“Nothing is evil in the beginning.” Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power begins with this assurance, intoned in the dark by Galadriel (Morfydd Clark). Set during the Second Age, thousands of years before the events of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogies, this eight-episode series based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s books and their appendices explores the beginnings of Galadriel, Elrond (Robert Aramayo), and Sauron himself — though for these immortal beings, that “beginning” may be centuries in the making. In this first episode, we are welcomed back to Middle-earth and introduced to a sprawling collection of characters, locations, and beasties both new and familiar.
Child elves bathed in golden light play along a riverbed in Valinor while young Galadriel builds a boat from folded parchment. But when another elf child sinks it, Galadriel turns to her big brother Finrod (Will Fletcher) for comfort. He tells her that a stone sinks because it looks down into the dark water; a boat floats because it looks up to the light. Galadriel asks Finrod how she can know whether to follow the lights in the sky or those reflected in the water; Finrod’s answer is a whisper only she can hear.
“We had no word for death, for we thought our joys would be unending,” Galadriel tells us. But the “great foe Morgoth” put an end to such idealism. As the Two Trees of Valinor are destroyed, the elves sail East across the Sundering Seas to Middle-earth to battle Morgoth’s orcs and to restore peace. Morgoth and his orcs are defeated, but the elves “learned many words for death” — and one of the fallen elves was Galadriel’s beloved brother. The orcs are on the run but still commanded by Morgoth’s most fervent disciple: Sauron, who Galadriel vows to hunt down. Burned into her mind is the wound Sauron sliced into Finrod’s flesh: a three-pronged sigil, bathed in fire and blood.
A sweeping pan over Middle-earth’s landscapes and across centuries of searching finds Galadriel leading a band of elves up a snow-covered mountain face in Forodwaith, the Northernmost Waste. Over the objections of Thondir (Fabian McCallum), she pushes the party through a blizzard and into a massive ruin of jagged stone. While surrounded by orc corpses embedded in the walls, Galadriel finds the three-pronged sigil carved into the stone, a sign that Sauron survived.
But before she and Thondir can resolve their dispute over whether to go home as the king commanded or press on, a giant bearded snow troll with curved horns growing out of his noseless face begins tossing elves into walls. Galadriel is in charge for a reason: She catapults herself off of Thondir’s sword to slice at the troll, then takes it down single-handedly with a sword to the throat and a knife to the head. That’s Commander Galadriel to you, thank you very much! Maybe not to Thondir, though — as Galadriel sheaths her blade, he lays his down, leading an extremely elvish mutiny as they all ceremoniously put down their swords and tell her that she moves on, she does so alone. And all that is before the main titles even appear!
In Rhovanion, the Wilderlands east of the Anduin, a pair of hunters with enormous part-wing, part-moose-antler appendages on their back trek the green and hilly landscape. As they move on, the Harfoots (a type of hobbit) creep out of hiding, popping up from tall grasses and out from tree trunks. A whole hobbit village shakes off its camouflage to come to bustling, gossiping life. Sadoc Burrows (Lenny Henry) is ill at ease — it’s uncommon for hunters to come this far this early. Meanwhile, the Harfoot kids are outside the village, picking wild berries in the charge of Nori Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh). It’s idyllic — until a little Harfoot gleefully shows Nori a huge, clawed footprint in the mud. She sends the kids quickly home just as a big, furry, and sharp-toothed creature comes into view.
To Lindon, Capital of the High Elves! A young Elrond (Robert Aramayo) sits writing in a yellow-leaved tree when a messenger seeks him out. Bad news: he’s not invited to the next council meeting, since he’s not an elf lord. Good news: his friend Galadriel has arrived, swathed in a shimmering gold gown and sumptuous green velvet — she cleans up well when not battling snow trolls in an evil blizzard-beaten fortress! She tells Elrond about the sigil she found in the stone and that she wants the King to send her back out, but Elrond warns her not to disobey the king again.
Time for a quick Harfoot interlude. Unlike the rest of the happily pastoral Harfoots, Nori “can’t help but feel there’s wonders in this world” that they haven’t yet seen. But her mother, Marigold (Sara Zwangobani) urges her daughter to find satisfaction there in their village; the Harfoots are the only creatures of Middle-earth who are just responsible to their community, and that relationship is how they survive.
Back in Lindon, Galadriel is feeling the tug of her own responsibilities. She and her company kneel in their armor (somehow both fierce and luxuriously draped — the elven magic gives them both immortality and impeccable fashion) as High King Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker) honors them for their efforts. In the words Elrond wrote for him, the king insists that the “days of war are over. Today, our days of peace begin.” Galadriel is unconvinced and even less enthused by the reward: The heroes will be escorted to the Grey Havens, her sun-soaked childhood home, “to dwell for all eternity in the blessed realm, the far west, the undying lands of Valinor. At last, they are going home.” But is it still home for her?
While fireworks burst over the lake, Galadriel gazes at a statue carved into a living tree, one among many, each lit by the soft glow of a lamp — a memorial grove honoring her brother and those who died with him in battle. Elrond arrives to ply his friend with wine, but Galadriel is in no mood to celebrate. She can’t go home — not until she’s rid the world of Morgoth’s evil. As Elrond promises that he will take up her task if the evil resurfaces, the memorial lights stretch out in both directions behind them, further than the eye can see, a reminder of how much has already been lost.
New location! In The Southlands, the lands of men, no one seems happy to see the two elves making their way through town. Arondir (Ismael Cruz Cordova) arrives at a tavern for his biweekly check-in and finds the locals discussing a poisoning. When he asks for more details on the poisoning (and is unconvincingly rebuffed), Rowan (Ian Blackburn) shouts at “knife-ears” (rude!) that “One day our true king will return and pry us right out from under your pointy boots.” Arondir goes out back to share a charged moment with Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi), a local healer, who seems way happier to see him than anyone else in town. But Médhor (Augustus Prew) reminds Arondir that the elves are here to monitor the town, not flirt with its inhabitants. Elves and humans have only attempted to pair up twice, and both times were tragic — the odds are against Arondir and Bronwyn sharing anything more than significant glances.
The chances don’t improve upon their return to their outpost: the high king has declared the war over and disbanded the far outposts. Revion (Simon Merrells), the watch warden, finds Arondir moping atop a watchtower. Revion warns him that they’ve been assigned to watch these people because of their allegiance to Morgoth. Arondir should be glad never to see them again. But there’s one person Arondir absolutely has to see again. He finds Bronwyn at her house and says that he has expressed his feelings for her “a hundred times over, in every way but words.” But before he can actually use those words, a man brings his cow to be healed, and the inky black goo that Arondir milks from it absolutely kills the romantic mood. He and Bronwyn set out east to check out the area where the cow last grazed. Might this be related to the mysterious poisoning the tavern-goers were discussing?
Bronwyn’s son Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin) and Rowan — the angry boy from the tavern — sneak into a barn while Rowan taunts Theo about his missing father. Theo is barely listening, though, because he has a task at hand. From under the rickety floorboards, he pulls out a broken sword he’s been hiding and that is clearly exerting a mysterious influence over him. The hilt is surrounded by twisted metal, and on the blade is the telltale sigil of Sauron.
If there’s one thing Elrond is going to do, now or thousands of years from now, it’s send a woman to the Grey Havens without giving her all the information. As Galadriel and her company sail across the Sundering Seas, Elrond and King Gil-galad discuss what they foresaw and kept from her: that if Galadriel stayed in Middle Earth, she might keep the evil alive rather than defeating it forever. “Galadriel sails to the sunset,” King Gil-galad says with a glint in his eye. “You and I must look to the new sunrise.” He tells Elrond he’ll be working with Lord Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards), “the greatest of Elven smiths” on a new project. It sounds suspiciously like a quid pro quo, but we’ll have to wait along with Elrond to learn more.
On the Sundering Seas, the elves are nearing the Grey Havens. They have their weapons and armor ceremoniously removed, although Galadriel cannot at first give up her sword. A flock of white seabirds bursts through the clouds and encircles the boat while the elves break into harmonious song. As the ship sails on and the song crests, the wall of gray clouds before them parts, and breathtaking golden sunshine streams through the cleft. But Galadriel cannot rejoice in this homecoming. She hears her brother’s voice again, asking “Do you know why a ship floats and a stone cannot?”
At this moment, a fiery meteor rips through the clouds. The elves on the boat see it; in the Southlands, Arondir and Bronwyn instinctively clasp hands as it burns its path across the sky. Galadriel backs away from the blinding golden light as seaspray falls like rain, like tears, as her younger self asks the same question — how is she to know which lights to follow? We now hear the answer that was only whispered before: “Sometimes we cannot know until we have touched the darkness.” She has, and now she knows. Galadriel dives overboard, into the water, the shimmering light above her, and surfaces just in time to see the wall of clouds closes again, shrouding the sea and her in darkness.
King Gal-galad saw the meteor too; he picks up a golden leaf in its wake and sees its veins turn black and corrosive. But nearest of all to the fireball is Nori, who watches it hit the ground near her village and explode. Ever curious, she follows it to the sight of impact, where she finds an unexpected sight: a nearly naked man, curled up in the center of the fiery hole. Who is he? How is he lying inside a molten crater? We’ll have to wait to find out until the next episode — the screen cuts to black.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres new episodes weekly every Friday on Prime Video.