The Wheel of Time Season 3 cut off Siuan Sanche’s head, and in the books Siuan doesn’t die. I’m good with it. I didn’t think I’d ever say that about this show, because back in Season 1 I was hardcore about it. Why does it do that? Don’t they know how the events went?
This one’s late, and I know it. The season’s been gone a couple of weeks. We didn’t do every episode like we usually do. My co-host and I got one or two of them out, and then life got in the way. There were some health concerns in our house, the kind of stuff that keeps you up at night and sends you to the emergency room and eventually the hospital, and we took the opportunity to focus on Mrs. Know-It-All’s wellbeing. I’m really happy we did. Things are on the up and up now, she’s back, and she finished the season yesterday. So I waited for her, because one of the things I really, really loved about this show was talking about it with you guys, and I wanted her in on it.
Big spoiler warning. We’re going to spoil the show and we’re going to spoil the books, and I’m not going to apologize for it.
What the Season Moved, and Why It Still Works
They flipped a couple of events. In the books, Moiraine secures a boat and they go to Tear. It’s Domon, the boat guy she’d hired to carry messages way back last season, because Robert Jordan’s world was a very small world. They get to Tear, the Aiel are attacking, Rand gets the sword, and Tear falls. The next book opens with him sitting there as its ruler, because the Dragon is going to start collecting up kingdoms left and right.
Rafe Judkins, who created the show, swapped it. We didn’t see Tear fall at all. We jumped to the Aiel and Rhuidean instead. In the books, Tear falls, the Aiel find their Car’a’carn because he’s got the sword, and that’s the motivation to go to Rhuidean and see if he’s really their guy. Here he’s the Car’a’carn first, and now they have to go to the Stone of Tear with him. It’s motivationally flipped. I think it still works, and I don’t see a problem with how it’s laid out. A lot of what you learn in that big episode, the one where you see the hole get ripped open in the world, is information you get later in the books anyway.
What got me past the bookcloak stage was listening to Brandon Sanderson on a podcast. He’s the guy Robert Jordan’s widow handpicked to finish the work after Jordan passed. The creators wanted him as a consultant early on, and he did it. He read scripts and gave his thoughts. He said he began to realize the story was too big, with too many working parts, to manage inside a series that for its budget was only getting eight, possibly nine or ten episodes. So as far as he’s concerned, this is very much the turning of the Wheel. These events have happened before and they’ll happen again. According to Jordan, the real world sits in the sixth or seventh age, I believe, and the books are the third. It’s our history, if you will.
Reading is what you see in your own head, and you can’t do a book on TV page by page. I know a lot of people don’t like the way it’s going as far as the books are concerned. My co-host is one of them, and even he’s come around when something is just cool. Mrs. Know-It-All said it last season and she said it again: it’s got to be really awesome for the people who read the books to see it come to life. It absolutely is.
A World People Kept Living In
The critics jumped all over the costumes. Why do the outfits look weird? They wanted English fantasy, something like George R.R. Martin and Game of Thrones. And yes, the Queen of Andor’s getup was very Queen of Hearts, both of the ones she wore.
That’s what made Jordan’s universe feel lived in to me. Time had passed in it. When Rome fell and the Dark Ages moved in, the advancement got swept away and you were stuck in something barbaric for a long while. That happened here with the Breaking, but overall people built on what was left. That’s why you get all these different styles of clothing and cultures with their own way of doing things. Tanchico looks more like Pirates of the Caribbean. That was a good episode, too.
Siuan, Loial, and Fifty Characters
They decapitated her. It’s rough. In the books Siuan gets stilled, she and Leane escape, and she ends up as essentially a scullery maid, cleaning pots for the general Morgase kicked out. Eventually she gets back to Egwene and becomes her servant, and later she’s restored.
Rafe Judkins does a really good job explaining why they didn’t do that. The story gets huge. There are some forty or fifty characters by the end and we’re following most of them. You’ve got an actress of that caliber playing Siuan, and you can’t suddenly go from her being such a major point to that. So this was the logical arc of her character and where it ended.
Same thing with Loial, who I can’t believe they killed. Correction: I hated that he seemingly died. In fantasy, if you don’t see the body, it’s not necessarily real. He broke the Waygate, the whole thing came down, and he fell. Who knows where he fell. Mrs. Know-It-All loved the sound that gate makes when it’s destroyed, that pulse. It’s a small thing, but you knew something had happened.
The show can still wreck you when it wants to. In the first episode, one of the two sisters down in the vault gets her mind wiped, and later you see her trying to relearn how to talk. They’d taken years of her development and regressed her almost to a child. It was so sad. And the Whitecloaks had to be shown being horrible, I get that, but Mat’s mom? Maybe she dies in the books, I don’t remember. It was heartbreaking, especially the way she went out. Mat’s sisters can channel, which I liked a lot, and I honestly don’t recall whether there were more channelers in Emond’s Field in the books, even after listening to the audiobooks while Mrs. Know-It-All was down. (We kept falling asleep to them. We woke up once and the male narrator had turned into the female narrator.) When the girls set that Whitecloak on fire, she was so into it. He was so horrible.
Powers That Aren’t the One Power
Egwene learning to dreamwalk was one of my favorite threads, and Mrs. Know-It-All brought up the time she pulled Rand in with her. Those powers aren’t related to the One Power. One of the Wise Ones says she can’t channel a stitch, but she can dreamwalk like nobody’s business. It’s like this in the books too. Perrin and the wolf brothers, the dreamwalkers, Min’s ability: these are abilities outside the One Power, and they’re all coming back.
Mat and the Three Asks
Mrs. Know-It-All really thought Mat was going to die. She asked us to spoil it for her and we wouldn’t. For her, I understand. For everybody else, I spoil everything.
The thing on the other side of the red gate is the fox from that game they’re always playing in the Two Rivers. The game is essentially a children’s game based on this guy. So when he asks Mat what else he wants, Mat realizes he’s inside the game, and if he doesn’t ask to get out, he doesn’t get out. He asks for all this magical stuff and all these people to leave him alone. Done. He asks for everything in his head to be fixed. Done. He asks to leave. Done. What he forgot is that there are terms. You have to set the price, and if you don’t set it, he does. In the books that whole situation is much longer and more involved.
You already get an idea of the repercussions, because when he sees Min he clearly doesn’t remember how he got there. This isn’t much of a spoiler: the creature filled the holes the horn left with other people’s lives. Battle tactics, information from the past. He got rid of what was overwhelming Mat and filled the gaps. Mrs. Know-It-All put it this way: he lost the memories and got an education.
The Ones We Love to Hate
Fans online have been going rabid about Nynaeve’s block. In the books it lasts much longer than this, and then she has her big moment. Here the moment was amazing. You could tell she felt like she’d been reborn. She came out of it confident, very “I did this.” Mrs. Know-It-All would like her to go after Liandrin next.
She also can’t stand Elaida, who took the Amyrlin Seat. I’m so glad they cast that particular actress. When I heard, I said, “Oh my god, I love to hate her.” Everything from her voice and her mannerisms to her demeanor is haughty. I knew where it was going. I didn’t know it was going to go down like this, and it was smoother here. I’d have liked to see a little more of that process, but they had a very tight time frame.
Then there’s Moghedien. She’s so nasty. She’s spitting in people’s food. She’s so petty that you want to say, you’re Forsaken, what are you doing? The Forsaken she killed and strung up like a spiderweb doesn’t die in the books, at least not like that. In the books he actually teaches Rand how to channel more, so I wonder how they’re going to do that now. And how cool was it when Elayne finds out Gaebril isn’t a real person? It took Thom Merrilin to tell her. He’d been watching the whole time and there was nobody there by that name.
Perrin, Faile, and the Two Rivers
Mrs. Know-It-All loves Faile, and she’s perfect, by the way. It took the entire season for Perrin to finally arc a little bit, standing up for what was right and leading them. Golden Eyes. I kind of like that name for him.
The Battle of the Two Rivers is a big, big deal, and for the budget they had I thought they did a really good job, right down to how they showed that little bottleneck with the Trollocs. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember Perrin surrendering in the books. He probably did, and I see why he did it here. If you know, tell me. Mrs. Know-It-All’s prediction is that they go after him. I hope so too.
She also loved that the Two Rivers just welcomed in the kid from the Tinkers. It’s a rough story. In the books he goes down a slightly dark path, and they almost treat it like an allegory for drug abuse. Once he chose violence, he chose violence every time. If they keep it up with him, he’s on a path. But you can only focus on so many characters at once, so who knows.
Rhuidean
Josha Stradowski, who plays Rand, played all those people in the past, and I thought it was wonderful. You see the original Aiel, who were servants and followed the Way of the Leaf. In the periphery the world is breaking. Volcanoes are erupting, the whole horizon is destruction, and they’re trying to save what they can in those really fast wagons. Then you go all the way back, to her before she was Lanfear, a scientist who thought she’d found whatever powers the Wheel. They broke the world, and that’s exactly what it looks like. You see what look like eyes made of energy staring through the hole. In Doctor Who it was the crack in time. That moment was unbelievable for me.
Moiraine’s side of it was a wonderful visual, with that spinning thing. Mrs. Know-It-All had to watch it sideways because she gets motion sickness from television, and I’d warned her. It was a brilliant way to show the Wheel turning. She sees moment after moment after moment, subtle at first, until it gets closer to her death, and in every version she dies badly. My read is that he doesn’t make it to the Last Battle if she’s alive.
Rand stayed in there seven days past when everybody else came out, and he came back with the rising sun and the two dragons. I love that they’re kind of metallic. They look like bracelets, but they’re more like tattoos.
And then there’s Sakarnen. Mrs. Know-It-All collects rocks, and she has one that looks just like it. She has a baby one too, which she forgot she had. When Moiraine first pulled it out of the tree, she knew exactly what she was looking at, and she said she felt like a part of it. All hers needs is a little light.
The Finale Felt Like a Cliffhanger
For as much as she didn’t love the last episode, Mrs. Know-It-All liked the fight between Moiraine and Lanfear. Her problem is that it didn’t feel like the last episode. She feels like there should be another one. I agree with her. The first season reached the end of a chapter. The second season, which started rough, kicked into high gear and became wonderful, came to a logical close. This one stopped on a cliff.
She doesn’t even count Rand as the cliffhanger. She screams “stop,” he glances at her, and he either stops or he doesn’t. Moiraine is the cliffhanger. We know Siuan died, so is Moiraine going to die too? That’s the one answer she wants out of the finale. Everything else she’s asking about comes from the earlier episodes, and so are most of my questions.
They rushed a lot of elements, too, like Morgase coming to Tar Valon. And Amazon hasn’t even announced a fourth season yet. They need to tighten up, or we’ll never know if Moiraine’s dead. I’m sure they’re going to renew it. They’d be dumb not to.
The Verdict
The Wheel of Time Season 3 is a 9 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
It’s a solid 9. It’s not a 10 because I think we can still go places and there are big things to come. Last season was close to a 10 for me, with the Seanchan and everything Egwene went through coming together. This one I watched knowing how it should go, and they still kept me entertained, told a good story, and held all the pieces together. It was engaging the entire time. Even the one I jokingly called the travel episode, the one after Rhuidean where everybody is going somewhere, was entertaining, and you learned things.
Mrs. Know-It-All gives it an 8. She probably would’ve given it a 9 if she’d liked the last episode more. It was a good episode. She wanted a little more because it was the last one, and you don’t feel resolved. That may be another reason I’m at 9 and not 10. Your mileage may vary.
It’s a very polarizing series. The critics who are harsh are harsh, and everybody else who loves it really loves it.
Tell us what you thought of the whole season. If you’re a bookcloak, by all means speak up, but actually have objections. Don’t be mad about a thing just to be mad about it. Tell me what’s wrong with it and why you didn’t like it. And if you remember whether Perrin surrenders in the books, settle that for me. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
