Enjoyed the finale a lot. My son, who's more of a Tolkien scholar than me, a little less so.
Couple of questions arising:
1) Celembribor still has 16 rings to make, with Sauron's help (according to lore). So...how's that going to work now? Options include
a) A flashback that shows Halbrand and Celembribor making the others before making the Three. Sort of like working on prototypes before the main deal. This would be the easiest way to keep to the lore, even with the truncated timeline.
b) Sauron comes back later, in a new guise, and makes the rings with Celembribor. This stretches credulity a bit, though it's telling that Celembribor does not know that Halbrand = Sauron, so it's possible (and perhaps is the writers-room reason why Galadriel doesn't tell him).
c) Celembribor doesn't make the remaining rings, but in another guise Sauron teaches Men and Dwarves how to make them themselves. This probably makes the most narrative sense considering where the writers have placed themselves at the end of S1, but it strays far from the original story.*
Any other options?
Question 2: While the Stranger is heavily hinted at to be Gandalf (due to that last line), in the lore only the Blues come during the 2nd Age. And the Stranger is going east, which the Blues did. So...which do you think he is? Gandalf? Blue? Saruman, maybe (he started off good, after all)?
*My son pointed out that, since there is already so little in the way of constraints to write for this period of ME's history, it's kind of a shame that some of the things that Tolkien was clear on get ignored. I'm not talking about timelines; we'd need new actors for the humans every episode if the timeline was to be respected. Rather, the way Sauron gets into Eregion, how the 16 rings get crafted, etc. Might have been nice if the show had remained faithful to these things. It's not a huge bother to me; as I said, I am no Tolkien scholar. I can see how it might bother those who bothered to learn the lore.
