Towers of Midnight is The Empire Strikes Back of the Wheel of Time fantasy series. Now this may seem like a completely ridiculous comparison considering that that film is the second Star Wars movie produced while Towers of Midnight is the thirteenth of the fourteen linear novels comprising the fantasy series. In order to understand the parallel, one must be aware that the construction of that series underwent a tumultuous and quite significant alteration in the wake of the untimely death of its creator, Robert Jordan.
Jordan died in between the completion of book 11, Knife of Dreams and the commencement of writing the immediately follow-up, The Gathering Storm. The series was intended to come to a conclusion with the sequel to that book, thus completing the Wheel of Time series over the course of just thirteen books. Instead, of course, the competed series (not including a non-linear prequel) is comprised of fourteen individual novels. Somewhat like the film adaptations of the final entries in the Harry Potter and Twilight series, what was one book split in the womb and became twins. Except that in this case, there literally was no conceivable way for all the myriad subplots and narrative threads to be tied together in a nice little bow without making the final book literally too expensive to print.
Under the original guidelines outlined by Jordan, the author who took on the job of completing the series, Brandon Sanderson, would have had to turn in a manuscript that would be almost 2,000 pages. Even Stephen King could not justify the expense of printing one single book that size. And so, in what seems to be the new tradition, the conclusion of the mammoth tale was split into (still relatively huge) books. In other words, one can look at the first eleven books in the Wheel of Time as genuinely being a long series while the last three books are like a trilogy unto themselves that wraps everything up.
And within that trilogy within a series, Towers of Midnight is the middle section. And what did The Empire Strikes Back teach us all about the middle section of a trilogy? That it serves a very unique and quite difficult purpose: to resolve certain conflicts that do not need to be stretched across the entirety of the trilogy while also preserving unresolved conflicts as cliffhangers. Perhaps no middle section of any well-known trilogy pulls this off quite as seamlessly as The Empire Strikes Back in the world of film. Towers of Midnight is the literary equivalent of that film because it also manages to strike the perfect balance between resolving conflicts that not only don’t need to be held off until the final entry, but shouldn’t be.
The Wheel of Time series is carrying the load of so many various subplots and mini-plots within those subplots that this became the central problem facing Sanderson. In order to bring everything to a satisfactory ending in one final volume, basically what you would be left reading is nothing but chapters that all end in a climax. It would just be one resolution after another, leaving no opportunity for the kind of texture and character exploration that the series is known for. The actual climactic volume in the series is almost universally agreed to have been unimaginably successful at resolving everything that needed resolving but at a pace that allows full enjoyment. In order for A Memory of Light to do the one and only thing expected and required of it—leave the reader satisfied with (at long last) the ending of the whole dang story—Towers of Midnight first has to succeed at tying up loose ends that shouldn’t get in the way of the real focus of the final book that everything has been leading toward the whole time.
It is not straying too far off the mark nor undervaluing the accomplishment of A Memory of Light to suggest that the real key to the near-universal agreement that the whole series comes to the end it deserved is due to the fact that Towers of Midnight does the job it was required to do which was get the non-essential stuff all wrapped up and out of the way so that the climax could get down to the business of letting good square off against evil in a battle that hopefully turns out to be a triumph of the right team for a change.
