, billboards raised in cities around the globe, and even a sky banner with the words "Save The Wheel of Time" flown over studio headquarters. Whether you loved The Wheel of Time or not, you have to admire the inspiring effort to bring the show back from the brink.

But saving The Wheel of Time was always going to be a long shot. Many shows are cancelled by television studios for one reason or another; very few are ever revived. With a show as big and complicated as The Wheel of Time, it's even harder. And today, it feels like the effort has taken a blow.

Throughout the past month, some of the biggest players from the series have remained conspicuously quiet. Showrunner Rafe Judkins waited a full month to post a goodbye message to the series, which nonetheless had a current of hope running through it. Rosamund Pike, the producer and star of the series who played Aes Sedai sorceress Moiraine Damodred, similarly waited to speak up about the cancellation; she posted a brief Instagram story around a week after Judkins' message, imagining she was channeling "anguish and rage" in one scene on set, perhaps because she had an intuition the show's fate was sealed. Now, she's just shared another, much longer look back on the series on her Instagram stories, and it has a sobering ring of finality.

Rosamund Pike says goodbye to Moiraine Damodred

Instagram stories only last for 24 hours, but the internet has already started documenting Pike's goodbye, which consisted of 15 images and short video clips that show her in costume, on set, getting make-up to look like she'd survived for days in the parched environs of Rhuidean, and more. The final image of the montage shows Pike's hand holding up her Aes Sedai ring, with the caption: "I hang up my ring." If you'd like to see more pictures, you can find them over on Reddit.

All told, this feels a bit like a gut punch. Pike was the very first actor cast in The Wheel of Time and has assumed an extremely large role in the series over time, both as its lead and as a producer. This isn't necessarily a final nail in the coffin for the efforts to save The Wheel of Time, but it feels like a major player laying down the burden of fighting for the series, and that's a fairly big difference from, say, The Expanse, where the production company behind the show was actively communicating with fans about the best ways to direct their efforts to save the show after it was cancelled by SyFy.

So does this mean the fight to save The Wheel of Time is done? Not necessarily. The Wheel of Time news channel WoTUp!, which has inside sources at the production, claims that there is a "soft" cancellation window for the series through August of 2025, which is when the last of the contracts with certain cast members expire. The host, John, emphasizes that while it won't be impossible for the show to still bounce back after that August window, it will be "incredibly difficult," since many of the actors may start moving on to other projects.

Obviously in the case of Rosamund Pike, she's a big star who is very much in demand. We can't expect that she'll sit around and wait on the whims of studios to see if they'll save the show. But it still stings to know she's accepting enough of the cancellation to bid adieu to Moiraine, a role she performed to perfection. As someone who's read all the books and spent a lot of time with this series over the years, I genuinely think we could not have asked for a better actor to play this part.

The SaveWOT campaign heads Down Under

Pike's post may be a downer, but the fans still haven't thrown in the towel. Last week, billboards sprung up in cities like New York, Los Angeles, São Paulo, and London, spreading the message to save The Wheel of Time far and wide. Another billboard popped up over the weekend, this time in Sydney, Australia outside of Supanova Comic Con.

So while hope feels a little slimmer today than it did yesterday, it does still endure. I imagine the SaveWOT campaign will continue this fight at least until that August "soft" cancellation window that WoTUp! mentioned, or someone attached to the show shares a clear message that it cannot return. Until then, you can head over to SaveWOT.com to learn more about how to get involved and commiserate with other fans who are processing the cancellation of the series.

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