The Rings of Power DP reveals that the [SPOILER] will return in the season 2 finale

This week, Prime Video will air the season 2 finale of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which has a lot of questions to answer. What will become of the elven city of Eregion? Will the Stranger reunite with Nori out in the desert land of Rhûn? And will the monstrous balrog the show has been teasing since the end of season 1 make its presence known in the depths of Khazad-dûm?

Cinematographer Alex Disenhof may have let the cat out of the bag for at least one of those when speaking with Jonatan Blomberg from MovieZine about his favorite scene from the finale. Beware SPOILERS below:

"I love the balrog sequence in 8. When you read something like that on the page, your first reaction is, 'How are we going to pull this one off?' And then you just break it down, you work with all the different departments, and it was this huge collaboration. We built this huge, 40-foot tall light that would kind of go up and down with fire effects so you could kind of get the scale of the balrog as it was lower and then it comes up and comes down, so the actors could play off that. It's also a very emotional scene. It's not just this cool set piece."

- Alex Disenhof

So Disenhof doesn't reveal exactly how the balrog will play into the finale, but the fiery monster hidden beneath the dwarven mountain will indeed return in the new episode, which you probably could have guessed without this assist — again, the show has been teasing something wicked this way coming for a while — but if you needed confirmation, you got it.

In the most recent episode of this Lord of the Rings prequel series, King Durin III is driven to greedy excess by his new ring of power, which inspires him to delve deeper into the mine even though other characters warn him of something sinister waiting below. That something is the balrog, a monster of the ancient world that once served Sauron's boss Morgoth, and which went into hiding when his boss was defeated. We know that this very same balrog will go on to fight Gandalf in the original Lord of the Rings story, which is set thousands of years later. So it has a journey ahead of it.

That journey may begin in the season 2 finale, which airs this Thursday, October 3. After that, we likely have a long wait ahead of us until The Rings of Power season 3, so let's savor this precious time while we can.

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