‘The Wheel of Time’ Showrunner Rafe Judkins Breaks Down the Season 3 Finale, From New Faces to Shocking Losses
Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for The Wheel of Time Season 3 finale.
After closing the book on its third season this week, Prime Video’s adaptation of The Wheel of Time has officially raised the stakes even higher than we thought was possible. Now that Rand al’Thor (Josha Stradowski) has declared himself the Car’a’carn, with the Aiel people more divided than ever over his claim, there are even more threats rising up against him and those he cares about. From the shadows, the Forsaken Moghedien (Laia Costa) is plotting to collar him — reluctantly teaming up with Liandrin (Kate Fleetwood) in the process — while others who were once his allies, like Lanfear (Natasha O’Keeffe), have sworn to eliminate him at all costs. Even the White Tower has fallen into unrest and infighting, resulting in the Amyrlin Seat, Siuan Sanche (Sophie Okonedo), being deposed and ultimately sentenced to death as Elaida (Shohreh Aghdashloo) ascends to take her place. It’s a dark, bloody finale that sets the stage for an even darker Season 4 on the horizon, provided the show earns a renewal.
Ahead of the premiere of “He Who Comes With the Dawn,” Collider had the opportunity to speak to several cast members as well as showrunner Rafe Judkins about the finale’s biggest and most shocking moments. Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, Judkins discusses the conversations that go into making any decision about a character’s exit from the series, why the writers wanted to introduce the interdimensional beings known as the Finn this season, and how Moghedien’s hand in Sammael’s (Cameron Jack) death makes her an even bigger threat moving forward. He also elaborates on the “gut punch” of the Tower coup and its deadly outcome, what the Alcair Dal moment sets up for both Rand and the show in a potential Season 4, and more.
COLLIDER: I know there’s probably both a practical and a story reason for what happened to Loial in the penultimate episode, but it doesn’t change the fact that my heart hurts, Rafe.
RAFE JUDKINS: I know. 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.
But always on the show, the thing we have to do is bring people in when they’re going to make the most impact, and then take them out when they’re done making their impact. 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. 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 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.
Rafe Judkins Explains That Surprise Eelfinn Appearance in ‘The Wheel of Time’ Season 3 Finale
The finale introduces a character that I think people might be really surprised to see, which is the Eelfinn. If you’re paying attention, the breadcrumbs have been laid for this moment, but how soon did the conversation start about introducing the Finn in the finale? They’re one of the more out-there aspects of the book, and it’s such a terrifying encounter when Mat goes through the doorway.
JUDKINS: We’ve always wanted to do it. It was our plan this season to put in the Finn at the end. It’s such a trippy moment in the books, and I always had a little bit of nervousness that the studio or network would be like, “You can’t do this. It’s so insane.” But luckily, with the strike falling when it did, it was just in the pages and had to be shot. The scripts were all done, and there was no way to change them.
For us, I really like how it plays. I wanted it to be as trippy and surprising and bizarre and horrifying as it was in the books, and so by landing it in the middle of the finale, where so much else is going on, it hopefully gives the audience that feeling of, “What? What am I even watching? What am I experiencing?” For all of the people who know nothing about the books, when they saw him on the day — Robert Strange is playing the character, who is this amazing actor; he’s done a lot of creature work, and so he helped build how the Finn would function in our world — everyone on set was like, “This is crazy and scary,” and I was like, “Well, we’ve done our job then.”
Nynaeve finally overcomes her block, which has lasted for the majority of the past two seasons. Did you always know that you wanted to build up to the moment in this week’s finale?
JUDKINS: Yeah. We’ve known since Season 2, when she goes into the Arches, that we wanted her to emerge from her block at the end of Season 3. It goes on longer in the books, but I feel like, on-screen, you almost can’t stand it any longer than we’ve already done it. We’d always planned for that and planned for this character of Elenar, her daughter that she spends time with in the Arches, to almost be her telling herself, “You have to trust the river. You have to release control,” essentially, which is the hardest thing for Nynaeve to do.
Here at the end, when she’s underwater, which is obviously when we tied together two different moments from the books to make this block-breaking moment for Nynaeve, we’ve been building to it the whole time. You see, throughout this season, the lessons she’s learning, even from the Sea Folk, and being seasick itself. Why is she seasick? She wants to control everything and stand her ground, and sometimes you just have to move with the boat. Sometimes you have to move with the water. Sometimes you have to trust the river. For her and channeling, to really be in control, she has to submit. That’s the story we wanted to tell with her and deliver it at the end.
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He also discusses Rand and Lanfear’s confrontation, Rand’s emotional scene with Moiraine, and more.
In the finale, Moghedien is the one who gets the definitive upper hand on Sammael. How did you want to use that scene to emphasize that she’s still a really big threat at this point — not just to the heroes, but to the other Forsaken?
JUDKINS: 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. 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.”
Rafe Judkins Talks the “Gut Punch” of That Character Death in ‘The Wheel of Time’ Season 3 Finale
There were a lot of fan theories going around about Moiraine and Lanfear this season, some of them rooted in book knowledge, that one or both of them might not make it out of their fight. Was there ever a version of this sequence where that was the case? Were you tossing around different outcomes at all?
JUDKINS: 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.
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.
Speaking of Siuan, I was initially really shocked when I watched the scene, but in hindsight, given what happens in the books, I don’t know that I can picture this version of Siuan doing a man’s laundry, for instance. What fueled the decision to kill her off?
JUDKINS: I had a long conversation with Sophie Okonedo, who plays Siuan, early in the process, and was like, “This is the story that continues in the later books.” To be honest, for both of us, it felt like that wasn’t a story that we needed an Academy Award nominee playing, necessarily, in the show. It’s just hard to have an actress at Sophie Okonedo’s level sidelined to that degree, but still being present throughout the show. She has a great storyline with Egwene that we do lose, which is really the biggest loss to losing Siuan, but we have a plan for how we’re going to still tell that story with a different character.
We’re always thinking. It’s never like, “Oh, you know what would be shocking? Kill Siuan.” Five billion conversations have gone into it. We know exactly what we’re doing with every storyline Siuan has in the books and who’s taking over those and which ones are getting cut. Anytime we make a change like that, we have a plan for how that’s going to flutter through into the rest of the series. For us, it ultimately came down to the fall of the Tower as the peak of drama and tension for the White Tower and for Siuan, and so to continue her story as a washerwoman, after that… it just didn’t feel like our version of Siuan made as much sense in that story.
In terms of blocking out the season, there’s so much ground to cover. Why did you want to end Season 3 with Rand at Alcair Dal? It does set up the internal schism that’s growing within the Aiel. You’ve got the Shaido on one side with Couladin and Sevanna, and Rand on the other. If the show comes back for Season 4, is this division within the Aiel going to be the main conflict?
JUDKINS: We really want to just set up Rand. He’s the forefronted character of this season, and at the end of it, we wanted to really have him in a place where he’s embracing his duality. A lot of this season is about his duality and about the fact that he doesn’t get to save the world or destroy it. He has to do both. He doesn’t get to be a sweet farm boy or power incarnate. He has to be both.
What we wanted to do was have the season end with a moment where he truly embraces his duality, and you hopefully see that in his endpoint of the season. The season has begun with Egwene seeing the good in him and the best in him and Lanfear seeing the worst in him, and both of these women embracing those sides of the character. By the end of this season, you have Egwene looking at him and seeing the worst in him, and Lanfear looking at him and seeing the worst in him because she’s seeing the best in him. They’ve flipped by the end of the season, so it has a really nice dramatic circularity to it for us. His face at the end of the season sells our story that we’re going to tell with him in Season 4.
Is there anything you can say about a status update for Season 4?
JUDKINS: I can’t say anything, but we have great plans for it. If we get to do it, I think it’s going to be fucking amazing.
All episodes of The Wheel of Time are available to stream on Prime Video.
- Release Date
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November 18, 2021
- Network
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Prime Video
- Showrunner
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Rafe Judkins
- Directors
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Sanaa Hamri, Ciaran Donnelly, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, Thomas Napper, Maja Vrvilo, Wayne Che Yip
- Writers
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Amanda Kate Shuman, Dave Hill, Rohit Kumar, Justine Juel Gillmer, Celine Song, Rammy Park, The Clarksons Twins, Katherine B. McKenna
