Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power’ Season 2 On Prime Video, Where The Stakes Are Raised As Sauron Brings The Darkness To Middle-earth

It’s been two years since the first season of The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power bowed on Prime Video, and the first season proved that a TV series in the LOTR franchise can be just as expansive and intricate as the movies were. In Season 2, Sauron is stalking Middle-earth; will he get the power that he desperately seeks?

THE LORD OF RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In a darkened cavern, Sauron (Jack Lowden) tells a crowd of Orcs that he’s the only one who can lead them.

The Gist: As the Orcs try to push back, Adar (Sam Hazeldine) stops them by declaring Sauron the new Dark Lord. But right as he’s about to crown Sauron, Adar attacks him, and the rest of the Orcs pounce. But what Adar doesn’t know is that Sauron doesn’t die, he just reforms into another body (Charlie Vickers).

Sauron follows a group of travelers escaping a horde of Orcs and joins them on a ship to what one person says “a man can escape himself.” When she ship is torn apart in a storm, Sauron comes face-to-face with Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), who swam to the wreckage to survive.

Galadriel returns to Lindon, she has to inform High King Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker) that the companion she was with, Halbrand, was Sauron in human disguise. But she also knows that Elrond (Robert Aramayo) has the three rings needed to keep the Elves in Middle-earth and Sauron’s darkness at bay. But Elrond won’t give them up; he thinks they must be destroyed to keep them out of Sauron’s possession, and he jumps off a cliff with them, in defiance of the High King’s direct order.

Sauron returns to Mordor, posting as Halbrand, and he tells Adar to let his people go in return for information on the weapon “the sorcerer” is working on with the Elves.

Meanwhile, Nori Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh) and The Stranger (Daniel Weyman) explore a barren land, and Nori encourages her companion to use his wizardry to find food. He does so, tearing apart a dead tree to find beetles inside. They catch an intruder in their camp and it turns out to be Poppy Proudfellow (Megan Richards).

As the Elves search for Elrond, he brings the rings to Cirdan (Ben Daniels). Waldreg (Geoff Morrell) tries to get information about Sauron out of who he thinks is Halbrand.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? As we now know, The Rings Of Power takes place thousands of years before both the Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit books and films; showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay based these stories on the appendices J.R.R. Tolkien wrote for the LOTR book series.

Our Take: The stakes are always high on Middle-earth, but Season 2 of The Rings Of Power raise those stakes even more, mainly because of how close Galadriel came to Sauron. The very existence of the Elves hangs in the balance, but if Elrond is to be believed, no good can come from the rings existing in a world where Sauron is so close.

As we saw in Season 1, the first episode doesn’t cover all of the characters that we follow in The Rings Of Power, but the episode definitely sets up a situation where massive battles are in the offing. And now that the audience is comfortable with these versions of the characters that they knew in older form in the films and books, they’re ready to go wherever they do.

Does the show indulge in lingering shots of the lush New Zealand scenery? Of course it does; at this point, it’s almost as much of a character in LOTR as the actual characters are. But those shots serve the same purpose as they did in Peter Jackson’s films; they show the scope of Middle-earth and the other areas where the story takes place.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Lord Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) admits Halbrand into his forge, not knowing that the man he just let in is actually Sauron.

Sleeper Star: We like Charles Edwards, so we’re happy to see that Celebrimbor will have a larger role this season.

Most Pilot-y Line: Since a lot of the episode takes place in Mordor, we were barely able to make out some of what went on in the darkness, at least on our HDR-enabled TV.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power ups the ante in Season 2, but still takes its time to explore various sets of characters. It’s rare when a show gets five guaranteed seasons, and the show’s producers and writers are taking advantage of this expanded time to make the stories as good as they can be.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.