'Rings of Power' Season 3 Will Introduce a Character That Subverts Tolkien’s Mythos

The show will tackle one of Tolkien’s biggest qualms with his own work

The Age of Men is over. The Age of the Orc Discourse has begun. In a recent interview with IGN about the upcoming season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, co-showrunner Patrick McKay said big changes are coming, including a five-year time skip. McKay went as far as to describe season 3 as a “soft reboot” of sorts. While that’s certainly a big deal, another line in the interview will stand out for many Tolkien-heads. The show will introduce “an Orc with an arc.”

McKay explains that the new season will introduce an Orc named Marnûkh, who says he's a defector from Sauron’s army that wants to help defeat his old boss. “He claims to know all kinds of things about Sauron’s strategy and reveals to the Elves that Sauron is trying to make the One Ring,” said McKay. “And if he succeeds, he will defeat everyone, including the orcs, because the One Ring will now make them subservient to him, slaves to him forever, and there’ll never be another Orc rebellion like Adar, who died last season, led.” Episode director Sanaa Hamri added, “I have a real soft spot for this Orc. I think the audience is going to be really torn about Marnûkh.”

As for why having an “Orc with an arc” is a big deal, Orcs in Tolkien’s Middle-earth have traditionally been portrayed as universally evil brutes who carry out Sauron’s bidding without question. While Orcs are capable of speech, implying they are sentient, they don’t seem capable of moral good. The Rings of Power willplay with that concept by introducing an Orc who works with the protagonists.

This won’t be the first time The Rings of Power has deviated from traditional portrayals of Orcs. Last season, there was a brief glimpse of an Orc with a family. The story also introduced Adar, an Elf who Morgoth corrupted into one of the first Orcs, but who fought against Sauron.

Tolkien wasn’t satisfied with his own handling of Orcs

The subject of Orc sentience and morality has been a hot topic for decades, one that Tolkien contributed to himself. He once described The Lord of the Rings as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work” and struggled with the moral dilemma introduced when he made Orcs able to speak. In Tolkien’s view, Orcs' ability to reason meant they were open to morality and, in a Christian framework, could be seen as having souls. However, if Orcs had souls, then it would be problematic to portray them as fundamentally evil and have them thoughtlessly slaughtered en masse.

For example, this dilemma came to a head in the game Shadow of Mordor, which introduced Orcs with distinct personalities while simultaneously encouraging the player to slaughter and enslave them through mind control. The portrayal of Orcs as beings that are seemingly capable of reason but are fundamentally “other” has frequently been compared to real-world racism, as noted by the Tolkien scholar Robert T. Tally.

Tolkien attempted to solve the problem of Orc souls by proposing several contradictory origins for the creatures, including that they were intrinsically evil beings directly created by Morgoth (Middle-earth’s equivalent of Lucifer), that they were essentially “beasts,” and that they were corrupted Elves (which is basically the approach the show takes). Tolkien was never fully satisfied with any of these origin stories.

We’ll discover whether The Rings of Power found a worthwhile solution to this age-old problem when the series debuts on Prime Video on Nov. 11.