Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series is huge. It’s 14 books long huge, so huge that Jordan died before writing the end of it; author Brandon Sanderson came in to finish it up. With a series that enormous, naturally some things are going to need to be changed for TV, and viewers have already noticed a lot of changes in the first three episodes, which are streaming now.
Some of the changes are comparatively small, liking aging the main characters up a bit. According to showrunner Rafe Judkins, this was done to bring the first season — which adapts premiere novel The Eye of the World — more in line with the rest of the series. “I think the whole series of Wheel of Time books is much more aimed at adult audiences than the first Wheel of Time book is,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “Eye of the World shares way more with Lord of the Rings than it does with Game of Thrones. It’s really very much that high fantasy, adventure storytelling. So for me, I wanted to infuse the first season of the show with a lot of the things that people love about the Wheel of Time series as a whole.”
Winter Night is the event at the end of the premiere episode when Emond’s Field is attacked by murderous Trollocs. And indeed, in the books we don’t see any of it happen; we only see a Trolloc attack Rand and his father Tam at their farmhouse.
To start, Laila isn’t a complete invention. “Well, there’s a scene in the books where Perrin says, like, ‘If I had stayed in the Two Rivers for a few more years instead of leaving, I think I would have married Laila Dearn,'” Judkins explained. “And so that’s what we took as inspiration.” But it’s not just that Laila exists that has fans worked up; it’s that during the attack on Emond’s Field, Perrin accidentally kills his own wife in the heat of battle, slicing her with an axe with a fierce blow meant for a Trolloc.
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