Fans eager to see a Galadriel/Sauron reunion in the second season of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will be thrilled to see the pair meeting in hand-to-hand combat in the final trailer. The trailer also hints at Sauron’s growing dark powers and an unlikely alliance between elves and Uruks.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, pretty much everyone guessed long before the S1 finale’s reveal that Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), king of the Southlands, was Sauron in disguise. Fans even dubbed him “Hot Sauron.” He took advantage of the fact that the elvish light of Valar was fading, putting the race of elves in danger of extinction unless they returned to Valinor to preserve their immortality. The discovery of the precious ore mithril gave the elves another option championed by Elrond (Robert Aramayo), Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), and the elven smith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards).

But there was only a little mithril available. Galadriel unwittingly brought Halbrand into the fray, and he suggested bonding the mithril with another metal, claiming it would amplify the mithril’s power—when the opposite was true. The season ended with the forging of the three elven rings out of an alloy of mithril and the gold and silver of Valinor: Narya (the Ring of Fire), to be worn by Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker); Nenya (the Ring of Water), to be worn by Galadriel; and Vilya (the Ring of Air), to be worn by Elrond.

S2 will explore the consequences of Galadriel’s actions in the S1 finale, and we already know there will be a major battle spanning two episodes. The first S2 teaser dropped in May and offered a tantalizing shot of “Hot Elf Sauron” creating Barad-dûr toward the teaser’s end. Prime Video debuted the official full trailer in late July during San Diego Comic-Con. We were also treated to a bonus featurette introducing a host of creatures: Barrow-wights, Hill-trolls, and Sea-worms, as well as Orcs, Ents, and the youthful version of the ravenous giant spider Shelob.

This final trailer opens with an ominous warning of war coming to Middle-Earth, punctuated by scenes of a fiery battle against Sauron’s forces. Elrond and his fellow elves fear Sauron cannot be defeated by their armies, particularly given his emerging powers: “Once the deceiver obtains a being’s trust, he gains the ability to sculpt their very thoughts.” We get further warnings about how the rings will “work an evil beyond reckoning” in Sauron’s hands. Celembrimbor seems to be catching on to the cost of forging the rings for Sauron (“What have you done to me?”), and we see the Uruk Adar approach Galadriel about a possible alliance: “Sauron is my enemy as much as yours,” he says. “I can help you destroy him.” And then we get a brief final glimpse of Galadriel and Sauron clashing swords.

The second season of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres on August 29, 2024, on Prime Video.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2043113

Among the many highlights of last weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con was the official full trailer for the second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Sauron has returned and is plotting his takeover of Middle-earth. Will donning the titular rings make the wearers his adversaries—or his collaborators?

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, Prime Video made a major investment in The Rings of Power when it acquired the rights to the source material from the Tolkien estate, even committing to multiple seasons upfront. Pretty much everyone guessed long before the S1 finale’s reveal that Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), king of the Southlands, was Sauron in disguise. Fans even dubbed him “Hot Sauron.” He took advantage of the fact that the elvish light of Valar was fading, putting the race of elves in danger of extinction unless they returned to Valinor to preserve their immortality. The discovery of the precious ore mithril gave the elves another option championed by Elrond (Robert Aramayo), Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), and the elven smith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards).

But there was only a little mithril available since King Durin III (Peter Mullan) refused any further mining. Unfortunately, Galadriel unwittingly brought Halbrand into the fray, and he suggested bonding the mithril with another metal, claiming it would amplify the mithril’s power—when the opposite was true. The season ended with the forging of the three elven rings out of an alloy of mithril and the gold and silver of Valinor: Narya (the Ring of Fire), to be worn by Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker); Nenya (the Ring of Water), to be worn by Galadriel; and Vilya (the Ring of Air), to be worn by Elrond.

Darkness will bind them

S2 will explore the consequences of Galadriel’s actions in the S1 finale. We also know that the Harfoot Nori and The Stranger will travel to the land of Rhûn in the east of Middle-earth, a new setting for the series, and apparently, there will be a “massive” two-episode battle. Per the official premise:

Sauron has returned. Cast out by Galadriel, without army or ally, the rising Dark Lord must now rely on his own cunning to rebuild his strength and oversee the creation of the Rings of Power, which will allow him to bind all the peoples of Middle-earth to his sinister will. Building on Season One’s epic scope and ambition, the new season plunges even its most beloved and vulnerable characters into a rising tide of darkness, challenging each to find their place in a world that is increasingly on the brink of calamity. Elves and dwarves, orcs and men, wizards and Harfoots… as friendships are strained and kingdoms begin to fracture, the forces of good will struggle ever more valiantly to hold on to what matters to them most of all… each other.

The first S2 teaser dropped in May, with a tantalizing shot of “Hot Elf Sauron” creating Barad-dûr toward the teaser’s end. The new trailer opens with Galadriel’s voiceover telling us that Sauron “sees himself as master of all of Middle-earth. He seeks to rule it not only through conquest but by bending the minds of all its peoples to his own. And for that he needs not armies, but rings.” We see Galadriel putting on one of the rings over Elrond’s strenuous objection. And she’s not the only one. “In choosing to wear those rings, you have all become his collaborators,” Elrond says, insisting the rings must be destroyed.

Galadriel begs to differ, believing her ring is guiding her.  The other bearers are reluctant to give up their rings as well, but eventually, they band together to take on Sauron’s forces, and we get some eye-popping footage of the aforementioned mega-battle. Remember: “When the darkness falls, there are always some who rise forth and shine.”

The Rings of Power S2 premieres on August 29, 2024, on Prime Video. You can also check out a featurette below, introducing a host of creatures: Barrow-wights, Hill-trolls, and Sea-worms, as well as Orcs, Ents, and the youthful version of the ravenous giant spider Shelob.

Listing image by YouTube/Prime Video

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2039912

The first time I saw the opening credits for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, I thought the patterns looked remarkably like so-called “Chladni figures“: vibrational patterns that form when one scatters sand on a vibrating plate. It seems I was not the only one. British science communicator and YouTube star Steve Mould got so many comments from viewers about the similarities that he decided to test that hypothesis—by re-creating the title sequence with his own vibration-generated patterns. He documents the journey, and the associated science, in the video above. The final re-created title sequence starts at the 10:55 mark.

The phenomenon is technically known as cymatics. In 1680, Robert Hooke experimented with running a bow along glass plates covered in flour to induce vibrations and noted the telltale nodal patterns that formed in the flour. “A rigid plate will have a set of natural resonance frequencies just like a string, and when the plate is excited at one of these frequencies, it will form a standing wave with fixed nodes,” University of North Carolina physicist Greg Gbur wrote back in 2013. “These nodes will form lines on the plate, in contrast to points on the string.” The flour on the plate made those nodal lines visible.

The 18th-century German physicist and musician Ernest Chladni perfected the method 100 years later when he repeated Hooke’s pioneering experiments with circular plates, even demonstrating the effect before Napoleon. The various shapes or patterns created by resonance frequencies are known as “Chladni figures” in his honor. Chladni even came up with a mathematical formula to predict which patterns would form. The higher the rate of oscillation, the more complex those figures will be. Similar methods are still used when designing acoustic instruments: violins, guitars, and cellos, for example.

Mould’s videos explore a wide variety of topics, including one on the physics of the so-called “chain fountain” (rising self-siphoning beads) that inspired two physicists to test his hypothesis and publish a 2014 paper. Mould also created a hugely popular YouTube video in 2016 about the science behind Chladni figures, which he demonstrated by sprinkling couscous on a large vibrating metal square. So he was a natural person to approach for people curious about whether The Rings of Power title sequence had been created in a similar fashion.

First, Mould took a closer look at the specific shapes featured in the title sequence and then tried to figure out how to re-create them (or a similar pattern) using his own vibrating plates, along with the transitions between the patterns. That involved more than a little math.

Mould used a program called Desmos to run through various combinations of the two variables at play and the patterns that should be produced on a square plate. (He also experimented with a pentagonal plate for contrast.) Many seemed to match fairly well with patterns in the title sequence. Then he set about trying to make those patterns for real. “I swept through a huge range of frequencies, found a handful that worked really well, and then I coded something up so I could quickly switch between those good frequencies,” Mould says.

The biggest challenge was achieving the distinctive pattern of circles featured at one point in the sequence. This required tweaking the boundary conditions to get different standing waves at different frequencies. Chladni’s original experiment involved a plate that was fixed at the center so that all the patterns had lines that went through that center, which doesn’t move and thus is part of a node line. But in the actual title sequence, that pattern of circles has no lines going through the center. So Mould vibrated the plate from the middle rather than running a bow along the edge, as Chladni did.

In the end, Mould came pretty close to the original pattern of circles, although he suspects the original owes a lot to CGI. “Maybe the whole thing is CGI,” he says in the video. “But if it is, I reckon they’re using simulation software for at least some of it to produce those Chladni figures.”

Listing image by YouTube/Steve Mould

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1886376

Hollywood is gearing up for San Diego Comic-Con next week—the first in-person version of the hugely popular and influential convention since the pandemic hit. Prime Video decided this was the perfect time to release a new, nearly two-and-a-half-minute teaser trailer for its upcoming series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It feels very much in the spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels and Peter Jackson’s classic film trilogy.

The first teaser for the new eight-part series landed in February during the Super Bowl and gave us some eye-popping views of the quality world-building we can expect. Per the official description:

This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness. Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.

The large ensemble cast includes Morfydd Clark as a young Galadriel, “now a hardscrabble warrior leading the Northern Armies,” who is determined to hunt down her brother’s killer. She ends up adrift at sea with a new character named Halbrand (Charles Vickers). All we know about him is that he is “running from his past.” Charles Edwards plays Celebrimbor, whom hardcore LOTR fans will recognize as the elven smith who forged the legendary rings.

Robert Aramayo plays a younger version of Elrond—”a canny young elven architect and politician.” (Aramayo also played the young Eddard Stark on Game of Thrones.) And Maxim Baldry will play the infamous Isildur, ancestor of Aragorn, who eventually defeated Sauron but fell victim to the One Ring’s corrupting power. 

Among other new characters, Sophia Nomvete plays the dwarven Princess Disa, and Orwain Arthur plays Prince Durin IV, but there’s no indication of what their relationship might be. Ismael Cruz Cordova plays a silvan elf named Arondir, and Nazanin Boniadi plays his love interest, Bronwyn, a single mom described as “a human village healer.”

There’s also a breed of hobbits known as the Harfoots, who mostly try to stay hidden and keep to themselves. But two curious young hobbits, Poppy Proudfellow and Nori Brandyfoot (played by Megan Richard and Markella Kavenagh, respectively), are more adventurous and somehow encounter “a mysterious lost man whose origin promises to be one of the show’s enticing questions.” That’s probably The Stranger (Daniel Weyman). Other characters include the dwarf King Durin III (Peter Mullan). The streaming platform has not yet revealed who will be playing Sauron.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1866757