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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON TWO, EPISODE THREE AHEAD!
The fact that it takes The Rings Of Power three whole episodes, almost half its second season, just to reintroduce all of the major characters from the first is demonstrative of a major structural weakness: it doesn’t have enough time or space for all the far-flung subplots it insists on treating as though they do anything to advance what is in theory if not in execution the overarching narrative of this season. That’s not to say that spending time in Pelargir with Isildur (Maxim Baldry) and the Southlander refugees is unimportant in the long run, but here and now it absolutely is, and every second spent there is a second that could have gone towards further fleshing out Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) and his relationship with Annatar (Charlie Vickers), or the bare-bones story of how the titular Rings of Power come to be, which is currently being told in bits and pieces between the substantial blocks of screentime devoted to peripheral characters.
Pharazôn and the Eagle | youtube.com
Even the most critical subplot on the show, that of Númenor and its people, is being shortchanged. We spend a grand total of fifteen minutes on the island kingdom of Men in the third episode, jumping straight into a funeral ceremony for a character most casual viewers have probably forgotten entirely in the intervening two years since the first season finale where he quietly passed away; King Tar-Palantir. The audience has no emotional attachment to him, which is fine, we don’t necessarily need to care about the guy to understand that his death marks a turning-point in Númenor’s history…unfortunately, the extremely brief sequence doesn’t convey the magnitude of the moment either, instead feeling oddly hollow and mundane.
The parts needed to assemble a compelling story rife with political intrigue are all there – the old king’s unpopular daughter Míriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), already acting as his regent, stands poised to take the throne, as is her right, while her charismatic cousin Pharazôn (Trystan Gravelle) is positioning himself as the figurehead for a revolution – but there’s only so much that can be done with them in under a quarter of an hour, and taking time across multiple episodes to build slowly towards the inevitable coup isn’t really an option when the season is already close to being over.
This may be the result of a disagreement between the show’s editors and producers over how much screentime to give the Numenoreans, reported on by Fellowship Of Fans in August of last year, though not knowing how many and what kind of scenes were left on the cutting-room floor, I can’t definitively say that their inclusion would have helped – besides which, I can’t pass judgement on what I imagine we might have seen from this subplot (ideally, a gripping succession drama rivaling House Of The Dragon‘s in terms of complexity and depth), only the version that Amazon saw fit to release into the world: which it brings me no pleasure to report lacks any and all of the aforementioned qualities.
While the character of Pharazôn stands out in his few scenes, entirely due to Gravelle’s spellbinding performance, he is also the greatest victim of the edit – or, perhaps, the writers? Whoever it was, let me say, that made him an opportunistic spectator to the coup we are meant to understand was the culmination of his political machinations. He certainly doesn’t shoot down any of the treasonous ideas being bandied around the dinner-table by the overtly duplicitous Lord Belzagar (Will Keen) and the ambitious young architecture student Eärien (Ema Horvath), but he seems almost disinterested in their conversation himself. It is Eärien who disrupts Míriel’s coronation ceremony by exposing the Queen Regent’s treasured seeing-stone, her palantír, and Belzagar who spins the arrival of an Eagle of Manwë (obviously intended for Míriel) into a sign for Pharazôn and leads the crowd in chanting his name.
Queen Regent Míriel | telltaletv.com
Pharazôn, for his part, gives Míriel one last chance before her coronation to simply follow his counsel, offering her a choice between a red gown he says represents Númenor’s glorious future and a white gown representing its somber past. Míriel chooses the white, declaring it the “humbler” of the two options. Humble is perhaps not the word I would use to describe any dress that comes with a mother-of-pearl mosaic collar, but then, I am not a Númenórean monarch. It is a gorgeous piece, far and away my favorite costume on the show, and you can read my interview with The Rings Of Power‘s costume designer Luca Mosca, where I asked about it specifically, here. Pharazôn, however, is visibly irritated by her virtuosity. If the idea is that he might have called off the coup if she had chosen differently (i.e. demonstrating willingness to be molded into a more pragmatic leader), it’s not explored any further, and just makes Pharazôn seem confused.
It’s a great scene for Míriel, though. Some viewers may find her staunch faith and moral integrity to be uninteresting qualities, but I see her as The Rings Of Power‘s most quintessentially Tolkienian protagonist: noble, fair and cold, in possession of a quiet strength she does not project outwardly, because she does not seek to be regarded as unassailable or unapproachable. This is illustrated beautifully when she embraces a grieving mother who had slapped her across the face just moments before, taking that nameless woman’s pain and sorrow upon herself as if it were her own. She may not have Pharazôn’s skill for addressing crowds and choosing words that can apply to many situations, but one-on-one, she is the more genuinely compassionate of the two. And most of that is down to Addai-Robinson, who on top of everything else, is playing a blind Míriel in The Rings Of Power season two (something that the show, admittedly, hasn’t done much with, but which factors into the fear that she is “weaker” since coming back from Middle-earth).
Apart from these two, no one else in Númenor has had enough screentime to make a strong impression this season. Eärien’s grief and rage over her brother Isildur’s apparent death in the Southlands, the driving factor behind her decision to break away from her father Elendil (Lloyd Owen) and join Pharazôn in overthrowing the Queen Regent, is referenced once or twice, giving her at least the impression of interiority, but her boyfriend Kemen (Leon Wadham), Pharazôn’s son, exists solely to fill out crowd shots as far as I can tell. Even Elendil just stands around. His only scene with any meat on its bones is one that’s been copy-and-pasted over from the first season – specifically, the scene in which Elendil, unable to calm Isildur’s distraught horse Berek, lets the animal run free in the Southlands.
Shelob | youtube.com
The scene ended there in season one, but this time we follow Berek back to the place where he lost his rider, amongst the smoking rubble of what used to be the human village of Tirharad, before Adar (Sam Hazeldine) and his Orcs moved in. Wandering into a nearby cave, he finds Isildur trussed up in webs, in line to be devoured by Shelob. The iconic monster’s inclusion in The Rings Of Power is, unfortunately, the most shameless form of fan-service: she could just as easily have been a creature invented for the show, like the mud-worm in episode four. You won’t learn anything about her that you don’t already know from the books or movies, though in fairness, I suppose there’s not much more to know. She’s a giant spider that eats people (even her brood-mother Ungoliant is just a giant spider that eats everything; these are not exactly Tolkien’s most complex characters we’re talking about here). While the sequence in Shelob’s lair isn’t likely to be anyone’s highlight of the season, it kicks the episode into gear – and as an arachnophobe, Shelob’s design and movements are all sorts of icky. She is smaller and less heavily armored than in The Lord Of The Rings, but what she lacks in size she makes up for with increased speed and agility.
Just as the ancient hero Beren, fleeing from giant spiders, stumbled upon Lúthien dancing in a hemlock grove in the Forest of Doriath, so Isildur escapes Shelob and meets Estrid (Nia Towle) – but the similarities between their love stories end there. Estrid, mistaking Isildur for an Orc, stabs him in the thigh, and then, while apologizing profusely, pulls the knife out of the wound (big no no), setting the tone for their interactions going forward. They make a pretty cute couple, if you like your romantic leads to share exactly one braincell between them. Estrid’s theme, softly undulating with a hint of mystery, also happens to be my favorite track off the OST. But is that enough to justify her and Isildur’s combined screentime greatly exceeding that of Celebrimbor and Sauron in this episode?
Once they’ve reached their destination, the Númenórean outpost of Pelargir, and linked up with the Southlander refugees, Isildur and Estrid’s short-term goals are fulfilled – sure, Isildur wants to go home and reunite with his family and friends, but he’s safe, and the show could have conceivably left him and Estrid there until a more opportune moment to pick up their story thread again. It doesn’t do that, which is why we end up lingering in the Southlands far longer than was probably necessary, with a pair of Ent serial killers and the “Wild Men”, the show’s term for the Southlanders who have chosen to serve Adar (no relation to the Wild Men in The Lord Of The Rings). I strongly suspect that Nazanin Boniadi’s herbalist-turned-reluctant-leader Bronwyn, the season one protagonist of the Southlands subplot, would have somehow provided the connective tissue between these leftover pieces of a narrative: but Boniadi chose not to return for The Rings Of Power‘s second season and the role was not recast. She is instead revealed to have died offscreen, leaving her son Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin) an orphan and the Southlanders leaderless.
Regardless of intent, Bronwyn’s death accentuates the themes that underpin all of J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories of Middle-earth, this one especially: the inevitability of death, and the fear of it. That fear is the driving force behind the creation of the Rings of Power, something the show was trying (albeit awkwardly) to convey in season one when it imposed a deadline on the Elves to either halt the effects of the passage of time on their bodies and souls, leave Middle-earth forever and return west across the sea to the Undying Lands, or fade, becoming intangible and powerless. In season two, the show gets the same idea across more gracefully using the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm, whose survival is dependent on a resource – sunlight – they have precious little of, and less and less with each tremor that threatens to bring the weight of the Misty Mountains down upon their heads. Celebrimbor, the smith who saved the Elves, is happy to help the Dwarves out of their own predicament, and no less so when Sauron shyly confesses that High King Gil-galad has forbade the making of any more Rings.
Celebrimbor and Annatar | thedailybeast.com
But while it would be no overstatement to say this is the single most important plot development of the season thus far, The Rings Of Power doesn’t communicate that by giving the lion’s share of screentime to a character like Isildur, who has plenty of time still to morph into a convincing protagonist before he’s called upon to perform the great deeds that will make him a household name. I’m doing my best not to spoil what’s coming for Celebrimbor, but he doesn’t have much time left, and the show needs to do a better job – and quickly – of managing its jostling subplots so they’re not squeezing the “A” story.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(left to right) Galadriel, Cirdan, and Gil-galad | youtube.com
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
Lindon | youtube.com
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.
Nenya | youtube.comNenya and Galadriel | youtube.com
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.
Gil-galad questions Galadriel | youtube.comHalbrand in Eregion | youtube.comHalbrand in Eregion | youtube.com
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 forge of Celebrimbor | youtube.com
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.
Elrond and Galadriel in Eriador | youtube.com
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).
The Siege of Eregion | youtube.comSauron in Eregion | youtube.comCelebrimbor looks upon his creation | youtube.comCelebrimbor destroys the rings | youtube.com
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.
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.
Durin IV and Disa receive Celebrimbor’s invitation | youtube.com
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.
Sauron and the Balrog | youtube.comKhazad-dûm coming apart at the seams | youtube.com
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 and Disa in Eregion | youtube.comDurin III calls a feast | youtube.comThe Seven Rings | youtube.com
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.
Durin III and Durin IV | youtube.comDurin III rejects Durin IV | youtube.com
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.
Elrond beseeches Durin IV for help | youtube.comDurin IV delivers a rallying speech | youtube.comThe Balrog | youtube.com
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.
Elendil | youtube.com
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.
Pharazôn and Eärien | youtube.comMíriel | youtube.comMíriel stands trial | youtube.comPharazôn and the Eagle | youtube.com
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.
Shelob | youtube.com
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.
Arondir and Isildur | youtube.comEstrid | youtube.comEstrid confronts a swamp creature | youtube.com
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.”
Tom Bombadil and the Stranger | youtube.comTom Bombadil | youtube.com
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 Stranger | youtube.com
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.
Easterlings | youtube.comEasterling | youtube.com
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.
Elanor Brandyfoot | youtube.com
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!
