Two seasons into Amazon’s splashy multi-hundred-million dollar investment in The Rings of Power , it’s hard to find a scene that subverts expectation. That too-good-to-be-true, Aragorn-esque Halbrand who was helping Galadriel in season one? Yeah, that was Sauron in disguise. Those settlements in the Southlands you’d have trouble placing on a map of later Middle Earth? Yeah, those get turned into Mordor.
The “Stranger” who fell to the ground with no sense of his identity among a band of pre-Hobbit figures? Well, by the time season two starts the show is still playing coy about his identity, though a transformation into a wizard you know from Tolkien’s fantasy epics is all but inevitable. The Rings of Power is governed by an overwhelming sense of predestination. Charitably, that’s an intended quality of the series.
The show, extrapolated from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings by creators Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne , tracks the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron and the last alliance of elves and men at the end of the Second Age of Middle Earth.
Even if you don’t understand all those proper nouns, you probably sense that there’s a large amount of box ticking involved: We have to get to know Sauron, we have to learn how he deceived the elves, we have to see the forging of the titular Rings of Power, we have to establish the current circumstances of all those elves and men. (And, because you can’t have a Lord of the Rings property without familiar halfling ch.