The Rings of Power's Sauron Reveal Exposed a Flaw in Its Heroes — and the Audience

For the past few weeks, as the internet's debated which character in The Lord of the Ring: The Rings of Power was Sauron in disguise, there has been a common joke-like refrain: “Maybe the real Sauron was the friends we made along the way.” But during the season-one finale of Rings of Power on Prime Video, that meme response became a reality — Sauron was revealed to be Halbrand, a friend that Galadriel had met on her journey to defeat evil.

While some people had correctly predicted the reveal, others were downright angry. After all, J.R.R. Tolkien considered Sauron to be “wholly evil.” The big baddie of Middle-earth is usually represented by a giant fiery eyeball or a Darth Vader-like figure in black armor. Isn’t Rings of Power contradicting Tolkien by showcasing a human-looking, emotionally sensitive, even somewhat romantic Sauron? 

Not entirely. In Tolkien’s writings, Sauron was not always evil (in fact, he wrote in a letter that “absolute evil” does not exist). It’s the same line that Galadriel says to open the show: “Nothing is evil in the beginning.” Sauron was a Maia, an angel and servant of the Gods (Gandalf and the other wizards are also Maiar, which is why they can sometimes give off Sauron energy). But he was corrupted by his master, the fallen god Morgoth. After the War of Wrath, dramatized in the pilot episode of Rings of Power, Tolkien wrote that Sauron wanted to redeem himself. He went to another Maia named Eönwë “and abjured all his evil deeds. And some hold that this was not at first falsely done, but that Sauron in truth repented, if only out of fear,” as written in The Silmarillion. But Eönwë did not have the authority to forgive Sauron and said that Sauron needed to beg the Valar, and work long and hard to truly be redeemed. 

For Tolkien, redemption is always possible, but it is achieved through hard work and surpassing multiple trials — it’s not just one event. Well, Sauron did not choose to take the long path towards forgiveness. In the show, the answer for why he doesn’t, in today’s age of antiheroes and morally gray characters, needs to be more interesting than, “He’s just bad to the bone.”

This is where Rings of Power hews more closely to Game of Thrones. Instead of depicting an amorphous, unrelatable entity of evil, Season 1 gives Sauron the redemption-arc treatment, where he’s a reluctant hero with shades of light and dark. “When Morgoth was defeated, it was as if a great clenched fist had released its grasp from my neck,” Sauron says in “Alloyed,” the season-one finale. “I knew if I ever was to be forgiven, that I had to heal everything that I had helped ruin.” That all sounds reasonable until he describes how he wants to help Middle-earth, by ruling it.

That rationale is also supported by Tolkien. Though he never wrote about Sauron’s motivations in Lord of the Rings, he did write in a letter that Sauron “had gone the way of all tyrants: beginning well, at least on the level that while desiring to order all things according to his own wisdom he still at first considered the (economic) well-being of other inhabitants of the Earth. But he went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination.” So Sauron in Rings of Power is less of an evil eye and more a Middle-earth version of Thanos.

The affection between Galadriel and Halbrand, and how that turns into betrayal, can also be supported by Tolkien’s writing. Sauron did successfully trick the elves, Men, and Dwarves into making the Rings of Power — they loved him so much that they called him Annatar, meaning lord of gifts. But Sauron also considered Galadriel “his chief adversary.” Even in Fellowship of the Ring, she tells Frodo that “I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thoughts. But still the door is closed!” A man so obsessed with you that he wants to know the details of your thoughts? Is that Sauron or Edward Cullen? 

It’s not enough for a television show to make its villain obsessed with the hero — it has to demonstrate why and how. And luckily Charlie Vickers as Sauron/Halbrand and Morfydd Clark as Galadriel had more than enough spark to justify their scenes together. In making Sauron a more complex villain, the show has also made Galadriel a more complex hero. Because she, like the audience, assumed Sauron would look and feel evil. Instead, she met someone who was actively trying to run away from power and temptation, and to live a quiet, simple life as a blacksmith. When she tries to get him to return to Middle-earth, specifically to the region that will become Mordor, he responds, “You are asking me to go to the one place that I swore never to return.” If Sauron is addicted to power, Galadriel unwittingly led him back to his drug of choice. Here, villains have the capacity for good and redemption, and heroes have the capacity to corrupt and destroy.

This gives their push-pull in The Hobbit films and the first Lord of the Rings film an additional edge. And when Galadriel says she “passed the test” in Fellowship of the Ring, it now includes an additional resonance: She has been forgiven for helping Sauron break bad. 

The Halbrand/Sauron reveal is ultimately surprising yet well-supported — and it exposes both a shared flaw between the series's heroes and audience. Showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne knew that audiences would come into the show with Sauron, the flaming eye on their brains and other assumptions for what a Tolkien villain looks like. This revelation in the season finale exposed viewers’ and the characters’ assumptions that evil is ugly or unappealing, like an orc. By showing that evil can manifest itself as good intentions — as a sad-looking, sensitive, handsome man on a raft — The Rings of Power brings the high fantasy of Middle-earth back into reality, and closer to what Tolkien originally intended.  

Diep Tran is an arts journalist/editor based in New York City. Follow her on Twitter @DiepThought.