When trying to condense 14 volumes of source material like The Wheel of Time into seven or eight seasons of TV, many hard decisions and concessions must be made. Changing timelines for narrative reasons and knowing what to cut are the two most significant tasks when putting together seasons based on so many books.
By all accounts, the third season of Amazon's show The Wheel of Time, based on the huge book series by Robert Jordan and finished by Brandon Sanderson, will focus mostly on book four, The Shadow Rising, which is a major foundational stone for what will come later. However, The Dragon Reborn, the third book in the series, also covers many key events of the story.
Will key elements from The Dragon Reborn make it into season 3 of The Wheel of Time?
Without revealing too much of the plotline for those who haven't read the books, The Dragon Reborn contains several key elements of the story. In this book, events take place in a formidable fortress called the Stone of Tear. Within, lead character Rand al'Thor encounters Callandor, an Excalibur-like sword that can only be drawn by the true Dragon Reborn. Rand drawing the sword is a sign to many that he is indeed this prophesied leader.
Meanwhile, Egwene, Nynaeve, and Elayne return to the White Tower for training and intrigue. Egwene also begins to realize she is a dream walker, a vital aspect of her overall story.
Rand also meets a few of the villainous Forsaken in The Dragon Reborn. One of these meetings was covered on the show when Rand killed Ishamael during the Battle of Falme at the end of season 2, which mostly adapts the second book The Great Hunt. In the books, this doesn't take place until the end of The Dragon Reborn.
Rand himself doesn't have much of a footprint in the third book until the end; he goes off on his own, which is basically what he does in the second season of the show. But this story isn't just about Rand. It's the story of many characters pulled into his orbit who must have their own successes for Rand to have a chance to fulfill his destiny.
The Shadow Rising is one of the bigger early books and gives us a lot of new information about the history of the world in which these books take place. It is hard to imagine how they were going to fit it all into eight episodes even without the need to adapt what parts of The Dragon Reborn they didn't get to in season 2.
The show has done a reasonably good job of shoving a lot of content into little actual air time. They will have to continue to do so if they want to pull off combining The Dragon Reborn and The Shadow Rising in season 4.
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