The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power Season 3 Resolves One of the Most Fascinating Mysteries From Middle-earth Lore

Full spoilers ahead for the first four episodes of The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power Season 3!

Prime Video has released the first four episodes of The Rings of Power Season 3, and they’re nothing if not eventful. But amid all the warring and hoarding of magical rings, there’s also a reveal that has a lot of Tolkien nerds’ heads spinning. The series has resolved what may well be the biggest lingering mystery from Tolkien’s vast Middle-earth mythology.

Read on for a full breakdown of the big reveal in Episode 3 and how it resolves a major loose end from books like The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales of Middle-earth.

Ciarán Hinds’ Dark Wizard Revealed

Back in Season 2, viewers were introduced to a new antagonist played by Ciarán Hinds. Known as the “Dark Wizard,” this villain reigns over the cursed land of Rhûn. Gandalf (Daniel Weyman) is desperate to put a stop to this powerful foe, lest the Dark Wizard ally himself with Sauron and create a truly unstoppable army.

Though Rings of Power is set many centuries before the events of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, many of the characters are designed to evoke familiar archetypes from the movies. Once again, we have a saga crammed full of noble elves, intrepid dwarves, plucky Hobbits (or Harfoots), and morally conflicted men. But sometimes those archetypes are subverted in the end. Much like how the seemingly Aragorn-esque Halbrand (Charlie Vickers) turned out to be Sauron, the Dark Wizard isn’t who many fans assumed him to be.

Initially, Hinds’ character was speculated to be Saruman, given that he’s a dark wizard with great ambitions and a willingness to fight alongside Sauron. But that never quite made sense, as it’s not until the end of the Third Age that Saruman allows his true motivations to be known. Season 3, Episode 3 instead confirms a different fan theory, revealing the Dark Wizard to be a being known as Pallando.

Tolkien didn’t write a great deal about Pallando (we’ll get more into that shortly), but the gist is that Eru Ilúvatar (the God of this fantasy universe) originally sent five wizards to Middle-earth to aid the kingdoms of elves and men in their war against Sauron. Alongside Gandalf the Grey, there were also Saruman the White, Radagast the Brown, and the two Blue Wizards, Alatar and Pallando. Radagast became mostly distracted by his love of the wilderness and animals, and the two Blue Wizards vanished into obscurity, leaving only Gandalf and Saruman to carry on the fight into the Third Age.

The series extrapolates on this backstory by revealing Hinds to be Pallando. In a conversation with the disembodied form of Eru Ilúvatar, Gandalf learns that Pallando became corrupted by his thirst for power and murdered Alatar. That act poisoned the realm of Rhûn. Despite this, Gandalf’s mission isn’t to stop Pallando, but to appeal to his better nature and convince him to stop his army from joining Sauron. Even Dark Wizards can be redeemed, it seems.

What Did Tolkien Reveal About the Blue Wizards?

The two Blue Wizards were never a big focus of Tolkien’s writings, which perhaps explains why they’re a source of such fascination among fans. They don’t appear at all in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings trilogy, leaving only a handful of scattered references in posthumously published works like Unfinished Tales of Middle-earth and The Peoples of Middle-earth.

As Tolkien established, Pallando was one of five Maiar (immortal beings of the same race as Sauron himself) who were handpicked to travel from the Undying Lands to Middle-earth to help rally resistance against Sauron. Pallando and Alatar were known as the Blue Wizards (or “Ithryn Luin” in the ancient language of Sindarin) because of their distinctive sea blue robes. Originally, only Alatar, Gandalf, and Saruman were chosen for this quest, but Alatar opted to invite Pallando along, and Radagast was also added to the group for some reason.

Once in Middle-earth, the various wizards split up and picked different areas to focus on. Saruman, Alatar, and Pallando journeyed east to appeal to the Easterlings and the Haradrim. And that’s about where the latter two characters’ story ends in Tolkien’s writings. Saruman eventually returned to the West and set up shop in Isengard, but Alatar and Pallando never came with him. They just disappeared, hence why when Ian McKellen’s Gandalf mentions the Blue Wizards in 2012’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, he can’t even remember their names (technically, that was because the filmmakers didn’t have the rights to use characters from Unfinished Tales).

Tolkien himself seemed pretty pessimistic about whether the Blue Wizards ultimately succeeded in their mission. In a letter published after his death, Tolkien wrote, “I think that they went as emissaries to distant regions, east and south... Missionaries to enemy-occupied lands as it were. What success they had I do not know; but I fear that they failed, as Saruman did, though doubtless in different ways; and I suspect they were founders or beginners of secret cults and ‘magic’ traditions that outlasted the fall of Sauron."

This lack of textual information has only fueled speculation about the Blue Wizards over the decades, to the point where they’ve become a major source of fascination for hardcore Tolkien nerds. What actually became of Alatar and Pallando? Now we finally know.

Obviously, Rings of Power is doing a lot of embellishing to build on what little Tolkien established about these characters. Now we know that Alatar and Pallando didn’t just fail in their mission; the latter actively became the sort of threat he was designed to quash. However, the series is hinting that there may still be a redemption arc in store for Pallando. The character is currently subservient to Sauron, but we suspect that’ll change as the final seasons of the show unfold. There may still be a chance for this fallen wizard to do some good and play a part in Sauron’s downfall, even if he’s doomed to be forgotten by history.

For more on Rings of Power, check out IGN’s review of Season 3, Episodes 1-4 and learn more about the big character deaths in these episodes.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.