‘LOTR: The Rings Of Power’ Season 1 Finale: Showrunners & EP Talk Sauron Twist, Tease “Grittier” Season 2, & New Characters From Tolkien Canon
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 1 finale, which just dropped on Amazon Prime Video tonight. For even more on the LOTR season closer, check out Deadline’s Inside the Ring, the Rings of Power after show on October 15. Right now, watch past episodes here.
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“Season 2 is fundamentally different in that our main villain is out and about, and doing his thing,” The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power executive producer Lindsey Weber reveals of what’s coming in Amazon Prime Video’s next installment of its J.R.R. Tolkien adaptation. “I think in some ways, it’s going to grittier, more intense, maybe a little scarier,” the EP adds.
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That villain is of course Sauron, and the just released Season 1 finale unveiled would-be blacksmith and King of the Southlands Halbrand (Charlie Vickers) to be the deposed Dark Lord himself.
The real identity of Sauron was the big question heading into the final episode of RoP Season 1, and, after some narrative sleight of hand, we finally got our answer, as well as a boatload of betrayal and new journeys to sail into Season 2.
Coming off the triumph in episode 6 of Adar (Joseph Mawle) and the Orcs in what is now Mordor, the Wayne Che Yip directed, and showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay penned “Alloyed” episode starts with the Ascetic (Kali Kopae), The Nomad (Edith Poor), and The Dweller (Bridie Sisson) approaching The Stranger (Daniel Weyman) and seemingly anointing him the all-consuming powerful Sauron. But, as the Mystics learn the hard way, they’re wrong, and as Nori (Markella Kavenagh) essentially advises the Stranger later in the episode, it best if he is true to himself.
Back among the panicking Elves, Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) learns that it’s she who has been deceived all along, after doing a deep dive into Halbrand’s family history and finding several holes. Her probe explains perhaps why Halbrand was thrown in jail in Numenor and was a skilled smith who so enthusiastically sought to make rings with Lord Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards). Upon confronting the would-be King, she thought was her trusted companion, Galadriel is put through a series of flashbacks including back to near beginning of the season when the duo was adrift on a raft and a reunion with her long dead brother that goes sour. When she returns to consciousness, Halbrand/Sauron is gone to what is now fiery Mordor. Subsequently, in a dash to save the Elves from extinction, Celebrimbor, Galadriel and Elrond (Robert Aramayo) finally mix the powerful mithril with other precious metals to make those fabled rings. As a blind Queen (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) steps foot back in Númenor to discover her father dead and divisions brewing, the finale ends with a tearful Nori leaving her Harfoot family behind to join the Stranger on a new journey.
Toiling away in the UK on Season 2, EP Weber and showrunners Payne and McKay spoke with me about the eighth and final episode of their Tolkien epic, which Amazon picked up for a five-cycle run. The trio talked villains, journeys, how they got to the end of Season 1, where Rings of Power could be going, new characters, and what was the deal with apples?
DEADLINE: After spending your time introducing your main cast over the early episodes, you really packed almost everyone in for this finale with a lot of pivot points for most of them. Why did you take that approach, did you worry it could be too much?
WEBER: You know, we have a big cast, and lots of characters that we love and hopefully the audience loves, and they all needed to have a special moment. In terms of our major plot engine, there’s just big stuff happening, by this point, but you know we wanted a finale that was going to be emotional and delightful, and thrilling, and surprising, and sort of scary and intense, and very dramatic. I think the guys wrote a beautiful script, and it was really well directed and performed, and we really just tried to make space for the actors to do their best work so these big moments could really land and resonate.
DEADLINE: So, let’s talk about a huge reveal – Halbrand is Sauron. Why did you guys decide to go with that? Did you consider other alternatives? Were there other characters or maybe characters we didn’t even know about who could have been Sauron?
PAYNE: I think from the beginning we wanted to build a relationship between Sauron and Galadriel. There was text that we found to be really, really fascinating from the Mirror of Galadriel, in which she says, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or at least all of his mind, the concerns, the elves and ever does.
So that from the beginning seemed like something really appealing to us. Then the idea of a Tolkienian chance meeting, as he called them, an encounter on the raft felt like it could be a delicious way to start off that storyline. So, that was the story that we went up in the beginning. We thought of ways that there are other characters you might think of for Sauron; the Stranger was certainly always going to be someone who we knew people would be thinking about, given his powers.
DEADLINE: You dropped a lot of clues over this season, are we going to get more into Halbrand’s backstory, how he got there on that raft, and set this up?
McKAY: I would say that those are all good questions and questions need answering. So hopefully those are new layers of the onion we can peel back.
DEADLINE: Where are you at in terms of the second season right now?
WEBER: These first few days are kind of a luxury for us because we’re just beginning and the guys are still writing, you know, polishing the script for Season 2, so they’re writing that. But if you wait a minute, we’ll be scattered to the corners in editing rooms and different sets and different locations, different directors and filmmakers, and prep meetings and post meetings and all these things, and it’s like you have to sort of be an octopus and have a tentacle everywhere at once.
I also think in the beginning of Season 1, there’s just so much that’s new, and you have to see how your actors are going to do, and how the material is going to feel, and how the balance of it works. Going into Season 2, we have the benefit of having built these relationships, both the relationships of the characters and the relationships of the actual human cast, and we’re the incredible beneficiaries of that thing and being this much further down the road.
DEADLINE: Let’s shift back up the road to the Stranger and the Harfoots in this Season 1 ender What awaits him and Nori? Is he Gandalf? And, most importantly, will we see Poppy again?
PAYNE: Well, we I think we need to be careful about not spoiling the adventure. I would say, you know, one of the goals from the very beginning for us here was to go to uncharted, unseen corners of the Tolkien map, a huge and tantalizing continent that readers and audiences have never been to.
McKAY: And the idea of a Tolkienian journey and adventure with a wizard and a halfling, it seemed to us like a really exciting and enticing new leg of the journey as it is, as it were. As far as Poppy’s concerned, I would just say, you know, Megan Richards and Markella Kavenagh have an undeniable delight and chemistry, and a friendship that those characters have built and that feels so authentic.
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 learned that he is ostensibly an Istari, you know, which means wizard. And he’s learning something else from the Mystics when they say he is he is not Sauron, he is the Oher, which sort of implies that potentially his destiny is entwined in some way with Sauron’s. But that’s all he knows at this point. And he’s going to have to go on another journey to learn more and maybe a name or his name becomes a part of that journey.
DEADLINE: Lindsey, looking back now over the season, it seems that episode 6, “Ud?n” and its giant battle would have been the place to end things, but that’s clearly not what you guys did. Why did you decide to have two more episodes after the explosion of Mount Doom?
WEBER: I think there are a few things.
We actually felt that from a character’s perspective, we wanted to explore what it meant for Galadriel to, who had been right a lot, to be wrong, really, really wrong for a minute. We wanted her to have to live with those consequences, and in a way that she couldn’t fix in the short term. So, as a thematic exploration, it seemed really important to do that,
Then, you want time after that to see what it means and live with the consequences and follow that emotional journey. So, on a plot perspective and sort of a season engine level, I think JD and Patrick imagined that we should do, this was their version of like an intimate battle. They talked about Stalingrad and Battle in the Streets, not sort of full epic but more hand-to-hand and brutal with surprising twists and turns. So, they were like, oh, we’ll do this little battle in six, and it turned into what it turned into,
DEADLINE: Not a little battle in the end …
WEBER: (LAUGHS) No, but it was meant to be sort of a character gut punch, and obviously, a sea change or land change, I should say, for the characters in Middle-earth. It was always meant to be, you know, primarily a really big emotional blow for our heroes.
DEADLINE: Talking about big emotions, Rings of Power has been NSA-level stuff from the drop. Where are you at now the finale is out there?
WEBER: Honestly, I’m so glad for episode 8 to be out in the world and for us to not have to be the guardians of a bunch of secrets any longer. We really love this episode and the way it all came together, and the people of the world will think everything, love/hate and in between, I’m quite sure, but it certainly seems like everybody’s talking about it and people are watching. I think we always knew there would be a lot of chatter from all corners, and it’s good to be talked about.
DEADLINE: I guess your life is deep into Season 2 production, didn’t you consider saving some of what we saw in the J.D. and Patrick penned finale for that?
WEBER: It’s funny you ask that, there are things that we saved that were going to be in the final bit of the season that we thought, oh, just it’s too big right now to do, to fit that in with everything else and let’s save it, and we’re actually doing some of those things now in Season 2.
DEADLINE: Really?
WEBER: Yes, and I think it’s really exciting to be exploring them and have the room to do it the way the way we really wanted to, so we weren’t giving anything short shrift.
DEADLINE: Does that exploration include new characters?
McKAY: Cirdan will be a part of the adventure moving forward in Season 2 We’ve cast a wonderful actor to play him that we will announce at some future date. But part of the fun of telling a story in Middle-earth is that there’s all these wonderful canon characters that you’ve met Season 1 and then there are additional canon characters that we will get to in future seasons. If you know the lore, you know, anybody is fair game who might have been a part of the world at this time.
WEBER: Season 2 is fundamentally different in that our main villain is out and about and doing his thing. I think in some ways, it’s going to grittier, more intense, maybe a little scarier. Certainly, it has a lot of the same other tonal ranges that you find in the show, which we feel are really sort of fundamental to feeling like you’re in Middle-earth, but once Sauron is openly on the move and working his plans, things get rather interesting.
DEADLINE: Sounds like you really have the full five seasons pretty mapped out …
WEBER: You know things evolve a bit, but from even before I signed on for this job, the guys really wanted to devise a story that would work from service level the first time and then would work on a whole new level when you saw it again with the full knowledge of the season. I would even say after you’ve seen future seasons, go back and look on those things again and view them in a new light. They really have a very careful plan, and as a producer, it’s really exciting to work with filmmakers like that because you can do so many exciting things and build so many layers into it. There are lots of things in there that will be a source of debate and fan engagement and discovery for people for a long, long time
DEADLINE: I’ve heard from several people that they’ve been paying attention to Rings of Power, but that they saw Season 1 as four movies, and I’ve heard from others that their plan was always to binge it once the whole season was out …
WEBER: I believe it, in fact, I know it to be true. My assistant, who is younger than I am, tells me that that’s a really important thing to younger people. That her generation, that age group in particular, really just want the immediacy of having it all out there I also love the idea that somebody would think of it as four movies. I’d be interested to go back and think of it that way. Certain episodes certainly do have a duality to them like the, you know, the first two that Jay (director J.A. Bayona) did were very much planned that way and feel that way.
DEADLINE: Speaking of planning, what is the symbolism of the Stranger’s apple, especially in the finale?
PAYNE: Apples have a lot of mythological resonances in cultures really across the world. There’s, obviously a biblical idea. I mean, it’s also commonly associated with the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But for a long time, you know, in many languages, the word apple actually could kind of mean any fruit. But in this story, I think you can look at it as one, a symbol of their friendship (between the Stranger and Nori). Food is dear and scarce, and the fact that Nori would still give the stranger one of the only good apples left is an obvious token of friendship.
At the same time, I think you can also look at it, if you want to lean into any, you know, the taking of fruit in a garden setting is something that portends kind of a loss of innocence, a leaving of Eden and heading into the difficult world. And The Stranger has effectively gone through a birth, and is then with the Harfoots, which are, have helped to nourishment, take care of him and, and it’s been a period of innocence for him. You could say he is now leaving that behind and going out into the world. I think as he holds on to the apple, I think friendship, again, is an important thing, is as he considers eating it, he hears Nori’s voice in his head and he thinks about her and, he’s clearly going to be very hungry. He’s been traveling a long time at that point. But rather than eat the apple, he holds on to the apple, as you know, holding onto to the friendship that he has with Nori. As I said, it’s important to him.
Anthony D’Alessandro contributed to this report
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