Wheel of Time showrunner delves into the shocking twist of Season 3’s finale

The Wheel of Time season 3’s finale isn’t short on big moments. By the time the credits roll, series protagonist Rand al’Thor’s taken his biggest — and most ominous — step yet toward embracing his destiny as world savior/destroyer the Dragon Reborn. His self-appointed mentor, Moiraine Damodred, squares up for her previously foreshadowed showdown with Forsaken baddie Lanfear, too. Plus, the tensions brewing in Tar Valon finally boil over, ushering in a new status quo for the White Tower in suitably dramatic fashion. But let’s be real: None of this holds a weave of fire to how Mat Cauthon’s season 3 arc wraps up.

[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for The Wheel of Time season 3, episode 8.]

After unwisely venturing through a sinister red arch, Mat finds himself in another dimension where he encounters an Eelfinn: a humanoid fox creature that grants three wishes, genie-style. Unlike a genie, however, the Eelfinn don’t work for free. So, in exchange for literal peace of mind, a magic medallion and spear, and a return ticket home, Mat’s left swinging from a noose! It’s all delightfully bizarre, and signals that — after flirting with the idea earlier in the season — The Wheel of Time is finally, unabashedly entering its cosmic era.

That won’t come as much of a shock to anyone familiar with the show’s Robert Jordan-penned source material. They’re already up to speed with both the Eelfinn and snakelike Aelfinn (Jordan’s other otherworldly barterers, who answer questions instead of granting wishes and haven’t shown up in live action yet). But anyone coming to The Wheel of Time without having read the books will be left scratching their heads — and showrunner Rafe Judkins isn’t worried in the slightest.

“We always have to think first and foremost about non-book readers because that’s the majority of the audience of the show,” Judkins says in a Zoom session with Polygon. “But we wanted to do [the Eelfinn] scene for book readers, because we feel like it’s iconic and important. And I felt like it was one of the scenes that’s incumbent upon us in the adaptation to succeed with.”

Even so, Judkins and his writers room still did their best to ensure newcomers to the World of the Wheel aren’t completely blindsided by season 3’s Eelfinn cameo. Notably, they leveraged Min’s prophetic visions to seed the red arch’s significance in the lead-up to the finale. So, when Mat finally steps through it, Judkins expects that “even people who know nothing about the books are cued up to know this is important, this is unusual […] because they’ve set this up the whole way through the season.”

And if franchise newcomers still don’t get it? Judkins insists that’s not a problem. “I am perfectly fine with them having that feeling,” Judkins says. “And then being absolutely fucking baffled and excited and confused by what is presented with them, and sort of overwhelmed a little bit with the unusualness of it. I really like things that break the traditional TV structures that we’re used to, things that break the traditional fantasy TV show structures that we’ve become really used to.

“Having a scene like that in the finale of the season is a way that you can lean into something that only The Wheel of Time can do and also give our non-book readers a real What the fuck moment where they can then go in and engage afterwards, Google it: What does this mean? Like what? It draws them towards our world and to our books and broadens it at the same time, because they go, I didn’t know something like this was possible in the world of Wheel of Time. And now I do, and that broadens my idea of what this world can be.”

That said, anyone who rushes to Google the Eelfinn won’t come away with a whole lot more information than what we get in the show. Jordan and Brandon Sanderson (who helped finish the final three Wheel of Time books after Jordan’s death) cultivated an aura of mystery around the two Finn races. True, we get hints at what’s really going on with them; their whole twisted trade system is rooted in an ancient treaty with humans, they “feed” on feelings and memories, and their realm is defined by topsy-turvy physics. But really, they’re an enigma to the end — albeit an enigma that comes with a preloaded visual template, at least.

“Right from the beginning, we tried to lean into this idea as, at its simplest — I talked about them like horror elves,” Judkins recalls of designing season 3’s Eelfinn. “Like, how can we take this idea, obviously, Eelfinn, Aelfinn, it’s leaning in the direction — this is what Robert Jordan was trying to do with them originally. So, use that as our basis point and then use the elements that he gives to them. Obviously, these guys, the focus is on this idea of foxes, and so taking those two and combining them together to sort of give to the audience something that feels otherworldly but still a part of our Wheel of Time world.”

To deliver on this brief, legendary prosthetics artist Nick Dudman devised a new, flocking-based technique for realizing the Eelfinn’s furry hide, setting them apart from The Wheel of Time’s existing animal/human hybrids, the trollocs. “[Dudman] used electricity to actually apply the fur directly to the actor’s skin,” Judkins marvels. “So, he actually has fur as if it was growing out of his skin.”

It took more than just innovative makeup to sell the Eelfinn’s otherworldliness, though; Judkins is quick to highlight the wider crew’s contributions to the scene. “Every department did a twist on what they do in the rest of the show. So that it still fits with our entire show, but it should convey to the audience this feeling that it’s slightly different. The grade on it is different. The costumes are different. Everything is slightly askew to the world we’re used to.”

All that effort paid off; the Eelfinn scene is easily among the most memorable season 3 has to offer. Indeed, most viewers will exit the third season keen to get to see these creatures again — and there’s a decent chance they will. Without spoiling things, a rescue mission to the Finns’ dimension is a key subplot in the penultimate Wheel of Time book, Towers of Midnight. But even if the Eelfinn (or Aelfinn) ultimately don’t factor into The Wheel of Time season 4 (or beyond), their debut in season 3 nevertheless marks a new, more supernaturally charged shift in the show’s focus going forward.

For some book readers, this can’t come soon enough — especially after earlier seasons largely downplayed the more out-there aspects of Jordan’s mythology (including excising Rand’s brief multiversal jaunt in book 2, The Great Hunt, from season 2). Yet Judkins remains adamant that diving straight into stuff like alternate realities and timelines, nested visions-within-visions, and the universe-sized personification of evil itself wouldn’t have worked on screen.

“You can’t just throw that at the audience right upfront. […] We wanted [it] to feel a part of our world,” the showrunner says. “Those [cosmic elements] are some of my favorite aspects of the books, and I think we’ve really successfully been able to bleed them into our world this season, both with some of the stuff we did in Rhuidean […] and then also with what we’re able to do here at the end with the Finn and seeing this world that’s different than what we expect. We’re going to keep doing it if we can.”

It doesn’t hurt that doing so further differentiates The Wheel of Time from the likes of House of the Dragon and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. While Judkins maintains that The Wheel of Time isn’t “chasing” those rival fantasy TV titles, he also acknowledges that the show is at its best when it can “lean into the stuff that is uniquely Wheel of Time.”

More importantly, the audience — including viewers only versed in the small-screen incarnation of Jordan’s lore — remain unfazed as proceedings become increasingly, well… fantastical. On the contrary, according to Judkins, fan feedback to season 3’s “trippy pieces” has been overwhelmingly positive. There’s no longer any concerns around dropping even something as wild as the Eelfinn into the mix — and it’s given Judkins the confidence to double down on all things cosmic in The Wheel of Time’s remaining seasons.

“The things that maybe the network might have thought [during] the first season that our audience could never be into, now they’re seeing how they really can get on board with that and can really understand how it works in our world. […] When I turned [season 3, episode 4’s cosmic-infused] script in — because that was one I wrote — everyone was like, We can’t do this. What is this? And I really believed we could do it and that people would respond positively to it, both book readers and non-book readers. And so, you know, it feels great that they have, because I think it emboldens us to be able to do more of that.”