The Rings Of Power: How Season 2's Sauron Might Connect To The Lord Of The Rings' Timeline
Showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay's "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" may be set thousands of years in the past, but the prequel series can still connect to "The Lord of the Rings" story in multiple ways. For instance, "The Rings of Power's" island nation of Númenor is the precursor to the mainland kingdom of Gondor. The show's titular jewelry — especially the One Ring to rule them all — is also still very important later on. Heck, even the "Rings of Power" first episode title, "A Shadow of the Past," has a direct link to the second chapter title of "The Fellowship of the Ring."
Now, a new rumor from fan site Fellowship of Fans' Twitter page may point to another way the show can draw a connection with the original trilogy. This could come through its until-now confusing iteration of Sauron (Charlie Vicker's Halbrand in Season 1) and the all-powerful Dark Lord that we all know and love from "The Lord of the Rings" story. The exclusive scoop states, "Gavi Singh Chera will play 'SAURON' in THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER Season 2," adding, "He will play the original form version of the character which is meant to be 'angelic' and 'ethereal' per sources."
If the leak is true, that means we may be getting a diversified, shapeshifting Sauron for Season 2 — which makes it much easier to connect his "Rings of Power" story to the original "Lord of the Rings" timeline.
The challenge with connecting to Season 1's Sauron
Season 1 of "The Rings of Power" spent a lot of time setting the stage for the world-breaking events to come. It introduced a veritable flood of characters, from Harfoots and Elves to Dwarves, Men, and strangely familiar superpowered Strangers. Our burgeoning heroes were threatened by trolls and sea serpents — as well as one another. Orcs under the independent warlord Adar (who was made up for the show) posed a bit of a threat, too. But in the end, they were just trying to find a home in the form of the newly minted Mordor.
From start to finish, there wasn't any universal threat to unify the good guys against a common force of evil — at least, not until the closing moments of the Season 1 finale. At that point, it was finally revealed (without too much surprise — it was kind of obvious) that the dispossessed mortal King of the Southlands, Halbrand, was Sauron in disguise.
The reveal was fun in the moment, and Charlie Vickers nailed the spine-chilling reveal. But once the dust settled, it left fans scratching their heads regarding how the story would link this random Sauron iteration back to the main Tolkienian timeline.
The main problem here is that, in the source material, there is no Halbrand. Sure, Sauron takes on various forms. Sometimes, he's a terrifying warlord. At other times, he's an angelic and attractive individual. At one point, he even masquerades as someone else, but even then, he's immortal, and his name is Annatar, the Lord of Gifts — not Halbrand.
In other words, Sauron is never depicted as a mortal man by Tolkien, which makes connecting Halbrand to the Lord of the Rings later on hard to picture — until now.
Connecting the potential dots between Halbrand and Sauron
Before we get too critical about past creative decisions for Season 1, we want to point something out. "The Rings of Power" is working with sparse source material for their show, so beefing up Sauron's admittedly porous backstory with the Halbrand narrative makes sense as an adaptive choice. Love it or hate it (and every fan has their opinion on the subject), it helps to fill in the gaps and provide a little creative backstory on what Sauron was up to as he started to build up his power in secret early in the Second Age.
This is a time when Tolkien gives us little information on the villain's whereabouts or activities. For inspiration, the showrunners built out the Halbrand persona from a couple of lines that Galadriel utters in "The Fellowship of the Ring" and used it to fill in the story between the two characters.
Now that the cat's out of the bag and we all know who Halbrand is, they need to get back on track with the original story, and adding another face to the multi-faceted Sauron persona is the perfect way to do so. If the rumor is true, and the show brings Gavi Singh Chera in to share the workload with Charlie Vickers, it makes it easier to shift back to the normal Sauron timeline that Tolkien created. This is a character that still has to deceive the Elves into making more Rings of Power (i.e., he can't be recognizable at first glance). Chera can play a secret version of the Dark Lord that helps forge more rings and then makes his own One Ring to rule them all.
A rebooted Second Age Sauron can easily connect to The Lord of the Rings
If the scoop is true and Gavi Sing Chera really provides a secret and sinister new version of Sauron for "The Rings of Power" Season 2, he can presumably continue to assume the more angelic and otherworldly iteration of the Dark Lord for the remainder of the Second Age story. According to the source material, along with tricking the Elves into making more Rings, Sauron still has to conquer huge areas of Middle-earth, assemble his Ringwraith servants, wipe out Elven kingdoms, lose a couple of wars, and seduce the Númenóreans into an Atlantis-like fate (one in which Sauron loses his beautiful physical appearance for good, forcing him to only take warped and terrifying forms ever after).
Only after all of that can we expect the show to set the stage for the survivors of the Númenóreans — led by famous folks like Elendil, Isildur, Gil-galad, and Elrond — to challenge Sauron back on the mainland. And that, friends, brings us to the War of the Last Alliance, which is the showdown depicted in the opening minutes of Peter Jackson's "The Fellowship of the Ring" movie. If the show really does bring Chera in to, in effect, reboot Sauron's larger story, it could pave the way to connect the still-in-development Sauron-Halbrand persona of Season 1 to the black-armored, Ring-wielding warlord of Jackson's trilogy intro. Once that's done, everything will be in place for Isildur to chop off his finger, take his Ring, and pave the way for the future events of "The Lord of the Rings."