SPOILERS AHEAD FOR “RINGS OF POWER” FINALE
With “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” having wrapped its first season, the show ended up resolving two mysteries that have lingered since the premiere – the identity of the fallen ‘stranger’, and the identity of Sauron, which ended up being two separate things.
The biggest of the reveals was Sauron with the Dark Lord in disguise being actor Charlie Vickers’ roguish character of Halbrand. The season ends with the man walking into his recently born land of Mordor.
In the wake of the finale, Vickers spoke to ScreenRant about what could be on the way for the character in future seasons:
“We know Sauron takes on different shapes in this era. All I can say is maybe to that. Maybe we’re going to do those things. I’m incredibly excited to explore him doing these things that we know he does. He has a s—load of rings to make, and he gets to go to Númenor, and he orchestrates the downfall of Númenor.
Then he has to take another form and go and fight in the Battle of the Last Alliance. The battle at the end of the Second Age. [But] the showrunners have a really specific plan, and I don’t know their plans as to how it’ll unfold, but I loved playing him in this repentance stage.
Whether the repentance is genuine or not is open to interpretation. But I think it’s going to be really cool now that he’s kind of out there. And it’s like, I’m back. I’ve been lingering. I’ve been coming back very slowly. And now, thanks to Galadriel, I’m back. And I’m excited to play that.”
His co-star Morfydd Clark, who plays Galadriel in the series, revealed that she was told Sauron’s true identity “when we were kind of filming our Numenor bits, but we weren’t given episode eight till really late on.”
Meanwhile The Stranger who fell from the sky was revealed to be an ‘Istar’ or ‘wizard’ of which there are five known in Middle-Earth history – Saruman the White, Gandalf the Grey, Radagast the Brown, and two Blue Wizards who went east before the War of the Ring.
Speaking with Deadline, showrunner Patrick McKay explained how the mistake of the Mystics confirm The Stranger and Sauron have an unexplained relation to each other:
“The Stranger’s journey and Nori’s journey with him is one of discovery. And for him it’s one of self-discovery. He has discovered some things. The stars he’s looking for are far to the east in Rhûn, where the stars are strange.
He has learned that he is, ostensibly, an Istar, which means ‘wizard.’ And he’s learned something else from the Mystics, we call them. They say he is not Sauron, he is ‘the Other’. Which sort of implies that potentially his destiny’s entwined in some way with Sauron’s.
But that’s all he knows at this point, and he’s gonna have to go on another journey to learn more. And maybe a name, or his name, becomes a part of that journey, but at this time, we only know what he knows.”
Executive producer Lindsey Weber adds to the outlet that the next season is going to be: “grittier, more intense, maybe a little scarier”. The next season is currently in production, whilst the first season is available in full now on Amazon Prime.
