Tarmon Gaidon: If WoT was a Sci-Fi TV Show or Film Franchise.
Given the recurring image of Rand & three women on a boat, RJ’s claim to have had the ending in mind from the very beginning of the series, and the final scene of Excalibur, which RJ named as his favorite genre movie, I offer the following possible endings for the Wheel of Time, based on the finales of other properties, as shown on the small and large screens.

Options
- After grappling with the insanity-making & tremendous power needed to defeat the evil god-being for the entire series, Rand barely makes it into the Pit of Doom to do his thing. At the last minute he hesitates, and Egwene bursts out of nowhere shrieking about power and how “precious” it is and that she alone deserves it. She is so busy with her newly discovered weave that steals One Power strength and ta’veren abilities that she inadvertently slips and falls into the Pit of Doom, where she provides the necessary buffer to allow the Dark One to be re-sealed away without tainting the force used in the sealing. Back in Tarwin’s Gap, just as Mat & the armies of the Light are about to be overrun, a cry rings out “The raken are coming!” The Seanchan save the day and the morat’raken pluck Rand & Perrin from the crumbling slopes of Shayol Ghul. They return to the Two Rivers to find that Siuan has set up a new channeling organization in Emond’s Field, so they kick her ass, and drive her out, when Leane stabs her in the back. The end. Oh, except for the boat thing, which unfortunately means Min lives forever.

- Rand jumps around in time and finds himself in the Fourth Age at some points and sometimes in Emond’s Field on Winternight. He meets a stout guy with a beard & hat & cane who claims to be responsible for Rand’s problems and tells him to solve the riddle of the Prophecies. Then he loses all his hair and then turns into a young guy who claims to be a professional writer despite an astonishingly weak vocabulary. Rand goes to Shayol Ghul in the past, present and future, and has the channelers with him in each era balefire the Bore. The changing writer guy appears and reveals he is the Dark One, and is not evil but was only testing Rand & the world to prove a point about knowledge and memory and misinformation. All the Two Rivers folk play cards, despite Nynaeve claiming they are all going to hell for it, Egwene sniffing at anyone who points out her tells, and Perrin getting mad because the queens on the cards remind him of Faile (she’s just in the next room).

- As Rand & company close in on the leadership of the Shadow, with almost every cool good guy getting killed, they encounter Shaidar Haran who claims to be on their side against the Shadow, but a Draghkar is attacking through the window, so Shadar Haran takes Rand through a gateway, leaving Nynaeve looking around all confused. On the other side of gateway, Rand is accosted by a number of soldiers, one of whom is Lan who isn’t dead after all, along with Janduin, Shaiel and Cadsuane, who is young, wearing no ornaments and petting Hopper, who does not seem to be reacting to her as if she were a two-legged she who touches the wind that moves the sun and calls fire, so clearly she cannot yet channel. With these interesting new developments shown, the series is cancelled by Fox. Bastards.

- The Dark One takes the form of Thom after the latter is murdered by Moridin. Lews Therin appears to Rand and has him drink from the Winespring River and tells him “Now you’re like me,” thus making him the new Dragon. The Dark One disguised as Thom comes upon the heroes, and Min wastes her knives flinging them at him, as “Shai’thom” advises her to save them. Rand & the Dark One team up to break the Seals on the Bore, by lowering Logain into the Pit of Doom in the hopes that his experience of being gentled & Healed provides him with some sort of immunity. Logain thinks that the Creator has been sending him dreams of a happy world of no death & no Last Battle and thinks that breaking the Seals will bring him to this world he dreams of. The Seals are broken, which makes Rand unable to channel, and the Dark One human. In the ensuing earthquake Moridin changes sides and helps save Loial from a tree collapsing in the Blight. Shai’thom starts to escape Shayol Ghul, but Rand runs him down and they have a knock-down drag-out brawl, which Rand loses because he brought a rock to a knife fight. Min appears out of nowhere and kills the Dark Thom with her last knife. Rand is mortally wounded but tells his friends to flee while he returns to the Pit of Doom to re-Seal the Bore to prevent the Blasted Lands from sinking under water before his allies can retreat home. A few of them escape when Perrin manages some last-minute repairs to a steamwagon, but Rand is fading fast when he rescues Logain from the Pit, and tells Master a’Vere that he must be the new Dragon Reborn. Master al”Vere is clueless so he asks the reformed Moridin to advise him. He is also sad that Logain will not get back to his Aes Sedai slaves, but Moridin advises him that maybe he can change the rules. Rand stumbles out into the Blight and lies down to die. Bela & Scratch come snuggle up next to him, and the last thing he sees is Perrin’s steamwagon trundling through a gateway to safety. Meanwhile he walks into the common room of the Winespring Inn where all his friends are waiting for him and smirking and Tam tells him they’re all dead, and half of the chapters of the last book have taken place entirely in Tel’Aran’Rhiod in a dream they mutually created. Later, the paperback version features an epilogue with Moridin explaining to a couple of stupid Andoran guards who represent the more obtuse readers exactly who killed Asmodean and why the term “RAFO” was flung around so much.

- A male channeler is gentled and executed, and then wakes up with the Last Battle a few days away. He meets a hot Seanchan flier who crashes her raken after trying to free a bunch of prisoners taken by Shadowspawn. She leads him back to meet the Dragon Reborn but they take him prisoner and when he argues, they take off his pants and show him that he has Trolloc legs. He is upset but escapes and returns to Shayol Ghul where Lanfear explains how he has finally helped the Shadow kill Rand ‘alThor by giving him information that will lure him into a trap. He defies the Shadow and strikes a blow for free will or something. Rand breaks into Shayol Ghul to liberate the prisoners, and ends up badly wounded in a fight with Shadar Haran. Rand’s girlfriends have merged into a single woman with traits of all three of them (Elayne’s pregnancy, Aviendha’s red hair, Min’s uselessness) who diagnose Rand as dying of heart-not-working. The half-shadowspawn protagonist offers Rand his heart and all is well. The Seanchan woman looks sad.

- As the Trollocs close in on Tar Valon, Rand is PO’ed because Min is dead and he’s blinded as well. He goes into Tel’Aran’Rhiod with the help of the Dark One to combat Moridin, who has made himself into an army by taking over other channelers. Rand wins but dies. His body is reverently carried into the Pit of Doom by several Myrdraal, and the Trollocs who have broken through the human lines pause their attack before they can slaughter the beaten-down defenders. The Dark One chats with the Creator and promises that any Shadowspawn who want to leave the Blight will be allowed and everything will be okay. Why we are supposed to give a damn is never explained.

- A middle-aged-to-elderly Rand is taken into the Great Holding by Seanchan spies, and compelled to lead them to a ter’angreal shaped like a glass skull of a Shadowspawn. After a fight that read much better in the preview chapters, the main Seanchan operative escapes and Rand is left to hide from a gigantic balefire blast in a cupboard. Amazingly enough, this works, even though he is thrown several miles. Afterwards he is fired as the Dragon Reborn and he & his friends sniff contemptuously at the paranoid High Lord who is always worried about Seanchan spies, as if this little adventure has not justified that “paranoia”. From there, Rand meets up with two kids who claim to be the children of the Queen of Andor who has been kidnapped. Since Rand used to sleep with her, he goes along to help and they end up following the Seanchan spies (after a whacky duel on the back of racing carriages through the Blight as tiny Trollocs chase them through the trees) into Shayol Ghul where the Pit of Doom keeps reconfiguring itself and it turns out the skull-ter’angreal belonged to a race of Dark Ones who built the remnants of the Age of Legends or something. It is also revealed that the kids are Rand’s, and in the final scene, after a rather lame wedding of elderly people who are a lot more pear-shaped than when the series started, the Crown of Swords blows off Rand’s head, and his son tries it on. It does NOT make us want to read more books about his adventures as the new Dragon Reborn, and he goes off to star in a Michael Bay trilogy based on fucking up the Malazan Book of the Fallen.

- Humanity launches a two-part assault on Shayol Ghul, with Perrin leading an army to attack it directly, while Mat leads a small group of PoV characters into the Tower of Ghenji to break the last Seal. Rand goes with him, but bails halfway through once Egwene is rescued from a tribe of short Ogier and they are recruited to the cause. Rand goes alone to confront Moridin and Shadar Haran and to his horror learns that his friends are walking into traps and Shayol Ghul is fully operational. He loses his temper over Moridin’s insistence that he turn to the Shadow and fights Moridin while Perrin & his wolf assistant realize the Bore is still Sealed and pull up before more than a handful of wolves and Aiel run smack into the mountain. Gareth Brynes croaks a warning that it’s a trap in case someone thought the now-visible onrushing horde of Shadowspawn was a surprise party. Meanwhile Mat runs into trouble when Cadsuane goes to use an ornament’greal to open the Tower but takes a Trolloc arrow to the chest, which makes her fart. Mat confuses the Shadowspawn defenders by pretending to be their friends and asking them to come out and help, and traps them in turn. To everyone’s disgust, the mini-Ogier turn the tide of the battle, while Mat & Aludra plant bombs around the Seal to destroy it. Perrin realizes the way is clear and leads a charge of wolves into the Pit of Doom to destroy Shayol Ghul. Rand is defeated by Shadar Haran, but the Myrdraal turns on Moridin and throws him into the Giant Fiery Toilet. Perrin throws his hammer at the Bore and barely runs fast enough to get out of the tunnel of spikes. Rand tries to help Shadar Haran escape so it can be a real boy, but stops to pull off its head, and it dies. Rand Travels from Shayol Ghul just before it blows up. Mini-Ogier party! Brandon Sanderson promises to write another series in 15 years describing the Age of Legends and War of the Shadow. There is no way this can possibly go wrong.

- An explosion on Shayol Ghul wipes out the Forgers which means the Shadow are suddenly economically doomed unless they make peace with humanity. Egwene being Egwene, she decides to send Rand & co to escort the Dark One to a peace conference. Along the way, the Dark One is assassinated, and Moridin arrests Rand & Nynaeve who were trying to Heal him, charges them with the murder and brings them back to the Blasted Lands for a trial. Egwene hangs them out to dry, because breaking the law in this instance would not bring her more power. Mat, Perrin & the rest of the good guys sneak through the Blight to rescue Rand & Nynaeve from a prison camp, and when they get back together, discover Olver was behind the assassination all along, which greatly disappoints Mat who tortures him to learn the identities of his co-conspirators. Rand and everyone else comes running to the rescue just in time to save Shadar Haran from a further assassination, after Mat & Nynaeve rig a ter’angreal-homing cannonball to seek out and kill Moridin lurking nearby in his fancloth cloak. Gaul shows up with the Aiel to shoot the explosion and then everyone saves Egwene & Shadar Haran at the peace conference. Shadar Haran & Rand embrace and agree to put aside their bigotry. Afterwards, the good guys are hanging out together on a ship and Egwene sends them a dream to tell them to come back to Tar Valon to be gentled and exiled to a farm. Mat cocks an eyebrow at Rand and says “If I were a channeler, my response would be ‘Go to hell.’ If I were a channeler.” Rand is a channeler, but instead he quotes the Travels of Jain Farstrider and orders Domon to set a random course. Everyone now understands the boat Foretellings.

- In the midst of the civil wars wracking Tanchico, Rand must fight the latest iteration of Shadar Haran, who has replaced his Myrdraal cloak with fancloth and is butchering the rival factions. Padan Fain shows up with an elite, Myrdraal-hunting task force, but gets killed tracking it through a slaughterhouse in spite of their fancy equipment. Rand ends up having to take the monster on alone, and manages to cut off its hand. It repairs the damage with pieces of a chamber pot. Rand tracks it down to the docks and boards its ship, where an Uruk-hai skull is described on a trophy rack to the delight of crossover fans, and he finally kills the Shadowspawn, only to have a bunch of other super-Myrdraal show up, give him an ancient sword, and sail off. This is the END of WoT, and subsequent lame-ass pastiches about Uruk-hai fighting Myrdraal DO NOT COUNT. Even if the tie-in computer game is cool.

Special Sub-Category: Joss Whedon writes A Memory of Light….
- Rand sacrifices himself to prevent the Dark One from breaking into the world and the series has a nice symmetrical ending, with an appropriate ending quote. But in order to milk one more book out of the whole deal, he is resurrected by a rogue White Tower experimental project. It turns out that by using his blood, a newer, more perfect form of Shadowspawn are created. It is both cute and the most disturbing creature in the whole menagerie of the series, and Rand pushes it through a gateway and it cries out piteously as it dies. Most of the other characters who are, in retrospect, obviously an early version of the cast of author’s next project in the genre, are killed off, but Min survives despite being a traitor & annoying.

- Nynaeve: “Do you know what happens to Spiders that get struck by lightning?”
Moghedian: “??”
Nynaeve: “The same as anything else.”
Reader: That was stupid
Author: Blame Nynaeve, not me.

- Rand leads all the Asha’man into the tunnel of teeth-spikes to confront an army of Shaidar Harans, and they’re about to be overwhelmed… but Nynaeve is working a weaving on the sword which Brandon Sanderson forgot to describe how Rand found it a couple books before. As a result, ALL the Asha’man are turned into Dragons Reborn, and are not immediately killed by the super myrdraal. How this does anything to stop the god-like evil being who can’t be grappled with, I have no idea. Then Mat’s foxhead medallion explodes and kills the Dark One and they win, despite leaving a giant crater where Emond’s Field used to be.

- Rand & co sneakily pretend to turn to the Shadow, but it is just a ruse to allow them to assassinate the Forsaken in a Godfather-type montage. The surviving heroes meet in an alley in Caemlyn afterwards, all battered and bloody. A whole army of Shadowspawn comes after them, led by the Dark One, on whom Rand calls dibs. They draw their swords and we turn the page to the glossary.

- Tor releases the books out of order, doesn’t advertise them properly and cancels the series after book 2.


Please feel free to offer your own ripped-off scenarios, particularly for those whose ending I have not seen and thus could not translate to WoT, such as BSG or Stargate or Harry Potter.