“Breakneck” is not a word I’d throw around often to describe the pacing of J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythology. Except under very specific circumstances, usually involving someone with the surname Baggins, the epochal nature of the struggles of the peoples of Middle-earth is a huge part of their appeal. The conflicts play out at a grand temporal scale, especially as time passes and the direct power of the gods isn’t a factor. It takes Sauron over three thousand years — a full millennium longer than the distance between now and the death of Jesus Christ — between losing the One Ring to Isildur at the end of the Second Age and getting all his ducks in a row for the final war you witness in The Lord of the Rings at the end of the Third Age, just for example.
The Rings of Power is taking a very different approach. Without getting spoilery, it appears poised to squash almost every important event of the Second Age into the span of a few years max. The forging of the Rings of Power, for example, took well over a century from Celebrimbor and Annatar’s initial experiments to the creation of the One Ring by “Annatar” in Mordor in the books. What could be gained by squashing all of that down into a matter of weeks?
An unnerving episode of television, that’s what. This week’s Rings of Power is essentially a Breaking Bad –style hour-long illustration of just how quickly ambitious people can ruin their lives, and the lives of those around them, with just a couple of bad choices. Those bad choices tend to have more impact when you’re a genius inventor Elf-lord, but still.
The Elf-lord in question is Celebrimbor, who’s powered here by a sad and anxiety-inducing performance by Charles Edwards. Edwards had been an odd choice for Celebrimbor for me until now; he simply seems too approachable to play one of the most towering figures in Tolkien’s entire legendarium.
But now I see the vision. Edwards’s job this is to take his genial approach to the character and draw the notes of self-doubt his placid disposition normally papers over. When you watch Celebrimbor look at his own shaking hands, wondering where the creation of the Seven Rings for the Dwarf-lords went wrong — he’s received word from Prince Durin that his father Durin III has undergone a complete personality change since receiving his very powerful piece of jewelry — you see the grandson of the godlike Elf craftsman Fëanor. Can he ever live up to his grandsire? And given the death and misery that resulted from Grandpa’s creations, would he even want to?
What about his pal Annatar, supposed messenger from the gods? His own trust in this angelic being seems to me to be one of the things Celebrimbor is doubting. Annatar is slowly undermining Celebrimbor’s place in his own laboratory/workshop — fighting over whether the Nine Rings for Men should be created at all, pursuing the work on his own when Celebrimbor declines to participate, and (though Celebrimbor doesn’t know this last bit) spreading rumors that the inventor’s psychological exhaustion has left his heart open to evil.
This last bit is a coverup for the visions of Mirdania (Amelia Kenworthy), an Elf craftswoman who turns invisible after putting on one of the team’s practice rings and promptly freaks out, wreaking Sam Raimi–style disembodied havoc in the workshop as her invisible self struggles with an unseen evil entity haunting the premises. Annatar convinces her she’s seen the shadow on Celebrimbor’s soul instead of, y’know. the fact that he’s Sauron .
That no one involved, not even Celebrimbor, takes any of this as a sign that they should delay their work until they figure out what the hell is going on is one of the smartest aspects of Nicholas Adams’s script. After living through the era of crypto and the Metaverse and AI and Elon Musk’s Twitter, how many times have we seen our own supposed visionaries, tech geniuses, and captains of industry brush past the obvious flaws in their grand plans only for ruin to result?
All of this has knock-on effects in the Dwarf realm of Khazad-dûm, which gets its famous Doors in this episode too. Durin III’s ring instantly enables him to find the right places to dig in order to let the sunshine back into their subterranean kingdom, a skill it takes Disa and her stone-singers a lifetime to master. It seems like cheating, she tells her husband the prince; he shares her concerns only when he watches his ring-wearing dad turn into the greediest Dwarf in Middle-earth overnight, a completely uncharacteristic quality for him to display. You can see the resonance between the Rings and addiction or mental illness here: That’s my loved one, but it’s not my loved one is real as hell, man.
Adding urgency to the Dwarf situation — and this, too, involves a massive collapse of the timeline — is the looming presence of an ancient evil deep underground. Disa senses it at the end of a delightfully Jacksonian sequence in which she chases a rolling crystal ball she’s purchased for her kid’s birthday into an underground lake, where her high-decibel singing receives a sort of evil call-and-response from some kind of massive, growling entity somewhere beneath the lakebed. (I know what it is, you know what it is, but let’s play coy for the moment.) Durin III’s plan is to dig as deep as hell to get all the gold and jewels the kingdom can grab; what could go wrong?
Over in Númenor, our heroes are also wrestling with the question of how best to wield newfound power. New ruler Ar-Pharazôn and his awful son Kemen (Leon Wadham) are throwing their weight around big-time, Project 2025 style: purging the military and civil service of political opponents, destroying symbols of the old regime like shrines to the Valar, the gods of this world.
In one such fascist raid, Kemen personally kills Valandil (Alex Tarrant), Isildur’s best friend, even after Isildur’s dad and Valandil’s (now-former) captain Elendil spare Kemen’s life when he finds himself at sword’s point. Kemen then washes his bloody sword in the sacred water of the shrine; you don’t have to worship the Valar yourself to understand, on a gut level, that this is an obscene act.
As for Pharazôn himself, what kind of Sauron-era bad guy would he be if he didn’t indulge in some massive hypocrisy, as a treat? After first using Queen-Regent Tar-Míriel’s reliance on a palantír — Elf tech, in a very anti-Elf society — as pretext for supplanting her, the newly-sceptred ruler of Númenor makes a beeline straight for the magical bowling ball himself. Whether he uses it, or what he sees if he does, is unclear, and it should be noted that this is obviously long before the days Sauron got his hands on these things and warped them to his will. But the guy is already talking angrily and enviously not only about the Elves, but about the Undying Lands of the Valar themselves. It seems like no matter what he sees, he’ll interpret it as “Gee, Pharazôn, you sure are powerful and cool! And also really handsome!”
It’s a testament to the success of the show at making the Númenor and Khazad-dûm material work — last season they’d been among the show’s cornier elements — that we’re saving fan-favorites Elrond and Galadriel for last. The former makes it his personal mission to tell High King Gil-galad that Celebrimbor’s region of Eregion is in danger from Adar’s orc army; Gil-galad refuses to send aid, because his Elf Ring has alerted him to Sauron’s presence there and he’s hoping Adar can take their mutual enemy down for him, whatever the cost to Celebrimbor. Cold, dude.
Galadriel, meanwhile, is prisoner of Adar’s orcs, now. To an extent, anyway: There’s no reason to believe she can’t cut her way to freedom the moment they let their guard down, and indeed she has a blade at Adar’s neck within seconds of being released from her paddywagon. But Adar essentially makes the same proposal to her that Gil-galad has tacitly accepted already: With her help he’ll sack Eregion and kill Sauron, to the larger community of Elves’ benefit as well as his and the orcs’ own.
Maybe the best thing I can say about this season of Rings is that what once read as simply bad writing of the show’s heroes and villains now feels fully convincing as honest to god shades-of-grey realpolitik. Once you introduce a slightly less psychotically evil arch-enemy in the form of Adar, would the Elves be tempted to side with him, or at least utilize him, no matter how temporarily or contingently? When confronted with the shocking truth about his own creations, would Celebrimbor pull the plug on the operation, or throw good money after bad and double down?
And how do any of the aforementioned parties account for a player like Sauron? So at home in full faux-Elf-lord drag it’s as though he never looked any other way, actor Charlie Vickers is thrillingly wicked to watch as the undercover archnemesis, radiating silently smug self-superiority like wifi bars. Fully the proverbial messy bitch who lives for drama, Sauron has free rein to straight-up lie to people’s faces in a way few characters this side of Walter White and Gus Fring (there’s Breaking Bad again) have been granted in the prestige-TV era.
Vickers’s performance also echoes that of Stephen Moyer as the luciferian London gangster Teddy Bass in Paramount+’s Sexy Beast prequel series earlier this year: Both are men who know and love what they are, and love that you haven’t yet found out. That’s what enables him to play Celebrimbor like a fiddle — deliberately sabotaging his own initial attempts to forge the Nine Rings by using too much of the Dwarves’ mithril, so that Celebrimbor will feel obliged to step in and set everyone straight. It’s what enables him to play everyone else like a fiddle subsequently — using Celebrimbor’s fatigue and frustration to make himself look like a prince by comparison. He’s a lord of lies, to the manor born.
And it’s like watching a cat play with his food. At one point, Annatar lectures Celebrimbor about how prone he is to manipulation by others. The balls on this guy! At another, Celebrimbor tells Annatar, in so many words, that he’s the kind of person who likes to plant seeds in other people’s minds and then present the results as if they’d grown there organically — but he still doesn’t see how successfully Annatar has pulled this exact scam on him. He’s a Loki-like trickster-god, toying with the emotions of Elves and Dwarves out of sheer perversity. This incarnation of Sauron is worthy of the name.
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