The Rings of Power season 3 begins at the darkest moment yet for Middle-earth. Sauron is in possession of the Nine Rings for men and is plotting his path to forge the One Ring, all the while sending his Orcs out to conquer new locales.
As a result, the stakes are pretty high for each of the show's beloved characters, and the showrunners reveal that there will be "tragic consequences".
"The elves are clinging on to being able to hold Sauron at bay, but only by the power of their three rings," co-showrunner J.D. Payne tells GamesRadar+. "And Sauron, his plan this season is to be able to neutralize the power of those rings by making One Ring to rule them all. Beyond that, he's also recruiting a massive army by giving out the Nine Rings for men."
As Patrick McKay adds, it's a tense situation to be in and one they wanted to acknowledge with real stakes. "In Lord of the Rings, people turn to the dark side; they fall to evil, and when that happens, there are tragic consequences," he adds. "And we felt that it was important for the audience to feel those viscerally, and for people that you love and whose stories you're excited to watch continue, sometimes the end is not happy for them. That can be painful. But it should be. It shouldn't be fun."
As Payne alludes to, the main frontier against Sauron is the Elves, led by a war-beaten Gil-galad, played by Benjamin Walker. He tells GamesRadar+ that it's not looking great for them when the third season kicks off, either. "It's the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dam, kind of going, 'Everything's fine!' Everything is not fine. If I take my finger out, we're all going to drown. Yeah, it's not great. Outlook is bleak, and the tool, the weapon we have been using are the rings, the power of it is eroding and becoming potentially ominous. So we're in a position where we can't do this on our own."
They look to Númenór, which is facing its own problems of civil war, with Míriel and Pharazôn split across two sides of the conflict. While they're out of the battle with Sauron for now, darkness is on the horizon for the kingdom too, as Míriel star Cynthia Addai-Robinson alludes to.
"There's going to be a lot of heartbreak in this particular part of the world," she explains. "And obviously there is a sense of being duty-bound, there is a sense of sacrifice for the greater good, and they are all driven by this particular worldview, and it just so happens that on the other side of that is Pharazôn and sort of what Númenor has become under his leadership and trying to make sure that it doesn't get to the point of no return. So I might be biased, but I love the Númenor storyline this season, and I think it's doing a very good job of taking us toward the inevitable, if you know where it all goes."
The expanding darkness is felt in all corners of Middle-earth too, as the Dwarven kingdom of Khazad-dûm has shut its doors to try and protect the Dwarven rings. Durin star Owain Arthur explains: "The stakes just keep on getting higher and higher. This is it, and the more power Sauron gets, the more danger there is, the more doom and gloom there is in Middle-earth, but there's hope."
The showrunners were keen to find some levity in this darkness too. This mainly comes from the romantic storyline between Galadriel and her long-lost husband Celeborn, played by franchise newcomer Jamie Campbell Bower. Their reunion is a point of light, which J.D. Payne says was one of their "main objectives this season".
"Romance was an important thing for us this season, and we brought in some writers in our writers' room. We asked specifically, we said, 'We want you to be really hard on us, be really hard on the story, and how do we make this romance work,'" Payne says. "You know, we looked at things that you know in sort of our shared canon of The Princess Bride and Before Sunset, that you know we both love, and you know these stories of what happens when people who loved each other once and have been separated for a long time get back together again. How do you pick the relationship back up?"
The answers will all be revealed when The Rings of Power season 3 begins on Prime Video on November 11. For more on Middle-earth, check out our guide on how to watch the Lord of the Rings movies in order.
