The Wheel of Time Season 2 Episode 2 “Strangers and Friends” features a devastating breakup.
**Spoilers for The Wheel of Time Season 2 Episode 2 “Strangers and Friends,” now streaming on Prime Video**
Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) relinquishes her bond with long-time Warder Lan (Daniel Henney) and tells the shattered man that they “were never equals.” The rupture occurs after Lan fails to protect a now powerless Moiraine from Fades in The Wheel of Time Season 2 Episode 1 “A Taste of Solitude” and has horrific implications for what might come next in the Prime Video series. Who will protect Moiraine now? Especially at a time when she’s cut off from the One Power? Furthermore, we’ve seen how the abject misery of losing an Aes Sedai can compel a Warder to suicidal ideation. Will Lan cave to his despair? How can this development suit Moiraine in her quest to stop the Dark One and aid the Dragon Reborn?
The Wheel of Time stars Rosamund Pike and Daniel Henney didn’t have answers to any of those existential questions, but they both shared their thoughts on Moiraine and Lan’s rift with Decider in interviews conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike began. Both Pike and Henney identified Moiraine’s inability to channel the One Power as a key contributor to the schism.
“I mean, Moiraine and Lan, as long as they’ve known each other — apart from their initial meeting — as soon as she bonded him, they had a covenant sealed by the One Power and didn’t really have to communicate as you and I communicate,” Pike said. “They felt one another’s feelings. They were psychically, spiritually connected on a deep and profound and interesting level. And so suddenly with the lack of the One Power, they have this distance and this disconnect that’s not even of their making, because they’ve never had to communicate like we communicate.”
“There are jokes in Season 1 about, you know, ‘God, I wouldn’t want to be at one of their dinners because they probably never talk.’ They’re sort of taciturn and silent because they understand everything about each other. So you know, I think they are feeling uncomfortable.”
Daniel Henney told Decider that he always treated Lan and Moiraine’s relationship as a “marriage,” albeit one without romantic intimacy. “The bond is very much like a marriage. They feel what each other is going through emotionally, physically. It’s almost like a twin kind of effect.”
“So when someone that you’re partnered with is severely altered or they change, it’s shocking, you know?” Henney said.
The discomfort between the two characters comes to an inflection point in The Wheel of Time Season 2 Episode 2. Moiraine refuses to let Lan accompany her on her quest to help Rand al’Thor (Josha Stradowski), the Dragon Reborn. She uses his failure with the Fade as an excuse, but Pike revealed to Decider that Moiraine’s reasons were more personal.
“I think Moiraine is feeling deeply ashamed and she’s feeling this loss like a kind of aching belly loss of a depression, and we all know, people who when they feel ashamed, they fight, you know, they lash out. Because shame is one of the worst emotions,” Pike said. “And she feels, I think, ultimately, that she can’t offer him anything anymore.”
Moiraine specifically lashes out at Lan by hitting him where it hurts: suggesting that they’ve never been equals. Daniel Henney interpreted this as a huge blow to Lan. “So I think he just feels a little bit, I don’t want to use the word betrayed, but he’s just he’s kind of surprised that she would say that,” he said.
Pike, however, insisted that Moiraine felt that she couldn’t be an equal partner to Lan. “Him biding his time to wait for her death when she can’t be an equal partner in this relationship is something that feels to her beneath him,” Pike said.
“I mean, she doesn’t express it quite as well as that, because she actually just butchers it and is rather unpleasant, as you see.”
When Decider told Henney that Pike interpreted the line in this way, he sort of rolled his eyes at the “Aes Sedai” logic of it all.
“It’s so funny, because as Lan, I feel like, ‘Of course, that’s what Moiraine would say,'” Henney said. “You know what I mean? It’s just like a roundabout Aes Sedai way of like camouflaging the truth and making it seem like that’s an excuse that makes her seem better. Like she’s coming at it from a righteous place. No, that’s a great answer.”
Moiraine might be doing her worst to push Lan away, but Henney added that the Warder still trusts her “one hundred percent.”
“At the end of the day, they both have the same mission. You know, he signed the contracts, so to speak, and he knows what this is all about. He knows that she’s in it for the greater good,” Henney said. “And he kind of has some emotional outbursts. That’s just because he’s frustrated.”
Pike, too, felt that Moiraine’s outburst came from a place of emotional frustration with the larger situation she found herself in.
“She does have deep respect for Lan, but she’s angry at the situation. And when you’re angry at a situation, you usually take it out on those closest to you, and in this case, it’s Lan,” Pike said. “And so, yes, they have a horrible time, I’m afraid. And, you know, it wasn’t very fun to shoot. She’s cruel, but, you know, I understand her pain.”
“And I think she’s also interesting when she’s cruel. I mean, who wants a character who’s always kind?”