Season 3 is already on the way, but it’s still hard not to talk about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power without eventually circling back to the same question: how much should the show have changed J. R. R. Tolkien’s universe to make it work on TV? For some fans, the answer is basically “nothing,” while for others, adapting the Second Age obviously requires some creative freedom, since the available material doesn’t exactly work like a fully fleshed-out story that’s ready to be adapted. And, well, the production certainly wasn’t afraid to take the second route. Overall, some of the changes work better than others, but one choice in particular has caused a lot of debate over the years and drawn criticism from part of the audience.
And the interesting thing is that, when you look at the first two seasons as one whole story, it’s hard not to defend that specific change — it’s not only one of the show’s biggest twists, but also a pretty effective way of exploring exactly what makes its major villain so dangerous. And that doesn’t mean everyone has to pretend this is faithful to what Tolkien wrote, because it really isn’t. The point is something else: as an adaptation choice, it was much smarter than it got credit for.
We meet Halbrand (Charlie Vickers) in Season 1, when Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) comes across a shipwreck. At that point, nobody really knew who he was supposed to be, since the character doesn’t exist in Tolkien’s writings. In theory, he was just a man who seemed to be running from his past and who happened to end up traveling with the protagonist. And for most of the season, Halbrand seems like nothing more than a mysterious character with a few things to hide, to the point that he eventually comes to be seen as the supposed descendant of the former King of the Southlands and the rightful heir to the throne. Then, in the season finale, we learn that he wasn’t hiding a complicated past at all, but his entire identity: he had been Sauron all along.
And what was the fan reaction to that? Pretty divisive. For people familiar with Tolkien’s Second Age, this wasn’t the story of the Dark Lord they expected to see, because his most important identity during this period is originally Annatar, the Lord of Gifts, who approaches the Elves offering knowledge and assistance, and that only comes into play in Season 2. So everything that came before it doesn’t exist in the books, including the relationship he develops with Galadriel. But that’s exactly what makes the show’s change so interesting when you stop to think about it: Sauron is known as the Deceiver, right?
We’re talking about a villain whose entire thing is deceiving other people, and not just in the generic “villain who lies” sense, but as a fundamental part of his character arc. Sauron convinces people that he’s someone they can trust and then uses that trust to get what he wants. So when The Rings of Power decided to hide his identity, the series wasn’t creating a new trait for him; it was taking an established part of his character and turning it into the very structure of the show itself. Why is that so interesting? Because the idea was for the audience to be one of the targets of that deception too. And did it work? Yes, since at the time, even though some fans were already suspicious, a large part of the audience (including people who had never read Tolkien’s works) genuinely wasn’t sure who he really was.
On Reddit, the theories were all over the place, with fans coming up with all kinds of arguments to defend the idea that he was Sauron indeed: “Everything we know about his backstory? He doesn’t actually tell us. Galadriel does while talking to him and he does some great improv and… doesn’t deny it,” explained user @Gaius21. But others were pretty convinced there was no way Halbrand could be the villain: “Do you really think a demigod/maiar like Sauron would be interested in joining a local Numenorian forge guild (and fail at that)?” said user @gundawg300. There was even a theory that he could be the King of the Dead.
After Season 1, showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay revealed the goal really was to play with the audience, but they developed everything in a way that could also keep readers from becoming too certain. “If deception is an important part of the journey, we wanted to preserve that experience for book readers too. The idea that the shadow can take many forms was part of what we were attracted to,” McKay explained in an interview with Vulture.
And okay, today it might seem like a twist that didn’t quite land with some people, or you might see fans who underestimate the idea, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good strategy. A twist doesn’t necessarily have to be impossible to predict to work. If that were the case, anyone who guessed the killer in a murder mystery would automatically prove the episode was bad. So, what really matters is whether the reveal works when it happens and whether the earlier clues still make sense afterward — and with The Rings of Power, if you rewatch Season 1, you’ll get a completely different reading of Halbrand.
From the perspective of fans who wanted a more faithful take on Tolkien, the answer to this question is a big “no,” since Annatar was already a deceptive enough identity, and adding Halbrand to the show was just a huge detour. And yes, the show could have introduced Sauron as a more traditional villain from the very first episode, since the audience knows he exists and Galadriel does too; everyone knows he’s out there somewhere. They could simply show him building his power while everybody tries to find him, right? But that wouldn’t make use of the best thing about Sauron, something that affects the audience’s perception of him, Galadriel’s arc, and the story as a whole. It’s a controversial choice, and there’s no getting around that, but it’s worth looking at it from a different angle.
Adding Halbrand to the plot lets you get to know the main villain before he fully takes on the role of the Dark Lord, and in doing so, you get the sense that there is still a possibility that he might be trying to choose a different path. Tolkien’s writing is pretty ambiguous when it comes to the character, and you can’t take everything completely at face value, which is exactly what the showrunners have always tried to explore with The Rings of Power. In the original material, after Morgoth’s death, Sauron did, in fact, have a moment when he could have repented. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien writes that he presented himself to Eönwë, renounced his evil deeds, and that “some hold that this was not at first falsely done, but that Sauron in truth repented, if only out of fear.” The problem is that Eönwë orders Sauron to return to Aman to face Manwë’s judgement, and he refuses because he’s ashamed of the idea of returning humiliated and facing a long period of penitence. So he hides in Middle-earth and falls back into evil.
And this affects his relationship with Galadriel, because she spends the entire first season trying to stop Sauron’s return and, without realizing it, helps Sauron move his own plans forward. That doesn’t mean she’s stupid, giving people a reason to criticize the decision to change her character from the ground up; in fact, she’s suspicious, obsessed with finding the enemy, and convinced that she knows what she’s looking for: a monster — except Sauron shows up as a man, which is why, in the Season 2 finale, both of them fight and Galadriel hesitates when she sees him as Halbrand. In short, the person she thought could help her defeat the Dark Lord is the Dark Lord himself, and that gives weight to both her arc and, especially, his.
For people who wanted an adaptation closer to Tolkien, this dynamic can feel totally made up, and technically, it is. But within the logic of the show, it serves a pretty smart purpose: Sauron needs to find a way to get close to someone who has dedicated her life to destroying him without her realizing who he is. Without Halbrand in the story, we would never really get to feel just how frighteningly dangerous the antagonist is.
It’s fine not to like the way his arc was designed for TV, but it’s hard not to acknowledge the idea is good (those two things aren’t contradictory). If the standard is faithfulness, there are plenty of problems to discuss, but The Rings of Power also had to turn an incredibly broad story, with gaps in time and information scattered across different texts, into something that could keep audiences invested for many seasons. To do that, it needed to create stronger connections between its characters, and Halbrand was one of those connections.
At the end of the day, this is a character who will probably remain controversial because fans have several opinions about him, but that doesn’t mean the show failed to understand Sauron. In some ways, it understood perfectly what it needed to understand about him: the fact that he’s the Deceiver. That role becomes much harder to dismiss when you consider everything that came after, as it was the first step in a story about a character who keeps changing his face, his strategy, and his approach as he finds new people to manipulate. And for a series where Sauron, the Lord of the Rings, is at the center of everything, that’s much more coherent than it might seem.
