Warning: The following review contains mild spoilers for The Wheel of Time Season 3.
There’s a pattern to the way I watch Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time that’s still firmly in place three seasons on.
I spend the first two or three episodes getting all worked up by how much showrunner Rafe Judkins and his cast and crew have strayed from Robert Jordan’s novels. Then I snap out of it, remember that no one could adapt a 15-volume series as written, and adopt a less puritanical position. I focus instead on how well Wheel of Time captures the spirit of its source material, as well as how entertaining it is not as an adaptation, but as a dramatic work in its own right.
Measured against these criteria, The Wheel of Time Season 3 earns a passing grade. It’s far from perfect – and purists will pull their hair out over its many departures from the books – but it effectively channels the essence of Jordan’s saga, while also delivering the goods as a standalone fantasy outing.
Picking up shortly after the events of Season 2, The Wheel of Time Season 3 sees the fight between forces of light and dark intensify. The Dark One’s most powerful servants, the Forsaken, are at large. Internal strife runs rampant in Aes Sedai stronghold Tar Valon, fuelled by the rogue Black Ajah. Even sleepy backwater province the Two Rivers is once again in peril. Yet all these threats pale in comparison to the danger posed by prophesied savior Rand al’Thor (Josha Stradowski), whose gradual, One Power-fuelled corruption may be too much for his closest allies – including Moiraine Damodred (Rosamund Pike) and Egwene al’Vere (Madeleine Madden) – to counter.
So, basically, Season 3 is a broad strokes remix of Jordan’s third and fourth Wheel of Time novels, The Dragon Reborn and The Shadow Rising, along with elements from other entries in the series. Characters, concepts, and events are compressed, combined, or outright eliminated as Judkins and his writers’ room as they try to wrangle the books’ numerous subplots, sweeping geography, and dense lore into a coherent eight-episode season of TV. And to their credit, they do a decent job; it’s always clear where people are and why they’re there. That said, as with Seasons 1 and 2, the constant to-ing and fro-ing means there’s rarely enough time for anything to sink in, blunting Season 3’s overall emotional heft.
The third season’s action is similarly underwhelming. Apart from the bloody VFX showcase that kicks off the season premiere and the heavily hyped Two Rivers battle late in the game, there’s not much excitement in The Wheel of Time Season 3. This isn’t a problem in and of itself. After all, Jordan measured out the Wheel of Time books’ spectacle judiciously, and there’s precedent for carrying that over to live-action. The most popular prestige fantasy show ever, HBO’s Game of Thrones, was arguably at its best when characters were trading barbs, not crossing swords. But for this approach to work, the dialogue has to crackle, and The Wheel of Time Season 3’s rarely does. Even the likes of Pike, Sophie Okonedo, Olivia Williams, and Shohreh Aghdashloo – easily the stand-out performers this go round – often struggle to do much with the lines they’re given.
The other make-or-break factor with set piece-lite fantasy shows is that when these sequences do finally arrive, they have to really deliver. The Wheel of Time battle scenes are fine, however, they’re a tad underwhelming compared to those in the aforementioned Game of Thrones and its prequel House of the Dragon, or even the multi-episode siege in Prime Video’s other fantasy series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The CGI is uneven, the staging and shot composition oddly pedestrian. Worse, an air of cheapness creeps into these sequences, as it does the series at large. Amazon MGM Studios clearly shelled out a lot of money for The Wheel of Time‘s third batch of episodes, but the overall presentation robs the costumes, makeup, and sets – all as beautifully designed and realized as ever – of the verisimilitude that makes a made-up world seem real.
All of which positions this review as an outright pan; honestly, it’s not. Just like when I watch The Wheel of Time, when I review it, I have to get the bad out of the way before I’m ready to consider the good. And make no mistake: there’s plenty to enjoy here – provided you’re not too wedded to Jordan’s text and can forgive some rough edges. Heck, there are moments when The Wheel of Time Season 3 is stunningly good. Notably, Episode 4 does a bang-up job of dramatizing a key event from the books involving a mountain of backstory, in a way that plays to the strengths of TV as a medium. No, it’s not a 1:1 recreation of what Jordan wrote (although much of what’s shown more or less lines up with the author’s canon). But the narrative, thematic, and emotional thrust are all on point.
And that’s true of The Wheel of Time Season 3 more broadly, too. Sure, characters frequently behave in ways that will seem alien to hardcore fans – the Moiraine/Lanfear piece of the puzzle this season is gonna drive book truthers wild – and the vibe skews more contemporary than Jordan’s Tolkien-influenced writings (even accounting for the scribe’s racier passages). Yet Season 3 is still a story of reluctant heroes thrust onto the frontline of an era-defining conflict. Of free wheel versus destiny, and self-sacrifice in the face of hopeless odds. Are the details different – even disappointing, on occasion? Absolutely. But if you can meet it on its own terms, it’s worth your time just the same.
The Wheel of Time Season 3 premieres on Prime Video on March 13, 2025.