What are the creepy-crawlies seen in the new Lord of the Rings TV show trailer?
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“An evil, ancient and powerful, has returned.” So begins the new trailer for Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which will soon return for a second season. The series, back August 29, from showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, takes place thousands of years before Frodo and Aragorn formed their fellowship, and reveals how the tyrannical sorcerer they sought to destroy created the rings that allowed him to conquer J.R.R. Tolkien’s mystical realm of Middle-earth.

Sauron is the evil in question. Known to moviegoers as a giant flaming eye, this malevolent being was revealed at the end of the Prime Video series’ first season as a handsome, daring rogue—and apparent human—named Halbrand (Charlie Vickers). In the season two trailer, he is introduced in the opening shots with flaming eyes again.

In the first chapter of the show, Halbrand encounters the elven warrior Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) when both are lost, stranded, and struggling. After lying his way into the forge of master elven relic-maker Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards), Halbrand and the other two end up creating the first three rings in a collection that will eventually bring elves, dwarves, and people under the mastermind’s control.

Amazon acquired the rights to Tolkien’s fictional history for a record-breaking $250 million in 2017, making this series one of the most expensive in history before even a frame of footage was shot. The broad strokes of the story, covering multiple seasons, were conceived by Mckay and Payne, who also gauged the input of the extremely vocal Lord of the Rings fan base. “We wrote most of season two before season one came out,” Payne said in a Vanity Fairpostmortem for the original episodes. “The cake was kind of baked before the audience response came in. Certainly, you look at audience response, and you see what characters people love, and what kinds of storytelling moves them. I wouldn’t say we’re overcorrecting for any of it, but we’re certainly listening to people’s responses.”

The new footage shows Halbrand/Sauron still up to his old ring-making tricks. The first trio of rings went to the elves, who had yet to accept them when the previous season ended. The dwarf king Durin III (Peter Mullan) is glimpsed in the trailer examining one of his own, which means another batch will be created during season two. We see rocks collapsing on the bridges of his subterranean city of Khazad-dûm, where Frodo’s fellowship took a shortcut under the Misty Mountains—which suggests bad tidings in dwarf land, perhaps caused (or alleviated) by a deal with the devil.

“Rings are the nuclear bomb in Middle-earth,” McKay told Vanity Fair as the first season drew to a close. “[A ring] changes everything. Everyone needs a ring, everyone wants a ring. They become the ways that these different cultures are subdued. It creates immortality. Sauron’s ring creates the entire mythos. Everything is different from here. The One Ring defines everything for thousands and thousands of years. It defines the Second Age and the Third Age. And we’re just trying to find ways to invest the process of this creation with as much richness and meaning as possible.”

In Tolkien’s novels and notes, Sauron is a notorious shape-shifter, and the second season of the Amazon show promises flashbacks to how he ended up in human form. Tendrils slithering through the woods, and a black mass of squiggling worms, crawling forward in the approximate shape of a person, may hint at some of his less savory appearances in bygone times.

McKay and Payne have also hinted that the relatively unknown far-eastern realm of Rhûn, the homeland of the three witches who hunted Sauron in the first season, will be further explored in the new episodes. “We know there are magic cults in Rhûn, which is one of the things Tolkien writes about. So maybe there’s a slightly different kind of magic [that] we can peel back the layers [of] in future seasons,” McKay said.

This could be the eventual destination of The Stranger (Daniel Weyman), who was strongly indicated, but not confirmed, to be the wizard Gandalf in the finale of last season. The tall, bearded figure has been fighting his amnesia and regaining his otherworldly powers as he ventures along with the halfling Nori (Markella Kavenagh).

But Rhûn could also reveal the presence of other well-known wizards as season two unfolds—although The Stranger still really, really seems like Gandalf. “He and Nori are going east. We know that the Blue Wizards go east. We know that Saruman has spent real time in the east,” McKay said. “Certainly he says some things and does some things that feel very Gandalf-y. So the jury could still be out.”

Saruman (played in Peter Jackson’s trilogy by the late Christopher Lee), of course, is the elder wizard revealed to be a duplicitous agent of Sauron, who betrays Gandalf and the entirety of Middle-earth who trusted him. It’s unclear at this point if he appears in the series, or who might play him—but that would be just as tantalizing a reveal for the fandom as the identity of Sauron himself.