The Wheel Of Time Season 2's Sniffer Powers Explained

Spoilers for "The Wheel of Time" Season 2

In the first episode of "The Wheel of Time" Season 2, the show jumps forward in time roughly half a year, fracturing the show's established narrative. After spending most of Season 1 together, the primary heroes of the story are scattered as Season 2 opens, which means the scenes begin to feverishly shift from one character to the next as the ever-more complex story unfolds.

When we catch up with Perrin (Marcus Rutherford) and Loial (Hammed Animashaun), we find them traveling with a group of Shienaran soldiers who are hunting down their enemies on the road. As they go along, at one point, they talk about a "sniffer."

In the "Wheel of Time" books, a sniffer is described as an individual with a unique gift: the ability to literally smell violence. When a violent act is more intense, it creates a stronger "scent" for a sniffer to follow. In essence, this turns them into trackers, an especially useful ability when what you're tracking is a pack of frenzied Fades, Darkfriends, and Trollocs that stole a very important horn and nearly killed your Ogier friend at the end of Season 1. The interesting thing about the sniffer storyline in Season 2, though, is that it's technically combining a couple of different people and elements from Robert Jordan's original "Wheel of Time" books.

The second "The Wheel of Time" book, titled "The Great Hunt," brings in the morbidly snuffling concept of sniffing via the character Hurin. The sniffer helps guide the group of Shienaran soldiers in pursuit of Padan Fain (played by Johann Myers in the show). But Hurin isn't in Amazon's series — at least, not yet. Instead, showrunner Rafe Judkins seems to have opted to roll the character's abilities into another important individual with the sniffing ability: Elyas Machera.

In the source material, Elyas is an old Warder who discovered that he is a wolfbrother. Like Perrin, he has the trademark golden eyes and is a wild character who lives in the wilderness. Technically speaking, Elyas should have shown up in Season 1. However, considering the fact that there are literally thousands of named characters in Robert Jordan's books, it makes sense that Judkins and company didn't try to shoehorn yet another larger-than-life personality into the show's opening salvo. They similarly brought in the ship captain Bayle Domon (Julian Lewis Jones) in Season 2, even though he's introduced long before that in the books.

The late introduction of Elyas appears to be an attempt to double characters up. So far, the role Hurin played in the source material is being fulfilled by the violence-sniffing wolfbrother Elyas. While it's a shift from the original narrative, it's nice to finally have Elyas on the scene, as he plays a pivotal role in helping Perrin accept his own canine disposition. Many of the changes to the source material have been irksome to fans, but this seems like an easy swap that lets the show introduce both a semi-important character and concept without burning up too much screen time in the process.