Praise Adar, the best character on 'The Rings of Power' (original) (raw)

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2 episode 8, "Shadow and Flame."

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has had a lot of room to play in Middle-earth. Unlike the films directed by Peter Jackson, this Amazon Prime Video fantasy series is not directly adapted from one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, but instead builds out the Second Age of Middle-earth based on Tolkien’s various writings about it. This has given showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay freedom to expand the possibilities of a Lord of the Rings story, and no character exemplifies that potential better than the orc leader Adar (Sam Hazeldine). Now that Adar has met a violent end in _The Rings of Power_’s season 2 finale, it only seems appropriate to salute the show’s best creation.

Many of the main characters in The Rings of Power are younger versions of characters we know from the original story, like the immortal elves Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and Elrond (Robert Aramayo). Others are legendary figures we’ve only briefly heard about, like Númenórean captain Elendil (Lloyd Owen) and Elven High King Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker). Some are new versions of familiar archetypes like the adventurous proto-hobbit Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and the gruff dwarf Durin IV (Owain Arthur). But Adar was a totally unique invention. Not only is he not mentioned in Tolkien’s original text, there isn’t even anyone like him in previous incarnations of LOTR. This is the first time we’ve ever seen an orc played with sympathy and pathos — much less one who is directly opposed to the dark lord Sauron (Charlie Vickers) rather than mindlessly serving him.

Adar was proof of what a new story about Middle-earth could be: Filling holes in the mythology, expanding on characters that previously got short shrift. Adar presented himself not as the orcs’ overlord, but as their father figure. For the duration of these two seasons, Adar was even able to convince the other orcs that attacking Sauron was in their best interests.

“The generations of orcs that are here now with Adar, they don’t know Sauron,” Hazeldine tells Entertainment Weekly over Zoom after the season finale. “They can’t possibly understand how bad it’s going to be if they are ruled by Sauron. Adar does know that, and so I think he can feel that he’s losing their support, but he has no choice but to push through and try to kill Sauron.”

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Sam Hazeldine as Adar on 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.'.

Ross Ferguson / Prime Video

Adar also connects The Rings of Power to Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. One reason he disdains Sauron is that he knew the previous Dark Lord. It was Morgoth, Sauron’s mentor, who originally transformed Adar from an elf to an orc. Who has respect for their former boss’ unqualified son? Adar was able to use this knowledge to his advantage by wielding Morgoth’s crown as a weapon against Sauron, having used it to destroy his previous form (in the flashback that opened season 2), and he tried to do it again.

Alas, the same trick didn’t work twice. Before Adar could kill Sauron a second time, he was struck down by his own “children.” Despite Adar’s strenuous efforts to show the orcs they could be more than Sauron’s slaves, they ultimately fell under the Dark Lord’s spell — giving this orc leader not just a personality, but a sense of real tragedy.

“What makes the character so interesting is the sense of responsibility he has to his children,” Hazeldine says. “Perhaps the orcs are irredeemable, since they were created out of evil and therefore cannot be anything else. But there's the argument that sentient beings should not be killed simply because somebody else doesn’t like them. Adar believes that the orcs are not just sentient beings, who are capable of more than simply evil. I talked about this with J.D. and Patrick, that perhaps left to their own devices, the orcs would just be killing each other. They’re unruly, to say the least. But with a leader who showed them care and love, perhaps they can learn to be something more.”

In the end, Adar’s project failed because he still wanted to use the orcs for violence. He hoped that this time he could use their warmaking abilities for good by vanquishing Sauron and securing a new future for their race. But ultimately the pressures of war wore down the orcs, and they opted to go with the leader who promised them eternal glory under his rule.

With Adar now dead, it feels safe to assume that for the rest of _The Rings of Power_’s run, the orcs will once again be servants of Sauron. But his example proves that there are other possibilities, and that there could be more to Middle-earth than meets the eye.