If the embed goes dark, the season three trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maP_Kyy3DCA
The critics have been to Middle-earth and come back in a good mood, which for The Rings of Power counts as news. The first social reactions to season three appeared yesterday, and GamesRadar’s round-up has early viewers calling it the show’s best season, with Charlie Vickers’ Sauron getting much of the credit. Reactions are not reviews, and nobody who has just been flown to a screening by Amazon is likely to call the result a turgid hobbit-free slog. But after two seasons of grumbling in the corner of the internet where people still argue about the Appendices, Prime Video will take anything that sounds like applause.
The new season jumps five years on from the end of season two, to the height of the war between the Elves and Sauron, when the Dark Lord finally forges the One Ring and the Men who take his nine become the Nazgûl. The Harfoots have gone. Jamie Campbell Bower arrives as Celeborn, Eddie Marsan as the Dwarf Thráin, Rory Kinnear as Tom Bombadil, and Simon Pegg voices the Balrog. That last casting means that the thing Gandalf will one day tell to go back to the shadow will, for now, sound faintly like a man about to order a Cornetto.
The real talking point is an orc. Adam Young plays Marnûkh, who claims to have defected from Sauron’s army and ends up as the prisoner of Galadriel and Arondir. He was apparently described on set as “an orc with an arc”, a phrase that has now gone round the fandom at roughly the speed of a warg with a grievance. Director Sanaa Hamri says, “I have a real soft spot for this Orc. I think the audience is going to be really torn about Marnûkh.” Young, admirably frank, admits: “I’d actually never read the books and so I just [threw] myself into the Tolkien world and Silmarillion and all of that.” Few people have ever started a Middle-earth reading list with The Silmarillion on purpose, and he deserves a medal for it.
Purists are already sharpening their pitchforks, but they may want to check with the author first. Tolkien worried about orcs for decades. Were they corrupted Elves, or Men, or something Morgoth made? Did they have souls, and if so, could any be saved? His late, unfinished attempts to answer that, collected by Christopher Tolkien in Morgoth’s Ring, read like a man realising he has built a world with a moral problem in the basement. A misunderstood orc is not quite the heresy the comments section will claim. It is a question the Professor asked himself and never answered. Whether Amazon answers it better is another matter.
A small British note: the season was shot at Shepperton, with location work on Portland Bill, so some of the Second Age’s darker days were filmed in Dorset. The first four episodes arrive on Prime Video on 11th November, with two more on 18th November and the final pair on 25th November. Whether Marnûkh turns out to be the first sympathetic orc in screen history or simply the first one with a good agent, we will find out then.
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