In just a few days, The Wheel of Time will return for a third season on Prime Video. After an especially spectacular second season finale, (and while Prime Video's other big fantasy project, The Rings of Power, seems to be faltering), the series looks ready to take the reigns as one of the premiere genre shows on television.
The Wheel of Time novel series by Robert Jordan is one of the best-selling fantasy series of all time, with a whopping 14 novels and a prequel to enjoy. Showrunner Rafe Judkins has said previously that he is working towards adapting those main novels into about eight seasons of TV. That likely means things will get, and it's easy to understand why: it takes between 18 to 24 months to create one season of big-budget television. At that speed, adapting one novel per season would take up the next quarter-century of the lives of the cast and crew.
While Judkins is a fan of the novels, it’s certainly understandable that he wants to edit the series down. But where will the cuts be made? Seasons 1 and 2 roughly adapted the first two Wheel of Time novels, with some elements from the third book, The Dragon Reborn, pulled in. Season 3 will mainly adapt the fourth book in the series, The Shadow Rising. The trimming begins.
There are several major plotlines in The Dragon Reborn and The Shadow Rising we could see this season on the TV show. Here’s a quick recap (BEWARE SPOILERS):
The Dragon Reborn and The Shadow Rising
In The Dragon Reborn, the characters begin to spread out before eventually converging on a fortress known as the Stone of Tear, where the novel’s climax takes place. (1) Rand goes on a solo-mission straight toward Tear to retrieve a magic sword; (2) Moiraine, Lan, and Perrin follow after Rand, tracking him through the wilderness like he’s a rabid animal; (3) Mat Cauthon goes to the White Tower and then to the land of Andor and then to Tear; (4) Elayne, Nynaeve, and Egwene hunt the Black Ajah (dark Aes Sedai) from the White Tower to Tear, and; (5) Min goes to the White Tower.
In The Shadow Rising, the characters do the reverse, mostly starting the book together in Tear before spreading back out again. The paths for that novel proceed thus: (1) Rand, Moiraine, Lan, Mat, and Egwene all go with the Aiel into the desert known as the Aiel Waste; (2) Perrin heads home to the Two Rivers with Loial; (3) Nynaeve and Elayne continue hunting the Black Ajah and go to a city called Tanchico, and; (4) Min stays in the White Tower; all hell breaks loose while she is there.
Got all that? Great, because there is absolutely no way a season of tv could fit all of it in. The real question is which plotlines from The Shadow Rising are included, and which are dropped. Also, will any plotlines from the third novel, The Dragon Reborn, make it in?
The answer to the second question was revealed in the recent full-length trailer released by Amazon. Egwene, one of the show’s female leads, is shown going through a series of visions during her trial to become an Accepted, one of the ranks within the Aes Sedai order. Egwene’s Accepted trial takes place during The Dragon Reborn and not The Shadow Rising. So part of that novel is definitely being included. Following this event, both Egwene and her friend Elayne Trekand join Nynaeve on a quest hunting the Black Ajah and head to Tear. This plotline has almost certainly been cut, or at the very least is significantly altered. In the recent trailer, Elayne and Nynaeve are seen in the city of Tanchico, where their quest to bring the Black Ajah to justice draws them in The Shadow Rising.
Since no trailer footage yet released has shown us the Stone of Tear, it is logical to assume that the show is moving Elayne and Nynaeve directly to Tanchico rather than bothering with the Tear part of their plot. Some recently released footage shows Nynaeve in the White Tower of the Aes Sedai testifying about Liandrin’s Sedai’s betrayal of her in the previous season, so she will spend at least some time there. What’s interesting is what that means for Egwene, who spends the third novel alongside Nynaeve and Elayne. Egwene has three plots she moves through across the third and fourth novels: the journey to Tear, unraveling mysteries in the White Tower, and journeying into the Aiel Waste to learn from the Aiel Wise Ones how to control her powers in the World of Dreams. I’m betting she just goes straight to the Aiel Waste and leaves the White Tower mysteries to her friends.
A huge amount of trailer time has been spent on Rand and Moiraine’s time in the Aiel Waste, including a major set piece that takes place in Episode 4, so we expect Rand’s arc to be drawn almost entirely from The Shadow Rising. In his case that makes some sense, since the second season already incorporated some of his story from The Dragon Reborn by having him out on his own and finding himself.
With Moiraine it is harder to tell, because in the trailers you see her in many settings, but are any of those real? Without going too much into the details, Moiraine is going to have a pretty trippy season and see some visions, so what is real and what is only in her mind makes it really hard to tell what is happening plot-wise. However, it is important that she spends almost the entire third novel following Rand and spends the entire fourth novel in his presence, so assuming the chase has been cut or severely shortened, we can assume Moiraine spends the majority of the season right alongside Rand.
Perrin’s arc looks like it will be drawn just from The Shadow Rising, with a large-scale battle taking place in the Two Rivers at the end of the trailer. Mat’s journey will perhaps be the most different from the novels as there are no shots of him in the Aiel Waste or Andor. Instead, he's seemingly in Tanchico, thousands of miles away. There is a shot of Queen Morgase of Andor standing beside her throne, so presumably some character we know will be headed there to serve as our eyes, but will it be Mat? That is far less certain.
Meanwhile Min, Mat’s friend and fellow cellmate from season 2, serves in the books as the point-of-view character for a whole lot of chaos happening at the White Tower. We know from released footage that this chaos will start right at the beginning of the season, but in that footage we see Nynaeve serving as a witness to those events, not Min.
Verdict
So, to recap from the list of plotlines above, from The Dragon Reborn events (1), (2), and (3) are probably not happening, while (4) will be heavily amended and (5) is an unknown. From The Shadow Rising, (2) and (3) will be apparently taking place with the same character roster as in the books, while (1) and (4) will still take place with slightly altered lists of characters.
Whatever happens, this is going to be one of the fantasy television events of the year. The Wheel of Time season 3 premieres on Prime Video this Thursday, March 13. Get ready.
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