(Minor spoilers)

With the Forsaken loose in the world, the heroes of the Light must chart their own courses and muster hidden strengths as they face the Darkness within themselves.

Adaptations are a discipline well recognised by awards but they remain underappreciated especially in a world where ‘fans’ demand the kind of slavish adherence to source material that cannot understand how different mediums require different approaches to presentation.

The Wheel of Time gets the nature of adaptation right. You could probably argue that it doesn’t have much choice – the books are long and for great swathes, they are overwritten and, honestly for me, tediously slow enough to try the patience of a saint.

That’s not even considering some of the politics of the original novels which haven’t aged all that well.

The last thing you want in an adaptation is to repeat the mistakes of the past, to bore your viewers or to slavishly hold to elements that work wonderfully on the page but cannot be translated satisfactorily to the screen.

This is a very long way of saying that The Wheel of Time season 3 is the best season so far – confident with its characters, ambitious with its set pieces and comfortable with the material it’s chosen to bring to the screen. It helps that we’ve two prior seasons of these same characters slowly becoming the people they are by now – emotional payoffs are that much better because of these histories.

I’m not someone who ever says ‘it gets good after a couple of seasons’ though. What I mean here is that with each character arc we’re seeing, the length it’s got to breathe means that the delivery counts, the substance is there. Our characters earn their disasters, their triumphs and their bad decisions.

Even with all the time they have to play with a couple of characters are less well served – Min being one big example and I think Egwene and Matt Cauthon too. But overall there’s enough space for everyone and some of these highs and lows reflect the focus of the source material on certain characters.

My one concern is that there are still a lot of ‘Chosen’ on the screen and if the books did an average job of explaining who they were and what they wanted, they add up to an entire shadow cast who just don’t come alive in a way that means you know who they are and what they want.

Beyond this, the direction has improved since Season 1 and it feels much more cinematic, even from the high points of Season 2.

Verdict: As ever the outfits are extraordinary and if it doesn’t inspire the commissioning of other shows in the same vein I’ll be very surprised (even if streaming is shrinking budgets).

I’m very much looking forward to Season 4.

Rating? 8 dark friends out of 10.

Stewart Hotston