“An evil, ancient and powerful has returned.” So begins the new trailer for Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which will soon return itself for a second season. The series, back Aug. 9th, from showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, takes place thousands of years before Frodo and Aragorn formed their fellowship, and reveals how the tyrannical sorcerer they sought to destroy created the rings that allowed him to conquer J.R.R. Tolkien’s mystical realm of Middle-earth.
Sauron is the evil in question. Known to moviegoers as a giant flaming eye, this malevolent being was revealed at the end of the Prime Video series’ first season as a handsome, daring rogue—and apparent human— named Halbrand (Charlie Vickers). In the season two trailer, he is introduced in the opening shots with flaming eyes again.
In the first chapter of the show, Halbrand encounters the elven warrior Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) when both are lost, stranded and struggling. After lying his way into the forge of master elven relic-maker Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards), the three of them end up creating the first three rings in a collection that will eventually bring elves, dwarves and people under the mastermind’s control.
Amazon acquired the rights to Tolkien’s fictional history for a record-breaking $250 million in 2017, making this series one of the most expensive in history before even a frame of footage was shot. The broad strokes of the story, covering multiple seasons, were conceived by Mckay and Payne, who also gauged the input of the extremely vocal Lord of the Rings fanbase. “We wrote most of season two before season one came out,” Payne said in a Vanity Fair postmortem for the original episodes. “The cake was kind of baked before the audience response came in. Certainly, you look at audience response, and you see what characters people love, and what kinds of storytelling moves them. I wouldn’t say we’re over-correcting for any of it, but we’re certainly listening to people’s responses.”
The new footage shows Halbrand/Sauron still up to his old ring-making tricks. The first trio of rings went to the elves, who had yet to accept them when the previous season ended. The dwarf king Durin III (Peter Mullan) is glimpsed in the trailer examining one of his own, which means another batch will be created during season two. We see rocks collapsing on the bridges of his subterranean city of Khazad-dûm, where Frodo’s fellowship took a shortcut under the Misty Mountains—which suggests bad tidings in dwarf-land, perhaps caused (or alleviated) by a deal with the devil.
“Rings are the nuclear bomb in Middle-earth,” McKay told Vanity Fair as the first season drew to a close. “It changes everything. Everyone needs a ring, everyone wants a ring. They become the ways that these different cultures are subdued. It creates immortality. Sauron’s ring creates the entire mythos. Everything is different from here. The One Ring defines everything for thousands and thousands of years. It defines the Second Age and the Third Age. And we’re just trying to find ways to invest the process of this creation with as much richness and meaning as possible.”
