Sauron

““There's something that Milton does in Paradise Lost that we talked about a lot,” says Payne. “Where he makes Satan a really compelling character. In some ways ...

So the first season is like Batman Begins, and the The Dark Knight is the next movie, with Sauron maneuvering out in the open.” The Rings Of Power is neither a faithful rendition of Tolkien nor in the same league as Milton, Shakespeare, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad or The Dark Knight. [a video about this as well](https://youtu.be/K1Uk2HBaIJQ), which you can watch below: [Read the full THR interview here](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/rings-of-power-sauron-season-2-lotr-1235240809/). This season has not been a deep character study of any of its characters, and has spent far too much time on tertiary and ultimately unimportant figures like Bronwyn and Theo to have been a real examination of Halbrand/Sauron (let alone Galadriel). Payne and Patrick McKay discuss the first season, the big reveal of Sauron in the season finale, and what to expect from the show’s arch-villain in Season 2. What I find remarkable about this statement is that the first season of The Rings Of Power relies almost entirely on surprises. He should have been a more heroic figure who the audience truly grew to love—if the plan was to trick us (and somehow Galadriel) into falling for him. Oh, and like the Joker from Christopher Nolan’s much-praised Batman movies, widely considered some of the best superhero movies ever made? What if we could get the audience to go through a similar journey?” You now know him as a person outside the name ‘Sauron.’ In some ways, we wanted to do an origin story for Sauron. He wants Satan to be so persuasive that he also seduces [the reader] and you’re unconsciously won over, so that you perceive your own fallenness and your need for redemption. We didn’t want to make a show that was about the hunt for Sauron, but we love the idea of Sauron as a deceiver who could, hopefully, deceive some of the audience”

We finally know who Sauron is. Halbrand was the Dark Lord all along. Here are all the clues you missed about Halbrand's true identity.

[Tarana Burke: What 'Me Too' Made Possible](https://time.com/6221110/tarana-burke-me-too-anniversary/?utm_source=roundup&utm_campaign=20221013) In reality, Adar has given that tool to one of his followers and is carrying a fake to fool his captors. In the last episode, Halbrand says Adar was both his and Galadriel’s enemy. She is so hellbent on tracking down Sauron that she misses all the hints he may be standing right in front of her. When she interrogates him on the raft, he says that her enemy lies in the Southlands, thus precipitating a series of events in which Galadriel convinces the Númenóreans to travel to the Southlands with her and suffer great losses during the creation of Mount Doom And then, of course, in the very next episode she does just that. [The Rings of Power](https://time.com/6205837/the-rings-of-power-amazon-most-expensive/) played coy about which character would claim the title of the Dark Lord by the end of its first season. In the very first episode he predicted that Galadriel would accidentally usher back the great evil that she hunted. And in the final episode, Galadriel brings him to the elven kingdom to be healed from a wound. “For the same wind that seeks to blow out a fire may also cause its spread.” Tolkien’s writings: In the mythology of Middle-earth, Sauron comes to the elves disguised as a “fair” man in order to trick them into forging the first three rings of power and learn their secrets in the process. Otherwise, his early encounter with Galadriel on the vast sea felt a little too random and fortuitious.

SPOILER ALERT: The interview includes details about the Season 1 finale of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. In one of the biggest twists in the ...

And for him I think if he’s in charge, he can heal the world, he can order things. And I think Tolkien says that Sauron should be thought of as terrible, and I think there’s no debating the fact that eventually and at his core, Sauron is very evil. And he’s saying, I just want to be good, I’m sorry, and I want to start fresh. And I think it’s really nice because it sets the show up moving forward to watch his descent into real darkness. But I think in that exact moment, he feels this cosmic connection to this person. I was hoping that this would happen when creating the character that people were going to be like, is he genuinely repentant, is genuinely trying to be a good man and start a new life? VICKERS: I think she’s survival to him in that moment. I think they have a cosmic connection, but I don’t think it’s necessarily in his mind a king and a queen-like, husband and wife-kind of situation. He talks to her about healing Middle Earth, and that comes back to a lot of what Tolkien said about it in that at the beginning of the Second Age, he’d been brought low and he lingered in Middle Earth, and his power then very slowly reemerged. I think I tried to walk the line. Because the way I like to look at it is that, in order to deceive Galadriel, Pharazon, Miriel and all these people he meets who are legends of lore, I think he would have to be fully invested in this character, that he is this human character of Halbrand, feeling, experiencing living things as a human. I did all that and then I kind of just let that settle in my subconscious.