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Exclusive: “The Rings Of Power” Costume Designer Talks Season Two, Sauron, And More

SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON TWO AHEAD!

Charlie Vickers as Annatar in The Rings Of Power, standing with his right hand raised to his chin in a contemplative gesture. He has long blond hair held back by a serpentine gold circlet, and wears a brown leather apron over a silver robe with minimal silver embroidery around the collar. He also wears brown leather arm-wraps.
Annatar | Amazon MGM Studios
Credit: Ben Rothstein / Prime Video

Just before the premiere of Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power season two in late August, I had the pleasure of speaking with the epic fantasy series’ costume designer, Luca Mosca. We touched on Sauron and Tom Bombadil, but at the time, he couldn’t tell me much about specific characters and their costumes. Now that the season is over, I sat down for another interview with Mosca to talk a little bit more in-depth about the season, specific costumes, and his experience working on The Rings Of Power.

Leith Skilling: So I wanted to start by first saying congratulations to you and your entire team. Season two was so well-received, and the costumes were just beautiful across the board.

Luca Mosca: Thank you so much. I should really stress on the word “Team”, because I was nothing in the face of the skills and professionality and efficiency of my entire Team. Not one of those costumes would be there were it were not for the Team. It takes a village and it’s really like a bee-hive operation and I’ve been chosen to be the queen bee. And everybody around me was just pure excellence. So I wanted to make sure that you are aware that you’re not talking to one person but you’ll be talking to hundreds.

LS: Especially on a production of this scale, I can only imagine how many people are involved at every level.

LM: I think we have been the largest TV show ever made. In New Zealand in particular, one really had the feeling that we were doing something colossal and immense.

LS: Well, on that note, how did you get involved with The Rings Of Power?

LM: I got a call out of the clear blue sky from one of the executive producers who explained that they were sadly losing their costume designer [Kate Hawley] and who invited me to join the show in New Zealand, so I interviewed, put together a few sketches and I was hired.

Luca Mosca standing with his arms wrapped around his sister Erica. Luca is wearing a long-sleeved blue shirt. Erica is wearing a blue-green headscarf and black-and-white dress.
Luca Mosca with his sister Erica | image courtesy of Luca Mosca

I was coming from the John Wick trilogy but could not join John Wick 4 because I had to go to Italy and join my family for a couple of months because my little sister who had gone skiing off-trail had met her death together with her boyfriend in an avalanche and I had to go tend to my elderly father who had been left alone. That was a true emotional cataclysm in my life. Once my father was taken care of, I was able to leave my dad in capable hands, fly to New Zealand and join the show. It was the proverbial “rollercoaster” or the “peaks and valleys” of life.

LS: Had you read the books or was this world entirely new to you?

LM: Although I was familiar with the trilogy, I read the books again in order to become an “expert” but here’s another intimidating thing: you think you know Lord Of The Rings because you know Saruman and Gollum but then you go into this kind of production and you are surrounded by so much knowledge and you hear people talk and it’s like “what are they talking about?” It’s gigantic, it’s a culture, it’s a language of its own, there are people who know how to write the runes and people who know how to read them, people who know everything and every single detail inside-out, it was an intimidating feeling.

Trystan Gravelle as Pharazon in The Rings Of Power, striding towards the camera with his hands by his side, as a wind whips at him. He has long dark hair going gray and a beard streaked with black. He wears a crimson robe with a long cloak and an ornamental silver breastplate with numerous belts around his waist.
Pharazôn | Amazon MGM Studios
Credit: Ben Rothstein / Prime Video

LS: We have to talk about Sauron, because he really is the center of season two. There’s so much fan art that’s been made of Sauron in his “fair form” as Annatar: did you try to reference any of that, and what other references and influences went into creating his new look?

LM: I had to tap into my background, my culture and my heritage and I started researching how in the Middle Ages a good monk would be depicted or a good prophet or a good Samaritan or a good messenger, since we drew a lot of visual inspiration from Middle Ages art or from the Byzantine period or from the Renaissance. One feature of that costume is that it is very drapey even if it looked like it was made out of burlap. The fabric was actually a precious raw silk that looked like burlap because the weave was open and rustic looking. We used this open weave quality and underneath it we put a shiny, silvery fabric that – only at times, only with movement when the knee or the elbow or the chest were pushing against the fabrics and only in places of contact – it shimmered through.

And that to me was one of the most successful costumes because it showed the “deceit” of Sauron: “Oh, look at me, I’m a humble creature, I’m a humble man, I’m dressed in burlap like a poor monk begging for scraps of food”. But in reality, if you dug through his costume, you would find all this decadent luxury underneath the first layer of fabric that is not typical of a monk. It was a beautiful concept and this is what we do as costume designers since we are storytellers and sometimes we even inform the actor of who their character is. Actors sometimes meet their character in front of a mirror in the fitting room, and Charlie Vickers loved that costume.

LS: Sauron and Galadriel obviously have a very close relationship and their journeys parallel each other this season. Do you design one’s outfit with the other one in mind?

LM: Absolutely. Always, always. We prepare “line-ups” of costumes: the illustrations are all lined up on a sheet of paper or on a board, to make sure – and this is something I do in every movie – to make sure that there are no clashes, or no similarities, or if there are similarities, they happen on purpose. Only once I display them out, only after seeing them all together I realize conflicts or issues, so yes: we do design costumes with that in mind, with a palette in mind and the costume of Sauron, the “fair form” at least, had a little bit of an Elven quality. It wasn’t the coloring of Celebrimbor, it wasn’t the greens and the purples of Eregion, but in terms of drape and fluidity and shape, it could very well pass for an Elf. So we do design these things with that in mind, and if you think about it, Sauron’s “fair form” is the same color as Galadriel’s armor, right?

LS: There’s been some speculation online over the similar silhouette and color palette of Sauron’s “fair form” costume and the costume of Celeborn, Galadriel’s husband, in The Lord Of The Rings films – was there any intent behind that?

LM: Not at all, that is not something that we had in mind or that we intended to reference.

Benjamin Walker as Gil-galad and Robert Aramayo as Elrond, standing side-by-side, surrounded by Orcs. Gil-galad has long dark brown hair and wears a burnished gold breastplate emblazoned with the intertwining gold and silver branches of the Two Trees of Valinor over a long-sleeved pale yellow tunic with large pauldrons and vambraces. Elrond has short, tousled dark brown hair and wears a very similar suit of armor but in silver. He has a deep wound in his right cheek, and blood is running down his face.
Gil-galad and Elrond | Amazon MGM Studios
Credit: Ben Rothstein / Prime Video

LS: Is foreshadowing something that you try to incorporate into the costuming? A lot of characters die this season – Celebrimbor, Adar, King Durin – are there any signals to their eventual fates that you incorporate into the costume?

LM: I try to, as much as possible, because us costume designers are psychologists and we try to give hints but sometimes like in the case of the death of Celebrimbor, it’s in the lore and is a known fact, the audience knows in advance. Celebrimbor’s look was one of the big tasks that I was met with when I landed in New Zealand. The Studio wanted a dignified, elegant and elevated Celebrimbor. And again, tapping back into my heritage of history and art, I thought that the best reference for Celebrimbor would have been Dante. Next time you see images of Dante or Dante with Beatrice, note how that kind of fluid gown is kind of translated into Celebrimbor’s costume. This kind of artistic “concept” is very seductive for the audience, for the director, for the actor or the producer. That was another successful translation of cultural elements from my particular background into modern filmmaking.

LS: Do you have a favorite group to design for; Elves, Dwarves, Númenóreans?

LM: You’re basically asking me as a parent to choose his favorite child – that’s impossible! So without telling you what was my favorite or my least-favorite – I can tell you that honestly I did not have a least-favorite, because every world and culture of Rings Of Power was so creatively enjoyable to design and I could go from looking at a bloodied Orc to seeing a celestial Elf during the same costume fitting session and the mental and creative stimulation of going from from Dwarves to Númenóreans or from Orcs to Elves was so satisfying. I particularly loved Númenor. Númenor is to me like ancient Rome at the peak – but at that last day of the peak, when after that the fall of the empire happened. It was at the peak of luxury and decadence and refinement with beautiful fabrics, shiny jewel-tones or primary colors. The Elves were elegant and the Orcs were so creative and designing for the Dwarves was so incredible, but Númenor was a feast of colors, of luxury, of embroidery, it was phenomenal.

LS: When designing armor, what is the process behind that, and especially for the Elves, how do you balance the beauty and aesthetics with practicality and durability?

LM: The first armor that I was tasked to design was for the elven army of Eregion. We looked at brass statues that were becoming tarnished with the verdigris of oxidation. And in my understanding of Eregion – and that’s why I used so much green in it, green and colors of foliage – in Eregion they were master builders and their city was incredible but they never prevented nature from coming indoors. So moss, lichen and creeping ivy were not trimmed but they were invited in and they were part of the environment. So the oxidation concept came up and I applied green “verdigris” to the armor.

How do we make them durable? Durability is a big problem, because much of the armor, just because of the nature of it, goes through battles with a lot of action and gets damaged. But the armor also needs to be made out of materials that are light and safe enough for the actor to wear. Can you only imagine if there were a sharp metal edge and I sent the actor out in it and they fell and got cut and injured? So the choice of materials is very important and is part of a long process. When I pass on the final sketch to the armorer who asks me: “are you sure?”, the little voice inside me says “No, I’m not! I will never be sure, give me another day, give me another week, give me another month”. But we have to move on and to commit to a specific design and to give it to a sculptor who first makes it in clay and also to a metalworker who makes a prototype out of real metal. At that stage I have to pull the trigger and say “this is it” and there’s no going back. For Gil-galad or Elrond the armor was slightly different and personalized, it was similar to the rest of the soldiers yet with slight differences and touches that made it unique to them.

LS: Where do the costumes currently reside?

LM: They’re all back in London at the Studios. As you could see there were a lot of costumes from season one in season two, and costumes from both seasons will also be carried over into the next seasons.

Charles Edwards as Celebrimbor in The Rings Of Power, seated at a small desk watching a candle burning. He has tousled brown hair streaked with soot and grime, and wears a brown leather apron over a dark green robe with holly leaves embroidered in spring green and gold around the collar. The tools and accoutrements of a jewelsmith are scattered about him.
Celebrimbor | Amazon MGM Studios
Credit: Ross Ferguson / Prime Video

LS: Lastly, a silly question. When the Lord Of The Rings films came out, there were Barbie dolls of characters like Arwen, Galadriel, Legolas. Is there any chance of a Sauron Barbie doll or a Galadriel Barbie doll for The Rings Of Power?

LM: (laughs) I don’t know, because I’m not involved with that side of marketing. What I do know is that there was a doll of John Wick in the black suit that was not made by the Studio. So these dolls might exist but I am unaware of them.

LS: We have to get on Amazon’s case to make the official versions.

LM: I will definitely make a request and say that Leith requested Barbie dolls.

LS: Well, that is all the time we have. Thank you so much for your time.

LM:  You have to shut me up because I could continue for hours as I like to reminisce about all of this; it was a beautiful experience. Let’s hope that the costumes get – that the whole series in general, the actors and the sets and everybody – get the due recognition during awards season.

LS: Emmys all around!

LM: I’m not a big social media person so I don’t have a “thermometer” of what’s going on but I hear a lot of positive stuff so – fingers crossed!

All episodes of The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power season two are now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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“The Rings Of Power” Season 2, Episode 5 Finally Puts The Rings In Focus

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON TWO, EPISODE FIVE AHEAD!

In Middle-earth, pieces of magical jewelry are almost inevitably the catalyst for widespread death and devastation, and in and of themselves are often objects of psychological horror. The Silmarillion is presented as a compilation of legends recounting how several generations of heroes and villains were driven to self-destruction in their relentless pursuit of the Silmarils, three jewels shaped by the legendary craftsman Fëanor. The Hobbit is a whimsical children’s story that abruptly morphs into something much darker when the Arkenstone is introduced, closely resembling a Silmaril in both appearance and narrative function. The Lord Of The Rings follows the quest to destroy the One Ring, which is semi-sentient and does everything in its considerable power to prevent its wearer from wanting to take it off or give it away, much less do harm to it. And Amazon’s The Rings Of Power attempts to piece together the story of how that and nineteen similar Rings came into being; how they were tainted in the making by the Dark Lord Sauron (Charlie Vickers), and how they almost brought all of Middle-earth under his authoritarian rule forever.

Close-up shot of a gold chalice on a table, around the rim of which are placed seven gold rings, each standing upright and crowned with a heavy jewel.
The Seven Rings | youtube.com

The Rings Of Power is the only one of these stories not told in full by J.R.R. Tolkien. A much abridged version of the tale can be found in the Appendices to The Lord Of The Rings, and slightly more detail is given in a short epilogue to The Silmarillion and in a fragmented outline published in Unfinished Tales, but Amazon only bought the rights to The Lord Of The Rings from the Tolkien Estate, so the Appendices are what their writers have to work with: excepting a few stray names exclusive to The Silmarillion and/or Unfinished Tales (like Sauron’s alter ego in Eregion, Annatar) that were apparently the result of separate bargains. Every interaction between characters on the show has been the invention of other minds and hands besides Tolkien’s own. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because as I’ve said previously, The Rings Of Power thrives when it’s given free rein.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the dynamic between Sauron and Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards). In The Lord Of The Rings, all that is said of the second-greatest Elven craftsman after Fëanor (besides having helped construct the West-gate of Khazad-dûm, an event the show covers very briefly) is that he was deceived by Sauron’s fair form and his promise to help the Elves rebuild Middle-earth after the catastrophic wars of the First Age. Together, they forged sixteen Rings of Power, and three Celebrimbor made separately from Sauron. But were the Rings his idea, or Sauron’s? Was Celebrimbor ever suspicious of his partner before the day, it is said, when Sauron first put on the One Ring he had forged alone and the Elves knew they had been betrayed? What, if any, signs of Sauron’s true agenda did he miss or look past nonetheless? What was their relationship? These and other details simply don’t exist.

Yet The Rings Of Power navigates skillfully through the gaps and cracks in the pseudo-historical narrative, weaving an almost unendurably intimate story of one man (well, elf)’s anguishing descent into paranoia under the soothing manipulations of a sociopathic deity that has only a loose basis in the text but is about as quintessentially Tolkienian as anyone could hope to write, evoking the tragedy of Fëanor, inevitably – but also, and arguably even more so, the deeply depressing Tale Of The Children Of Húrin, or Narn I Hîn Húrin, whose sibling protagonists eventually commit suicide after discovering that they had been bewitched by a malevolent dragon into an incestuous relationship with each other. Obviously, not quite the same situation (though the dragon Glaurung, with his ability to mesmerize and deceive, is actually very similar to Sauron), but as The Rings Of Power‘s Celebrimbor begins to wake from the spell Sauron cast on him, learning from his friends in Khazad-dûm that the seven rings he gifted to the Dwarves have malfunctioned horribly in some way, he experiences all the same emotions – most viscerally, a sense of horror and revulsion with himself.

Sauron, still posing as the lovely Annatar, is there at once to guide Celebrimbor gently but firmly through his crisis, assuring the Elven-smith that even though it was his fault the seven rings do not work as intended, together they can make things right by forging more: nine more, to be precise. Sauron’s unwavering composure, in stark contrast to Celebrimbor’s increasing panic and bewilderment, is another classic manipulation tactic, giving Celebrimbor the illusion of something steady to hold onto as his world seems to be falling apart, while simultaneously misleading onlookers to their relationship into believing that Sauron is the sounding board for Celebrimbor’s erratic outbursts. Within their controlled environment, the boundaries of which continue to shrink as Sauron isolates Celebrimbor from his people, the once-powerful elf retains just enough agency for it to seem plausible, even to him, that he is in fact responsible for all his actions over the past several weeks, intensifying his feelings of confusion because he keeps making choices that seem right and they keep backfiring.

Charles Edwards as Celebrimbor, in close-up, with Charlie Vickers as Annatar standing behind him, looming over his right shoulder. Celebrimbor has short brown hair and wears a forest-green pleated velvet robe with holly leaves embroidered around the frilly collar. Annatar has long blonde hair held back by a golden circlet, and wears a brown leather apron over a plain white robe with moderate silver embroidery.
Celebrimbor and Annatar | msn.com

Vickers and Edwards, separately and especially together, continue to be the season’s standout performers, with Edwards more than making up for his lack of screentime throughout season one and the first half of season two. His mildness, easily mistaken for meekness, belies his true strength and force of will, which Edwards summons to the forefront of his depiction as the two smiths clash more frequently in episode five. Realizing that he cannot convince Celebrimbor of the necessity of the Nine Rings, Sauron enlists their young pupils to help him forge the Nine in open defiance of Celebrimbor’s orders, all before his very eyes. Sauron is not the smith Celebrimbor is, however, and Celebrimbor eventually feels compelled to intervene and lend them his aid, if only to prevent any of his cherished apprentices from being injured or inadvertently killed. No doubt that was Sauron’s intention, to strongarm the stubbornly virtuous smith into finishing the job they started by cruelly exploiting his love for his people, which Celebrimbor could not hide even if he were trying.

Vickers, meanwhile, begins stripping the already thin layers of humanity out of his character, his eyes becoming colder, his posture more statuesque, and his demeanor more aloof and unkind as the project grinds to a halt just inches away from completion. The almost imperceptible fidgeting of his fingers or the twitch in his jaw whenever the forge is briefly still, and his soulless mimicry of Celebrimbor’s genuine care and concern for the smiths all speak to his growing impatience and willingness to start shedding blood to get what he wants.

I should probably mention Mirdania (Amelia Kenworthy) at this point: the only named smith besides Celebrimbor, she acts as a representative for the whole group, and The Rings Of Power inevitably puts her character through a great deal of emotional and mental abuse on their behalf – but where Celebrimbor and other male victims of Sauron’s manipulation are shown to fall slowly under his spell and are allowed to keep their dignity even in their darkest moments, Mirdania is won over by a single compliment about her physical appearance, rather than her skills, and her role almost immediately reduced to Sauron’s hopelessly smitten, willing plaything. Given that she is, in addition to being the only named smith, the only named female character in Eregion and one of a handful of named female Elves on the show, the decision to utilize her in this manner is an extremely unfortunate one.

The Dwarves weave in and out of Sauron’s plans, mostly impervious to his attempted manipulation of their minds, but not entirely incorruptible. The typically sober and cautious King Durin III (Peter Mullan, who has scoffed at fans who take the show “ridiculously seriously”, but is by no means phoning in his performance) is emboldened by the Ring of Power on his finger: at first making use of the heightened perception it grants him to locate a place in the cavern wall where the Dwarves can safely chip away, permitting a thin beam of sunlight to reach the dark-enshrouded underground city of Khazad-dûm. Of course, because we’re already on episode five of eight, it’s not long before the King’s newfound ability leads him in the opposite direction, deeper into the mountain’s ancient foundations, probing for the untapped natural treasury he knows lies just out of his reach.

Concurrently, his daughter-in-law Disa (Sophia Nomvete) takes a wrong turn in the market and ends up on the shores of a vast subterranean lake (hate when that happens), where she makes an unsettling discovery: the Dwarves may not be alone in Khazad-dûm. Something deep under the city is awake, the force of its breath stirring the waters of the lake. But Disa and her husband Durin IV (Owain Arthur)’s attempts to warn the King prove unsuccessful, so together they devise a plan to prevent him from delving any further. The fiery Nomvete steals most every scene she’s in, but Arthur’s performance is equally impressive this episode, as his character finally stops hiding behind his cantankerous humor and opens up about his complicated feelings towards his father.

Sophia Nomvete as Disa and Owain Arthur as Durin IV, in a crowded market. Disa has curly dark hair piled up on her head, and wears a silver-and-gold mantle over a pleated gray dress encrusted with gold. Durin has bushy reddish-brown hair and a long braided beard, and wears a rust-red studded breastplate over a red-and-gold tunic with red leather armbands.
Disa and Durin | geekgirlauthority.com

Fatherhood is a prominent but understated motif in The Rings Of Power, and the show depicts a wide range of father/child relationships, often complex and tense: you have the Durins double, who are at each other’s throats half the time but still love each other deeply, even if they have a hard time expressing that; Adar (Sam Hazeldine), whose name in Sindarin literally translates to ‘father’, doing what he thinks is best for his adopted children, the Orcs, and inadvertently causing them to resent him; the Silvan Elf Arondir, in many ways Adar’s parallel, struggling to form a connection with the mortal youth Theo, whose mother Arondir loved; and you have Ar-Pharazôn (Trystan Gravelle) and Elendil (Lloyd Owen) in Númenor – two very different men on opposite sides of an ideological divide, who have more in common when it comes to their parenting skills (or lack thereof) than is probably evident at first glance.

That’s not to say they’re equally awful fathers: Pharazôn straight-up does not like his son Kemen (Leon Wadham), and blatantly manipulates him with an empty promise that he’ll tell Kemen what his dead mother foresaw of his future if he agrees to do his dirty work. But Elendil, while he’s a heroic character where Pharazôn is not, is almost as emotionally detached from his children. He loves them, but he doesn’t know how to talk to them, and makes very few attempts (at least that we see). His daughter Eärien (Ema Horvath) is well within her rights to be confused and upset by his actions: he campaigned hard for Númenor to go to war, got her brother killed (so they both think), and now refuses to speak of it, except to spout the vagaries of the Faithful. Unfortunately, she’s had so few scenes this season that her decision to move fully into Pharazôn’s camp and join him in overthrowing the government still feels like a sudden heel-turn, but I get it.

I can’t bring myself to hate Eärien, but Kemen? Well, let’s just say that’s a different story. He may not have willingly ransacked a holy site and intimidated people peacefully praying if it weren’t for his father’s instructions, but goading a man into fighting him, and then killing that man dishonorably by stabbing him in the back after said man spared his life – that was all Kemen’s doing. And it would be bad enough if it were some random Númenórean extra we didn’t know previously, but it’s not: the man in question, Valandil (Alex Tarrant), is an endearing character we’ve known from season one, whom Elendil loved as his own son, and his death comes as a complete shock. The imagery of him bleeding out in Elendil’s arms, while Kemen casually cleans his blade in holy water, cements Kemen as The Rings Of Power‘s worst character – by which I do not mean that Wadham is giving a bad performance, or that the character is poorly-written (underwritten, yes), but rather that he is so despicable he gives Sauron and other, more competent villains on the show a run for their money. He faded into the background in earlier episodes, but no longer.

Episode five, Halls Of Stone, achieves an almost perfect balance between the subplots in Eregion, Khazad-dûm and Númenor that the season as a whole could have stood to replicate. Writer Nicholas Adams, who also wrote the standout sixth episode of season one, Udûn, finds and focuses in on the emotional core in every scene of his precise, yet richly nuanced script; a focus maintained by co-directors Sanaa Hamri and Louise Hooper. Adams will not be returning for the show’s yet-to-be-officially-announced third season, sadly, but this is the quality of writing The Rings Of Power really ought to be matching from here on out (as the second season is now complete, I can say it comes so close as to make little difference in the final three episodes, but falls just a little short).

Leon Wadham as Kemen and Trystan Gravelle as Ar-Pharazon, standing side-by-side in a vast hall, talking. Kemen has short brown hair and wears a russet-brown robe with a gold cape and dark blue sleeves. Pharazon has shoulder-length curly gray hair and a beard, and wears a silver toga-like garment over a dark red robe, with a golden scepter in his hand.
Kemen and Ar-Pharazôn | meaww.com

With this episode, The Rings Of Power rights itself after a short rough patch (short, I say, but two weak episodes still constitute a quarter of the season), and gives us a glimpse of what might have been if the season had been stripped of its slow-burn accessory subplots in Pelargir and Rhûn. Everything falls into place around Edwards’ Celebrimbor, Vickers’ Sauron, and the titular Rings – which are not just props, but protagonists (or antagonists) in their own right, with a degree of sentience and agency. Finally, that’s actually starting to feel like the case.

Episode Rating: 9/10

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“The Rings Of Power” Season 2, Episode 4 Indulges In Fan Service

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.

Markella Kavenagh as Elanor Brandyfoot in The Rings Of Power. She has short, curly brown hair, and wears a dark green blouse. A disc of silver hangs on a cord around her neck.
Elanor Brandyfoot | youtube.com

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.

Shot from below looking up at Robert Aramayo as Elrond and Morfydd Clark as Galadriel, standing near the broken edge of an elevated stone walkway through a pine forest. Elrond has short tousled brown hair and wears a gray cloak over a pale yellowish-gray tunic. Galadriel has long blonde hair in a braid, and wears a gray cloak over a silver tunic with a quiver of arrows strapped to her back.
Elrond and Galadriel on the Axa Bridge | youtube.com

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.

Ismael Cruz Cordova as Arondir, standing over Maxim Baldry as Isildur, extending a hand to the man. Arondir has close-cropped dark hair and wears a gray cloak over a gray wooden breastplate sculpted into the glowering face of a man with a leafy beard and hair. He has a quiver of arrows strapped to his back. Isildur has shoulder-length shaggy brown hair and wears a gray cloak. They are in a forest.
Arondir and Isildur | youtube.com

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.

Rory Kinnear as Tom Bombadil, standing outside in a rock garden. Bee-hives sit on a wooden bench behind him, and a pile of branches. Tom has long curly reddish-brown hair and a bushy beard, and wears a white tunic with rolled-up sleeves and a brown leather belt.
Tom Bombadil | nerdist.com

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.

Ciaran Hinds as the Dark Wizard, seated on a stone throne carved with runes and hieroglyphs, in a cave between basalt pillars. He has long, straight dark brown hair, a long beard going gray, and bushy eyebrows. He wears white robes with a silver breastplate and gauntlets on both his wrists, and carries a horned staff in his right hand.
The Dark Wizard | radiotimes.com

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.

Episode Rating: 6.8/10

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Annatar Arrives In “The Rings Of Power” Season 2, Episode 2

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.

Charlie Vickers as Annatar in The Rings Of Power, facing Charles Edwards as Celebrimbor, whose back is turned to the camera. Annatar has long blonde hair held back by a golden circlet, and wears a white mantle over a white tunic with silver embroidery. Celebrimbor has short brown hair and wears a dark red robe with gold embroidery.
Annatar and Celebrimbor | youtube.com

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.

Charles Edwards as Celebrimbor, in close-up, standing on a mezzanine overlooking his forge. It is dark. His face is lined with worry and possibly fear. He has short brown hair, and wears a red robe with gold embroidery.
Celebrimbor | youtube.com

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.

Underwater shot of a hand, reaching for the bottom of a shallow pool teeming with small fish and a few brightly-colored coral. The hand wears a single golden ring, in which a dark red gemstone is set.
Narya on the hand of Círdan | youtube.com

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.

Owain Arthur as Durin IV, reading from a piece of parchment while Sophia Nomvete as Disa stands just behind him, reading over his shoulder. Durin has red hair and a bushy beard. He wears a red-and-gold short-sleeved tunic. Disa has long dark curly hair, and wears a loose gray gown with a cape.
Durin IV and Disa receive Celebrimbor’s invitation | youtube.com

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.

Episode Rating: 9/10