Amazon Prime’s “Lord Of The Rings” Renewed For Second Season!

With several months yet to go before filming even begins on the first season of Amazon Prime’s hugely ambitious adaptation of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, the studio has already gone ahead and renewed the big-budgeted fantasy series for a second season. There are several new details in the Deadline article which broke the news, so allow me to ramble on about them with urgency and excitement. As you can probably imagine, I’m trembling with anticipation.

Amazon Prime's "Lord Of The Rings" Renewed For Second Season! 1
indiewire.com

First of all, we have the news that the second season of the series is already in the works – Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, has confirmed that as we speak, the writer’s room for the series (which includes J.D. Payne, Patrick McKay, Gennifer Hutchison, Bryan Cogman, etc) is currently collaborating on writing the bulk of Season 2 scripts. As is noted in the article, this is really good news because it means that we, the audience, won’t have to wait that long between Seasons 1 and 2. In fact, at the speedy rate that things are going, we could expect to get the first two seasons almost back-to-back. My heart can’t take this.

Additionally, it has been revealed that after J.A. Bayona has finished filming the first two episodes of the series’ first season, the show will go on hiatus for four to five months, allowing time to review the footage and write more material for the second season before moving on with filming. In Deadline’s words: “By going on a longer than normal hiatus, LOTR will be ready with Season 2 scripts so it could possibly film some Season 2 footage during the Season 1 shoot, or even film the remainder of Season 1 and Season 2 back-to-back.” This is, of course, the same tactic that Peter Jackson used when directing his equally ambitious movie trilogy of Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings. Parallels. Parallels!

The article also notes that the majority of the series is expected to film outdoors, on location in New Zealand, as we suspected. That could mean a return to the practical-effects pioneered by Jackson in his movie trilogy, or it might indicate something else entirely (Deadline suggests that it’s because Tolkien loved the outdoors: I have no idea whether they’re right or not).

So there you have it! This is an extraordinary action by Amazon, as it seems to suggest complete confidence in the fledgling series, which has a long way to go before it gets off the ground. While we wait, leave your thoughts and opinions in the comments below!

Should We Be Worried About Amazon’s “Lord Of The Rings?”

This is a departure from my usual posting format in that this is not strictly a news story, but more of a response to a news story. The story, in this case, is actually an interview with Game Of Thrones screenwriters and showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, which was posted online in Twitter thread form by an attendee, who goes by the username Needle & Pen. The interview was shocking, and soon had the entire internet collectively wringing their hands and crying out to the heavens: “How did this happen?”

Should We Be Worried About Amazon's "Lord Of The Rings?" 2
comingsoon.net

Well, by Benioff & Weiss’ own admission, they don’t know – or seem to care. In the interview, which reeks of white privilege, elitism and snobbery, the two men proudly revealed just how inexperienced and unprepared they were for the task of adapting the massive fantasy epic to the small screen, and just how happy they are that they were able to basically dupe HBO into hiring them. For instance, they talked about meeting with A Song Of Ice And Fire author George R.R. Martin for the first time, and confessing to him that they “didn’t really have any” bona fides or experience. In their own words: “We don’t know why he trusted us with his life’s work.”

Now, I’d love to talk about Game Of Thrones, and the various failings of Benioff & Weiss, but that’s not what this post is about – or, well, it is, but only indirectly. This post is, in fact, a response to a response to this interview: soon after that tweet went public, The One Ring.net, the most trusted and reliable Tolkien forum in the world, expressed their concerns that Amazon Prime’s upcoming adaptation of the histories of Middle-earth would fall into the same trap as Game Of Thrones: and they had some legitimate fears, so let’s break down what was said by both sides, and what Amazon can learn from the hugely underwritten, half-baked final season of Game Of Thrones that firmly cemented Benioff & Weiss as some of the fantasy genre’s most hated individuals.

The One Ring.net (or TORN for short) drew attention to the fact that JD Payne and Patrick McKay, the showrunners of Amazon Prime’s Middle-earth series, share many similarities with Benioff & Weiss: both are relative newcomers to the scene, having no experience in TV, or in the making of big-budget, spectacular fantasy epics. Payne and McKay did write a script for a Star Trek movie – but it was never used, which isn’t exactly a promising sign. And, as TORN pointed out rather dismissively, both duos are, when it comes down to it, just “a couple friends”. It’s true that Payne and McKay have been working together for most of their adult lives, just like Benioff & Weiss, but I think it’s worth mentioning that Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, two-thirds of the creative team behind The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, were a married couple when they started working on the ambitious film project, yet nobody has any complaints about that. The fact that Payne and McKay have a close friendship isn’t really a problem, in my opinion. The fact that they have no prior experience – obviously, that could pose quite a substantial problem along the line. But here are my three reasons why we should NOT be worried about Amazon’s Lord Of The Rings prequel series becoming the next Game Of Thrones-level disaster.

1: They’re Not Alone.

For Benioff & Weiss, being handed full creative control over HBO’s most daunting and daring TV adaptation wasn’t a passion project so much as “expensive film school” – or, in Weiss’ words, a “ten year drunk party”. And the two men treated it as such, giving themselves freedom to make as many mistakes as they wanted. They admit in the interview that working with costume designers, for instance, was a “learning experience”. And yet, rather than bring in talented and experienced individuals to help them figure out the process, Benioff & Weiss went in the completely opposite direction, much to HBO’s chagrin – they decided early on that it was going to be just the two of them, stumbling through the series’ development like idiots, because they “didn’t know better”. They were eventually forced to bring in another writer, Bryan Cogman, and were helped by a second, Dave Hill: both men got to write a whopping four episodes each – out of seventy-three.

On the other hand, Payne and McKay are not alone, and have surrounded themselves with incredibly talented people from all different genres of film and television: their writer’s room is nigh on overcrowded, in fact, with Payne and McKay being joined by Gennifer Hutchison of Breaking Bad, Helen Shang of Hannibal, Jason Cahill of The Sopranos, and Justin Doble of Stranger Things, with Bryan Cogman, Glenise Mullins, and Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey as consultants. It’s a far cry from the two-man show that was Game Of Thrones. There are talented and dedicated people involved with Amazon Prime’s series who can help to guide Payne and McKay on their debut journey. Is that all it takes to steer a five-season epic series with a budget close to a billion dollars? No, probably not. But it’s a good first step, and it will hopefully prevent Payne and McKay from indulging in the amateur excesses that Benioff & Weiss seemed to enjoy in their first few years working on Game Of Thrones.

2: There Is Diversity On Amazon’s Team – Though Not Enough.

One thing that immediately stood out in the Benioff & Weiss interview was their casual dismissals of fans’ complaints of racism, sexism, and especially white privilege – i.e., the idea that white men, even without being blatantly racist, still think they are owed certain privileges and rights by virtue of their skin color. For instance, the privilege to simply walk up to HBO and say “hey, give us a TV show to make”.

Benioff & Weiss’ counter to the argument was that Dave Hill, whom I previously mentioned wrote a total of four episodes from 2015 to 2019, is of Asian descent. Vanessa Taylor also had a brief stint working with the two men before leaving to write The Shape Of Water. But, is that really enough? In a series that is known for having some of the most iconic female characters in fantasy, is it enough to have only one woman temporarily helping to write those characters? And do I even need to rhetorically ask if it’s enough to have zero people of color in the non-existent Game Of Thrones writer’s room?

Now let’s take a look at Amazon Prime’s creative team for their Lord Of The Rings series: leaving aside the fact that Amazon Prime Studios is, in fact, run and overseen by a woman, Jennifer Salke, who was recently named the 17th most influential person in Hollywood, we have, in the Lord Of The Rings writer’s room, a total of three women as of right now: Mullins is also a woman of color, while Shang is of Asian ethnicity.

So, Amazon Prime is doing only marginally better than Game Of Thrones in terms of gender and cultural diversity: but at the very least, there’s some progress being made. We have to hope that more women and POC are added to the writer’s room as time goes on, but for now we can at least be assured that there is already more diversity on this team than on the team assembled for Game Of Thrones.

3: Payne And McKay Have Nowhere To Hide.

Okay, that sounds unintentionally threatening. What I mean is this: when Benioff & Weiss began their tenure on Game Of Thrones, they were doing a relatively simple adaptation from page to screen: and while they did introduce a bunch of new elements, they continued to work from George R.R. Martin’s novels until 2016, when they ran out of source material to draw from: and at that point, most fans tend to agree that the show suddenly began to decline in quality. At first it wasn’t too noticeable, as the fanbase was initially excited to be surprised, and was willing to ignore some of Benioff & Weiss’ mistakes: but by the finale of season 7, it was becoming clear that something was wrong: after years of slow, patient build-up, the storyline of the Night King and the White Walkers was being rushed into the foreground, and Benioff & Weiss were already publicly discussing their desire to conclude the story in its eighth season. The last two seasons were drastically abbreviated to provide for this, with the final season being cut down almost to miniseries format, with only six episodes to tie up several hundred loose ends, story-threads, subplots, so on and so on. And, as everybody is now aware, the final season didn’t go over well: poorly received by critics and fans, the once-mighty TV series ended with a bit of a whimper, reducing complex characters to cardboard cutouts and basically ruining what made the show so much fun: its depth. To nobody’s surprise, though, that depth was a hallmark of Martin’s work, not Benioff & Weiss’.

Payne and McKay don’t have the ability to hide behind J.R.R. Tolkien’s published novels for several years before finally having to strike out on their own, into uncharted territory: because the Amazon Prime series isn’t actually an adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings. It is instead a prequel series, covering the only time-frame in Tolkien’s extensive legendarium that he didn’t write much about – the three-thousand year long era in between the events of The Silmarillion and the downfall of Sauron that is glimpsed in the prologue of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship Of The Ring. Why do I continue to call the series The Lord Of The Rings, then? Well, there’s still no official title for the show, so it’s going to have to do, despite being a little misleading.

Anyway, it’s encouraging to know that what we see from Payne and McKay will be indicative of the series’ quality going forward, whereas with Benioff & Weiss we were cruelly deceived. The writers at Amazon Prime will have only scraps of material to work from, but it’s their responsibility and duty to fill in the gaping holes in Tolkien’s mythos. Hopefully, they can achieve that – and if they can’t, then we’ll know right away, rather than wasting ten years of our lives.

And finally, a bonus point that I think is worth mentioning: Amazon Prime seems to care for the Tolkien fanbase in a way that Benioff & Weiss never did for Game Of Thrones‘. In the interview, the two men admitted to grossly misinterpreting their own fanbase; in an attempt to make fantasy popular to “NFL players”, they stripped the books of their more fantastical, magical elements – that is, until the final season, when those were the only things left in their dwindling toolbox. They didn’t ever listen to fans’ feedback, because they didn’t see the value of considering other peoples’ reactions. And it’s just as well, because as for their opinions on the books they were meant to be adapting, well…

Now, we don’t know what Payne and McKay think of Tolkien’s work: all we have to go on is the official Amazon Prime press release that says they feel like Frodo on the beginning of his great journey, etc, etc. But Amazon Prime’s Lord Of The Rings has been surprisingly cooperative with and responsive to fans – at least, until their official Twitter account basically went missing in action several months ago. For instance, when fans noted that there were design flaws on one of the Middle-earth maps released by Amazon, the creative team (which we now know is led by renowned artist John Howe) was quick to revise the map. And aside from that one blunder, the other maps they’ve released all hold up to scrutiny, remaining faithful to even some of the obscurest bits of Tolkien canon. And if you’re wondering why I’m rambling about the maps, consider that Benioff & Weiss also acknowledge in their interview that they themselves were “geographically challenged”. So again, Amazon Prime is one step ahead of them in that regard.

So there you have it: my response to the response to this incredibly dismaying interview with the two men responsible for some of the highest highs and the lowest lows in modern television history. If you want to read the full Twitter thread, referenced several times above, I’ll direct you here. I wish you luck.

So what do you think of all this? Do you think Payne and McKay have an advantage, going into this daunting project: or will they end up being the next Benioff & Weiss? And as for Benioff & Weiss themselves – what do you think of their admissions and confessions? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Joseph Mawle Joins Amazon’s “Lord Of The Rings”!

Amazon Prime’s upcoming The Lord Of The Rings prequel series is thoroughly fascinating and occasionally bewildering: just the other day we discussed the intriguing case of the uncovered audition tapes for the series, which revealed what seemed to be the four leads of the eagerly-anticipated show. Now, a completely new character has popped up out of nowhere! I tell you, it’s been an exhilarating process covering the constant stream of news about this project – and we’re still only in the pre-production stage!

Joseph Mawle Joins Amazon's "Lord Of The Rings"! 3
koimoi.com

Anyway, we’ve got a new casting announcement, and it’s already been getting a fair bit of attention: Joseph Mawle, an English actor best known for portraying Benjen Stark in just 6 (count ’em, 6) episodes of Game Of Thrones. Benjen was a minor character at best, and never did anything particularly memorable until rescuing Jon Snow from beyond the Wall in the seventh season. And yet this news is, as I said, stirring up the Tolkien community, with even platforms as well respected as The One Ring.net complaining about how the Amazon Prime series is already beginning to turn Lord Of The Rings into a carbon copy of Game Of Thrones, ignoring the wishes of Tolkien purists, etc, etc. I honestly don’t understand how that logic is even supposed to make sense – in my opinion, it would be like saying that Peter Jackson’s trilogy was turning into a carbon copy of Back To The Future Part II when they cast Elijah Wood, simply because Wood happened to have an insignificant role in the latter film (bet you didn’t know that).

Whether or not Amazon Prime is channeling Thrones for this project, let’s consider what we know about Mawle’s casting before jumping to conclusions. According to the trades, Mawle is taking on the role of “Oren”, one of the series’ main villains. Now, let’s face it: Oren, while it’s almost certainly another codename, sounds a good deal like Sauron, and there’s a strong possibility that Mawle will in fact be Amazon Prime’s Dark Lord (I feel like we’ve had this conversation many times already). He is the oldest cast-member to join the show so far, but still has distinctly Elven features, very much in line with men like Hugo Weaving or Lee Pace, who convincingly and brilliantly portrayed Elves in the previous Middle-earth films (and that Elvenesse is something Mawle will need, if he is to play Sauron, who should spend much of his time onscreen disguised as an Elf. Mawle is also a very good actor, which, you know, is also a bonus.

If you want my honest opinion (you probably do, if you’re reading this), I see Mawle as a better choice for the Witch-King of Angmar, whom we should expect to see in the series: with his long, gaunt features and thin frame, the actor seems like he could do a great job portraying the sorcerer in all his ancient, incorruptible glory, before his inevitable downfall into ruin. I mean that as a compliment, by the way.

So what do you think? Is this our Sauron? Or our Witch-King? Or somebody entirely different? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Amazon’s “Lord Of The Rings” Auditions Reveal New Characters!

We’ve all been waiting hungrily for something, anything, to give us a deeper insight into Amazon Prime’s upcoming prequel to The Lord Of The Rings. So, when a bit of news drops that’s actually surprisingly revealing and at the very least full of stuff to talk about, the fact that it gets barely any coverage is…well, disappointing. But don’t fear – I am here, to tell you everything you need to know about the new characters we now know will populate Amazon Prime’s Middle-earth.

Amazon's "Lord Of The Rings" Auditions Reveal New Characters! 4
polygon.com

We’ve understood for a rather long while that there are four major characters in the series who are going by the codenames Tyra, Eldien, Beldor and Aric. They’re generic fantasy names, and there’s no precedent for any of them in Tolkien’s own writings, so it’s possible (even likely) that they are just codenames, nothing more than that. But for a while, that was all we knew about any of these four leads: basic names that could have come out of any Fantasy Name Generator online. We were able to attach a gender to the name of Tyra, because Australian actress Markella Kavenagh was supposedly in talks to play that character. But now, we have new information about all four, due to some newly uncovered audition tapes for the series.

Before we break them down, remember that these scenes, like the Mirror of Galadriel, could be very unreliable guides. The dialogue being used in these actors’ auditions is complex enough that it could in fact be edited together from an actual version of the show’s script, but don’t count on it: while it might be an indication of the sort of material to expect from the series, it’s highly probable that we never see any of these scenes (or anything even remotely resembling these scenes) in the show – this sort of scene and dialogue is usually expressly written to give the auditioning actor a sense of the character they might be portraying, from personality to manner of speech. For instance, you’ll note that the character of Eldien and Beldor both have the same scene, but with very different dialogue. With all that said, you will join me, with bated breath, as we begin our first deep dive into Amazon Prime’s Middle-earth. The time is sometime in the Second Age, thousands of years before the events of either of Peter Jackson’s trilogies. The setting…well, we’ll discuss that as we go along.

All four audition tapes have been deleted, presumably by Amazon Prime’s bidding, but the wonderful folks over at Redanian Intelligence who uncovered the videos were able to transcribe them before their disappearance (and I was able to watch two of them as well).

The first two videos focused on the character of Tyra: the dialogue indicates that Tyra is an elf, with a compassionate nature, who also seems to be deeply insightful and/or gifted with some powers of foresight. She and another woman are riding in a wagon when they hit a man, who would appear to have been knocked unconscious by the blow: Tyra demands that they stop and help him, while her companion argues that, if they take him back to their home, “anything bad that happens as a result of it will be our fault”. Tyra, however, appears to have won the argument by the time the scene ends. There is one possible clue about the setting of this scene: references to wild bears and snow, which would presumably suggest that Tyra and her friend live somewhere in the forested north of Middle-earth, most likely in the kingdom of Lindon, where Gil-galad ruled the largest contingency of Elven-folk. And that raises an interesting point – who is this man that Tyra and her friend encounter, and what would happen if they brought him back to their home, or village? We know from Tolkien’s own writings that the Dark Lord Sauron entered Lindon in disguise sometime early in the Second Age: could he be this strange man? It seems unusual that he wouldn’t take the form of an Elf, however, when trying to infiltrate an Elven kingdom.

What we gather from this scene is that Tyra and her people are very rural Elves – they drive wagons, they live in a wild, dangerous part of Middle-earth, and, aside from Tyra herself, they appear to be wary and distrustful of strangers.

The second audition tape, also deleted, features Tyra in a different scene: here, she and a girl who is most likely her younger sister, find themselves lost in a dangerous place after an attempt to forage for berries in the woods leads to the girl losing her doll and straying away from Tyra’s care. It’s a sweet little scene, and it shows Tyra taking the lead in a difficult situation.

Again, the scene suggests a rural, woodsy setting. If I had to guess, I’d say Tyra is almost certainly a Silvan Elf, more akin to the Wood Elves of Mirkwood than the High Elves of the West. None of the characters in these two scenes use very archaic dialogue, as opposed to the third scene, which focuses on the character of Eldien.

Eldien is possibly the most interesting and complex of the four, based on the little we know of her personality. I was fortunate enough to see the video of Chloe Bremner’s audition for the role prior to its being taken down, and I thought Bremner did an okay job with the material. Eldien is in every way the opposite of Tyra: she is most likely a High Elf, and her vocabulary and philosophies are far more extensive than those of her rural co-star. In the scene, Eldien is approached by her longtime friend Beldor, perhaps at a banquet or after some kind of memorial ceremony for the Elves who died in the wars of the First Age. Eldien herself is a veteran of those wars, and bears with her an everlasting pain, much like Frodo’s at the end of The Lord Of The Rings. But while Frodo was granted the opportunity to pass into the West and find healing, Eldien is an Elf who rejected the West and is now being forced to pay the price, living out her life in the utter loneliness of Middle-earth. Beldor offers her a potent drink, but Eldien rejects it, saying that no wine can cure her sorrows. She speaks about “the nameless dark” (i.e. Morgoth, the great enemy of the First Age), and mentions having killed dragons in her time – note the plural: Eldien didn’t just get lucky and happen to kill a dragon once, she’s literally one of the greatest warriors in all of Middle-earth. But despite being so aware of evil, Eldien seems like she could be the perfect target for Sauron when he inevitably rises to power: in her desire to find healing and joy in Middle-earth, Eldien might be easily tricked into joining Sauron when he promises to rebuild the world, greater and more beautiful even than the Western lands of the gods. Like Sauron, she has ambition and seems driven by purpose. Unlike Sauron, though, she is a mother, something that is revealed at the end of the scene when Beldor tells her to go home: “if not for yourself…do it for your son”. Eldien grows angry and threatens to end their friendship if ever he uses her family against her again. Clearly, there’s tension between them, though it doesn’t seem to be romantic, which is a relief. Beldor, in fact, appears to be much younger than Eldien. He doesn’t recall the great wars against Morgoth, and Eldien tells him that he is blessed because, for him, evil is merely “pictures set in a glass of the cathedral windows” -an interesting comment, considering that cathedrals aren’t typically seen in Middle-earth: again, remember that all of this dialogue is probably fabricated – it’s just there to give a sense of the character.

And the sense that I get from the character of Eldien is that she’s a great, even legendary heroine, possibly on the level of Galadriel: or is it possible that she is, in fact, Galadriel? I know, I know, she references a son, and we all know Galadriel never had one: or did she? Tolkien himself revised and rewrote Galadriel’s backstory multiple times toward the end of his life, and in one version Galadriel was in fact the mother of Amroth, the prince of Lórien who would one day be immortalized in Legolas’ tragic ballad of Amroth and Nimrodel. I’m not saying this is the case here, but it is something worth noting.

Beldor’s version of the scene, acted rather less convincingly by Conor Fogarty, is confusing: Beldor approaches Eldien and tries to convince her to go into the West, as in the previous scene, but here his intentions seem sinister – he mentions that it is the will of “our chieftain” that Eldien must depart, and the pronouns he uses reveal that the chieftain is a woman, which is interesting. But neither he nor the chieftain have Eldien’s best interests at heart, it seems, since Beldor appears to be trying to get Eldien drunk – he tells her that he carelessly poured “fire ale” into her goblet, and as the scene ends Eldien asks him what he put into the drink: to which Beldor replies “Is it working?”. Suspicious! Is this a kidnapping that we’re witnessing in this scene? At first I suspected that Beldor could be the codename for Elrond, who fits the bill of being a High Elf warrior young enough not to have fought in the wars of the First Age but old enough to have a place of some importance in the early Second Age: but somehow I can’t imagine someone as wise as Elrond ever intentionally doing this to someone he considered a friend. The reference to a female chieftain is interesting, since it would appear to be Galadriel at first glance, meaning Eldien might not be a codename for the Lady of Lórien after all. Or is this chieftain a new, wholly original character created for the show?

Finally, we have Aric: a roguish, selfish trickster who is perfectly prepared to sacrifice anybody, even his own friends, to get himself out of a predicament. In his first sample scene, performed by Nick Hardcastle, Aric takes refuge with an unnamed woman who seems to have interacted with him before: the two are not on good terms, but could develop a friendship as time goes on, depending on how callous Aric really is – he certainly has no problems with deserting his own people to the whims of an unidentified but clearly unfriendly power. The woman tells him that he’s “monstrous”, and Aric simply replies that “there’s no room for mercy if one wants to survive”. He then turns the tables on her, asking her what her own choice will be: if she will cast him out or protect his secret in exchange for his own help. We don’t hear her answer, but it’s clear from the setting of the next scene that she agrees to help him.

We’ve gathered a lot of information about Aric already: he is the only one in the group of four who might be a human, and his storyline appears to take place during a time of warfare in Middle-earth: the people whom he betrays are refugees, “injured…a thousand miles from safety”. He speaks of soldiers, and hounds trained to hunt men. His demeanor suggests an antihero or ruffian: and everybody loves one of those.

Let’s take a look at the final scene. In this one, Aric and the same woman are traveling, and have just escaped a run-in with soldiers – but when Aric asks where the soldiers came from, his companion responds oddly: “There are many places in this world stranger than you can imagine, older than you ever visited”. Does this suggest that Aric and the woman might have run into non-human foes: orcs, perhaps, returning from the mountains to wreak havoc on Middle-earth? And how does his companion even know about them – unless she herself is not a human, but an Elf? Honestly, I can’t shake the feeling that her speech pattern strongly resembles that of Eldien, whom we already know might be forced to leave the safety of her Elven homelands: Aric himself is clearly wary of the woman, and asks her why she was “voluntarily separated from her squadron”. He also references the strength of her will and her pride, two things we can already establish that Eldien has in plenty; and he reprimands her for speaking in flowery language and not saying what she means – something that Elves are always being accused of in Tolkien’s works. Regardless of who she is, Aric’s own identity comes to light, at least a little, in this scene. He and the woman get to talking about “farlanders”, a strange term that might possibly refer to the Men of Númenor on their far-distant island in the Western Sea. These farlanders might not be great people, Aric seems to concede, but they aren’t the ones responsible for throwing him out of his home, leaving him with nothing. But he is resigned to his fate as an outcast, and he notes, as the scene ends, that he can’t do much about it without an army, anyway.

From this scene, we gain one or two details: firstly, Aric and his companion are on their way to a castle, though no reason for that destination is given. Aric notes that, even if they do reach the castle, his safety is not guaranteed, suggesting that he has a reputation as a troublemaker throughout Middle-earth. Who could he be? Is he, perhaps, Sauron in one of his many disguises, and is his companion then bringing him to one of the Elven refuges where Sauron fears he may be found out? Why, then, wouldn’t he simply try to kill this woman or turn her away from her determined course? If he is Sauron, then his tragic backstory is in fact a lie, though one with a grain of truth: he was thrown out of his home and left with nothing, by the decree of the gods. And it would be ironic if this were him paying no heed to the “farlanders” on their distant island, when Sauron would one day be responsible for bringing about the destruction of the island of Númenor and almost all its people.

In conclusion, we have four very interesting and unique characters here: Tyra, a lovable Silvan Elf who wants nothing more than to save lives and help people; Eldien, a High Elven warrior with poison in her heart, looking for peace in her time; Beldor, a loyal servant of his chieftain obliviously following orders, even if it means hurting a friend; and Aric, a rogue of unclear origins, moving through Middle-earth and leaving a trail of destruction wherever he walks.

I’m very interested to hear all your own theories about these four characters, and what you think of the dialogue and scenes. Share your thoughts in the comments below and keep your fingers crossed that Amazon Prime release some official news soon!