“Bind yourself to me,” Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) implores a man she’s only just met as the sea lashes at them both. In the second episode of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, “Adrift,” our responsibility to each other — even when we’d rather keep to ourselves — is at the center of the action. An elf must trust a human; an elf and a dwarf mend an old rift; a Harfoot connects with a stranger who fell from the stars.
We pick up right where we left off: Galadriel, alone, treading water in the middle of the sea, her ship and those aboard it safe behind the veil of clouds in Valinor. She takes off swimming. Meanwhile, Nori (Markella Kavenagh) stands gaping at the unconscious figure in the burning crater, when Poppy (Megan Richards) startles her and Nori falls into the somehow not-hot hole. Nori is going to Nori: She pokes the bearded mystery man directly in the face. At first, nothing happens — until suddenly, he grabs her wrist and moans. The wind kicks up, swirling around Nori and the Stranger (David Weyman). The rocks fly into the air, orbiting the two figures like a strange solar system. The fire is suddenly sucked into the middle and disappears; after a moment he collapses and the fire returns.
The girls wheel the unconscious man through the night with a stolen wheelbarrow and lamps, looking for a place to keep him safe. Is he a troll? No. An elf? “Wrong ears, and he’s not handsome.” Human? “No way, he’d be squished.” But they can’t debate too long — the wheelbarrow escapes them and rolls downhill. Good old-fashioned hobbit hijinks! Once they catch the runaway wheelbarrow, they hide the Stranger in a clutch of trees. Nori pleads with the skeptical Poppy in language that echoes Galadriel’s own driving sense of duty. “I feel like he’s my responsibility…I was supposed to find him, me.” She has to know he’s safe before she can walk away.
We move from one nighttime scene to another, bleaker one: Arondir (Ismael Cruz Cordova) and Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi) in Hordern, Bronwyn’s now-destroyed hometown. There are no bodies, no wounded, no sign that anyone was present for the destruction. They creep through collapsed and still-smoldering houses, seemingly alone in the smoky dark. Inside a ruined home, Arondir spots a deep pit and passage dug under the floor, clearly purpose-built by someone, or something. With one last longing look, Arondir sends her off to warn her people while he jumps down into the tunnels, torch aloft.
New location! Eregion, realm of the elven-smiths, is a city of towers built into the mountainous side of an island. In Celebrimbor’s (Charles Edwards) chambers, he fills Elrond (Robert Aramayo) in on his project. Celebrimbor aspires to fill Middle Earth with beauty, not just war, and to “devise something of real power.” He has brought Elrond here to help build a forge, one with a fire “as hot as a dragon’s tongue and as pure as starlight.” But he needs it done by spring. Elrond suggests seeking “partners outside the confines of our own race.”
And with that, the map snakes up to Khazad-dûm, realm of the dwarves. Thousands of years in the future it will become an orc-infested, balrog-cursed, desolate tomb. But here in the Second Age, the streams still flow to the mines, cradled in lush green mountains. Elrond assures the smith that the dwarven prince, Durin, is like a brother, but the guard at the stone door quickly disabuses them of that notion. Elrond has another trick up his feathered sleeve: he invokes the Rite of Sigin-tarâg and the doors suddenly open. Elrond is hustled in alone, and sees the mines in their glory: waterfalls, green cliffs for farming in streaks of sunlight, and a bustling underground metropolis carved into the belly of the mountains. Prince Durin IV (Owain Arthur) bats away Elrond’s flowery language about their friendship to introduce the dwarven test of endurance. They’ll break stones with hammers until one of them can do no more. If Elrond forfeits, he’s banished. If he wins, they’ll grant a single favor. Just as Elrond crushes his first boulder, we cut back to Nori.
She finds the Stranger drawing designs on a nearby boulder. He turns, yelling, and the trees surrounding them bow down toward him. “You remember me, don’t you?,” Nori pleads. Something in him does, and the world returns to its natural state. Through creative hand gestures and frankly gross snail-eating, they forge a friendship. “Where is it you’re from, anyway? Where do you belong? Where are the others… like you? Are there any others?,” Nori asks. In answer, the Stranger begins drawing a symbol in the mud, alongside others carved into the trees. He speaks in an unknown language, repeating “Mana” and “Úrë” with increasing urgency. Meanwhile, Nori’s father Largo (Dylan Smith) is helping to set up a canopy at camp. At the height of the Stranger’s agitation, Largo’s ankle spontaneously gives way. His foot is in a bad way, and the whole camp is anxious, wondering if he'll be able to migrate.
Galadriel is still swimming, surrounded by impenetrable gray fog, when she hears a bellow. A decrepit raft comes into view, and she is pulled aboard. Galadriel says simply that she was separated from her ship. “So you’ve not seen it?,” asks Eamon (Berynn Schwerdt) trepidatiously. “The worm?” Before either can get answers, the passengers spot a ship in the distance. Is it deliverance? Corsairs? It’s neither: It’s their own wrecked ship, dragged through the sea by the feared worm, an enormous creature with fins that slice through the water. The passengers panic, and one of them shoves Galadriel back into the sea. Each time she comes up for air, we catch a glimpse of the destruction: the worm circling back, its huge jaws rising out of the sea to chomp down on the raft, its many fins ripping through the raft, sending debris and people flying. And then the sea is still and silent. In the distance, the last remaining bit of the raft cuts through the fog, rowed by Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), who pulls her aboard. Once again, the various races of Middle-earth must strike a tenuous bond.
Back in Khazad-dûm, that bond is breaking like the many boulders Durin and Elrond are ferociously hammering until Elrond finally forfeits. As they ride up a rock face to the exit, Elrond learns just how he’s offended his former friend: “Twenty years may be the blink of an eye to an Elf,” Durin shouts, wounded. “But I’ve lived an entire life in that time! A life you missed.” Elrond offers only his congratulations on the milestones he’s neglected, and a request: He’d like to apologize to Durin’s family as well. Durin’s wife Disa (Sophia Nomvete) welcomes Elrond with an overwhelming warmth her husband cannot offer. Over dinner, she shares how she and Durin met: She was resonating, a practice where the dwarves sing to the stones to learn “what might be hidden, where to mine, where to tunnel, and where to leave the mountain untouched.” Charmed by their affectionate home, Elrond notes the yellow tree from Lindon that grows improbably in the room. “Where there is love, it is never truly dark. How could it not grow in a home like yours?” Elrond asks. It’s enough: Durin tells Elrond to stay.
On the seas, Galadriel wonders what kind of man leaves his companions to drown, while Halbrand thinks she’s a deserter. She asks what Elves have ever done to cause his animosity, but his response chills her: “It wasn’t elves who chased me from my homeland. It was orcs.” As a storm rolls in, darkening more deeply the already gray sky, he reveals that he’s from the Southlands.
We know what town Halbrand has fled, and now Bronwyn does too. At the tavern, her news is met with skepticism. Waldreg (Geoff Morrell) won’t flee with only her word to go on; he’s “seen landslides less dangerous than a wayward tongue,” and the tongue of a woman who trusts elves is not worth much in this town. But at home, Theo hears mice under the floor. He attacks the floorboards, only to peer through the hole and see the ice-blue eye of an orc peering back. Arondir is still crawling along the tunnel when the spindly shadow of some creature he surely does not want to meet looms on the wall. Rats scurry past as he squeezes through a passageway and slides down into an underground lake. He clambers to shore and watches the surface, ready to strike. He’s unprepared for the long fingers that emerge from the roots behind him and drag him away.
When Bronwyn arrives, her home is in shambles and there’s a pit in the middle of the floor. She finds Theo hiding in their walls, then hides herself in the closet opposite, just as the clawed fingers, raspy breath, and skull-clad head of an orc emerge from the hole to prowl their room. The orc bursts through the closet doors to grab Bronwyn. They fight; the orc is vicious, but Bronwyn and Theo are resourceful and determined. When next we see the orc, it’s just a head that she’s slammed onto the tavern table as proof and/or pudding, as Waldreg requested. “If there are any of you here who want to live, we make for the Elven tower at first light,” she declares, then storms away.
Speaking of storms: Galadriel and Halbrand are in the middle of a doozy. The waves lash and roil their rickety raft, and they work together to hold it, and each other, together. Galadriel has bound herself to their makeshift mast and tells Halbrand to bind himself to her. But before he does, the raft breaks apart and Galadriel sinks through the water. Halbrand cuts the rope that ties her to the anchored wood and brings them both thrashing to the surface. Near the Harfoot camp, Nori has come to tell the Stranger that they’re migrating soon, and she can’t help him. His strange magic affects the fireflies in their lanterns, and they burst free, spilling upwards like embers from a fire. He gently whispers in his unknown tongue, and they form a yellow constellation in the sky. Nori understands: he wants their help finding these stars. But after the still-weak Stranger collapses, the firefly in Poppy’s palm dies, and all the twinkling yellow lights blink out.
In Khazad-dûm, Prince Durin tells his father that Elrond doesn’t know what the dwarves have. King Durin III (Peter Mullan), with skepticism and a truly spectacular waist-length gray beard, is not so sure. “There can be no trust between hammer and rock,” he warns his son. “Eventually one or the other must surely break.” Two guards open a box in front of them. We cannot see its contents — just the silvery blue light that illuminates their faces when it’s opened.
In the Southlands, Theo pulls out the broken, rusted sword he’s been hiding, and as it whispers to him, he sees a glimmer of fire in the shattered blade. Just then, an oozing trickle of blood is pulled, or pulls itself, from the wound on his hand and inches toward the sword like an earthworm. As it makes contact, it hisses and sizzles, turning the flicker of fire in the sigil into a blaze. But rather than giving off smoke, it seems to inhale it, turning the smoke to metal, beginning to remake itself in front of Theo’s eyes. In answer to Bronwyn’s call, Theo’s answer is ominous: “Yes, mother. I’m ready.” Just as they escape the town, Galadriel and Halbrand have escaped the storm. They are unconscious on their raft when it drifts into the shadow of a large ship, a mysterious caped figure on deck silhouetted by the finally shining sun. Who is he? We’ll find out next week!
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres new episodes weekly every Friday on Prime Video.