"The Wheel of Time" and the Ache of What-Might-Have-Been

It's time to start making peace with the end of our beloved series, but we must always be thankful for what we had.

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First, I want to promise that I’m going to get back into my readings of The Dragon Reborn soon. I’m on the road doing signings for my queer Appalachian romance novel (Country Road Romance, if you’re interested), so I haven’t been able to read as much of the book as I’ve wanted. Besides, like many of you I’m still grappling with the reality that the show was canceled and working through my complicated feelings about that phenomenon so, for this week, I’m going to talk a bit about why it is that so many of us are still trying to wrap our heads around the fact that a show that had garnered a pretty devoted following has nevertheless been given the old heave-ho by a streamer that has clearly decided that it’s no longer worth investing in long-form fantasy TV storytelling.

Part of the sadness, to be sure, comes from the fact that the third season ended on a cliffhanger, with Rand poised to fully embrace his identity as the Dragon Reborn and the Car’a’carn of the Aiel, to say nothing of the fact that Forsaken are loose, the White Tower is riven, Nyneave has come into her powers, and Perrin is held captive by the Whitecloaks. This is all a lot, and all of our characters still had quite a lot to give us in terms of story and development. Now, we can’t help but wonder what might have been, how the characters and arcs and stories that we know and love from Jordan’s books would have looked like in this fantastic adaptation.

There’s also something remarkably poignant and sad about the many pictures and clips that we’re getting of the behind-the-scenes bonds shared by the various actors. While we endlessly debate the merits or flaws of the storytelling choices in the series–and, for what it’s worth, I think that Rafe Lee Judkins and team did a great job wrestling Jordan’s sprawling and unwieldy series into a show that made sense on its own terms while also capturing the essence and the spirit of the original–there’s no question that the cast gave it their all and that they all managed to personify the characters we love from the series. If anything, the cast actually improved on the characterization of the main heroes, particularly the men. Josha Stradowski, Marcus Rutherford, and Dónal Finn deserve all of the praise and accolades for adding new depth and complexity to Jordan’s sometimes paper-thin characterizations, and I give the cast a lot of credit for giving us male heroes that I didn’t want to strangle every time that they’re on-screen.

The real MVP is, of course, Rosamund Pike. I gushed over here last week, so I won’t belabor the issue today, but I do want to reiterate that we’re so lucky to have had such a remarkable talent portraying one of Robert Jordan’s very best characters. Pike is one of those actresses who can elevate any production simply by virtue of her presence. Even through some of the rougher moments of the first season, her talent shone through, and it’s clear that she gave her all to bringing Moiraine to life in all of her glorious and frustrating complexity. Seeing her post an Instagram story proclaiming that she was hanging up her Aes Sedai ring was like a punch in the gut, a potent statement that, unfortunately, and much as we all might wish it were otherwise, it might be time to simply accept that The Wheel of Time as we knew it is over.

The sadness we all feel is exacerbated, strangely enough, by the (increasingly faint) hope that some other streamer, perhaps Apple TV+, would pick up the show and give it a new life. This was always a bit of a stretch, given the changing landscape of streaming television, something that both I and a number of others have noted. Shows like The Wheel of Time are just too expensive to gamble on these days without at least some guarantee of success and, besides, Apple has pretty much poured its enormous resources into shows that are squarely in the realm of science fiction, so I’m a little bit skeptical of the idea that it might now pivot to fantasy. Yes, fantasy and sci-fi are adjacent genres, but they look and feel very different, particularly when they’re brought to life in an adaptation. While I get, and very much share, the hope that Apple might surprise us all and throw a lifeline to The Wheel of Time, I just don’t think that it’s very likely. Every day that passes without word of salvation makes that hope recede further into the distance which means, in turn, that I’ve started to just accept that we’re not going to get a fourth season. (It’s also worth noting that, even if Apple did give the series a fourth outing, it’s very unlikely that it would continue beyond that. It’s always important to remember that series like The Wheel of Time are extremely expensive).

As a result of all of this, I continue to think about what The Wheel of Time might have looked like had it been given the time and space to really develop its stories. By now it’s become accepted wisdom that the show only really hit its stride in season two and that the third season was by far the best, with some truly breathtaking and heartbreaking moments that also set up some bigger conflicts to come. There will always be those who want to criticize the show and refuse to see the good things about it, but for me it will always be a very special sort of fantasy show, one that combined the big-budget spectacle of Game of Thrones with the queerness of Queer as Folk.

But, as we all know, the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills. It may be that, in some future year, we’ll get another adaptation of this series. No adaptation, however, will match this one in terms of the dedication of its production team (the emphasis on the material culture of this world is still something that astounds me) and its potent and unapologetic queerness. So, for now, let’s bid farewell to this beautiful series, and let’s always be grateful for what we had.