Yesterday, the eighth and final episode of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was released. And as usual, I come to you with my humble opinion on its faithfulness to the lore.
Since episode 5, I’ve been scared that this show would 100% derail and become terrible. Episode 7 made those fears more realistic. Now, with the last episode, most of that fear is cured. I now see that the ‘Elves need mithril was merely a plot device to get to the forging of the great rings. I don’t agree with it, but it was necessary to have something do the job, and Tolkien just hadn’t really written anything. As far as I’m concerned, the Elves were never ‘sick’, it was just the tree, and Gil-galad was merely exaggerating.
Now, onto the Stranger reveal. When the mystics came and called him Sauron, I still doubted it. The Stranger has been built up to be good, and I had my own theories as to Sauron’s whereabouts. The Harfoots pull of a fantastic rescue, though Sadoc Burrows didn’t make it through. But he was accepting of death, and it almost reminded me of Morwen, from the Silmarillion, who also died calmly and acceptingly, watching the sun come up. Of course, the term Istar surprised me, as the Stranger cannot be one of the five wizards, canonically speaking, but it appears that the timeline compression has reached a whole other level. My only thought is, maybe he is Olórin, the Maia (angelic being, such as Sauron, the wizards, and many characters from the Silmarillion) of Gandalf’s origin, returned to Middle-Earth, and will return to Valinor, only to return as Gandalf in the Third Age.
Our storylines merge and split a bit again, but next comes the elven story, with Galadriel, Elrond, Celebrimbor, and Halbrand in Eregion. They have trouble figuring things out with the small amount of mithril that they have, but Elrond wins them extra time from Gil-galad. When Gil-galad said ‘I owe you nothing’, I was very much expecting Elrond to say something along the lines of, ‘You owe it to my father.’ Because his father, Eärendil, did save all of Elves, Men, and Dwarves from extinction by sailing to Valinor and summoning the host of the Valar. But moving on, we get the Halbrand reveal. I’ll admit that I wasn’t a big believer in this theory, but I was as soon as he told Celebrimbor to ‘call it a gift’. For those of you who don’t know, at this time he called himself Annatar, (but as Amazon doesn’t have the rights to this name, they couldn’t use it) which means Lord of Gifts. After that, the entirety of this storyline was great. Not only was it canon to the established lore, it even reflected some of Tolkien’s core themes. True creation requires sarcrifice.
Our Numenor story was also quite good. We see Elendil and Miriel bind themselves to the Faithful, and begin to see Pharazon’s obsession over immortality. I don’t want to spoil the show, but this will play a big part in upcoming seasons.
Overall, this episode was my personal favourite since episode 3. I give it a solid 8.75 / 10. The season as a whole was very well rounded, and I will most certainly be watching Season 2. I have my gripes and nitpicks, but I think, overall, I can give Season One a good 7/10. I will soon be releasing a page about my opinion of the whole season, unconstrained by length, and predictions for Season 2. But remember, we do not say farewell, we say Namarië.