The Rings of Power bosses figured out the Stranger's identity as they went

Beware SPOILERS for The Rings of Power season 2 finale below!

The second season of Amazon's The Lord of the Rings prequel show The Rings of Power has just wrapped up. That means there are three seasons left if showrunners Patrick McKay and J. D. Payne want to finish out the five-season plan they've said time and again they started production with. “We were very fortunate to get hired for this gig because we pitched it as heavily-serialized, long-form storytelling — a 50-hour movie,” McKay told The Los Angeles Times. “So while there are discoveries along the way and you never want to be locked into a plan that misses something that could be better, the signposts that we’re hitting are holding to that plan. We have a destination and an arc and a journey for him that will hopefully tie into later stories in a way that is unexpected.”

So here, McKay is saying that while they have a plan for the series, not everything is set in stone and there's some flexibility built in. How much flexibility? Well, apparently they didn't know the identity of the Stranger (Daniel Weyman), the mysterious wizard who falls to Middle-earth in the first episode of the series, until the end of the first season. “No one will believe us, but this was a journey of discovery for the character and the characters around him, and it was a journey of discovery for the writers,” McKay said. “We wanted this to be the origin story of a wizard coming to terms with who he is and what he has to do.”

In the the season 2 finale, we learn that the Stranger is actually Gandalf, the famous character from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is set thousands of years after the events of The Rings of Power. By the end of the first season, McKay and Payne had committed to this path, dropping mondo-sized hints like the Stranger debuting Gandalf's well-known line, “If in doubt, always follow your nose.”

“They had about five different lines that they wanted me to record at that point, some of which were Gandalf in lines and some of which would never [have] been said before,” Weyman remembered. “Obviously, I knew there was resonance there. But as we talked about it, the idea was that it might be nice that a line that Gandalf says was said by an unknown wizard in the Second Age. It’s become a wizard thing over time. All of that played for me because at that point he didn’t have a name and I didn’t need to know it.”

"The whole first season was about keeping the audience in the dark about whether he was going to be good or whether he was going to be evil. And the whole of Season 2, I didn’t feel too bothered about the buzz around his name because I was just playing these really precise scenes. To suddenly be given this information was a real pinch-me moment as a 47-year-old thinking back to my childhood dreams of being a wizard."

"There's no such thing really as canon in Tolkien," says professor hired to defend The Rings of Power

If you ask me, it doesn't make a lot of sense to say, on the one hand, "we always had a plan for the series" and on the other say, "we didn't know the identity of this main character when we started making the show." Sure, a five-year plan might not have every detail accounted for, but that one should be in place, don't you think?

Two seasons in, it seems pretty clear to me that The Rings of Power plays fast and loose with J.R.R. Tolkien's source material. For instance, the show covers the events of the Second Age of Middle-earth, which in Tolkien's reckoning takes place over thousands of years. On The Rings of Power, these events are compressed to what seems like a few months.

And I don't even mind that the show has gone so far afield of the source material — if the show is entertaining, I'll enjoy it, and I've more or less enjoyed this show — but it's annoying that the producers are still trying to maintain that they're staying true to the books. Like, c'mon, who do you think you're fooling at this point?

Here's an example from McKay: “What we do on this show all the time is we look for ellipses in the mythology and then those become great opportunities to hopefully fill in the blanks. Gandalf the Grey falls to the Balrog and then is sent back as Gandalf the White, who’s not exactly the same guy but he is the same guy. This is the idea that perhaps there was an even earlier iteration before he was the Grey.” So he's saying that they look for gaps in the mythology they might be able to fill in, which sounds reasonable, but then proposes that Gandalf had a whole other identity we'd never heard about. That's not filling in a gap. That's creating a whole new story Tolkien never came close to contemplating. That's not adaptation; that's pure invention. And again, I don't even mind so long as that invention is entertaining, but it's weird that they keep insisting they're coloring within the lines when they're now marking up the table.

It sounds like that will continue in future seasons. For instance, Payne points out that, according to Tolkien, the wizards were forbidden from contesting Sauron's power directly. “Why might that prohibition be put in place?” he asked. “If you have five wizards and it’s five on one, why couldn’t they just take on Sauron in an all out wizard grudge match? That’s a question that we’re looking at in terms of, what journey does Gandalf go on in the Second Age that might make that prohibition exist in the Third Age?”

So in The Silmarillion and in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, it seems clear that the Valar — basically the gods of this world — forbid the wizards from directly fighting Sauron when they dispatched the lot of them to Middle-earth. But now it sounds like Payne wants to rewrite that so something happens in the Second Age that calls for this prohibition to be put on the wizards in the Third Age, which is when The Lord of the Rings proper is set. It just plain cuts against the text of the book, but Payne sees a dramatic opportunity in it. And I'll say again: I'm not so much annoyed that he's ignoring the text — that ship has long since sailed — but more that he's acting as thought the show is still faithful anyway.

One of the wildest examples of this comes from an interview with Tolkien scholar Dr. Corey Olsen that The Rings of Power has posted to its Twitter page. "There's no such thing really as canon in Tolkien," Dr. Olsen says. "Tolkien's ideas were ever evolving."

Olsen is talking about how Tolkien originally wrote that Gandalf and the other wizards arrived during the Third Age of Middle-earth, but that towards the end of his life was considering rewriting things so that they arrived during the Second. That part is true; Tolkien's thinking on some things did change over time. But to say that "there's no such thing really as canon in Tolkien" when this author spent his life carefully crafting languages, characters, backstories, mythologies...I mean, you can't make that up. It's nuts.

I don't know Dr. Olsen, but it seems like he's saying what he has to say for The Rings of Power to maintain the illusion that it's faithful to Tolkien's work even as it changes everything about it. For instance, Olsen cites a line from the books where Gandalf says "To the east I go not." In The Rings of Power season 2, Gandalf does indeed go to the eastern region of Rhûn, which seems like a direct contradiction. But Olsen argues that by "the east," Gandalf meant Mordor. "He meant, 'Don't expect me to go throw down with the dark lord at the gates of Barad-dûr.'"

So on the one hand there's no canon in Tolkien, and on the other there's definitely one interpretation of that line that is correct. It seems obvious to me that Olsen is arguing what he has to argue in order for The Rings of Power to maintain the facade that it's remaining faithful to Tolkien's work, because if you interpret the line "To the east I go not" using a common sense reading, Gandalf's journey to Rhûn is nonsensical. I wish the producers would just say, "Gandalf says he doesn't go east in the books but we sent him there anyway because we thought it would be fun"; at least that would be honest. Instead they're putting up this smokescreen where what Tolkien wrote only matters when it matches up with what they wanted to do anyway, and in every other instance is open to interpretation.

And again, this is coming from someone who basically enjoyed The Rings of Power season 2, even though I don't think it's not the kind of show worth taking seriously, because of this sort of thing. You can watch both seasons on Prime Video right now. A third season is (probably) on the way.

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