The first two episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power put a great deal of the spotlight on Galadriel, with it now clear that the Prime Video series is going to focus on her quest to find Sauron.
When King of the Elves Gil-galad made it clear her fight was over, Galadriel and the elves under command were told they were being rewarded with a one-way trip to Elven ancestral home Valinor. As you'll likely remember, that's where Frodo Baggins and some of his friends were permitted to enter at the end of The Return of the King.
While Galadriel comes close to accepting this eternal gift, she decides at the last minute to jump overboard from the ship taking her to what could be her final destination. She knows Sauron is still out there and that her battle is not done, and Morfydd Clark explained the character's decision during a recent interview with The Wrap.
"So something I really focused on with Galadriel was the guilt she was carrying," the Swedish-born Welsh actress says. "I kind of was really interested in, ‘You can’t escape your history.’ And you particularly can’t when you were there for all of it. And she just feels like, to me, that she didn’t deserve to go back yet; her work wasn’t finished."
“I remember speaking with Rob Aramayo a lot about the magnitude of that leap," she added. "And then yeah, it was a big move. Very big move, first of all. And...she doesn’t know she’s going to do it until the moment she’s in the water."
In the second episode, Galadriel is lost at sea but encounters the survivors of a sea worm attack on a makeshift raft. Saved by a man named Halbrand, a shadowy figure on a boat eventually discovers them, and Clark went on to share her take on why he rescues her before that ship appears.
"I think he saved her at that point, and when they meet, because she will increase his chance of survival dramatically. And I think that’s all it is at that point – that he knows that there’s something about this person and she’s clearly very powerful and skilled, and he might die without basically."
We'll see if there's more to Halbrand than meets the eye, though currently can't wait to find out who their savior is. There's been a lot of speculation on that front, though we'd bet on the ship hailing from Númenor. Located in the Sundering Seas between Middle-earth and Valinor, it's an island of men, and that could leave Galadriel in a curious predicament.
The first two episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are now streaming on Prime Video!