Who Is "Meteor Man"?

2022-09-14 22:29:02 PDT

My wife and I have been watching The Rings Of Power. So far, we haven't been terribly enthused.

• There's too many storylines and characters: it's hard to keep track of, and everything gets diluted. I haven't found any plot line or character yet that I am really excited to see more of, just a lot of barely-above-meh.

• As someone who has read much of Tolkien's literary output including The Silmarillion, I still don't understand a lot of what happens in the show. It feels to me like a lot of barely-disguised move-the-plot-along fridge logic. My wife keeps asking me "why was that?" and I keep saying "I don't know." Not a good sign.

One of the classic ways to try to hold interest in a serial, one that goes way way back, is to have a Mysterious Figure for the audience to worry about. We have not one, but two here: "Meteor Man" and Halbrand. Of the two, Meteor Man is the more interesting to me, which is to say I care a tiny bit.

Sadly, I don't trust The Rings Of Power to have a satisfying identity set up for Meteor Man at this point. My suspicion is that it will be something stupid. Here's some guesses about Meteor Man's "true identity" I've seen from folks I watch on YouTube: I've ranked them in the order of my belief, although I'm not yet enthused about any of them.

• Gandalf: This is in some ways the obvious choice: a Maiar Fire Mage, a really familiar and beloved character who is known to be friends with the Hobbits.

  This last was my initial reason for adopting this theory — in the Tolkien Cinematic Universe, as in any CU, writers can't seem to resist overexplaining trivial stuff from characters' backstories. "You know why Gandalf likes Hobbits so much, right? In the Second Age, one of them helped him and then he befriended a Hobbit clan."

  The problem with the Gandalf theory, as pointed out by Robert at In Deep Geek (an excellent YouTube channel), is that there's a bunch of hints that Meteor Man is actually evil. There's the corrupted leaf in Lothlorien as the meteor sweeps by. There's the whole "so evil the fire gives no heat" thing (that as far as I know was invented for The Rings Of Power and probably shouldn't have been, as it doesn't fit at all with Tolkien and is stupid). There's the dead fireflies, and Nori's dad breaking his leg when Meteor Man breaks a stick.

  Still, the problem with Meteor Man being evil is that we are clearly expected to trust Hobbit girl Nori's instinct that she should help him. Indeed, the writers set up a second child character, Bronwyn's son Theo, as a kind of bad counterpart of Nori who manages to steal some kind of ultra-evil Morgoth dagger. While Nori ending up doing evil and Theo doing good is exactly the kind of stupid subversion I would expect from bad writers, I hope the writers of The Rings Of Power are better than that.

• A Balrog: This is Robert's suggestion, and it's a tricky one. It's the kind of thing the writers might do, I guess? See his video for some of the justification for why it could be so.

  However, I think there are some issues with this identification. First, I am not aware that any Balrog took human form anyhwere in Tolkien's stories; they are always described as overt monsters. Second, it appears from Tolkien lore that the Balrogs all came to Middle-Earth in the time of Melkor: there is nothing to support any falling from the sky for no reason at this point. Finally, see the argument against a truly evil being above.

  Still, as Robert repeatedly points out, we are promised a Balrog by the previews of The Ring Of Power. I suppose it could be this one. I just doubt it.

• Sauron: I mean, why would Sauron come sailing in from the sky and crash with no knowledge of who or where he was? Why? Maybe I give the writers too much or too little credit here. Perhaps there's some truly clever explanation; perhaps the explanation will just be handwaved.

  Anyhow, Sauron is going to have to be charming and deceptive enough at some point to convince the Elves (Celebrimbor, probably) to forge The Rings Of Power. This doesn't seem like a great start. Again, see the argument above about pure evil.

• A Blue Wizard. The Blue Wizards are really minor characters from Tolkien that we know little about. Only real arguments in favor are that they are known to go to the South, where Nori et al are.

• Radagast. Nope. Thought about it early on, because of firefly powers. But nothing else would really make sense here that I can think of.

• The Witch-King of Angband. I found this suggestion here.

• Saruman. Not much fits here. Fire powers, the exact opposite of beguiling speech, etc etc.

• "The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon". This website suggested this. It is both ingenious and ridiculous. Hopefully not.

• Tom Bombadil. Makes no sense. Not even worth debunking.

• Some newly-invented character not mentioned by Tolkien.

  No. Just… please no. If so, the writers better save the reveal for the end, because I'm quitting the minute they start adding major characters of their own invention.

• Some character only from The Silmarillion. Basically impossible, since Amazon would not have the rights to any such character not also mentioned in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit.

One clue that has been much bandied about is the only words spoken by Meteor Man so far: "Mana Ure". Apparently Ure is a Quenya Elvish word for something like "fire", "heat" or "the sun". Mana is more complicated, but may be some sort of interrogative like "where?" or "what?". My theory is that "Mana Ure" is "Where's the fire?", a reference to all the rushing around he's seeing. Or maybe "Ure Mana", "Your Momma".

The one thing I take away from all this is that the writers have written themselves into a can't win situation for me. Absolutely none of the above possibilities would be anything but sad and ugly.

It would have been far better to just leave Hobbits and Meteor Man out of this one. The Hobbits can't become too famous without spoiling The Lord of the Rings anyhow, since we're told they really weren't in the old accounts. If Amazon's writers need a Meteor Man to keep the audience holding on, the series is likely unwatchable. My curiosity has certainly passed.

I'll leave you with my theory: Smaug. Someone once told me that it is never a good to leave a live dragon out of your calculations. Dragons are all about fire, they come from the sky, they are magical, they are evil but not super-evil in the same way as the other stuff in Tolkien.

This is a really stupid theory. But it's better than Tom Bombadil.