Last week, The Wheel of Time debuted its most powerful episode yet with "The Road to the Spear," and we're still sifting through the fallout. The episode dialed in on prophesied messiah Rand al'Thor (Josha Stradowski) and his Aes Sedai mentor Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) as they journeyed into the sacred Aiel city of Rhuidean. There, they each underwent trippy vision quests which laid their souls bare; Rand relived the experiences of his blood ancestors to learn the history of the Aiel while Moiraine lived through thousands of possible futures which almost always ended in tragedy.
It should come as no surprise that this episode was a colossal undertaking. “It doesn’t feel like it may be sometimes, but to pull off so many different eras, to have [Rand actor Josha Stradowski] in different makeup, to have him giving a different performance… every single thing that we did through building this episode is really hard to do in television,” Judkins told Screen Rant about the episode. “One of the reasons I wrote the script is because, if another writer on the show had done it, the network, studio, and all the HODs would’ve just said ‘No, we’re not doing this. It's too f***ing insane.’”
Despite how ambitious "The Road to the Spear" was, it very nearly ended up even bigger. The night after the episode premiered, Judkins hopped on a stream at The Dusty Wheel, a long-running Wheel of Time fan community on YouTube, to talk about how Rhuidean came to life for the screen — and to spill a few fascinating secrets.
Why The Wheel of Time showed a flashback of Rand's father Janduin
The entire interview is very much worth a watch — it spans the first 40 minutes or so of the video, before The Dusty Wheel's innkeepers break down some of Judkins' comments. While there were plenty of interesting insights, the one that piqued my attention the most was when Judkins revealed he had actually written more flashback scenes that didn't make the cut — and why he added one which didn't appear in the book at all.
In The Shadow Rising, the book which forms the basis for season 3, Rand experiences nine different visions while he walks through the glass columns of Rhuidean. The show cut that down to six; however, the first of those visions, when Rand inhabits the body of his father Janduin, didn't appear in the book at all. Judkins explained that he wrote this first flashback in order to make it very clear for audiences that we were seeing Rand's bloodline and not his past lives, since reincarnation is such a prominent theme in the show. It also tied things around to one of the most iconic scenes from the show's first seasons: the Blood Snow, where Rand's mother Tigraine fought off a bunch of soldiers while she was pregnant and then gave birth to him on the slopes of Dragonmount.
"That first one hopefully connects the audience emotionally to these visions, tells them that we're going through the bloodline in a very clear way, and makes them think, 'I'm leaning into this because I'm about to get payoffs for things I've seen since Episode 1 of season 1 and I want to feel like that," Judkins explained. "And so to me it felt very natural, and I tried to write the scene in a style that was as close to the style Robert Jordan had for the rest of the flashbacks so that hopefully as you watch it you kind of can't remember, 'Oh was that one of the flashbacks in the book or not, I can't remember for sure'?"
I had pretty much that exact reaction about wondering whether Janduin's flashback was in the book or not, so I'd say Judkins achieved that goal.
The Wheel of Time nearly included the first Maiden of the Spear
One flashback that didn't appear in the episode shows the very first Maiden of the Spear; that's the cultural group of Aiel warrior women that includes Aviendha, Bain, and Chiad. In the books, we see how the very first Maiden, named Morin, picked up a short spear and chose the way of a warrior under the guidance of Jeordam, the son of the Aielman Lewin, who we saw in the show's third flashback where Rand's ancestor was banished from the Way of the Leaf after killing a bandit.
In addition to serving as the showrunner on the series, Judkins also wrote this show-stopping episode. He revealed that he actually wrote a flashback which included the first Maiden of the Spear and went as far as casting her, but ultimately had to leave the scene on the cutting room floor.
"We actually almost shot two additional flashbacks that I really liked, one being the Aiel singing at [the Avendesora] to stop a man who'd gone wild with power, which I thought was really powerful and beautiful. And we had one of Jeordam...where you sort of get more of the backstory of Cairhien and the gift of water, and included in that one we had the Maiden with the first short spear. And so those two were the other two that I really wanted to try to get in, but ultimately, with what we had, the time that we had and the production budget we had to shoot it, those to me felt like the ones that could fall out the most easily and you could still track the whole story. So we thought about it super carefully the whole way through, of which of the flashbacks could we use, which of the flashbacks will feel complete and whole to the audience if they watch them."
Despite cutting out those scenes, "The Road to the Spear" did honor them in some small ways. "We tried to do a nod to [the first Maiden] when Mandein hands his spear over to his wife and she starts the line of spears," Judkins said. "Because that actress, who's amazing, [Judith Georgi], she had originally been cast to play the first Maiden of the Spear."
While I would have loved to have seen more flashbacks in Rand's journey, streamlining things also feels very fair. The episode already runs over an hour; two extra flashbacks might have pushed it closer to being a short movie than an episode of television. But I'd love to get storyboards or something for those scenes, maybe in a physical release one day (hint hint, Amazon).
The Wheel of Time is in the thick of season 3, with plenty more good stuff to come. New episodes drop Thursdays on Prime Video. We'll be covering the season extensively here at the site, so check back for more in the coming days!
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