‘The Rings of Power’ Season 2, Episode 2 Recap: Strange Weather

Amazon released the first three episodes of Season 2 of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” at once; read the recaps for Episode 1 here and Episode 3 here.

Season 2, Episode 2: ‘Where the Stars are Strange’

The Halbrand heel-turn at the end of “The Rings of Power” Season 1 brought focus to a story that, to a degree, had lacked a clear antagonist. Yes, Galadriel had sensed Sauron was still alive; and yes, she had persuaded the Numenoreans to secure the Southlands against Adar’s orcs, as a bulwark against whatever Sauron might have in mind. But this big enemy, while having a name, still remained somewhat theoretical.

To quote “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” at times last season it was hard to hear Galadriel’s plans without asking: “Who versus? Who are we doing it versus?”

As Season 2 began, the existence of Sauron had been confirmed. But because he fled after helping forge the first three rings of power, at this point he remains — to our heroes at least — a chilling shadow, not a present threat. So this season’s second and third episodes, while revealing some of Sauron’s secret schemes, also returns to some of the minor villains and complications introduced in Season 1, showing how the elves, dwarfs and humans still have a lot of conflict to sort through, internal and external, before they can unite to vanquish their Big Bad.

Here are five takeaways and observations from Episode 2:

Those weird witches are back!

Remember how at the end of Season 1, the Stranger had to protect his harfoot friends from three mystics dressed in white who referred to him as “the Dark Lord?” This was a clever bit of misdirection from the “Rings of Power” writers, meant to keep the viewers from catching on too quickly that Halbrand was secretly Sauron. But the incident also helped the Stranger remember that he is actually of the Istari, an ancient order of wizards who in various forms have often intervened in the affairs of Middle-earth.

In this season’s second episode, those mystics return to their home base to report to the Dark Wizard (Ciaran Hinds) on their encounter with the Stranger. The sequence is one of the show’s most visually inventive to date, involving a woman bleeding onto the floor while surrounded by hundreds of butterflies — the form the mystics dissipated into after the Stranger violently attacked them — which flutter about and then reconstitute into a different woman.