MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON TWO, EPISODE FOUR AHEAD!
Although the term “fan service” used to refer primarily to random scenes of female nudity or gratuitous violence in Japanese anime and manga, in recent decades it has come to be more broadly defined as anything included in a piece of media to please the perceived target demographic, usually the diehard fans of the universe to which that piece of media belongs: and it can range from the inoffensive (a meaningful reference or detail only fans will catch) to the in-your-face (shoehorning in a beloved character just to have them do or say “the thing”, or revisiting an established location when any other would have sufficed). As a rule of thumb, fan service should only have a small, positive impact on a person’s enjoyment of the story being told. It shouldn’t be the story.
Shouldn’t be, I say, but it all too often is, because in every fandom there are some who believe that the sole purpose of stories is to service them, and who consequently treat storytellers as fan servants, with whom they can be as cruel and demanding as they like. These fans do not want their favorite franchises to offer them anything new or unfamiliar – and since they tend to be conservative, straight, cisgender white men, that inevitably includes anyone who doesn’t look like them. Unfortunately, these people have a way of amassing power and influence over fandom spaces by claiming to want what’s best for the fans, and then act as gatekeepers, which is why studios insist on courting them even though it’s been proven time after time that franchises which bend over backwards to try and placate these fans leave themselves nowhere to grow, and for nothing, because these fans will never be satisfied, especially not if they know they can wield their power and influence to prevent their favorite franchises from ever evolving or experimenting, as happened just recently with The Acolyte.
Amazon reportedly has no intention of ending The Rings Of Power prematurely, which is reassuring to hear, but they’re still making efforts to reach “fans” (loiterers, at this point, seems a more accurate term for them) who claim to hate the show; an admirable and probably pointless endeavor, if even the overt fan service in the first season, of both the innocuous and egregious varieties, wasn’t enough. The very act of compressing the three-thousand year timeline of the Second Age, making it possible for the show to adapt all of the major events of the Age without having to switch out the entire human cast between seasons, was a kind of fan service. Bringing in proto-Hobbits and a wizard heavily implied to be Gandalf is fan service as far as I’m concerned, since these characters have yet to fold back into the overarching narrative (and, in fact, stray further afield with each passing episode).
In its second season, and particularly in episode four, The Rings Of Power doubles down on aggressively targeting people who will never admit to watching the show regardless of whether they do, when it should be focused on telling a cohesive story. With everything else the show is trying to accomplish in just eight episodes, there’s simply not enough time to squeeze in appearances from Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear), the Barrow-wights, Shelob (in episode three, but she still counts) and the Ents – none of whom have any good reason to be here, with the possible exception of Tom (ironically the last character who should ever need a good reason for anything).
It would be one thing if we didn’t know about most of these cameos beforehand – then at least the shock of seeing a Barrow-wight or an Ent would distract, on an initial viewing, from how extraneous their few scenes really are. But Amazon put it all in the marketing. We’d seen pretty much the entirety of the Barrow-wights sequence, for example, split up across various trailers, teasers, and behind-the-scenes clips long before the episode dropped. Though, to be honest, that was only one of several factors in why that particular scene fell flat for me, not least of which had to do with the atrocious optics of introducing a new Elf, Daemor, played by a Black actor, Oliver Alvin-Wilson, and then killing him off almost immediately; the only casualty of the wights. Never mind that what makes the encounter with the wights so terrifying in The Lord Of The Rings is that they didn’t kill their victims straightaway, instead putting them to sleep and dressing their bodies in the garments and jewelry of the barrows’ original occupants for uncertain, but obviously ritualistic, purposes. The Rings Of Power‘s Barrow-wights are just your run-of-the-mill reanimated skeletons, and not scary in the slightest.
Even before they showed up, the wights were getting on my nerves, because I could sense the characters were being forcefully shoved in their direction. My internal alarm bells started ringing when Elrond (Robert Aramayo) mentioned crossing the “Axa Bridge” to reach Eregion. “That’s funny,” I said to myself, “I don’t know an Axa Bridge.” As it turns out, there’s a good reason for that. It was made up for the show, and crosses the River Baranduin south of the Old Forest, on a road leading through the hills of Tyrn Gorthad (better known as the Barrow-downs). All of which is fine. There could conceivably have been a bridge there in the Second Age. It’s just…there’s no reason for Elrond and his company, speeding across Eriador, to go anywhere near it. Draw a straight line from Lindon to the capital city of Eregion on a map of Middle-earth and it takes you across the Baranduin at Sarn Ford, many miles to the south of the non-canonical Axa Bridge, which (according to the map shown in the episode) would have taken Elrond’s company northeast, out of the way entirely.
And that’s not even the most confusing part, nor is it when the group reaches the Axa Bridge, and it’s revealed to span an impassable canyon, deep and wide with sheer sides (on the eastern border of what becomes the Shire, not an area known for having rugged geography). No, it’s the fact that this bridge contrived to take them directly to the Barrow-downs is broken, and so the group’s map expert Camnir (Calam Lynch) declares that to circumvent this canyon that shouldn’t exist, they must turn south through the Barrow-downs…which do not extend south of the Axa Bridge on the map shown to us mere moments before, and in fact, lie somewhat to its north. So either Camnir is extremely, like, embarrassingly bad at following maps, or the writers are. And I’m inclined to believe it’s the latter.
Maybe I’m being nitpicky about the bridge, but I think it’s fair to say that any fantasy story with such a large scope should aspire to give its audience a general sense of where things are in relation to each other, and of the distances between them, especially when that information is often critical to understanding the plot. Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and Elrond traversed the long leagues between Lindon and Eregion in a matter of seconds back in episode one, but three episodes later the same journey in the opposite direction is long, perilous, and requires a map-expert. There’s an even greater distance and many more natural obstacles between Eregion and Mordor, but The Rings Of Power has on multiple occasions treated that span of over a thousand miles as a mere insignificance, easily covered by Sauron (Charlie Vickers) in human form twice, both times while pretending to be wounded, and now by Adar (Sam Hazeldine) and his legions of Orcs, without anyone noticing except a pair of Ents in the Southlands.
But if I don’t stop ranting about maps now, I never will (maybe it’s a subject for a separate post), so let’s move on to the Ents. They’re scarier than the Barrow-wights, which is a surprise. Olivia Williams and Jim Broadbent lend their voices to this dendriform power couple, named Winterblossom and Snaggleroot respectively, who rip people limb-from-limb if they raise axe to tree. They’re great characters: I would have loved to spend time with them in a show that actually had time to spare on an environmentalist murder mystery subplot, but The Rings Of Power is not that show. And although it’s in the process of investigating these Ent serial murders that Isildur (Maxim Baldry) and Estrid (Nia Towle) become conscious of their romantic feelings for each other while Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) proves himself as a father figure to Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin), I find it difficult to believe there wasn’t a far more efficient route to the same destination (help, I’m about to make this about maps again). A conflict between the Southlander refugees and those who swore fealty to Adar could have easily provided a backdrop to all of these developments, and simultaneously done more to deepen our investment in the people who will one day become Isildur’s people when he goes on to found the Kingdom of Gondor, whereas following the Ents, even though it’s to rescue Theo, pulls Isildur out of that environment.
Isildur, marooned on Middle-earth and thrust into a leadership position he didn’t ask for, has an unlikely (but, given his…connection to hobbits, rather fitting) mirror-image in the Harfoot Elanor “Nori” Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh), who also finds herself separated from her family and everything that represented home to her in season two, lost in a strange land, forced to take refuge among a people wary of outsiders, and gradually becoming a respected member of their community and helping them in their fight to save their homes. There’s even a burgeoning romance in both subplots, though it’s not Nori herself, but her best friend Poppy Proudfellow (Megan Richards) who falls head over heels in love with one of the Stoor hobbits they encounter in Rhûn; the slightly peculiar Merimac (Gavi Singh Chera). However, seeing as I still strongly feel that Poppy wasn’t originally intended to come back for season two, Nori and Merimac may well have had a relationship in an earlier draft.
But Nori already has a much more interesting relationship with the Stoors through their leader, Gundabel (Tanya Moodie), who reveals to her in a surprisingly powerful scene that the ancestor of the wandering Harfoots was a Stoor, who left the narrow gorge where they’ve always lived in search of a promised land called the Sûzat, a land of rolling green hills and clear rivers. It’s written as Sûza-t in The Peoples Of Middle-earth, but the meaning is the same: it’s derived from a word in the Westron tongue, sûza, which means province, county, or…shire. Sûzat or Sûza-t, therefore, denotes The Shire. This arguably falls under the category of fan service just like Ents and Barrow-wights, but it doesn’t bother me the way those do for two reasons: one, it’s relatively subtle (yes, you can find the translation easily, but the show itself doesn’t provide one), and two, it isn’t just a reference for the fans. This is what Nori’s story has been building towards, all along. She will unite the estranged Hobbit tribes and lead them to a permanent home.
There is one small problem with this, and that’s the timeline. Canonically, the first hobbits to cross the River Baranduin (how do we keep ending up back here?) into The Shire were the brothers Marcho and Blanco in the year 1601 of the Third Age, almost two-thousand years after the events of The Rings Of Power. The showrunners have shown no qualms about compressing three-thousand years of history into what feels like a couple of months, so I wouldn’t be shocked if they extended the history of The Shire back by a millennium, but I’d much rather they didn’t, to be honest.
Alternatively, they could have Nori lead the hobbits to the Gladden Fields, where we know Stoors at least were living about a thousand years into the Third Age, and where Sméagol was born and raised. We’re probably going there one way or another, because the Battle of the Gladden Fields is where the Second Age comes to an end. And it’s worth noting that Isildur, Nori’s parallel, is involved in that battle, so to have their storylines finally segue at the very end would be thematically satisfying. But I’d hate to miss out on the perilous crossing of the Misty Mountains by the hobbits, so maybe Nori will make it to Eriador, and settle her people in the Bree-lands, the only place in Middle-earth where Men and Hobbits coexisted during the Third Age.
It may come as a surprise to learn that I want more of Nori, Poppy, and The Rings Of Power‘s proto-Hobbits – I’ve been complaining bitterly that the storyline in Rhûn is eating up screentime, after all. And it still is, but the problem is not and has never been the Hobbits. It’s the Stranger (Daniel Weyman), whose search for a gand (a wizard’s staff) is turning into the most frustrating kind of fetch-quest. Weyman is charming, but he can’t elevate relentlessly dull material. Tom Bombadil’s appearance feels timed to inject a shot of energy back into this subplot, but it’s not enough – especially not with how subdued the show’s take on Bombadil is in comparison to the bold, boisterous version we meet in The Lord Of The Rings. I understand that a more book-accurate take on the character, who dances wildly about and breaks into song without the slightest provocation, might have scared off some casual viewers, but that’d be preferable to boring them and underwhelming fans with a solemn and mature Bombadil who mumbles his songs under his breath.
The parts of Tom’s portrayal that I truly enjoyed are all attributable to Kinnear – his hearty laugh and big smile, his ungraceful gait, the twinkle in his eye when he starts to ramble and the distinctive Cornish accent he settled on for the character – all the little things he nails, that assure me he would have been quite comfortable playing Tom as originally written. There’s something to be said for juxtaposing him with Weyman’s reserved and quizzical Stranger, too, as the clear contrast between their personalities makes Tom feel more vibrant and more whimsical than he really is. But as I said back when it was first announced that Tom would be making an appearance in season two, he is a character defined by his refusal to acknowledge the importance or urgency of any narrative that happens to cross his doorstep, and if you, as a screenwriter looking to utilize Tom in your adaptation of a story that didn’t even include him in the first place, aren’t prepared to start there, you’d probably be better off using any other character from the legendarium.
The Rings Of Power‘s Tom Bombadil not only takes an active interest in the Stranger’s journey, but aggressively pushes him to confront the mysterious Dark Wizard (Ciarán Hinds) before his power becomes one with Sauron’s and they set Middle-earth aflame, as the Wizard’s already done to Rhûn. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised that the writers went this route, but I’m not happy about it. For all the changes it’s made, The Rings Of Power has never, to my recollection, committed such a blatant mischaracterization – Tolkien having only sketched out in the broadest of terms what most of the protagonists of the Second Age were like as people, and characters like Galadriel and Elrond, whom we know from the books, being significantly younger here even by Elf standards, has given the writers leeway. But Tom is, in his own words, “eldest”, predating the first raindrop and the first acorn. It’s hard to handwave away the differences in his depiction by saying that three-thousand years changed him, seeing as he’s roughly fifty-five thousand years old.
There is one side-effect of Tom’s inclusion, I should note, that almost – almost – justifies his inclusion; that we get to hear his song, lyrics lifted straight from the pages of The Lord Of The Rings and set to music by the brilliant Bear McCreary, belted out by Rufus Wainwright over the end-credits with ethereal backing vocals from Raya Yarbrough, who has a voice cameo in the episode as Tom’s wife Goldberry. It’s a poignant rendition of a nonsensical ditty, befitting the version of the character we see in the show, and it’s never leaving my playlist. McCreary’s work on season one received widespread acclaim but was shamefully snubbed for an Emmy nomination: I pray that voters do not make the same mistake again next year. The technical categories are where The Rings Of Power has its best chance of nabbing gold – in terms of music, visual effects, production design, costume, hair and makeup design, there’s simply nothing else on TV that comes close to matching it. But I don’t seriously expect it to pick up so much as a single nomination in any of the major categories, which might as well forbid entry to non-HBO genre television. And that’s a real shame, because in a fair world, Charlie Vickers and Charles Edwards’ symbiotic yet distinct performances as Sauron and Celebrimbor could plausibly secure them both trophies.
Their absence from this episode, the first (and thankfully, the last) of the season not to check in on the situation in Eregion, is felt strongly. Without Sauron physically present to keep The Rings Of Power‘s various story threads fastened to the central throughline he represents, they come loose alarmingly quickly, disrupting the smooth flow of the narrative. Bolstering these subplots to the point where they can eventually stand on their own is a matter of finding the time to do so: time, the only resource in short supply on the most expensive television show ever made; wasted – in this episode at least – on superfluous cameos.
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON TWO, EPISODE TWO AHEAD!
Ever since it was announced that Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power would be adapting the events of the Second Age of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, fans have been waiting to hear one name – a name which never appears in the text of The Lord Of The Rings or its Appendices, but has seeped into mainstream perception of the story, by way of fan-art and fanfiction. It is a name I feared we might never hear spoken onscreen, after we learned that Amazon does not have the rights to any of the books in which it was published, including The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales: Annatar…”Lord of Gifts” in Quenya…the name adopted by the Dark Lord Sauron (Charlie Vickers) when he went among the Elven-smiths of Eregion, disguised as an emissary of the Valar, and deceived their wisest. While the writers could have invented their own name for the character, it would have been a blow to The Rings Of Power‘s legitimacy, perhaps a fatal one.
We still don’t know exactly how Amazon goes about acquiring a name or piece of information from The Silmarillion, etc., and in the absence of official answers rumors thrive. TheOneRing.net reported in January, citing “verifiable spy reports” and some wild rumors started on 4chan, that Amazon had quietly acquired the rights to The Silmarillion, though they said the same thing before season one aired, and only a single Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales-exclusive name – that of Númenor’s capital city, Armenelos – ever popped up in the final product. In February, Fellowship Of Fans reported that Amazon had gone to the Tolkien Estate to negotiate access to specific passages from Unfinished Tales regarding the Istari. For my part, I’ve always assumed that the showrunners are so tight-lipped on this subject because they have to do a fair bit of pleading with the higher-ups at Amazon to in turn go back to the Tolkien Estate (whom they paid $250M upfront in 2017 for the rights to The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit, ironically the two least useful pieces of source material for the show they ended up making) and shell out more mind-boggling amounts of money in exchange for the rights to use a name like Annatar.
It’s just the name, nothing more (so far), but the name alone carries weight, and the effect of its use in an already dramatic sequence is immediate and enthralling. Sauron, having weaseled his way back into Eregion disguised as Halbrand, under the pretense of wanting to share with its lord Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) news of the Three Rings – which he has prevented from reaching Eregion – finally secures an audience with the Elven craftsman near the end of the episode…and finds him less amenable than he had hoped to the idea of forging more Rings of Power for the race of Men. Celebrimbor is, in fact, so put off by the very notion of placing objects of such world-altering potential in the hands of “covetous” mortals that he is unwilling to treat with Halbrand further, and the Dark Lord, internally sweating bullets, has no choice but to confess that he is not a man at all. He turns to sorcery, the most advanced form of optical illusions, to convince Celebrimbor that he is in truth a beautiful blonde envoy of the Valar named Annatar in search of an artist, preferably an extremely talented Elven jewelsmith directly descended from the very greatest, capable of saving Middle-earth and its people from imminent destruction.
Annatar’s appropriation of Christian religious imagery, first speaking to Celebrimbor as a disembodied booming voice coming from his hearth and then appearing to descend from the clouds, succeeds in overawing the reverent Elven smith, and his shameless flattery certainly doesn’t hurt either. Poor Celebrimbor; he’s really not a bad guy. It wasn’t arrogance that told him to open the gates to Halbrand, it was frustration with the Elves for keeping him in the dark, and empathy for the man alongside whom he did his best work (and knows it), who tells a similar story of being disrespected and dismissed when he was no longer useful to the Elves. The Rings Of Power makes a point of showing Sauron manipulate his victims not by exploiting their vices but by turning their virtues against them – Galadriel (Morfydd Clark)’s righteous anger, Adar (Sam Hazeldine)’s love for his people, and now Celebrimbor’s kind heart. A person can resist their vices, or overcome them. But if their virtues are so thoroughly corroded that the two become confused, they will never be safe in their own skin.
Edwards, 54, may not physically resemble the image many fans had of Celebrimbor, typically portrayed as a (frankly rather generic) young, square-jawed Elf with long dark hair and broad shoulders, but the star of Britain’s National Theatre carries himself with a dignity that is thoroughly Fëanorian, perhaps most palpable in the scene where he goes to speak with Halbrand at the gates, meaning to turn him away; it is raining, and Celebrimbor is followed by attendants carrying a large and ineffective umbrella over his head, a visual that would be distracting, to the scene’s detriment, if the actor under the umbrella wasn’t unwaveringly convincing as someone worthy of the whole production, but Edwards is. Far from stoic, however, his character is downright excitable, the fast and fluttery mannerisms coaxed out of him by Sauron evoking a moth drawn instinctively to the flame that will consume it. I don’t have much to add about Vickers’ invariably alluring performance here that I didn’t already write in my review of episode one, but suffice it to say that his Sauron remains the dark heart of the season.
Sauron’s gravitational pull, irresistible even when he’s not onscreen, finally knits (most of) The Rings Of Power‘s disparate story threads into a cohesive web. The Rings themselves give him tiny fingerholds in the minds of their wearers, by way of which a shadow may creep undetected even into the golden realm of Lindon. And for Galadriel, wearing a Ring of Power risks solidifying a connection between her and the Dark Lord that was already there. During the brief time they knew each other, Sauron planted a venomous seed in her exposed heart, and Clark, transferring a bit of Saint Maud to Middle-earth, vividly conveys Galadriel’s bewildered horror, disgust and anger at having to share her body with it as it invisibly takes root. I keep coming back to the moment after she instinctively refers to Sauron as “Halbrand” in a heated argument with Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker), undermining all her efforts to prove that Sauron no longer has influence over her – the expression that momentarily contorts her face is not comprised merely of predictable regret and shame, but also shock that her tongue could betray her so, the impatient frustration that comes with knowing exactly how her slip-up will be used against her, and the feeling she refuses to confront that tells her Gil-galad is right to distrust her. Layers upon layers of emotions, communicated in a split second.
Other standouts from the cast include Robert Aramayo, playing Elrond as a battered young idealist who would rather see the Elves abandon Middle-earth than become beholden to the Rings of Power (an interesting and important counterargument to Gil-galad’s assertion that their use is justified by the dire circumstances); and the charming Ben Daniels as Círdan, whom I feel obliged to inform you all shaves with a seashell and sea-foam – but unfortunately also has to deliver some of the season’s most perplexing dialogue thus far, including drawing an inapplicable analogy between the Three Rings and the writings of the First Age poet (and notorious drunkard) Rúmil, in a monologue that’s essentially saying “separate the art from the artist, even if the art is magical objects of great power and the artist is the literal Dark Lord”. Elsewhere, The Terror‘s Ciarán Hinds makes a strong first impression in his brief appearance as the unnamed “Dark Wizard”. I speculated that he was being styled to resemble an imagined younger version of Sir Christopher Lee’s Saruman the White, and I would now like to add that if Hinds is playing Saruman, whose airs he affects, he has the potential to rank among the franchise’s greatest casting choices. I never thought I’d see the day where I’d be hoping neither nameless wizard on The Rings Of Power turns out to be a Blue Wizard, but here we are.
There is still alarmingly little to say of the other nameless wizard – Daniel Weyman’s Stranger – walking across Rhûn with only the vaguest sense of a direction, in the company of reliably endearing Harfoots Elanor “Nori” Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh) and Poppy Proudfellow (Megan Richards). Their subplot on the edge of the world provides the occasional moment of levity and a welcome change of scenery from the forests and mountains of western Middle-earth, but at the cost of staggering the narrative. Events in this episode result in the Stranger and Harfoots becoming separated, further dividing the story’s time and focus through episode four.
But while I would happily exchange some, most, or all of the Stranger’s scenes this season for a few more fleshing out the seduction of Celebrimbor, the subplots closest to the action in Eregion earn their keep on the show. The Rings Of Power struck gold in season one with the coupling of Owain Arthur and Sophia Nomvete, two equally boisterous and complimentary personalities, as the Dwarven prince and princess of Khazad-dûm, so it’s no surprise to see them back and leading their own storyline under the mountain. Their characters are living a bit more modestly these days (just a bit: Nomvete’s Disa still wears a robe encrusted with chunks of gold, and both her and Arthur’s Durin IV twinkle from all the gold-dust in their hair and beards) but their love for each other is unaffected, and anchors them as their kingdom literally crumbles. It’s particularly exciting to see more of Nomvete’s fire in the scenes Disa shares with her estranged father-in-law, King Durin III (Peter Mullan), and to have her extraordinary singing-voice featured again on Bear McCreary’s beautiful score.
In the episode’s final minutes, Durin and Disa receive a letter summoning them to Eregion to speak with Lord Celebrimbor – an invitation they can hardly refuse, given their present circumstances, but one that will have fateful consequences for Khazad-dûm, the Dwarves, and indeed, all of Middle-earth. Seven more Rings of Power, designed by a well-intentioned Celebrimbor with Dwarven collaboration but sullied in the making by the malicious hand of Annatar, will be brought into the world alongside the Three as a direct result of the meeting, speeding the Dark Lord’s plans along. Although he’s had to backburner his idea of forging additional Rings for Men, Sauron is already almost halfway to his goal of bringing the Free Peoples under his control and in the darkness binding them, to paraphrase the verse inscribed on the one Ring he hasn’t yet spoken of forging to anyone. And he accomplished all of this, mind you, with some hydrogen peroxide and a hair straightener. Morgoth could never.
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON TWO, EPISODE ONE AHEAD!
Just as the first season of Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power opened with Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel narrating over a montage of scenes that followed her progression from a child of Valinorean peace and tranquility to a woman hardened by the ceaseless wars she and her kind brought to Middle-earth’s shores, season two tries to do the same for the character of Sauron and goes to show that Amazon hasn’t “bought” the Tolkien Estate (as some of the series’ detractors claim), seeing as they were evidently denied access to the descriptions of Sauron’s First Age activities found only in The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, resulting in a prologue and premiere episode that knows it would be so much stronger if it were free, either to adapt the source material or, barring that, outright contradict what it can’t adapt.
Until that time comes, The Rings Of Power will continue to dance on tip-toes – whether with the gracefulness of a fleet-footed Elf or a lumbering cave troll is entirely dependent on the individual writer for each episode – to avoid touching anything it legally cannot, including the most detailed account of Sauron’s origins (The Ainulindalë), his motivations (TheLetters Of J.R.R. Tolkien and Morgoth’s Ring), and his deeds (The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales), which significantly restricts The Rings Of Power‘s Sauron-centric prologue: from starting at a point in time even remotely equivalent to when Galadriel’s began; from using any of the names for Sauron that he canonically preferred to the one in common use among his enemies; from explaining that he belonged to a class of angelic beings called Maiar, specifically one tasked with maintaining order and coordination; from laying bare his vision, ultimately unobtainable save through the domination of all living things, of the world under his control; and from referring to how the Valar, the pantheon of godlike beings ranked above the Maiar in power and seniority, offered him a second chance after Morgoth’s defeat, which Sauron considered and rejected, being unwilling to part with the power he had obtained in Middle-earth.
Most of what was omitted can be inferred to exist still, offscreen. Sauron is not not a Maia in The Rings Of Power, the word just isn’t used. There are subtle hints in his dialogue that point to his true ideology and aims, maybe a bit too subtle, but they’re there. And for all we know, he could conceivably have had his moment of repentance shortly prior to when The Rings Of Power picks up his story as he gathers the Orcs at his fortress in cold Forodwaith, intending to be accepted as Morgoth’s successor. Jack Lowden’s Sauron is rather more pitiable than intimidating (and I can’t say that would be an entirely unfounded read of the villain), but his face befits the name Mairon, nowhere used in this sequence but plausibly still the name he wore as a Maia. The very best version of The Rings Of Power often isn’t the one onscreen, but the one hiding between-the-lines.
With that said, this episode is extremely entertaining in its own right, and again, we need only turn to the prologue – a very effective microcosm of the entire season so far – to understand why. It may be sacrilegious to suggest, but The Rings Of Power feels most at ease when it’s having fun playing in the vast sandbox that is Middle-earth, using the building-blocks at its disposal, but arranging them in ways that J.R.R. Tolkien wouldn’t have, like when it implied that Sauron and Galadriel had romantic feelings for each other, or when it invented an extremely compelling half-Elf, half-Orc character named Adar (Sam Hazeldine), whom Sauron inherited at the end of the First Age along with everything else that once belonged to Morgoth. Perhaps The Rings Of Power‘s single most valuable contribution to the Middle-earth legendarium is Adar, who not only straddles the line separating good and evil, but forces Middle-earth’s heroes and its villains alike to grapple with the disturbing implication that all Orcs straddle that line as much as any people – something that Tolkien himself was coming to acknowledge near the end of his life, but was never able to reconcile with his earlier depictions of the Orcs.
Adar’s decision, solidified in secret while Sauron addresses the Orcs and makes it increasingly clear that he not only doesn’t see them as his people but assumes it is in their nature to serve a Dark Lord (the same prejudice he accuses Elves and Men of holding), to kill Sauron then and there with his own crown, transforms a coronation into an execution, and all the Orcs get in a stab, until the bloodied heap that remains of Sauron erupts, sending shockwaves across Forodwaith. But while Adar and the Orcs depart in search of a new home, the camera tracks Sauron’s pooled blood as it runs in rivulets through cracks in the stone, coagulating deep underground into something utterly repulsive and somehow mesmerizing to watch, a mass of tiny feelers groping back towards the surface, absorbing small animals and insects; a sort of reverse-Gollum that gradually becomes more humanoid as it slithers purposefully out of the mountains, eventually getting stuck to the wheel of a merchant’s cart, consuming her, and thereafter wearing the body of Charlie Vickers’ Halbrand.
At this point (and through no fault of a consistently exceptional Vickers, I must add), the prologue gets bogged down contriving a string of unremarkable scenes intended to signal to the audience that Sauron’s pursuit of redemption under a new name throughout season one was not entirely a deception, as well as retroactively justifying how he came across the heraldry that allowed him to pass himself off as a lost king of the Southlands, and why we and Galadriel first encountered him on a raft in the middle of the Great Sea. The answers to these outstanding mysteries are linked, but neither is particularly interesting. It’s when Sauron returns to the Southlands in the body of the episode that Vickers gets to show off his strengths as an actor, an opportunity that season one deprived him of until its final few minutes. In his scenes opposite Adar (now the Lord of Mordor), Sauron, still disguised as Halbrand, manipulates masterfully – exposing the feigned weakness he wants Adar to believe he can wield as leverage over him, his concern for his people, and using that very same weakness on Adar’s part to begin amassing an army. There is such salt-of-the-earth sincerity in Sauron’s ruggedly handsome face and in his folksy accent that the absence of it in the half-smiles which crook the corners of his lips and never quite reach his steely eyes escapes notice initially.
If Vickers’ performance embodies the idea put forward in The Lord Of The Rings that the agents of evil “seem fair, and feel foul”, Hazeldine’s is the inverse: the grim set of his mouth and the slow, seemingly methodical way in which he moves do not betray emotion, but it roils under the surface and shimmers faintly far behind his eyes. Hazeldine is a less lanky man than Joseph Mawle, who played Adar in the first season, and his version of the character is physically imposing where Mawle’s was frail, without a trace of trembling rasp in his voice. But Adar’s love for the Orcs, the enveloping and unconditional love of a parent for their children, is as genuine coming from Hazeldine as it was from Mawle in season one, and both actors deliver the best performances of their respective seasons.
In comparison, the evolution of Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel and Robert Aramayo’s Elrond from one season to the next may not seem significant, but there is a newfound surety in their performances, with which comes the ability to turn over their characters and explore their different facets. Galadriel is still impulse-driven by nature, but she let those impulses drive her straight into a ditch in season one, forcing her to consult other emotions besides her shattered sense of self-righteousness as she tries to back out of her current predicament without accidentally entrenching herself any deeper. Elrond, by contrast, has never been more certain in his definition of “right” and “wrong”, and is aghast when High King Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker) doesn’t see it the same way, putting the idealistic young politician in an uncomfortable and isolating position where people he’s regarded his whole life as fundamentally good appear to be shedding their morals all around him.
Having Elrond grab the Three Rings and leap off a waterfall into the Gulf of Lhûn to prevent the Elves from using the devices of Sauron isn’t exactly subtle storytelling, but I respect The Rings Of Power for unapologetically foregoing subtlety in favor of spectacle every now and then. It’s the rare fantasy show in the post-Game Of Thrones television landscape that gets a kick out of testing its audiences’ suspension of disbelief. If we accept that Elves exist and can walk over snow without sinking and tell a person’s height and hair color from over fifteen miles away, why can’t they also survive a fall of many hundreds of feet into the ocean? What’s important is that Elrond isn’t just jumping off a waterfall for the sake of having something cool happen in an episode light on action, but because The Rings Of Power has exponentially raised the stakes by having Sauron involved in the forging of the Three Rings (a controversial deviation from the canonical account, where the Three are created behind Sauron’s back, after the Seven and the Nine) and deliberately obfuscating the extent of his involvement. It is a choice that the show proudly owns, taking advantage of the opportunity that’s emerged to closely and critically examine the Three Rings and the potential consequences of wearing them.
Enter the character of Círdan (Ben Daniels), the oldest and wisest Elf in all of Middle-earth, who harbors Elrond when he washes up in the Grey Havens and offers to discard the Three by dropping them into a submarine trench…only to have a change of heart and do the exact opposite of what he promised Elrond, putting on one of the Three himself and delivering the other two to Gil-galad and Galadriel. The Elves are able to slow their inevitable fading and continue the fight against Sauron in Middle-earth, but at the cost of becoming bound to the fate of the Three Rings (and therefore also Sauron, which, to be honest, does make a lot more sense if he had a hand in their creation). It may have been their best choice, but was it the right choice? The Rings Of Power leaves the audience with that question. Although, as a fan of Círdan, who has never had a speaking role in an adaptation of Tolkien’s works before, I’m also left wondering why the writers chose to utilize him in this way. Daniels is perfectly cast in the part, make no mistake, but the narrative does him no favors by having Círdan betray Elrond’s trust the way a parent might an errant child and then fall victim to the temptation of the Rings, all before most viewers will even have picked up his name.
I have no idea how to elegantly segue into talking about The Stranger (Daniel Weyman), still following the stars eastward into the land of Rhûn, where he believes he will learn, or relearn, his true name and purpose. Unfortunately, he’s no closer to finding any of those things after the first three episodes of season two, and spends almost the entirety of the premiere lost and going in circles, his genuinely charming banter with his stalwart Harfoot companion Elanor “Nori” Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh) the only highlight of this subplot. I’m not sure how much longer The Rings Of Power can even keep up the pretense that the Stranger’s identity is a mystery, when the magic staff that he keeps seeing in his dreams is referred to on several occasions not as a staff, or a stave, or even a wand, but a gand, derived from the Old Norse word gandr, one half of the name Gandálfr or, you guessed it, Gandalf (“wand elf”). There is no reason, none whatsoever, to use this particular word if the Stranger is not Gandalf. And if it’s a misdirect, I’ll be furious.
While the Stranger and Nori can certainly keep a conversation going, the return of Nori’s friend Poppy Proudfellow (Megan Richards) is a welcome relief at a particularly slow moment in this storyline, giving them both another person to bounce off. I’m inclined to believe, however, that her inclusion was the result of rewrites, because of how little effort is put into explaining why she decided to follow Nori after turning down the chance to travel with her and the Stranger last season or how she even caught up with them, and once added to the party, she does nothing that Nori could not also have accomplished. But I always wanted the three of them together anyway, so I can’t object to her reappearance, only to the fact that it doesn’t save this subplot, which continues to waste time in a season too short and too crowded already to spare even a second.
That’s the other big problem lingering over The Rings Of Power season two: the story it’s telling, spanning seven kingdoms and all the lands between, is simply too large to be condensed into a season of just eight episodes. Of course, it would help if every subplot was equally engaging, but regardless, there’s not enough time for them all to be fully fleshed-out. And the first episode is only juggling three, mind you, divided between Lindon, Mordor, and Rhûn – in the episodes that follow, The Rings Of Power makes its way around Middle-earth, revisiting Eregion, Khazad-dûm, Númenor, and the Southlands. Every location is its own enormous, fully-realized world, but the time we’ve spent in each is just barely enough to get reacquainted with the characters we already met last season. I’m not demanding twenty episodes, each an hour long, per season (though I wouldn’t object), but surely the most expensive show on television can afford ten?
Thankfully, The Rings Of Power is in no other aspect stingy. The first episode of season two boasts CGI more convincing than most blockbuster movies, breathtaking locations ranging from New Zealand to the Canary Islands, extensive practical sets, a panoply of props including the titular Rings, and gorgeous costumes (for more on that subject, see my interview with the series’ costume designer, Luca Mosca), of which my favorite is, perhaps surprisingly given its relative simplicity, the gray robe embroidered with golden waves that Círdan wears in his introductory scene: an unpretentious but beautiful garment well-fitted to its owner’s personality. Through the lens of director Charlotte Brändström (who directed the sixth and seventh episodes of season one) and cinematographer Alex Disenhof, Middle-earth bursts to life.
The flaws that have always held The Rings Of Power just a hair’s-breadth back from greatness continue to do so, but the series strains against its bonds and makes a valiant push forward in this episode, a reintroduction to the world and its characters that doesn’t seek anyone’s forgiveness for sizable changes to the source material, whether smart or baffling, but asks only for patience. If not all fans will be inclined to give it even that much, there are many still who will be intrigued by what the series is doing to grapple with the broader themes of Tolkien’s work, and I see enormous potential yet in this unconventional adaptation.
POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON TWO AHEAD!
The Rings Of Power attracts a lot of undue hate, but of all the many criticisms directed at the show in its first season, one with which I think most, if not all, fans would agree is that the forging of the titular Rings and everything leading up to it was handled rather clumsily. While the show was inevitably going to disappoint somebody no matter how it adapted this pivotal moment in Middle-earth’s history for the screen, on account of how many times Sauron’s deception of the great Elven craftsman Celebrimbor, in his “fair form” as Annatar, has been depicted across art, fanfiction, cosplay, and video games, resulting in just as many highly distinct opinions of how these two characters – whose actual appearances and personalities were sketched out in the broadest of strokes by J.R.R. Tolkien – “should” look and interact, it is quite impressive that The Rings Of Power managed to upset basically everybody.
To recap: Sauron, disguised not as Annatar but as a grungy Southland prince named Halbrand, is injured in battle when the Southlands fall to Adar, just badly enough that the Númenórean medics can’t do anything for him, but not so badly that he can’t apparently withstand a journey of a least a month or two on horseback at breakneck speed to the nearest Elven kingdom, Eregion, a thousand miles away. There, Halbrand instantly recovers, wanders seemingly by accident into Celebrimbor’s forge and meets the legendary smith, who is despondent, having failed to produce anything that can prevent the fading of Elvendom – which the Elves have decided is imminent because a tree in Lindon is dying (long story). Halbrand explains to Celebrimbor what an alloy is, at which point Celebrimbor decides to trust this random stranger unreservedly and work with him. But Galadriel grows suspicious of Halbrand and does some digging, discovering that there is no prince of the Southlands. She confronts him privately about her suspicions that he’s actually the Dark Lord Sauron, and thankfully he is, or that’d be really awkward. He leaves Eregion, Galadriel decides not to tell anybody, and a clueless Celebrimbor proceeds with his and Halbrand’s plan to create powerful circular objects out of mithril – but where Halbrand wanted two crowns, one for him and one for Galadriel, Galadriel advises Celebrimbor to make three Rings. And all of that in the final episode of the season, which also had to accommodate a totally isolated subplot involving Harfoots and wizards on the other side of Middle-earth.
Now, I am not a “book purist” by nature, so deviations from the source material do not inherently bother me – as long as they contribute to a better (or at the very least equally compelling) version of the story being told. I have accepted that for the show’s purposes, the Three Rings had to be forged before the Seven and the Nine, and I probably could have gotten over my disappointment that Sauron appeared to Celebrimbor as a mortal man instead of an Elven emissary of the Valar, but I cannot make excuses for the hectic pacing, plot contrivances, and inorganic character beats required to bring everything together in the final few minutes of the season finale. The forging of the Rings neither lives up to expectations nor makes for entertaining, well-crafted television in its own right.
I can’t say I’m surprised, then, that the marketing for season two – culminating in the trailer released at San Diego Comic-Con – has made it very clear that the story of Sauron and Celebrimbor, far from being over, will instead begin anew in the upcoming second season, with Celebrimbor taking on a much larger role and Sauron finally adopting the name and guise of Annatar when he returns to Eregion. I admit to wondering whether this was planned from the outset or a direct response to the first season’s mixed reception, but either way I can guarantee you that some book purists will claim responsibility for the show course-correcting if they deem it a success and insist that the showrunners ignored the fandom entirely if not. Amazon probably doesn’t care as long as they tune in – and they will. Even if they feign morbid curiosity, the chance to endlessly critique the shortcomings of an adaptation promising to adhere closer to J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings is like catnip for some book purists.
And not that you would be able to tell from the comments section under the trailer on YouTube, where miserable internet trolls have shown up to spam the dislike button and scream into the void about Amazon “desecrating” Tolkien’s legacy (I don’t even consider these to be book purists; most have never read the books and only know what they’ve been told by right-wing rage-baiters), but the upcoming season actually looks good. In this post we’ll be going over all the new footage shown at San Diego Comic-Con, as well as a few shots from other teasers and promotional materials Amazon has put out since then that I wouldn’t be able to talk about otherwise. I’m divvying up this breakdown into smaller segments focused on each of the five main storylines: Eregion and Lindon, Khazad-dûm, Númenor, the Southlands, and Rhûn. I’ll do my best to keep spoilers to a minimum even as I try to arrange images from the trailer into chronological order based on my knowledge of the books.
EREGION AND LINDON
For reasons that The Rings Of Power has never felt compelled to elaborate on, the Elves have until next spring to find a cure for a specific tree in Lindon or they will fade, if they do not escape over the sea into the West. Obviously, the idea of Middle-earth slowly becoming uninhabitable for the Elves is an ever-present theme in all of Tolkien’s writings that deal with them: they were meant to live forever in the Undying West, but many of them followed Fëanor to Middle-earth in the First Age and tragically fell in love with a world that was always intended to belong to humans, who would inevitably drive them out. The forging of the Three Rings does indeed constitute the last attempt by the Elves to prevent the doom that awaits them in Middle-earth, but the arbitrary urgent deadline and the magical mood-ring tree are clunky and overly literal means of conveying all of that.
Thankfully, The Rings Of Power will be pressing pause on this storyline by having Galadriel and Elrond arrive in Lindon with the Three Rings in the nick of time to save the tree before it dies. Galadriel isn’t being forthcoming about the fact that Sauron was involved in the creation of the Three, but Elrond (who was already catching on last season that Halbrand wasn’t what he claimed to be) seems to have reservations about the Elves putting on the Rings and probably communicates this to the High King Gil-galad, because we see that in a last resort, as the ceremony is failing and the Rings have fallen useless to the ground, one of them – Nenya – bounces down a flight of steps and comes to a stop in front of Galadriel. The whole sequence evokes how the One Ring made its way deliberately to Bilbo Baggins in the prologue of The Fellowship Of The Ring, and suggests that the Three Rings possess wills of their own. With no other choices left to her, Galadriel picks up the ring, slips it on her finger, and seals her fate.
And with that, I’m sure, the tree will put forth a single fragile leaf and the sky will begin to clear. Gil-galad and Círdan the Shipwright will hastily put on the other two rings, and in a matter of moments, Lindon will be returned to a state of perpetual autumn – not spring or summer, notably, because the Rings can only roll back time so far and winter cannot be held at bay forever. But with the crisis temporarily averted, Gil-galad has bought himself time with which to question Galadriel and Elrond about what went down in Eregion, and Galadriel will be made to reveal the true identity of Halbrand.
Cut to Halbrand, returning to Eregion one dark and stormy night, and being welcomed back into Celebrimbor’s house by the Elven-smith himself. I expect Celebrimbor to be wary of Halbrand at first, as he remembers Galadriel’s vague warning not to engage with the Southlander, but believing him still to be just that, he will make the decision not to turn away his unexpected visitor. After all, Celebrimbor is the Lord of Eregion; how much trouble could one man be? Well, lots – you’d think Celebrimbor would have learned that lesson the hard way from having lived in Nargothrond in the First Age – and of course, Halbrand is no man, but a few red flags can’t stop Celebrimbor. Which…I mean, fair.
In a featurette titled Forging The Rings, we see Halbrand and Celebrimbor discussing the Three Rings while Halbrand dries off by the fire. Celebrimbor asks if they worked, and the response – “They worked wonders” – puts a huge smile on his face. Sauron will probably keep up the pretense for Celebrimbor that he was in Lindon to witness the ceremony, but in truth, I think Sauron is attuned to the Three Rings and can sense when and in what ways they are being used (when worn), even if he cannot tell who’s wearing them.
That same evening, if Celebrimbor’s clothing is anything to go by, Sauron will cast off the disguise of Halbrand and reveal to Celebrimbor that he has been sent by the gods to do for all of Middle-earth’s Free Peoples what he has done for the Elves – and to that end, they must make more Rings of Power. A wide-eyed Celebrimbor, who by this point is mentally forging their wedding-rings for each other, asks for his name, and Sauron, now fair-haired and clean-shaven, replies “a sharer of gifts”; which isn’t an exact translation of Annatar (lord of gifts) but is close enough that I’ll forgive it, even if Tolkien probably wouldn’t.
The forges of Eregion will play host to some intense interpersonal drama between Celebrimbor and Annatar over the course of the season, as Celebrimbor gradually becomes aware that the sixteen Rings of Power they’ve made together – including seven gifted to Celebrimbor’s close friends among the Dwarves – were tainted from their very conception. But with Annatar simultaneously amassing an army of orcs to blockade Eregion from Lindon, Celebrimbor’s only hope is that Galadriel, Elrond, and a small band of Elven warriors carving a path through the perilous wilderness of Eriador will reach him in time to stop Sauron before it’s too late, ahead of a larger army led by Gil-galad making its way more slowly by road.
The eventual Siege of Eregion will sprawl across two episodes, altogether apparently comprising one of the largest and longest battles in television history. If I had to guess how everything plays out, I’d tentatively speculate that after Sauron’s disguise is finally penetrated by Celebrimbor, the Elven-smith will make an unsuccessful attempt to capture him on his own, Sauron will escape, and before Celebrimbor can assemble a defense, the Dark Lord’s armies which have been lying in wait will already be at the gates (hence why the only bridge leading in or out of Eregion, which the Elves likely would have destroyed if they’d had time to do so, is still intact in the image below). As Eregion falls, a distraught Celebrimbor throws the nine remaining Rings of Power into the fires where they were made, intending to thwart Sauron, but then reaches into the flames and retrieves the Rings (I say this because in the previous trailer, he was seen cradling one hand, which looked blackened and burned).
Galadriel and her Elves, mere miles away, have run into one last insurmountable roadblock between them and Eregion: Adar, whose Orcs make up the bulk of Sauron’s army. Adar will capture Galadriel, and relate to her how he “killed” Sauron at the end of the First Age, and how he plans to do so again, for good this time. His line in the trailer, “Leave Sauron to me”, is presumably directed at Galadriel, who might even plead with him to join forces with the Elves.
While Sauron goes to Celebrimbor and demands that he relinquish the Nine Rings, Elrond coming back from a last-resort mission to Khazad-dûm (more on that in a minute) meets up with the army of Gil-galad and leads a cavalry charge to rescue Galadriel and relieve the Siege of Eregion. I’ll let you all discover the outcome of this clash for yourselves when the episode airs, but I will say this: behind-the-scenes footage confirms that Arondir will both arrive on the battlefield at some point, and it’s strongly implied in the trailer that an army of Dwarves under Prince Durin IV will join the fray at Elrond’s behest. It’s shaping up to be a convergence of many different plotlines.
KHAZAD-DÛM
The last we saw of the Dwarves in season one, Prince Durin IV and his wife Disa had gotten just enough mithril to Celebrimbor for him to make the Three Rings, but were obstructed from mining more by Durin’s conservative father Durin III, who worried that the risk to Dwarven life and limb outweighed the benefits of helping the Elves. In season two, Celebrimbor reaches out to the younger Durin again, this time with an invitation to visit Eregion and receive a gift on behalf of all the Elves.
I suspect that by the time Celebrimbor’s letter reaches Khazad-dûm, the underground kingdom of the Dwarves will already be in danger of collapsing in on itself, making the offer of a few Rings of Power hard to resist, even for King Durin III. Furthermore, I think it’s Sauron’s doing. We see him at one point standing over a flame that he has manipulated into the shape of a Balrog, spirits of fire that long ago became beastly servants of the Dark Lord Morgoth, and over whom Sauron exercises a degree of control as Morgoth’s successor. One of the few Balrogs that survived the cataclysmic end of the First Age now hibernates deep underneath Khazad-dûm, and as Sauron prods it from afar using sorcery, its stirrings have caused the bedrock of the Dwarven kingdom to tremble.
Durin and Disa, therefore, leave for Eregion to see if Celebrimbor can be of any assistance, and discover that the Elven-smith has prepared for them seven Rings of Power, one for each of the leaders of the seven Dwarven clans (of which Durin III is one), and each one capable of slowing or reversing time like the Three. But when the Dwarves return and present the Rings to Durin III, his downward spiral into madness begins almost immediately and is noted by everyone around him, including his son and daughter-in-law.
Durin III becomes afflicted with a heightened form of “dragon-sickness” that affects Ringbearers (Dwarves, canonically, much slower than other races, but I guess there’s an exception to every rule). In his paranoia, he can’t bear the thought of losing the ring and aggressively reacts to his son trying to remove it from his hand with a full-bodied slap that sends Durin IV flying, but at the same time, he seems almost eager for someone to try and take it by force, prowling around his treasury with an axe so he can assert his claim to the ring with blood.
While Disa goes spelunking in search of the root cause of Khazad-dûm’s recent troubles, Durin IV receives a visitor – Elrond, who makes a bold and desperate request of his old friend, asking for an army of Dwarves. I’m throwing out a guess here, but I think that when Galadriel and Elrond’s band of Elven warriors run into Sauron and Adar’s armies in the woods encircling Eregion, Elrond breaks away from the group and rides past Eregion to Khazad-dûm, knowing that a handful of Elves can’t possibly take on the might of Mordor alone and that Gil-galad’s armies coming down from the south will not make it to the field of battle in time. And Durin IV moves quickly, rallying the Dwarves to fight.
Since Disa isn’t standing alongside Durin IV while he’s delivering his speech to the Dwarves, she’s probably still poking around at the mountain’s roots, which can’t possibly be a good idea when a Balrog is in the vicinity. We catch a brief glimpse of the creature fully awake and enraged, wielding a sword of flame; raising the distinct and frightening possibility that Disa gets burned to a crisp. If she lives to tell the tale of what she saw (again, assuming she runs into the Balrog at all), I wonder if her efforts to stop the Dwarves from mining too deeply in search of mithril will put her in direct conflict with her husband, as he wants to supply the Elves with more mithril.
NÚMENOR
In the wake of a devastating defeat for the Númenórean ground armies in the Southlands last season, Queen-Regent Míriel and Lord Elendil weren’t expecting to be welcomed back at the end of season one by crowds cheering their names, but nothing could have prepared them for the news that Míriel’s elderly father, Tar-Palantir, had passed on in their absence, leaving his throne temporarily vacant and allowing the prospective Queen’s charismatic cousin Pharazôn to step in, ostensibly on her behalf. Míriel, dealing with the permanent loss of her eyesight, and Elendil, pushing through grief over his son’s death, must now take command of the island kingdom as it oscillates wildly between the time-honored traditions of the Faithful that have led to so many dead and wounded in a far-off land, and the aggressively isolationist policies held by Pharazôn and his followers.
In the books, it’s not a specific military blunder that causes the division, but changing Númenórean attitudes towards death – which, among the Faithful, is regarded as a gift, while Pharazôn and others like him see it as a curse, and become increasingly envious of the Elves, who enjoy immortal lives in Middle-earth and can leave at any point for the Undying Lands in the West, while mortal Men are forbidden to travel west beyond Númenor, even to visit their friends. Unfortunately, The Rings Of Power hasn’t really touched on any of these concepts, and the show – which has compressed the events of thousands of years into a few months, at most – just doesn’t have the multi-generational scope necessary to effectively convey how death gradually becomes a fixation of the Númenóreans, to the point where they are unable to find pleasure in living and can only derive transient satisfaction from taking out their fear and anger on the natural world and the native peoples of Middle-earth. This is all kind of important, though, for future storylines, so expect some mention of these things in season two.
As the rift in Númenórean society widens, even separating Elendil from his daughter Eärien, Míriel is put on trial (I think willingly) for her deeds and for her very beliefs. Her judge is to be the sea itself, or rather, what dwells within it – a tentacled leviathan that will spare her life if it finds her innocent and rip her to pieces if not. A crowd gathers to watch the ceremony, including Eärien, who makes a fateful choice to stand with Pharazôn, not her father. Whether their shocked expressions are in reaction to Míriel walking out of the water unharmed or to her mangled corpse floating to the surface is anyone’s guess.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when we see the Eagle of Manwë landing in the Court of the Kings, but I’m inclined to say that by this point Pharazôn has either declared himself King (following the results of the trial, perhaps?) or Míriel is being held in prison awaiting her trial and Pharazôn is acting again as Regent in her stead, as she is nowhere to be seen during this sequence and thematically, the arrival of an Eagle can only be interpreted as a warning from the gods that Númenor is straying down a path to certain ruin under Pharazôn’s leadership. Even Pharazôn knows that, but he also knows that many Númenóreans harbor a long-simmering resentment towards the gods (for all the reasons listed above) that they will never dare to speak aloud unless their leader does so first, and that these people are waiting with bated breath to see if he will be just another leader guided by signs and omens, like Míriel and Tar-Palantir before her. So he responds to the threat – with one of his own, brandishing his sword at the virtuous bird: a gesture of defiance which certainly won’t appease the gods, but in the short term, elicits awe from his surging supporters and fear from his opponents.
THE SOUTHLANDS
I’ve mentioned Elendil’s dead son, but of course, fans of the books and films know that Isildur – destined to play a role of singular importance in the War of the Last Alliance, still a few seasons away – didn’t actually perish in the cataclysmic eruption of Orodruin. He is, however, thousands of miles away from Númenor when he comes to in season two: and that’s not even the worst of his problems. Isildur is alone (apart from his faithful horse Berek) and surrounded by Orcs, in what was once the Southlands and is now the burnt and barren land of Mordor, where everything from the air to the local vegetation wants to kill him.
Escaping Mordor means crossing the mountain-range that forms a jagged fence along the country’s western, northern, and southern borders, in which there are only two clear points of entry – the vale of Udûn in the north, where the Black Gates will later be built, and the Morgul Pass (not yet known by that name) in the west. But as would still be the case thousands of years later when Frodo Baggins found himself stuck on the opposite side of these mountains looking for a way into Mordor, these two passes are not only known to the Orcs but frequently used by them, leaving Isildur with no choice but to attempt the treacherous Pass of Cirith Ungol dizzyingly high above the Morgul Pass: the same path, if it can even be called a path, that Frodo would ultimately be forced to take. Mordor’s Transportation Department says they’ve been meaning to get that road fixed for a while now, but I’m starting to think someone over there just enjoys diverting foot traffic into the lair of an enormous and bloodthirsty spider.
In their defense, Shelob is quite a small and bloodthirsty spider in the Second Age when Isildur runs into her. Some might even call her cute (not me, but some). Personally, I’ve never had such a visceral, full-body reaction to the creature as originally written or depicted in The Return Of The King, and I’ll explain why: Peter Jackson’s Shelob, like most “giant spiders” in fantasy, is so large that my brain doesn’t really register it as a spider, if that makes sense. I mean, I know it’s supposed to be a spider and it looks like a spider, but the size difference between spiders in the real world (the largest of which, the goliath birdeater, can grow up to 12 inches long) and Jackson’s Shelob (which is the size of a small car) is so great that I can just about turn off my arachnophobia. Not so with The Rings Of Power‘s Shelob, which, while definitely larger than the goliath birdeater, is just small enough that it’s still feasible to me. It can’t be much larger than megarachne, a prehistoric eurypterid discovered in 1980 and misidentified as a spider until 2005, that clocked in at around 21 inches long. I guess that’s how I measure a giant spider’s scariness: if I can convince myself that it or something akin to it could have existed at some point, I will never sleep again for fear that it will come back.
Evidently, Isildur escapes Shelob’s lair (Berek, on the other hand, may not be so lucky), but the land he descends into on the other side of the Mountains of Shadow is no less dangerous than the one he just left. It is here, though, that he makes some new friends, running into Arondir, a battle-hardened Silvan Elf leading the Southlander refugees who fled before Adar; Theo, an embittered young boy whose mother Bronwyn, one of the protagonists of the first season and Arondir’s love interest, has died offscreen in the intervening time because the actress, Nazanin Boniadi, left the show; and Estrid, a human woman whom we see handcuffed in some shots, suggesting that she’s either a liberated prisoner of the Orcs or a prisoner of Arondir himself, who has been said to distrust her.
As this odd little foursome moves across Middle-earth in search of a new home for the Southlanders, they encounter a number of creatures the likes of which we’ve never seen in this franchise before, including a giant centipede that tries to make a quick snack out of Estrid, and an Entwife, tall as a house, that effortlessly swats Estrid into the air (this woman cannot catch a break). What happened to the Entwives is one of Middle-earth’s greatest unsolved mysteries: long ago, in the First Age, they left the unkempt forests and built well-ordered farms and gardens in Rhovanion where they taught agriculture and horticulture to humans, but near the end of the Second Age, war swept across their lands and the Entwives vanished from history entirely. They may have been slain, or been taken captive by Sauron, or fled far east and south, into Rhûn and Harad. No one knows. Looking ahead for a moment, I almost hope The Rings Of Power doesn’t give us closure one way or another, leaving the audience with profound sorrow and a glimmer of hope to hold onto – but for now, I’m just excited to finally see an Entwife onscreen, and I would love for the show to visit their gardens in a future season.
Somehow, perhaps by hitching a ride on the Entwife’s shoulder, Arondir makes it to Eregion in time for the battle that concludes the season, but I would be surprised if Isildur, Estrid, or even Theo followed him. Their story lies in the Southlands, where the three of them will begin building something out of their weary and leaderless people; the indomitable kingdom of Gondor.
RHÛN
While Elanor “Nori” Brandyfoot and the Stranger will face countless perils in the literally uncharted land of Rhûn beyond the eastern border of J.R.R. Tolkien’s map of Middle-earth, at least their story is in no immediate danger of linking up with the central narrative. Fitting, then, that one of the first characters they’ll meet in Rhûn is Tom Bombadil, an enigmatic character best known for being so extraneous to the plot of The Lord Of The Rings that he’s been left out of nearly every adaptation of the books thus far. In all seriousness, though, Bombadil’s incompatibility with the story is deliberate: Tolkien considered him the embodiment of a “natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war”, someone who takes delight in “things for themselves, without reference to [him]self”, and considers “the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control….utterly meaningless….and the means of power quite valueless.”
With that in mind, something feels slightly…off about The Rings Of Power‘s take on Bombadil telling the Stranger that “Every soul in Middle-earth is in peril; will you abandon them to their doom?” I’ll reserve judgement until I hear it in its proper context, but it’s hard to imagine Bombadil saying those words in that order. This is the same person Gandalf warned would be “a most unsafe guardian” when he spoke out in opposition to a proposal put forward by the Council of Elrond to bring the One Ring to Bombadil for safekeeping. “He would soon forget it, or most likely throw it away.” And Gandalf would know: after Bombadil’s wife Goldberry and Farmer Maggot, he seems to be Bombadil’s closest friend in the books, and the Stranger in The Rings Of Power is heavily implied to be Gandalf, so there’s that.
On that note, I really don’t know how the show could get away with revealing that the Stranger is anybody other than Gandalf at this point. And I’m not just talking about his “always follow your nose” line to Nori in season one that Gandalf uses thousands of years later – also directed at a Hobbit – in The Fellowship Of The Ring. Thematically, his story is just not building towards him being Saruman, Radagast, or one of the two Blue Wizards. I do believe we’ll see these characters, most of them, arriving in Middle-earth to combat Sauron over the course of the series, but the writers chose to have the Stranger come in on a meteor specifically so he could bypass everyone and everything else, Sauron and the Elves, all of it, and land where he would be discovered, nurtured back to health, and befriended by a Hobbit. I know I’ve entertained the notion that he’s a Blue Wizard in the past, but this man is Gandalf. There’s no getting around it.
The Mystics in season one seemed to reach the same conclusion when they named him “the other”. Some took this to mean “the other” Blue Wizard, since there are two, but the full line was “He is not Sauron, he is the other”, which to me feels like another compelling argument for the Stranger being Sauron’s counterpart, the literal Enemy of Sauron, i.e. Gandalf (although I acknowledge that Saruman may have been the original Enemy of Sauron, if it was ever anything more than a title, and Gandalf may have adopted it when he “became” Saruman). Regardless, the fact that the Mystics knew in advance of both Sauron and the mysterious “other”, but had no way of distinguishing between the two until he turned on them, always implied to me that they were followers of a third and perhaps more sinister entity. Normally I’d say you know where I’m going with this, but honestly, I don’t even know if I know where I’m going with this, so bear with me.
What we know for certain is that Ciaran Hinds plays a wizard in The Rings Of Power, who appears to be the leader of the Mystics. We caught a glimpse of him in the trailer, and got a better look in a teaser posted on Twitter – and I don’t know about anyone else, but I get the distinct impression from the image above that the costume designer, hairstylists, and makeup artists were instructed to try and make Hinds pass for Sir Christopher Lee as Saruman, as he might have looked a few thousand years younger than when we met him in The Lord Of The Rings. He’s very clearly wearing off-white, which isn’t necessarily indicative of anything, but you’d think if he were a Blue Wizard, there’d be a hint of…I don’t know, blue, in his costume somewhere.
The interesting thing to consider here is that Tolkien actually sets a precedent for Saruman having traveled in the east, alongside the two Blue Wizards, in a 1954 essay published in Unfinished Tales. The Blue Wizards, according to this text, never returned, and what became of them was a mystery. In 1958, Tolkien wrote in a letter that they had likely strayed from their mission and established “secret cults and “magic” traditions” in the east. Near the end of his life, he revisited the topic, gave the Blue Wizards new names (Morinehtar and Rómestámo), and wrote that they arrived in Middle-earth much earlier than the others and were successful in undermining Sauron’s influence amongst the people of Rhûn and Harad, supporting those who rebelled against him.
I believe that The Rings Of Power is pulling bits and pieces from different versions of the story, creating a situation where Saruman and/or one of the Blue Wizards has set up a cult, while the other has stayed true and is leading the opposition to Sauron in the east. I don’t have much in the way of evidence to support this theory, but the writer in me says that if you have two characters and two equally compelling but contradictory versions of their shared storyline at your disposal, you simply adapt both versions using both characters, consequentially putting them on diverging paths, which in turn leads to more potential conflict and drama. I mean, that’s how I’d go about it.
My one concern is that Nori Brandyfoot, who was the clear protagonist of this subplot last season, will see her screentime and relevance to the story diminish as the Stranger comes into his own as a character and acquires all kinds of new powers. When the Stranger was placed among the Harfoots, and the question of how he would choose to repay their kindness was the primary source of tension, Nori’s perspective was essential as the person who took the Stranger in, vouched for him when no one else would, and had the most at stake when it was revealed to her – and the audience – if she had made the right choice. But now that we know the Stranger well enough to say with some surety that he is “good”, and with Nori and him leaving the Harfoots behind, what will she bring to the table in season two as the focus shifts to fulfilling the Stranger’s objectives?
I want to bring up showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne’s response to being asked point-blank at a San Diego Comic-Con panel if we’ll see LGBTQ+ characters on The Rings Of Power: “Maybe you have already”. Earlier at the same panel, they teased a romance involving Poppy Proudfellow; Nori’s best friend, who stopped short of joining her and the Stranger as they embarked on their adventure but works up the courage to go after them in season two. I was one of many fans who caught their breath when Poppy ran up to Nori and seemed poised to give her a kiss goodbye as they parted ways in the season finale, but I wasn’t surprised when it didn’t actually happen, because queer characters and relationships in Middle-earth has always seemed like too great an ask. I hesitate to get my hopes up even now, for fear that the showrunners were only baiting their LGBTQ+ fans, as is still so common.
And I think that just about does it for me. How did you enjoy the epic trailer out of San Diego Comic-Con, and which storylines and characters are you most excited to see when the first few episodes of The Rings Of Power season two drop August 29th? Share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!