‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: Lord of Illusions

What a wunderkammer of an episode. From its opening moments, in which grumbling orcs desert Adar’s army rather than fight, to its closing image, of catapults hurling flaming rocks that arc through the night sky on their way to rain death and destruction on the sprawling Elf city of Eregion, this week’s Rings of Power delivered something special seemingly with each scene. 

Sauron is as good a place to start as any. This season he’s emerged as every bit as compelling and intriguing an on-screen presence as Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel, thanks both to Charlie Vickers’s restrained yet still somehow howlingly villainous performance — the man really knows how to gloat with his eyes alone — and to the unique way his character is written. You simply don’t see many villains who straight-up lie to people’s faces all the time just to make life worse for everyone other than himself. What a motive, and what a modus operandi! 

It all culminates this week in an eerie sequence where he uses his powers of deception to convince Celebrimbor it’s a bright sunny day in Eregion, when in fact it’s the dead of night and everyone in the city is in a blind panic because thousands of orcs are coming to kill them all. It works not just because it shows you how much Sauron outclasses everyone else in terms of power and cunning — he’s playing Celebrimbor, one of the greatest minds in the history of the Elves, like Jimi Hendrix played “The Star-Spangled Banner” — but because you get the sense that Celebrimbor kind of wants to be deceived. Wouldn’t he rather ignore the nagging voice in his mind that says “But that was the siege alarm you heard! And it was the middle of the night last you checked!” and go back to the work that has so consumed him? Sauron guesses, correctly, that the answer is yes. 

Eregion is being besieged by Adar, the proto-Orc who, at least in theory, is fighting for orc freedom from Dark Lord tyranny. (The aforementioned grumbling deserters have a different opinion of the guy than he has of himself, notably.) He spends the episode duping Galadriel into thinking he’s after an alliance; cleverly, he plays to her pride by saying “put your pride aside,” allowing her to convince herself she’s being magnanimous and open-minded by confiding in him about Sauron/Halbrand and the Rings of Power, when in fact she’s just being a mark. 

In part this is predictable behavior — orcs gonna orc — but it’s also salutary from a storytelling perspective. It’s important to remind the viewer that though he’s less of an open sadist and sociopath than Sauron, Adar is still a murdering scumbag, regardless of how he got that way. Normal people, after all, would naturally recoil from an object as accursed as the crown of Morgoth, Sauron’s late boss, the way Galadriel does; Adar can carry it around and use it as an anti-Sauron silver bullet because, on a fundamental level, evil does not repulse him.

Nor does it repulse Durin III anymore. What a fascinatingly repellent figure the Dwarf-lord has become, sitting on a golden throne with piles of treasure all around him — just like a certain golden somebody who will cause his descendants a lot of trouble a few thousand years down the line. He initially rebuffs the request for more mithril silver issued by Annatar in Celebrimbor’s name (he’s running the show in Eregion now, having successfully isolated Celebrimbor from everyone else while convincing everyone it’s for his own good), but only because it will drive up the asking price. His son the prince is horrified, and correctly blames his Ring of Power, which he tries and fails to convince his dad to take off his finger. His resulting emotional breakdown, in which he sobs to his wife Disa that he can still see his old dad in this new person’s eyes somewhere behind the addiction, “far off and faint”…oof, man, that’s some real shit.

“The whole world’s gone mad,” Durin Sr. tells Durin Jr. during their confrontation, and he’s not wrong. The lord of Khazad-dûm is possessed by his ring. The lord of Eregion is obsessed with making more. Galadriel is cutting deals with orcs, until she gets double-crossed. And in Númenor, the new ruler Ar-Pharazôn is throwing his weight around. Wearing a red robe that pops against the digitally goosed blue-and-gold color scheme of the setting (if you must use that played-out palette, doing so in order to make a different color stand out is the reason why), he accuses Captain Elendil of treason and sentences him to something called “trial by abyss,” in which Númenorean trumpeters summon a “sea-wyrm” which will or will not eat him depending on whether the gods will it. 

But at the last minute, the usurped queen Tar-Míriel takes the trial in his place, since his alleged crimes were committed in her name. Just as all seems lost, she’s thrown back ashore — and possibly into power — by the massive beast, which is seen in all its splendor in a glory shot that may be the show’s most memorable image to date. 

Until, that is, the final shot of those fireballs soaring over the river with death as their destination. I know I said earlier this season that I’d be staying way from comparisons to J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing as much as I could, but this feels like it’s operating at the scale at which I’d long imagined these sieges of the Elf-kingdoms of yore. It feels big, scary, and inevitable. Sauron himself seems to feel it, welcoming the assault with arms outstretched in a Jesus Christ pose. Galadriel had warned Adar he was stepping right into Sauron’s trap; that’s the story of the entire world this season, and it’s thrilling to watch unfold.

But there are some bright spots. Far away from it all, while Nori and Poppy settle in to the Stoor colony they found, the Stranger continues to get cryptic, aphoristic advice from Tom Bombadil, the wise and impossibly ancient entity who’s taken the form of a young Santa Claus. Bombadil tells him he has a choice to make: He can go to save his friends, or he can accept his destiny and seek out his wizard’s staff, but he can’t do both. 

This is almost certainly a ruse — dollars to donuts he picks his friends and that’s how he finds his staff — but that’s neither here nor there. Mainly I just want to point how endearing these two figures are, particularly Daniel Weyman’s Stranger. In fact, he’s so warm and sympathetic and lovable that I don’t care anymore — go ahead and make him Gandalf, no matter if that makes textual sense or not. I like the guy a lot, and that’s Gandalf’s greatest weapon.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.