The third season of The Wheel of Time ended with a pair of back-to-back bangers: first came "Goldeneyes," which featured a huge battle scene in the Two Rivers. Then we got the finale, "He Who Comes With The Dawn," which brought several plotlines to thrilling climaxes.
These episodes also included some major swerves from The Wheel of Time books, especially when it came to killing off major characters. (Turn back now if you don't want SPOILERS.) In "Goldeneyes," gentle giant Loial (Hammed Animashaun) apparently plunged to his death while trying to keep an army of Trollocs from using a Waygate to invade the Two Rivers. And in the finale, we got two unexpected deaths: the Forsaken sorceress Moghedien (Laia Costa) killed fellow Forsaken Sammael (Cameron Jack) in an act of villain-on-villain crime. And in the biggest surprise of all, Siuan Sanche (Sophie Okonedo), the leader of the Aes Sedai, was executed during a coup of the White Tower. In the books, she only has her powers taken away before escaping imprisonment.
Why did The Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins and his team decide to make these changes? Speaking to Collider, Judkins began by explaining the thinking behind Loial's death. "It was something that people kept suggesting in the writers’ room, and I'd be like, 'No! We're just not going to do it. I understand why it makes sense, but I'm not going to do it.' I fought it and fought it and fought it. I think the only way I was able to keep my heart alive was that we don't see a body on screen, which, for me, at least, in a fantasy show, if you don't see a body on screen, there's always a little question in your mind."
"For Loial, there needed to be a loss for Perrin. At the end of the Battle of Two Rivers, he needed to feel loss. Perrin always struggles with violence and what violence means, and when you fight a battle, you lose people. For him to lose someone very close to him and someone that he's really been with since the end of Season 1, and who is kind of the person who's been at his side the longest now, hopefully for his character, people can see the impact that makes on him. But we're all sad to see him go."
It's true that we don't actually see Loial die; he plunges down into the depths beneath the Ways, but who knows what's down there? It could be anything. Maybe he'll show up in an Ogier stedding in a future season. I'm not in denial, you're inconsolably upset!
Why did The Wheel of Time kill Sammeal early?
Then there's Moghedien killing Sammael while he's bound by Moiraine in the Aiel Waste, defenseless. "I think that Moghedien’s horrifying in the books, even though she actually doesn't typically ever succeed in doing anything that dangerous, and so for adapting her to screen, we don't have the benefit of the language used to convey just how threatening she is, saying things like, 'If anyone's in a room with Moghedien, they're going to die.' We have to show it," Judkins explained. "We had to show Lanfear being afraid of her. We had to put in the scene with the Gray Man so that you could see the threat that she poses."
"We felt like so many of the Forsaken are always talking about her being an assassin from the shadows, and how dangerous she is. By killing Sammael, we could put it on screen so that people feel that in every scene she's in, someone's going to die. And in most scenes that we're getting into in this season, someone does die, so we want to keep her threat level alive, because she's always in the shadows. The idea is that when she emerges from the shadows, it's probably the last time you're going to see her, because you're going to die in that scene. So, hopefully, through doing what we've done in this season with her, the audience will have that feeling that you have when you read the books in your chest when you see Moghedien in a scene. 'Oh my god, I don't know what's going to happen next. I'm really worried for all of my favorite characters in this scene.'"
Moghedien was a lot of fun in season 3, so I can't completely argue with his reasoning. The rub is that Sammael still has a bunch to do in the book series, but Judkins has proven adept at combining and streamlining plots from the massive novels in ways that make sense onscreen, so I think he'll be able to pull something off.
Why did The Wheel of Time kill Siuan Sanche?
Siuan Sanche's death was especially surprising, not only because she doesn't die at this point in the novel series, but because the show had spent a lot of time building up her character and developing her relationship with Moiraine (Rosamund Pike). And now that's all over.
When Siuan is deposed as the Amyrlin Seat and then unexpectedly executed, Moiraine is many miles away, fighting the Forsaken Lanfear (Natasha O'Keeffe) in the Aiel Waste. "We knew that what we wanted to do was make you nervous that Moiraine was going to die, so that you were not seeing the death of Siuan coming, and that is, hopefully, how the dramatic tension is playing out in the finale, that the audience is so worried about Moiraine that they forget to worry about Siuan, so that the Tower coup has this gut punch," Judkins said. "I remember when I read the Tower coup in the books, I just lost it. I threw down the book. I called my mom. We wanted that same gut punch to come from the Tower coup in the show, and so we built the Moiraine/Lanfear stories so that it would feel like you were going to lose Moiraine or Moiraine and Lanfear, and then lose Siuan instead."
There's also a more practical reason why The Wheel of Time has been clearing the boards a bit: "For all of our characters, we have these incredible actors tied to them. In the books, you can just collect them and collect them and have 47 people in a scene, which is totally fine. Practically, in television, you can't have three Academy Award winners just standing by the wall listening to other characters talk," Judkins said. "So, we have to be really thoughtful about when every character can come into the show and leave the show that makes the biggest impact for who they are."
For the record, Judkins has plans to bring back Siuan Sanche, at least, should the show continue, perhaps in a dream sequence or a flashback. The world of The Wheel of Time is full of magic, so there are a lot of options.
The third season of The Wheel of Time has received rapturous praise from both critics and fans, so it doesn't seem like these premature character deaths have soured folk on the show. I think that's because they were executed well and clearly came from a place of wanting to tell the story of the books while acknowledging that things need to be different for TV, rather than just changing things for their own sake. Now all we have to do is wait for Amazon and Sony to renew the show through to the end!
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