Next month, The Wheel of Time will return for its third season on Prime Video, and from the opening minutes we've already seen, it looks spectacular. Based on the beloved fantasy book series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, The Wheel of Time tells a sweeping tale about a group of young men and women who are drawn into a battle against the ominous Dark One, who wants to shatter the titular wheel of time and end the cycle of rebirth. At their head is Rand al'Thor (Josha Stradowski), a reincarnated hero known as the Dragon Reborn, and the Aes Sedai sorceress Moiraine (Rosamund Pike), who seeks to guide him to his destiny.
When it comes to adapting popular fantasy works for TV, no show has it quite so difficult as The Wheel of Time. The series consists of 15 novels total, while the TV show is planned to run for around eight seasons. That's not to mention other challenges, like recasting a major character before filming was finished on season 1, leading to a "complete rewrite" of season 2; or filming during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which "upended" plans for the final battle at the end of the first season.
So it should come as no surprise that The Wheel of Time has had to deviate pretty far from the source material. But somehow at the same time, it's remaining one of the most faithful fantasy adaptations of the moment, at least in terms of its dedication to the overall spirit and vision of the original work. How is that possible?
Just like Moiraine Damodred, The Wheel of Time is playing the long game
I wanted to dig into this topic a little today, using one of the most controversial changes from The Wheel of Time season 2: Moiraine Damodred losing her access to the One Power (aka magic). In the final showdown of the first season, Moiraine is cut off from her magic by the Forsaken Ishamael (Fares Fares). She spends most of season 2 thinking she's been "stilled," or severed for good from the Source. We only find out in the penultimate episode of the season that Moiraine was only "shielded," or temporarily cut off by a weave of magic left on her by Ishamael, which prevented her from reaching her own powers.
None of this happens in the books, and it had many fans in an uproar during season 2. I was among them, and was vocal about the reasons taking away Moiraine's powers was a fraught idea. I worried that it would tread on future plotlines, creating repetition in the show and nonsensical confusion for its magic system. I also disliked it because it was very similar to what The Witcher did with Yennefer in season 2: taking away a strong female character's magic powers because she didn't feature in that stretch of the books, and the writers behind the show couldn't think of anything else to do with her. That's not a trope I enjoy in the first place; when it's done with leading women who are supposed to be imperious in their magical strength, turning them into victims, it's a bridge closer to being problematic.
But then The Wheel of Time paid it all off in Episode 207, "Daes Dae'mar", when Moiraine finally regains her access to her magic with Rand's help. At that point it became much clearer to me what The Wheel of Time had done...and why it was a ringing endorsement for the show's long game strategy that should calm fans' fears about changes from the books.
The Wheel of Time has to make hard choices in the name of the overarching story
Rand coming to Moiraine's aid in "Daes Dae'mar" serves a few different purposes. The first is that it ties Rand and Moiraine closer together. She has always been the staunchest supporter of the Dragon Reborn, but now her fate is tied to him in a much tighter way because she was, in essence, the very first person he used his powers to save. What Rand did in breaking Ishamael's shield over Moiraine was akin to a miracle in this fantasy world; only another male channeler could have even seen Ishamael's weaves, and it's likely that only Rand or another Forsaken would have had the strength to break them.
This very personal moment between Rand and Moiraine will add even more weight to their evolving dynamic. In the book on which season 3 is based, The Shadow Rising, that dynamic changes in a large way, as Rand seeks to assert more of his dominance as the Dragon Reborn and Moiraine has to work around his newfound willfulness without snuffing it out, since a tame Dragon would be unable to face the Last Battle ahead.
But the more important aspect of why this plotline worked so well is in what it taught the audience. The Wheel of Time is a massive, sprawling fantasy series with lore so dense that multiple encyclopedic world books have been written about it. Understanding all the workings of the story and its magic system is a daunting enough task in the books, where Robert Jordan had thousands of pages to cover it all. Getting these concepts across in a television show is even harder.
Many magical weaves from the Age of Legends — the time when the Forsaken lived — are lost to the mists of history by the time Rand al'Thor begins his journey. We see other channelers like Siuan Sanche (Sohpie Okonedo) cut off Rand's access to his own magic, shielding him in much the same way that Ishamael shielded Moiraine. However, that shield only works as long as Siuan keeps channeling it; the minute she stops, Rand is released.
The idea of "tying off" a weave so that the shield will remain without anyone actively channeling into it is one of those seemingly lost arts from the time of the Forsaken (in the show at least; the books use this explanation for a different aspect of channeling). The knowledge of how to do this particular magical binding is so far gone that the Aes Sedai don't even know it's possible, which is why Moiraine assumes she's stilled for most of the season. By going down this road with Moiraine, it allowed both the characters and viewers to learn about the lost art of tying off magical weaves.
That's important because it will be a crucial detail in the show's future; there are some key plotlines in The Wheel of Time books that are only possible because certain channelers know how to tie weaves off in that manner. We need to know how that works sooner rather than later, because one of those plotlines kicks in right at the end of The Shadow Rising. It feels safe to assume we'll see some version of it play out in season 3.
What the show did with Moiraine wasn't just a way to give screentime to its biggest star, Rosamund Pike (although it certainly was that). It also established a complicated piece of lore that viewers will need a firm grasp on going forward.
The more I think about this plotline with Moiraine, as well as a few others that initially bothered me, the more I can see the impressive planning the show had to do. While many of the deviations from the source material were baffling at the time, they make a lot more sense in retrospect.
There are a few other changes I want to discuss, but to get into them we need to touch on a MAJOR SPOILER FOR BOOK 5, THE FIRES OF HEAVEN.
The Wheel of Time is setting up a devastating moment from Book 5
The deeper we get into The Wheel of Time, the more it becomes apparent that the show is painstakingly laying groundwork for the future. Back in season 1, one of the most common complaints I heard from book purists was that the fourth and fifth episodes covered a bunch of pointless side characters and lore ideas that wouldn't be relevant until too far down the road to be worth including at the time. In Episode 104, the False Dragon Logain Ablar (Álvaro Morte) kills a bunch of Aes Sedai; in Episode 105, we see the warder to one of those Aes Sedai take his own life because he is too grief-stricken to go on.
None of that happens in the book series, but there were a bunch of events from the books that got cut from season 1 instead. That fan complaint felt pretty reasonable.
But now that we're about to plunge into season 3, the show's choices make more sense. That warder/Aes Sedai plotline is obviously set up for a major story beat in The Fires of Heaven, where the bond between Moiraine and her warder Lan is permanently broken in traumatic fashion. I worried that season 2 was jumping the gun on that plotline by having them grapple with something similar, and I do still worry that Moiraine and Lan's ultimate break will have less impact.
At the same time, The Wheel of Time is a complex beast, and one thing we can now say for certain is that when Moiraine and Lan do part ways for good, viewers will have a very firm grasp on all the implications, because the show has taken the time to make them extremely clear.
We're already seeing some of that forward-thinking with season 3. In the books, we never find out what visions Moiraine saw during her trip to the sacred Aiel city of Rhuidean. The show has already teased that we'll get to see Moiraine's visions, and that they reveal that the only way for Rand to survive his coming battle with the dark is if Moiraine dies. That's a firm set up for the plotline I mentioned from The Fires of Heaven, which we'll be seeing in either season 3, or season 4 at the latest. This show is constantly setting up what's to come, because it has to in order to not come apart at the seams.
The more you study and rewatch The Wheel of Time, the more all these little references and bits of foreshadowing become apparent. That's why, for all the changes it's made from the books, I still think The Wheel of Time is working the hardest to stay faithful to its source material out of any major fantasy show on television.
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