‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Season 2 Episode 1 Recap: The Dark Is Rising

Well. Well, well, well. Now that’s more like it!

The last thing I wrote about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was this: “a crushing disappointment.” I stand by that. But I also speculated that the inexperience of creators and showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne, coupled with the sheer amount of money poured into the misfire, meant there was little chance the show would improve. 

Boy, am I happy to be wrong. It’s early yet, obviously, and the show could revert to the mean. But the first episode of Rings’ second season, is, quite frankly, crackerjack live-action fantasy television. No one’s going to mistake it for the first-in-class Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon franchise anytime soon — for one thing, my 13 year old cracks wise about the special effects looking goofy when they watch this one — but can it stand with Amazon’s similarly improved sophomore season of The Wheel of Time? If it keeps it up, I don’t see why not.

One of the first season’s most frustrating aspects was its insistence that simply refusing to tell the audience something was the same as creating a genuine sense of mystery and intrigue. All that’s gone now. The puzzling circumstances of Sauron (Charlie Vickers), for example, get cleared up almost immediately, and in a fun, horror-movie kind of way. In a flashback, we see an earlier, more Elven incarnation of the Dark Lord (Jack Lowden) attempt to take control of the hordes of orcs that survived the fall of their mutual master, Morgoth. 

But the grandaddy of the species, Adar (Sam Hazeldine, taking over from Ben Mawle — like The Wheel of Time, one of the most interesting performers departed after one season, though in both cases the replacements seem more than adequate), had other ideas. He stabs Sauron with his own iron crown, leading to a genuinely brutal and disgusting Ides of March situation in which dozens of orcs stab Sauron’s physical body. After a final burst of power that freezes everything for miles around, Sauron’s body disappears.

Maybe the better word is dissolves. His black blood drips into the ground, collecting in a pool from which horrid, spaghetti-like tendrils extrude to engulf and devour a too-curious rat. Then a millipede falls victim, and finally a human traveler. Next thing you know, the amorphous mass of Venom-like goo that was Sauron is now the handsome fellow we know and loathe. 

Here I’ll pause for a brief note to the reader. After covering the second season of House of the Dragon without paying any attention at all to the wider/wilder A Song of Ice and Fire fandom, I realized how much more fun and fruitful it is to ignore fandom entirely when reviewing fannish shows. So even though I have tattoos that prove my allegiance to the source material of both Rings and House, you’re not going to hear me talking about J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing that much. And you’re definitely not going to hear me talk about the wishes of fandom, a toxic concept long overdue for the ash heap of history. 

That said, in the book, Sauron is lord of the vampires, and sometimes takes the form and powers of one himself. So I’m completely down with the weird body-horror interpretation of this supernatural persona, as developed by writer Gennifer Hutchison and director Charlote Brändstöm. It’s a little like if Uncle Frank from the first act of Hellraiser got set loose in Middle-earth, and boy am I down for that.

Anyway, Sauron heads south, but runs into humans fleeing the orcs now led by Adar. He joins up with these humans before their ship is sunk by that sea monster from Season 1. Sauron being Sauron, he stares the beast down until it swims away, then links up with Galadriel as per the events of last season. That explains that! And I’m glad. Shows really can just go ahead and tell us what’s going on, instead of assuming we enjoy being kept in the dark. No need to drag it out.

Back to the vampire thing, there’s a similar shoutout to Sauron’s connections to classic folkloric monsters in the material that takes place in the here and now. Having ditched the Elves after revealing his true self to Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), Sauron was subsequently captured and carted off by the orc and human servants of Adar, who’s rather enjoying himself as lord of the newly formed hellscape realm of Mordor.

The scenes that follow are a hoot. In his guise as Halbrand, fallen king of the Southrons, Sauron allows himself to be beaten, starved, tortured, and chained up with a warg, one of Middle-earth’s fantastical mega-wolves. Huge mistake: Sauron, canonically a werewolf himself, has a kinship with these beasts. Even after he sweet-talks Adar into letting him go, convincing him he can convince the Elves to divulge the location of Sauron’s latest incarnation, Sauron/Halbrand makes sure to let the monster loose so it can devour his prison guard.

The fact that Sauron pauses for a moment as he rides away from Adar’s encampment to listen to the resulting screams and have himself a little secret smile about them speaks volumes about the show’s new approach to the Dark Lord, and Vickers’s portrayal of him. He’s still Sexy Sauron, but there’s a new edge to him, a gleefulness in the way he lies without hesitation, harbors obvious grudges and indulges them for fun, and is generally just an untrustworthy piece of shit. Isn’t that what Sauron really is when you get right down to it? 

I can fully get behind a version of this archnemesis of all that is good who, before his final incarnations as a standard scary guy in black armor and a giant flaming eyeball, was just a handsome asshole who took pleasure in the suffering of others and in fooling people he considers his inferiors, which is to say literally everyone in existence. It’s like they cracked the code for this character. 

The show takes a similarly clarifying approach to the question of the titular Rings of Power as it does to “What is the deal with Sauron?” One of the first season’s most confusing changes to the book was switching around the order in which the disguised Sauron and his Elvish colleague Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) forge the three Rings of Power meant for Elves. Aren’t they supposed to be totally free of Sauron’s influence, hence their ability to hold him back from the doings of Galadriel, Elrond, and Gandalf for hundreds of years? Well, yeah — and apparently, that’s still the case, though not everyone believes it.

Much of the Elvish material comes down to a simple dispute between Galadriel, who says Sauron had no hand in the forging of the three rings for the Elven kings, and Elrond (Robert Aramayo), who thinks it’s not worth the risk to use them given Sauron’s close relationship with Celebrimbor at the time. But the High King Gil-Galad (Benjamin Walker), desperate for any tool that can help stave off the slow fading of the Elves from the lands of Middle-earth, takes Galadriel’s side.

So does a most unexpected ally. From the moment he makes his Harrison-Ford-in-The-Fugitive waterfall-dive escape, Elrond has one Elf in mind who can help him: Círdan (the great Ben Daniels), the oldest and wisest of the Elves of Middle-earth. Famed as a shipwright, Círdan knows of an ocean trench deep enough to hide the rings forever.

But he chooses not to toss them into it. When a sudden wave stops him, he takes the opportunity to look at the rings for the first time — and immediately high-tails it to Lindon, the main Elf kingdom, where he reveals that he has claimed one of the rings and prompts Gil-Galad and Galadriel to do so as well. Together they restore the golden tree that is the symbiotic symbol of Elvendom in Middle-earth, even as Elrond slinks away aghast. Poor Elrond, doomed to never have anyone follow his advice to destroy magic rings.

This episode wisely doesn’t waste time on a full around-the-horn tour of all its characters, so the third and final plotline involves the proto-hobbit Harfoots, Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and Poppy (Megan Richards), as they help guide their crash-landed wizard friend (Daniel Weyman) to the far-off land of Rhûn, to which his dreams have beckoned him. Is he Gandalf? Is he some other member of the Istari, the order of angelic beings made flesh we know as the wizards? I dunno, but it’s kind of fun to watch him be sweet and awkward across a whole wasteland as extremely cool-looking evil guys in skeleton and plague-doctor masks track his every move.

Maybe it’s no coincidence that this episode leans hard on the show’s strength: a game cast, who’ve made heretofore underwritten, or just plain badly written, characters come alive. Morfydd Clark, Daniel Weyman, and Robert Aramayo were highlights of the first season, and that hasn’t changed.

But this wouldn’t account for suddenly making Charlie Vickers’s mimbo Sauron a compelling presence. It wouldn’t explain how Sam Hazeldine’s Adar is as intriguing as Benjamin Mawle’s, especially now that we know what he did to move into position. (Another needless mystery, cleared right up.) It certainly wouldn’t account for the brand-new role of Círdan, or of the way Ben Daniels makes you instantly trust this bearded Elf-lord’s judgment. It’s impossible to believe this guy is being played for the fool, the way Daniels plays him. He’s just too warm and witty a presence to get duped by Fuckboi Sauron.

Shows can improve after their first reasons. Radically so, even. Look, I’ve seen it a million times now: Foundation, The Wheel of Time, Billions, The Leftovers, and Halt and Catch Fire all showed promise in their initial outings that wasn’t realized until their sophomore seasons. I’ll freely admit to thinking The Rings of Power had the least good first season of the lot. But stranger things have happened than for a show with a weak first season to suddenly become fun — have you been following the election, for example? This episode of The Rings of Power made me happy, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.