#tm9 speculation

first of all, i agree with everyone who’s said we’re probably going to get another season with molly. maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but i really don’t think it’s going to happen this early. i mean, in the campaign he doesn’t even touch his backstory at all — why bother starting to set that up more with him in the show if he’s just going to get killed one episode later? i think they know molly is a beloved character and honestly, this would feel very early at least to me (even if it technically matches when it happened in the campaign based on how many seasons they’re expecting the story to take, the pace of the show is much faster so it would be surprisingly soon) so i’m hoping they recognize that a lot of people would feel cheated if after getting so little time with molly, we get even less here.

that being said, i know i could be wrong about that, but i still don’t think it’ll be yasha who does it whenever it happens.

they’ve been setting up yasha as a big fight, yes, but they’ve also set up not just that she’s being controlled but the specific way she’s being controlled — the rune/sigil on the back of her neck. my guess is that while fighting her, one of them will hit it and break obann’s control over her, and she’ll join the team once they realize she wasn’t doing any of that willingly. OR they’ll get lucky and she’ll show up looking for the beacon right around the same time that they’re getting their asses kicked by volstruckers while trying to steal it, and she’ll be the reason they get out alive because she’s a damn killing machine. maybe both! maybe she’s fighting indiscriminately and helping them while also hurting them. or maybe they’ll succeed in stealing it and she’ll have to chase them down to get it, triggering the fight where they free her from obann’s control. i don’t know.

all we know is that (if i remember correctly) she’s about to meet them in zadash because she specifically asked where the beacon and the cerberus assembly are, which most likely means obann caught wind of a very powerful artifact switching hands and wants her to steal it for him. and i suspect that goal is going to make him the villain of season 2. (i forget if she said the beacon or just the assembly, but even if it was just the assembly, i think that must be the reason she’s looking for them. the alternative of course is that she’s there for something related to vess and the book, which maybe is more likely now that i think about it, but i’m sure that’ll end up intersecting enough with the plot that it doesn’t really matter which one he’s interested in. surely if he’s chasing down vess, he’ll want to chase down molly too, right?)

if they go the route of making molly’s death early, which i hope they don’t, i think it’ll happen during the beacon heist, which i don’t hate outside of the timing because they’ve already set trent and the volstruckers up to be a solidly hateable alternative to the iron shepherds.

alternatively, if they give him another season, i think it’ll be obann that gets him in the end. hell, they could even go the route of actually calling the cult of the angel of irons “the iron shepherds” because they’re trying to shepherd the “angel of irons” into the world! it just seems like the perfect way to do it without having to introduce another set of villains. i don’t know how it’ll happen, but it seems to me like obann is both the most obvious choice for the villain of the next arc and the most obvious replacement for the iron shepherds.

maybe…maybe it’ll even be molly that leads them down into bazzoxan, or wherever they decide to set the confrontation. i mean, we know he’s more interested in knowing his past than he was in the campaign, even if he says he’s not, and i have a feeling his blood going into that stone wasn’t just for aesthetics. maybe he’ll start having dreams or just instincts about where they should go next, and they won’t know it’s tharizdun leading them into the same trap obann has been trying to chase them into until they get there, and it’ll be a confrontation with his own past that ends his part of the story.

honestly, i think that’s the best possible outcome, and it feels plausible given how everything has been set up. i think it would be a narratively satisfying way for him to go and work toward setting up the eventual confrontation with lucien, whereas yasha pulling the trigger would just make it make absolutely no sense for her to join the team after.

of course, essek will most likely be somehow involved in all of this too, since he’s also on his way to zadash to retrieve the beacon, but i’m not sure what role i think he’ll play. i do wonder if maybe he’ll end up running with the nein for a while, since pretty much the only other way for him to be involved would be working against them and i feel like that would make the whole trusting-him-and-then-being-betrayed-by-him thing much more complicated. maybe they say they’re also there to return it to the dynasty so he decides to work with them to do that? or if they do go the being-chased-down-by-obann route, maybe it’s more of a “yeah you’ll have this back but first we have to make sure we’re not leading this entity of death and destruction straight to your front door” and essek has to run with them because he doesn’t trust them and isn’t just going to leave the beacon in their hands and hope they’re really going to return it.

personally i hope they’ll still end up going to bazzoxan at some point in the process because i NEED to see my boy verin, but that’s neither here nor there. (godddd can you imagine how delicious it would be to get a confrontation between essek and verin, if verin knows their mom died or if essek tells him? and for verin to see just how cold and cruel he’s becoming as he’s shutting down? that’s definitely just wishful thinking but i will be thinking about it forever.)

so that’s my best guess: everything will converge during the beacon heist, they’ll end up with obann on their tail, and molly will unwittingly be the reason they run right to him, leading to the confrontation where he dies. maybe it’s even obann who’s the reason molly is resurrected again as lucien, bringing one of tharizdun’s chosen back into the fold.

as far as the pirate arc, i have no doubt we’re going to get it, but i think it inevitably has to be later because in campaign time, fjord had lots of time to be haunted by the eldritch horrors before we got to that point, but in show time it’s still pretty early in his personal horror show. i bet we’re going to see more of that warlock and patron back-and-forth before they set sail. that just feels like a plotline that’s so directly tied to his backstory and i don’t think he’s ready for it yet, so i think it’ll be a later-season arc.

hell, it could really even be a season 3 arc if we get the obann stuff and more dynasty stuff in season 2, which is definitely possible — maybe they do actually succeed in bringing the beacon back with essek’s help and then something with molly or yasha pulls them back out into the wastes to have that confrontation with obann. maybe obann regains control of yasha and they could even work the whole kidnapping arc into it as something yasha does before running back to obann, leading molly to him because if obann is potentially curious about vess he’s definitely dying to know what the fuck is going on with molly.