The Wheel of Time Season 3 won’t be premiering on Prime Video until Thursday, March 13, 2025, but that didn’t stop the powers that be from giving fans a sneak peek last week. Amazon dropped the eleven minute cold open of The Wheel of Time Season 3 online and it’s red hot. What starts with the sneaky Red Sister Liandrin (Kate Fleetwood) being brought before the Amyrlin Seat (Sophie Okonedo) to answer for her crimes as a Darkfriend last season — namely kidnapping and selling the heroic Nynaeve (Zoë Robins), Egwene (Madeleine Madden), and Elayne (Ceara Coveney) as slaves to the invading Seanchan — turns into a chaotic battle that shatters the integrity of the White Tower.
As soon as Liandrin is exposed as a Darkfriend and member of the Black Ajah, she calls upon her sisters in the room to come to her aid. Soon it’s revealed that all of the Ajahs have been infiltrated by the Black Ajah. Sisters turn upon sisters, resulting in a extended battle where beautiful women of all ages, races, shapes, and sizes tear each other apart with sheer power. It’s a relentlessly cool scene that simply goes hard.
The sequence has resonated so much amongst Wheel of Time fans because it not only teases even more juicy drama to hit the White Tower in Season 3, but because it depicts the Aes Sedai in all their ferocious glory. The fantasy genre is flooded with big medieval style battles packed with warrior dudes and duels between tall and handsome knight. In The Wheel of Time, a whole room of full grown women get to break each other down. Full grown women, who are all unique, yet all uniquely powerful; women whom other women might actually be able to see themselves as.
“I mean, it’s something I’m very proud of in the show,” Wheel of Time star and executive producer Rosamund Pike said. “Robert Jordan wrote this fantasy series that people, namely women, who had never previously been able to read themselves into fantasy so easily, suddenly had role models everywhere in this series.”
Of course, women exist all over the fantasy genre. What Pike is referring to is the fact that The Wheel of Time features many, many matriarchal societies, from Andor to the Aes Sedai, where traditional gender roles are reversed. After all, the whole plot of The Wheel of Time centers on the fact that the most powerful channeler of all time has been reborn in the body of a man, Rand al’Thor (Josha Stradowski), who is just as likely to save the world from evil as he is to succumb to darkness and insanity because his gender is afflicted by the “taint.”
“I mean, [Jordan] wrote a very, very modern tale, which we know,” Pike said. “But I think the way the show’s been cast and what we’ve looked for in the diversity and even, you know, on all fronts — whether it’s in terms of ability or neurodiversity or race — we’ve really wanted to be inclusive in the Aes Sedai because power is everywhere.”
“I think that’s the message we want to set forth. That power is — beauty, yes — but also power is another thing that isn’t governed by one particular look.”
Because Robert Jordan described all of the Aes Sedai as having an “ageless” look, that made them look forever beautiful, wise, or even glowing, some readers took umbrage with how Prime Video’s Wheel of Time interpreted this. Showrunner Rafe Judkins went out of his way to cast actresses of all ages, sizes, and ethnicities to play the Aes Sedai. Pike affirmed that she was all about this approach.
“I know what Robert Jordan describes as an ‘ageless-ness’ in an Aes Sedai face,” Pike said. “I mean, that’s always problematic when casting a show because in order to convey the depth of experience of these women, you can’t have an entire cast of twenty-something women playing the Aes Sedai. It it doesn’t work.”
“So we have to interpret ‘ageless’ as something to do with spirit, I think. Not to do with conventions of appearance.“
No one who watches the eleven-minute Wheel of Time Season 3 sneak peek of the Aes Sedai battling it out in the White Tower could possibly deny each and every woman’s indomitable and ageless spirit.
The Wheel of Time Season 3 premieres on March 13.
