The Wheel of Time Episode 7 Ending Explained: Is Rand Really The Dragon Reborn? Spoilers!
The Wheel of Time Episode 7 Ending Explained: The time for answers has come in The Wheel of Time. In episode 7 (Darkness reigns at shortcuts) it has finally been revealed that Rand al’Thor is the Dragon Reborn a man capable of harnessing the One Power and that, according to the prophecies, he is destined to defeat the Dark One. in the Last Battle or to join him, and that according to one of the keys to The Wheel of Time he could break the world again. But Rand is much more than that. In fact, the penultimate episode has focused more on the past than the future of the character. And it is that Rand is an aiel.
It all started with a scene from his birth. A mysterious pregnant woman dressed in desert robes confronted several armed soldiers in the impressive opening of the penultimate episode. There she was mortally wounded about to give birth. Luckily for the baby, at the critical moment the soldier who comes to her decides to help her. As soon as we see the heron symbol on his sword, we know who it is: Tam al’Thor, whom we believed to be Rand’s father.
The Wheel of Time Episode 7 Ending Explained
He is, in fact, his adoptive father, although Rand suspected nothing until that night when the Trollocs and the Shadow spawn raided Two Rivers. Wounded by a Trolloc and delirious, Tam revealed to his son that he found him as a newborn on Dragon Mountain. Everything works together then, because that is where the Aes Sedai with the talent of prediction, Gitara Moroso, saw the birth of the Dragon Reborn in the presence of Moiraine and Siuan launching the search for the Aes Sedai of the Blue Ajah.
It turns out that Tam left Two Rivers when he was young and joined the army, where he became a master swordsman. But fed up with the war, when he found the newborn Rand could not avoid rescuing the baby and taking him back to Dos Ríos where he would raise him peacefully and away from the violence of the world. At least until that fateful night came. Kari, the woman to whom Mat tries to explain what happened in his hallucinations, is Rand’s mother, but by the time the series begins, she has been dead for several years.
We only know directly about Rand’s biological mother that her name is Tigraine, but the scene has elements that suggest the true background of the character. As her clothing and combat skills reveal, she is a Spear Maiden of the aiel. We speak of a warrior race that inhabits the desert lands between the Western Lands and the Shara known as the Wasteland of Aiel. This civilization is going to give a lot to talk about in the future. Suffice it to say for now that their life, marked by the harshness of the desert and the absence of water, their estrangement from the rest of the nations and their warrior fierceness closely resembles the Fremen of the Dune universe and they are, like them, one of the most interesting civilizations in the books of The Wheel of Time.
The Aiel earned a well-deserved reputation as deadly warriors during the Aiel War, in which they fought the nation of Cairhien in chaos for two years. It had been the King of Cairhien himself who unleashed that war from which Rand was born by breaking an old truce, and with his death the conflict ended. The last battle, known as the Battle of the Luminous Walls or the Blood Snow, took place on the slopes of Mount Dragon; and it is the bloody ravaged field in which we see Tigraine. This is all additional information that the Amazon series has released, so we will soon learn more about the conflict in which Rand was born.
In the series we had already had a lot of news about the aiel before, although it is one of those elements such as Liandrin’s intrigues or the brief appearances of Padan Fain that the series has been seeding very little by little. The first aiel we saw appeared in the third episode, like a hanging corpse that Mat was forced to loot in order to get ahead. Mat has heard that they are as bad as Trollocs, such is the reputation that precedes them, but Thom Merrillin explained to him that no, that Aiel are fighters but they are dedicated to honor. You only have to fear from them when they are wearing the veil.
Later, Loial the Ogier recognized Rand himself as a person from the desert, as he has the same red hair that characterizes them. To the curious fascination of the ogier, he denied it. “An aiel from Dos Ríos who insists he is not. Thats weird. I like oddities”. And it is that Rand did not know his origins until now Min has confirmed it.
Unable to deny his fate any longer, Rand has recognized that he is the Dragon Reborn and that he has been channeling the One Power almost since his adventures began. He has told Moiraine and together, in order not to condemn their companions, they head through the wound to the Eye of the World where they must face the Dark One in the last chapter of The Wheel of Time.
Is Rand really the Dragon Reborn?
Throughout the first season the series has been playing with the possibility that any of the protagonists was the Reborn Dragon. Having ruled out that it was Logain Ablar, Álvaro Morte’s character who turned out to be a false Dragon, we have suspected each of the other characters. Perrin’s golden eyes suggested that he is destined for great things, and we’ve also seen how Mat’s dark side could be linked to the man of prophecies. Any one of them, or Nynaeve or Egwene, could have turned out to be the Dragon.
The confirmation that it is Rand seems to have ruled out all these possibilities, but we must take into account a possibility that the series sowed in episode 6 (The Flame of Tar Valon) and that would make a tremendous difference with the books of The wheel of time. Moiraine suspects that the reincarnation of the Dragon could have split into several bodies. Min’s vision of the group, where none stands out above the others, may have finished confirming this possibility. Rand al’Thor is an aiel and a man capable of wielding cursed male magic, but he may only be one of the five heads of the Dragon Reborn.
