The Rings of Power Doesn’t Know What To Do With Arondir

[Warning: The following contains spoilers up to Season 3, Episode 4 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.]

As The Rings of Power directs its focus toward Sauron’s (Charlie Vickers) conquest of Middle-Earth, certain subplots have fallen by the wayside. The harfoot characters — the show’s version of hobbits — do not appear in the first half of Season 3, eliminating a storyline that offered a more ground-level view of Tolkien’s world. Instead, we’re now spending a lot more time with royal dynasties and military leaders, a storytelling choice that prioritizes major players from Tolkien canon over characters created for the show. In the process, the elven warrior Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) feels noticeably shortchanged, co-starring in Galadriel’s subplot for most of the four episodes released this week. Then in the final moments of Episode 4, he gets killed off.

Back in Season 1, Arondir was arguably the most high-profile new character in The Rings of Power: an elf whom we first meet as a watchtower guard in the Southlands, the front line of an orc invasion into human territory. Arondir also garnered attention as the franchise’s first elf played by an actor of color, becoming an unofficial figurehead for the show’s racially diverse reimagining of Middle-Earth. At the same time, his role began to highlight some blind spots in the show’s casting strategy, which avoided hiring non-white actors to play well-known characters like Gandalf (Daniel Weyman), Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), or Elrond (Robert Aramayo).

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Among the elven characters, Arondir represented a different perspective from leaders like Galadriel and Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker), whose stories were already baked into Tolkien’s legendarium. In some respects Arondir can be interpreted as a working-class character, inasmuch as such a thing exists for immortal elves. But in Season 2, his role ran into some problems. With the unexpected departure of actress Nazanin Boniadi, Arondir had to continue on without his main scene partner and love interest, Bronwyn. He was left with a meandering arc that focused more on action scenes or team-ups than on providing a solid storyline of his own. That issue continues in Season 3, where Arondir spends much of his time traveling with Galadriel and the new orc character Marnûkh (Adam Young), co-starring in a mini-quest that leads to several surprising discoveries in Episode 4 — along with Arondir’s death.

We can’t know for sure why Arondir was killed off in this manner. Possibly Cruz Córdova wanted to move on to other projects; possibly this is just part of the overall narrative shift in Season 3. Either way, it’s a disappointing send-off, hampered by the show’s struggle to define Arondir’s role as an independent hero. Coupled with the disappearance of the harfoot storyline, it feels like The Rings of Power has given up on the idea of treating its original characters as legitimate co-leads. 

Thanks to the five-year time jump between Seasons 2 and 3, a lot of developments have taken place off screen — including the forging of a bond between Arondir and Galadriel. We’re led to assume that they’ve spent the past five years fighting side by side among a wartime community of elves. However, the specifics of their time together remain unclear, with the reticent Galadriel only calling Arondir a friend for the first time in Episode 2.

Believing that he failed in his duty to protect the Southlands, Arondir still struggles with guilt over losing track of Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin), Bronwyn’s teenage son. He rightfully fears that Theo will be dragged further into the war, and we soon learn that Theo has, in fact, been enslaved by Numenorean forces. None of us could’ve predicted what happens next, as Theo escapes and winds up in Sauron’s clutches, gifted with one of the nine rings created to control the kings of men. He’s now on the path to become a Nazgul. Theo’s entanglement with Sauron is another element that mostly develops off screen, and in Episode 4, he ends up killing Arondir on Sauron’s orders, offering a tragic kind of closure for their earlier relationship.

One of the persistent problems with Arondir’s role is how disjointed it feels compared to the other main characters, who get to spend entire seasons building rapport with the same recurring co-stars. Previously anchored by his relationship with Bronwyn, Arondir battles orcs in the Southlands (including a brief period of enslavement) and then becomes a kind of roving hero who co-stars in other people’s subplots, acting as a protector toward Isildur and then Galadriel. By the end of the Season 3 premiere he’s planning to strike out alone in search of Theo, but that plan is derailed by the arrival of the dissident orc Marnûkh, who delivers a crucial piece of news: Sauron is forging a “master ring” that will shift the balance of the war. Faced with this terrifying prospect, Arondir decides to accompany Galadriel and Marnûkh on a mission to undermine Sauron’s plans.

Loyal to the memory of the orcs’ rebel leader Adar, Marnûkh is here to help Galadriel locate an elven smith whom Sauron requires to forge the ring. Acting as their guide, Marnûkh will lead Galadriel and Arondir to the orc prison where this smith is being held and help them break her out.

Over Episodes 3 and 4, these characters return to the ever-popular Tolkien activity of hiking through forests, with Arondir growing increasingly angry at Marnûkh’s crass sense of humor. With Galadriel forced to act as mediator, Arondir finds it impossible to look past his longstanding hatred of orcs, only admitting that Marnûkh can be trusted once he successfully leads them to the prison. Later on, Marnûkh is shocked to see Arondir save his life during a fight scene, having finally accepted the orc’s worth as an ally.

Episode 4 feels like a true midseason finale, culminating in an action-packed prison break for Arondir, Galadriel, and Marnûkh. After sneaking inside with the two elves disguised as prisoners, they discover that their target has already died in her cell. However, Galadriel’s long-lost husband Celeborn (Jamie Campbell Bower) turns out to be imprisoned nearby, leading to a moving reunion just before Sauron arrives on the scene. 

Despite the seemingly impossible odds of escaping an orc-filled fortress with Sauron on the prowl, the elves and Marnûkh fight their way to a clifftop platform where a giant eagle is meant to fly in and get them out. But at the last moment, Theo arrives, wearing the proto-Nazgul garb of Sauron’s human lieutenants. Revealing his identity, he urges Arondir to leave Galadriel and Celeborn and save himself, but Arondir refuses, telling Theo to abandon Sauron and flee with him instead. For a moment it seems like this might work, but then Sauron shows up, ordering Theo to kill Arondir. Theo then stabs Arondir in the chest, leaving him to die as Galadriel and Celeborn make their escape. Ruling out the likelihood of a miraculous recovery, the episode closes on a shot of snow falling on Arondir’s unmoving face.

In theory, Arondir’s trajectory highlights the personal costs of the war, but he doesn’t receive enough meaningful screen time to really bring that theme to the foreground. Motivated by guilt and grief, he sacrifices his own desires in the name of protecting others. It’s a consistent thread in his characterization, yet it leads to a bittersweet conclusion. His death is another point where the show’s casting choices create an uncomfortable subtext, killing off the only non-white elf character while Galadriel and Celeborn live on to play their canonical roles in Middle-Earth’s future.

During Arondir’s final four episodes, we witness the bare bones of an interesting emotional arc. As a foot soldier in an apocalyptic war, Arondir grieves the loss of a child whom he wanted to protect. He also comes to terms with the undesirable possibility that his enemies aren’t quite as irredeemable as he believes. But with so many other storylines competing for airtime, those themes must play out over just two or three scenes between action sequences. It seems clear that the writers are far more interested in the Game of Thrones -style politicking among royal characters like Durin IV (Owain Arthur) and Pharazôn (Trystan Gravelle), losing track of Arondir’s purpose in the story.

Tolkien was obsessed with creating elaborate genealogies and myths for Middle-Earth’s various cultures, but the stories that audiences know and love best are anchored by hobbits, featuring a broad cross-section of society. Going into Season 3, I get a sense that while The Rings of Power is deep in the weeds of Tolkien lore, it only understands one side of his approach to Middle-Earth’s class system. Yes, Tolkien was an avowed monarchist, but he was also invested in relatable heroes who weren’t born into power. That viewpoint is apparently no longer a priority.

As the show homes in on the origins of the One Ring, every major storyline now revolves around powerful figures from Tolkien canon, confirming that The Rings of Power has failed to make its original characters feel equally important. And now the most prominent of those original characters has been written out of the story. Reading interviews with Ismael Cruz Córdova, you can tell that he put a lot of thought into crafting this performance over the past five years, speaking about Arondir’s lingering grief and strong sense of justice, and his rare perspective as a main character with relatively little power. It’s too bad that those ideas didn’t get more time to breathe.

New episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 3 stream Wednesdays on Prime Video.