While watching the second-season premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which focuses on Sauron, the elves, and the journey of the Stranger and his Harfoot companions, you might have found yourself thinking, Wait, doesn’t this show have a bunch of other characters? What about Númenor? What about the dwarves? Is anything going on with them? How about Arondir? What about the rest of the Harfoots? This second episode provides some answers via scenes that catch us up with the goings-on in Khazad-dûm in general and with Durin IV and his wife, Disa, in particular. The rest, it seems, will have to wait.
The slow rollout makes a lot of sense, though, particularly given the way the episode circles back to Khazad-dûm to capture the effects of Mount Doom’s eruption. This is an event large enough to disrupt all of Middle-earth. It has a profound and immediate effect on the home of the dwarves, where, as the episode opens, Durin IV and Disa are learning to live within more limited means now that Durin has been more or less disowned by his father. Having lost his princely status, Durin now has to watch his spending and, we’ll later see, has lost the respect that used to come with his title. But not the respect of Disa. Their relationship seems as contentious but fundamentally solid as ever as they visit the marketplace and argue over spending. “Ya married a prince. Now you’re bound to an outcast,” Durin tells her, but he has to know she’s not in it for his money. Then disaster strikes. As the aftershocks of Mount Doom’s eruption reach Khazad-dûm, the skies blacken as the tremors seal the sun shafts that allow them to grow crops and otherwise sustain life underground. Short of a total tunnel collapse, it’s about the worst thing that could happen to the dwarves.
Far away, Galadriel has problems of her own, first in the form of a nightmare vision in which she’s visited by Celebrimbor, whose announcement of Sauron’s return morphs into a violent vision of the smith’s death as he recites the now famous (to us) lines describing how many rings will be handed to the various races of Middle-earth. But when she tries to raise the point that Celebrimbor may be in danger to Gil-galad, she gets the brush-off. There’s no way Sauron could get to him, he assures her, what with the ten-foot-thick walls of dwarven stone and everything.
He doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about. It’s not that Gil-galad isn’t afraid of Sauron. In fact, he may be a bit overly cautious when it comes to Galadriel, fearing that she’s particularly vulnerable to Sauron’s charms because he had once won her trust. But even though he, like Galadriel, has been prone to ominous visions since putting on his ring, Gil-galad can’t imagine that a being as powerful as Sauron could be dressed as a humble traveler who’s just kind of hanging out, waiting for Celebrimbor to invite him up as he attempts to win the pity of Mirdania (Amelia Kenworthy), Celebrimbor’s assistant. Celebrimbor intends to keep his promise to have nothing to do with the person he knows only as Halbrand. But promises have a way of getting broken (and the cut to a bunch of dead elven messengers doesn’t exactly suggest all is well in his corner of the kingdom).
But what of Caras Gaer in western Rhûn? Where’s that, you ask? It’s a spot we haven’t seen before in a remote part of Middle-earth, but it seems like it will be quite important to our story. Those masked riders — “trackers,” we’ll soon learn they’re called — last seen stalking the Stranger and his companions? This is their home base where they report to a character known, for now at least, only as “the Dark Wizard” (played by Ciarán Hinds, always a good thing). It’s there that the Dark Wizard — styled to look a lot like Saruman as played by Christopher Lee in the Peter Jackson films — holds court in a moth-filled room attended to by servants whose blood he uses to summon the Dweller, the meanest looking of the three witches who followed the Stranger around in the previous season. The Dark Wizard is not too happy with her report; the tracker’s report, however, sounds more promising. The tracker tells his boss with great confidence that he’ll be able to bend the Stranger to his will by threatening to kill his Harfoot friends.
He may be onto something too. When we rejoin the happy trio, the shorter members are trying to give the Stranger a name. “No one can give you a name. It is yours already,” he tells them. “It is who you are. And when you hear it spoken, you feel your heart glow.” (Could the name start with a G? To be determined.) The Harfoots believe they’ve found a shortcut, but the Stranger cautions that his preference “would be to avoid that part in which we would run out of water the first day and die of heat in the second.” Then again, any route would seem to have its dangers, particularly given that they’re being followed by trackers who come this close to catching them.
It’s getting desperate back at Khazad-dûm, too. A Disa-led attempt to lead a group of Stone Singers to bring the kingdom out of the clutches of the Hand of Darkness yields nothing, nor does Disa’s attempt to prompt Durin III to mend fences with his son. But Durin III doesn’t want to apologize, nor does Durin IV, so the situation seems to be an impasse as deep as, well, Khazad-dûm. Durin IV’s own efforts are just as fruitless. His band of miners reaches a dead end, and they mock the once (and future?) prince for his softness. In summary: There’s seemingly no end to either the personal crises of the Durin family or the broader crisis enveloping all the dwarves. The outlook is not great.
Nor is it terrific for Galadriel, who brings her woes to Elrond only to find that he shares Gil-galad’s misgivings about her past friendship with the person she did not know was Sauron. Elrond goes even further, expressing distrust for all three elves who have chosen to wear the rings. That doesn’t stop him from bringing his problems to Círdan, who tells him he should fear the powers of the rings but needs to “open your eyes and guide them before the darkness spreads across Middle-earth and blinds us all.”
Back in the wasteland of Rhûn, the Stranger has resorted to dragging his smaller companions behind him before collapsing from the effort. The good news? He passes out not far from a well. The bad news? That well is attached to a bell that attracts the trackers shortly after the Stranger reawakens. Events then unfold at a rapid clip. The Stranger finds a staff that resembles the one from his dream, the trackers arrive, and, after a short confrontation, a fight breaks out. Though the staff initially seems to offer a powerful defense against the Stranger’s enemies, the storm it summons spins out of control, destroying the staff and whisking the Harfoots away to parts unknown? R.I.P.? Probably not, but it doesn’t look good for the little ones.
A different sort of unpromising development unfolds in the lab of Celebrimbor. The smith has invented a new sort of creation using a sliver of mithril and left Sauron out in the rain, as well he should. Then, after threatening to remove the visitor by force, Celebrimbor makes the mistake of letting him talk. By teasing the smith with information about the rings and playing on Celebrimbor’s ego and grievances, Sauron worms his way back into Celebrimbor’s good graces. Then he keeps going, describing himself as a kind of angel “sent to bring guidance to the ears of the wise” and promising to bring “knowledge none other possesses.” He also has a request: How about making some of those rings for humans? Sure, they’re flawed, but if Celebrimbor plays his cards right, he will be forever revered as “the Lord of the Rings.” (Hey, that sounds familiar!) As for Sauron, he’ll be a partner, a role that requires both a new hairstyle and a new name: Annatar.
As the episode draws to a close, it looks like a lot of others will soon be encountering Celebrimbor and presumably learning of his new partnership. Elrond and Galadriel are headed his way (with Elrond serving as the expedition’s leader, much to Galadriel’s chagrin), and Durin has received an invitation to head that way too, with other dwarves in tow. This may not end well.
After the previous episode’s setup we got, well, more setup. But the plot also thickened during this outing. Sauron’s plan is starting to become more clear, as is the origin story of the other rings of power. And whatever’s going on in Rhûn looks likely to have some serious consequences. Also, it’s nice to have the dwarves back in the picture. The relationship between Durin and Disa (and the performances by Owain Arthur and Sophia Nomvete) continue to be highlights, while the Khazad-dûm segments strike a nice balance between high seriousness and earthiness that some of the other sequences can’t always find (though the Harfoots always help on this front). The outcome of this story, as with all prequels, may be inevitable — we know what happens with the rings and Sauron, and it’s not good — but the series continues to find surprising ways to reach its foregone conclusion.
Mithril Links
• The trackers are one of this season’s most intriguing additions. In some ways, as faceless, threatening figures on horseback, they foreshadow the Nazgûl. They haven’t been created, yet the Dark Wizard explicitly refers to the tracker who visits him as a mortal. So who are they? Hmm …
• It’s hard not to pick up on some sparks between Galadriel and Elrond, though that future too is already written and it does not involve them getting together. At least not canonically.
• Cidran: “Judge the work and leave judgment concerning those who wrought it to the judge who sees all things.” Would that it were so simple, right? (That line would sound a lot like it was speaking directly to the viewer if this were in a Harry Potter or Neil Gaiman adaptation, wouldn’t it? Tolkien, though a man of his time in many ways, is not a problematic figure in that way.)
• This episode really pays up the Sauron-Satan resemblance, both with its imagery and the way Sauron mixes truth and lies to play on his victims’ desires.
