The following article contains spoilers for The Rings of Power season 2.
The Lord of the Rings tells an epic fantasy story, a war waged by all Free Peoples of Middle-earth against the primordial forces of evil. It is a story of resilience and one halfling who ends a reign of tyranny by accidentally throwing Gollum and the ring into the fires of Mount Doom. The Rings of Power—Amazon’s wildly expensive prequel series—gives us some much-needed context for Frodo’s great achievement, drawing a line between the One Ring getting destroyed and a scheme by Sauron that began all the way back at the end of the First Age.
The biggest surprise in Rings of Power is how it makes Sauron a rather sympathetic, easy-to-root-for figure. We see the monumental, millennia-spanning hard work Sauron put into creating his rings and trying to conquer Middle-earth, as well as the humiliation, the lies, the sweat, and the blood he shed for his dream. The first season showed Sauron was willing to pretend to be a lowly and repentant human, save Galadriel (who literally spent centuries trying to hunt him down) multiple times, buy drinks for every smith in Númenor, get beat up by said smiths without protest, get imprisoned multiple times, and also give the great elven smith Celebrimbor the key to save all elves.
Season 2 begins by taking us to the dawn of the Second Age, hundreds of years before the events of the first season. Here we meet a Sauron who is defeated, his armies decimated and his mentor imprisoned and thrown into the abyss. If that wasn’t enough, his attempt to get revenge and raise an army fails when the remaining orcs betray Sauron and shank him to death, reducing him to a black blob that spends centuries before regaining physical form. In the first episode, we also see Sauron (in the form of the human Harbrand) captured by the very orcs who once killed him, as he willingly suffers torture for several days in order to plan a scheme that would pit elves against orcs —while also planning on taking a new disguise to trick the elves into making the other titular rings of power.
Let no one say that Sauron did not suffer and put in the work for his dream of unifying Middle-earth under his rule. This is not the mighty Dark Lord who would one day hold all of Middle-earth terrified, whose armies would reduce all Free Peoples to a few thousand men, two hobbits, a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard, against at least ten times that number in orcs, Easterlings and trolls before Mordor’s Black Gate. He may not have built his city on rock and roll, but he did build it nonetheless.
There are epic battles and history-making moments awaiting in the rest of the second season of Rings of Power, but the premiere’s biggest achievement is a rather inspirational story about one guy not giving up in the face of adversity and fighting to fulfill his dream. Even though we know he fails time and time again, Sauron does not give up. When Isildur eventually cuts off his ring finger and Sauron loses his physical body once again, he still keeps working, gathering forces from his magic all-seeing-eye tower, spending millennia searching for the One Ring. If you ever doubt yourself or think it’s too late to start chasing your dreams, remember Sauron was only 50,100 years old when he crafted the One Ring.
And remember that all of that planning, all the sacrifices were undone by an unlikely hobbit literally walking into Mordor and throwing a ring into a volcano.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
