Hell yes, brother: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is back. A few years ago, after a stiff and creatively uncertain first season, I never would have expected to say that. Yet Season 2 represented a dramatic step forward, powered by Charlie Vickers’ brilliant performance as the deceptive Sauron and Charles Edwards’ equally compelling turn as Celebrimbor, the Elf craftsman whose genius makes him Sauron’s target and eventual victim. Morfydd Clark, meanwhile, has been a strong presence as Galadriel from the beginning.
The show also wisely moved away from some of its weaker detours, including the romance between an Elf and a Human. The Dwarves and Númenor gained greater emotional weight and energy, while the once-overextended mystery surrounding Daniel Weyman’s Gandalf-like Stranger finally reached a conclusion. In its place came more promising questions, including the identity of Cíaran Hinds’ Dark Wizard and the purpose of his masked followers. The season’s enormous final battle unfolded across three episodes and even functioned as an allegory for resisting fascism—a particularly welcome note considering how deranged fascist tech billionaires have adopted Tolkien’s language and imagery.
Put simply, The Rings of Power grew into something more confident than the series it had once seemed destined to be. It became bitchin’. And, happily, that momentum continues. Directed by longtime series contributor Charlotte Brändström with the velocity of a genre film or a syndicated action series, and driven by a terrific script from showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay, this may bear no closer relationship to J.R.R. Tolkien’s original story than Bram Stoker’s Dracula did to the novel named in its title. But Francis Ford Coppola still turned that material into a modern classic, and The Rings of Power has become an exhilarating ride in its own right.
The new season opens with Galadriel narrating the state of the world. Five years have passed since Sauron began his war against the Elves of Middle-earth, and the Dark Lord is winning decisively. The three Elven Rings—artifacts forged without Sauron’s involvement—have allowed the Elves to contain him within two fortified realms: Rivendell, ruled by Elrond (Robert Aramayo), and Lindon, home of High King Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker). Gil-galad, Galadriel, and Círdan the Shipwright (Ben Daniels) currently bear the rings.
As in the second season’s opening, which depicted Sauron being brutally murdered by orcs before collapsing into a revolting mass of black, vampiric sludge, the story quickly plunges into horror. Surrounded by his orc followers, Sauron recites an incantation resembling—but not quite matching—the inscription that will one day appear on the One Ring. He places the resulting ring on an unfortunate orc’s finger as a test. The creature is burned alive.
“All creation requires sacrifice,” Sauron says with a sigh, trying to transform a catastrophic failure into a philosophical lesson. What a guy.
The immediate problem is that Sauron believes he needs the knowledge of his former ally and eventual victim, Celebrimbor, to complete the Master Ring he hopes to forge. Celebrimbor still lingers in the series as a voice of doubt inside Sauron’s mind—and, in a wonderfully grotesque detail, as a skeleton displayed on the Dark Lord’s wall. One of Sauron’s orcs reminds him that he ordered Celebrimbor’s plans destroyed, while every other Elven craftsman was killed when their city fell. An unfortunate oversight.
That leaves Sauron with one option: seize one of the three Elven Rings. Because he had no role in their creation, they are free of the corrupting influence attached to the Rings made for Men and Dwarves. If Sauron can obtain one, he may be able to study its construction and use that knowledge to forge a ring capable of ruling them all. He tells the insolent orc Marnûkh (Adam Young) that whoever brings him an Elven Ring will end not only the present conflict, but every war. The series continues to portray orcs as reluctant soldiers who resent the commands of their masters, a detail worth remembering when Marnûkh’s real agenda begins to emerge.
A flashback set “THOUSANDS OF YEARS EARLIER,” as the on-screen caption helpfully announces, introduces Galadriel’s first meeting with her future husband, Celeborn (Jamie Campbell Bower, familiar to viewers as one of the elite vampires in Twilight). The romance does not entirely work for me. Its dialogue leans heavily on cliché, while a sequence that shifts from dancing to swordplay to flirtation borrows from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon without approaching that film’s elegance. Some of my resistance is probably inevitable: in Tolkien’s books and essentially every adaptation, Galadriel is far more compelling than Celeborn. He has always been a difficult sell. Still, the pair are engaged by morning, so they seem to have enjoyed themselves.
The tone changes sharply when the story returns to the present. Galadriel leads a superbly staged woodland battle against Sauron’s forces, a collection that includes Elves, Men, and one enormous, heavily armored figure in a black Hellraiser-style helmet. He is the King of Lossoth (Paul Hickey), though his more significant title is now Naznagôl, or Ring-servant. He is not yet undead or completely enslaved to Sauron, since the Master Ring has not been made, but the ring he wears was created from Sauron’s blood. The result is a bearer who is effectively immortal, nearly impossible to destroy, extraordinarily powerful, and thoroughly evil.
Following a thrilling clash, Galadriel and her ally Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) survive to fight another day. Galadriel, however, remains tormented by visions of Sauron. During his time beside her under a false identity, he burrowed into her mind and nearly killed her after offering her a place at his side. She clashes with Elrond over whether they should seek assistance from Númenor, the island kingdom descended from Elros, the human brother of Elrond. It is, as ever, a complicated family history.
The Númenoreans currently on screen are not exactly eager allies. Under the leadership of Kemen (Leon Wadham), son of the usurping King Ar-Pharazôn, they have enslaved the people of Pelargir, a port region in Middle-earth. Among those prisoners is Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin), Arondir’s human friend and something close to an adopted son. The so-called “low men” are forced to clear their forests to build Pharazôn’s enormous fleet, even as the Ents living nearby begin to resist. Kemen mocks the suffering of the Tree-herders and dismisses Middle-earth—one of fantasy literature’s most beloved settings—as “a vile land.” If there were any doubt about his character, that settles it.
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He sounds like exactly the kind of ruler Sauron might target in his campaign to distribute rings among kings and lords. The series shows one version of that strategy when the Dark Wizard’s masked servants arrive at Sauron’s court in Mordor. They are former rulers in their own right, representatives from the immense desert kingdom of Rhûn in the East. Their offer is an alliance against the Elves, but Sauron has a different use for them. After his orcs execute two of the envoys for speaking out of turn, the remaining men are forced into a deadly contest, with the survivor promised one of Sauron’s rings.
Khamûl (Zubin Varla) wins. Receiving the ring is agonizing, sending part of his consciousness into a realm beyond the living world. The sequence uses trembling visual overlays that recall the most unsettling passages of Twin Peaks Season 3. Once he removes his mask, Khamûl is revealed as a blond man whom Sauron names “Fairest of the Nine,” outfitting him in gleaming golden armor. His assignment is to overthrow the Dark Wizard, unite the fallen sorcerer’s forces with his own supporters, and deliver the resulting army to Sauron so the conquest of Middle-earth can be completed.
Several complications stand in his way. Gandalf—now known to both Sauron and the Dark Wizard—is still somewhere in the world, and Khamûl says the wizard “wields the Secret Fire itself.” Sauron promises to handle this new threat personally.
Sauron also finds an unexpected source of support. While Númenor rejects his overtures, the kingdom’s enslaved people are eager to work with anyone who might help them overthrow their hated masters from across the sea. Theo is among them. Like the masked rulers before him, he is forced into a fight to the death for the chance to claim a ring, setting up the episode’s cliffhanger.
Far below the surface, in the Dwarven kingdom of Khazad-dûm, King Durin IV (Owain Arthur) and Queen Disa (Sophia Nomvete) prepare to welcome his elder brother, Prince Thrain (Eddie Marsan). Tolkien’s writing, as far as I can tell, does not establish an older brother for Durin. The name “Durin,” however, belongs to royal Dwarves who resemble the first Durin, the original ancestor of their people. He is believed to be reincarnated in successive generations, much like the Dalai Lama—though the show has not, to my recollection, made much of that concept.
In theory, that belief could explain why the throne passed to someone older than the eldest male descendant. Thrain is not interested in accepting that explanation. He initially presents himself as conciliatory, following a reunion with old friends that involves a considerable amount of drinking. Yet he has arrived with Dwarf-lords from the Iron Hills and the Blue Mountains, who demand the rings Durin’s late father promised them in exchange for payment. Having witnessed the damage one of those rings inflicted on his father, Durin refuses to distribute them.
Thrain recognizes his opening. Disa, perceptively, does not believe his performance as the reasonable brother. When Thrain discovers Durin secretly supplying weapons to the Elves for their war against Sauron—a violation of Dwarven neutrality—he confronts him. Durin now suspects that Thrain wants the throne. He does not know that Thrain is also pursuing Disa, whose lack of interest is absolute, with the series hinting at some form of sexual assault in their shared past. We do know, however, that when the brothers finally fight alone outside the mountain kingdom, the encounter could turn especially vicious.
Before the confrontation can become as grim as Sméagol and Déagol’s, Marnûkh arrives. Claiming to possess information that could save Middle-earth, he tells them that Sauron is working to create a Master Ring. Elsewhere, Gil-galad and Círdan observe the exchange through the power of their own rings. If Sauron succeeds, even the untouched Elven Rings—and the minds and creations of their bearers—could be endangered. The question is whether they can believe an orc, particularly one promised wealth and status in exchange for stealing the secrets of the Elven Rings for Sauron.
There is no question that The Rings of Power is an extremely loose adaptation of Tolkien’s source material. It is “Dracula with a romance between Dracula and Mina” loose. But I would not compare it to a version of Carrie in which Carrie never uses her telekinetic powers to kill anyone. The Second Age is not especially easy to adapt without a great deal of invention. The rebellious orcs, the expanded Dwarf politics, the Galadriel-Sauron tension, the wizards maneuvering for power, and the compression of centuries into a handful of years are all creations of the series.
Change itself is neither a virtue nor a flaw in an adaptation. Payne and McKay have transformed Tolkien’s Second Age into a sword-and-sorcery epic—an audacious, borderline absurd choice that I cannot help but admire. At minimum, it produces one wildly imaginative moment after another. Your reaction may differ, as the familiar disclaimer goes. For me, this unapologetically maximalist fantasy spectacle is a road that keeps going ever on and on.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
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