Wheel of Time season 3 sneak peek shows trouble is brewing for White Tower (exclusive)

The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills, but trouble seems to be afoot for the White Tower in season 3 of The Wheel of Time.

As previously revealed in an 11-minute sneak peek at the first episode, the Black Ajah are out in full force this season. But, as made abundantly clear in an exclusive clip Entertainment Weekly can debut above, the Red Ajah could be trouble, too.

The scene introduces us to Elaida do Avriny a’Roihan (Shohreh Aghdashloo), a ruthlessly powerful Aes Sedai of the Red Ajah, who is as proficient in politicking as she is in channeling, and who has a long history and scores to settle with both Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) and Siuan (Sophie Okonedo).

“I don’t want anything except to see the Reds return to our rightful place in the heart of this tower, like we were when I was the highest,” Elaida says ominously in the clip. The other Reds are skeptical of her, because it’s been a long time, and Liandrin’s (Kate Fleetwood) prior antics have put them in a tough spot.

Elaida tells them this is exactly the time they have been preparing for, and then finally reveals her true intentions: “We call for a vote in the hall to send a group of eight sisters to find Rand al’Thor and cage him.”

She’s turned away for now, but this is a portent of things to come, says showrunner Rafe Judkins, who tells EW he wanted to look at the point of view of the show’s antagonists more this season.

But also, he says, “It’s Shohreh Aghdashloo, so you want to do justice to her and give her a storyline and scenery to chew — so we try to give her as much as we can — and this character of Elaida, we also want the audience to be paying attention to her.”

He describes the character as “competent, and extremely shrewd” and a “dangerous politician.” “As soon as you see her come back into this story, you realize, oh, this woman is an operator, and no matter what obstacle is placed in her way, she’s not afraid to find a way to remove it, which makes her a very, very interesting and juicy character,” Judkins explains. “So this was something we were really excited to see for her, and to also see the different color in the show of, what does a group of just Red sisters talk about on their day off?”

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To that end, Judkins says he and the show’s writers were inspired by “what it feels like to be a young person walking into a room full of powerful lesbians in Los Angeles,” when creating this particular scene. The showrunner says it was an experience he and writer Ali Adler have first-hand knowledge of. “You’d walk into this room where just the women in it were so spectacularly powerful and kind of disdainful of everything around them that I felt like that’s the true feeling of the Red Ajah salon — think of where the coolest, most powerful lesbians in the world would hang and what they do there,” he says.

As for the rest of the season, Judkins teases that fans can expect “incredibly iconic scenes from the books that people have waited years to see,” including Rhuidean, Mat fighting Gawyn and Galad, Moiraine and Rand in the Aiel Waste, and, of course, Elaida and the White Tower. But it’s not all big action set pieces and major moments. Judkins is excited to see the characters “have a little fun,” too. “We have enough time and we’ve carved out enough time that we have a lot of characters and a lot of storylines, but also they do have moments to have fun with each other and to laugh. And these characters love each other and we love them, and I think it’s really nice to get to see some of the softer and more down moments with the characters,” he says.

However, this is still The Wheel of Time we’re talking about, which means “some really f—ing trippy stuff that you don’t get in other fantasy series.” For instance? “I feel like you get that with Rhuidean, both for Rand and Moiraine in the rings, you get that with an arch that we have in the show that provides a very trippy moment,” he teases.

Three seasons in, Judkins says he feels like he and the other masterminds behind the show have the confidence to “tell some of these weirder, stranger, more fanciful parts of the books.” He concludes, “I really love those, and I think it makes for interesting television. You don’t know what to expect. And so that’s one of my favorite things about this season and being able to adapt it, is being able to lean into some of the stranger pieces of the Wheel of Time world and let our freak flag fly.”

Season 3 of The Wheel of Time premieres Thursday, March 13, on Prime Video with the first three episodes, with additional new episodes streaming each week thereafter until the season finale on April 17.