‘The Rings of Power’ Season 2 Premiere Recap: All That Glitters

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‘The Rings of Power’ Season 2 Premiere Recap: All That Glitters

The flaws of Season 1 are still evident, right from the start. The novelistic approach leads to some sections that drag on too long; and the series on the whole can feel a bit over-serious and leaden. That said, the Season 2 premiere also contains everything that worked well in the previous season: the visual splendor, the wide narrative canvas, the rich performances and the complex consideration of how and when to wield extraordinary power.

With all that in mind, here are four takeaways and observations from the Season 2 premiere:

‘Always after a defeat, the shadow takes another shape’

Season 2 opens with a riveting sequence, nearly 20 minutes long, which fills in a key bit of back story: how Sauron ended up in his Halbrand form, adrift at the start of Season 1 in the middle of the sea. What we see is a sort of origin story for both Sauron and Adar. Addressing the orcs shortly after the ****** of the dark lord Morgoth, Sauron (played by Jack Lowden for this one scene) delivers what could be called the opposite of a pep talk. He warns his armies about the long ****** ahead, in which “many orcs will ****.” And he insists they have no choice but to follow him, because no one else in Middle-earth can stand their race.

Then, just as Adar appears ready to crown Sauron as the new dark lord, he flips the spiky crown upside-down, stabbing his superior in the back of his neck, at which point the assembled orcs swarm and stab him a lot (a lot) more. Sauron bleeds out and seemingly *****, with his ultimate end involving an ********** of light and frost that covers the surrounding land. In what perhaps should have been a clue to Adar, Sauron’s body vanishes; in any case, it leaves Adar as the new orc-father, in what becomes Phase 1 of his “make the Southlands into Mordor” plan.

This explains why, throughout Season 1, Adar insisted that he ******* Sauron. Except he didn’t, really. Instead, Sauron’s blood drips down, pools up and reconstitutes into a creepy-looking, shape-shifting entity, which then dines on rats and bugs until it becomes strong enough to slither aboveground and absorb the essence of a human. It then becomes Halbrand, who joins with a band of fleeing Southlanders, one of whom bears the insignia of the realm’s former king. Their escaping ship gets wrecked, thus looping us back to the moment we first met Halbrand and setting up the chain of circumstance that leads Galadriel to believe she is in league with a fallen ruler.

This is all wonderfully fantastical stuff, filled with dark magic and ominous foreshadowing. (The ur-Sauron creature alone is a marvelous effect.) The sequence also re-establishes an important “Rings of Power” theme: It may be impossible to ******** true evil because the efforts to do so boomerang back on anyone who tries.

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