It wasn’t even clear whether Egwene healed her or she healed herself, but either way it makes me worry about how the show is going to muddle the source material’s rules about how “burning out” or “stilling” (which is the term in the books for taking away a woman’s ability to channel doing the same thing to a man is called “gentling”) works-which is hugely important to several key plotlines down the road. I also think that Nynaeve’s “death” scene was anticlimactic, mainly because there was no way her character was getting killed off so unceremoniously (more proof that this is definitely not Game of Thrones), so there was no real tension there, and also because it didn’t really make a lot of sense how she came back. It felt like I got a huge build up and then hardly any payoff, which is disappointing, to say the least. I’m not demanding something on the order of the Battle of Helm’s Deep from The Two Towers, necessarily (which probably still stands as one of the most impressive battle scenes ever filmed), but something a little more than the Fal Darans shooting a few arrows out of a wall would have been nice. Yes, the bit with Nynaeve and Egwene and the other three channelers basically blowing up an entire army of Trollocs was very impressive-but it was also a letdown. (Not to mention that detailing all the ways in which the show has so far altered the canon material would be an entire essay in itself.) Look, you cannot promise a big climactic battle… and then not give me one Therefore I’m hesitant to criticize even the ones I feel were potentially catastrophic in their ripple effects on later plotlines, because it may be that the show had no choice in the matter. It is nearly impossible, as a result, to tell which deviations from the source material of the books in the last two episodes were deliberate, and which were driven by a lack of Mat. What I will note is that the sudden absence of such a central character for the climactic final episodes of the first season must have been a virtual body blow to the writers, in terms of making the story work. Personally, I feel like anything guarded that closely has to fall firmly in the realm of Not Our Business, so I will refrain from speculation on my own part. The cast and crew have been impressively tight-lipped about the reasons for Harris’ departure, and naturally, as a result, speculation has run rampant among WOT fans both new and old as to why exactly he left. From the way episode 6 “The Flame of Tar Valon” ended, with the rest of the characters proceeding into the Ways while Mat stays behind, and his complete absence from episode 7 and 8 (except for one very brief shot which looks like it could have been cobbled together from earlier footage), it seems clear that Harris did not return to the production after the first shutdown. It finally wrapped production in May 2021. The show briefly resumed shooting for the last two episodes of the season in late 2020, before being shut down again.

But when COVID-19 struck, the production was shut down in March 2020. Barney Harris was present to shoot the principal photography of the first six episodes of the season.

Wheel of time pilot episode