“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power ”finally reveals the Stranger’s identity

As season 2 comes to an end, viewers have learned a lot about both the mysterious wizard (Daniel Weyman) and Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear).

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2, episode 8, "Shadow and Flame."

At long last, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has resolved a mystery that dates back to its premiere episode. In the season 2 finale, which hit Amazon Prime Video this week, the mysterious wizard — who has thus far only been identified as “the Stranger” (Daniel Weyman) — finally accepted his true name.

After the Stranger uses his magic to protect the harfoots and the stoors from the Dark Wizard (Ciaran Hinds), one of them comes up with an affectionate nickname for him: “Grand elf.” After the Stranger turns this sobriquet around in his mouth a little bit, he streamlines it into his iconic name: “Gandalf.”

Related: Evil takes root: Darkness rises in The Rings of Power season 2

Although the Stranger’s arrival in Middle-earth in the first episode of The Rings of Power (crashing to the ground like a meteor in the middle of the Second Age) differs from the official history of Gandalf established by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings (where he arrives at the Gray Havens by boat in the Third Age and meets Círdan the Shipwright), the show has been dropping hints that he really is Gandalf for a while. When the character finally spoke in the season 1 finale, he told Nori (Markella Kavenaugh) to “always follow your nose” — an iconic LOTR quote spoken by Gandalf to the Fellowship of the Ring in the Mines of Moria.

But The Rings of Power hasn’t been hiding the secret that the Stranger is Gandalf. Rather, it’s been telling the story of how he became Gandalf. In addition to gaining his name, season 2 also saw the character find his gnarled wooden staff and discover his purpose in life protecting weaker people (such as the harfoots and stoors, progenitors of LOTR’s beloved hobbits) from the forces of darkness.

“In the first rehearsal I ever had, I asked Daniel and [showrunners] J.D. [Payne] and Patrick [McKay] if the Stranger was Gandalf,” Kavenaugh said at a recent Q&A in New York City following the premiere screening of season 2’s final two episodes. “I didn’t quite realize how forward a question that was for my first rehearsal. But Daniel said something that stuck with me: ‘The Stranger, when we meet him, doesn’t know who he is.’ So from then on I didn’t think about it, and just focused on where we were in the story.”

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The Stranger is helped on his way by another mythic figure from Middle-earth: Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear). Although he plays a significant role in the first act of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Bombadil has famously been excised from previous screen adaptations, like Peter Jackson’s movies. A big reason for that is he doesn’t contribute to the plot so much as the world-building of Middle-earth. So when McKay and Payne decided to bring Bombadil into The Rings of Power, they tied him directly to the Stranger’s storyline.

“He’s such a fan favorite, but it’s so challenging to bring him in because in some ways, Tom Bombadil is an anti-dramatic character,” McKay told Entertainment Weekly earlier this year. “You don’t go to Tom Bombadil to advance your narrative, and if you try to, he'll deliberately frustrate you. They say in the Third Age, if you were to give him the One Ring, he wouldn't try to become an evil demi-god with it, he would probably just misplace it and forget he even had it. But if you go to him and just hang out and sing songs, if you wait long enough, Tom will tell you the secrets of the universe."

Related: Breaking down The Rings of Power season 2 battle episode — and how it subverts our LOTR expectations

McKay continued, "so to be able to have a character like that, you have to find just the right way because the story has to move forward and there has to be drama. So we found a way that felt like Tom could come in a way that felt true to his character, but would also advance the story as we continued to move forward.”

So Bombadil pushes the Stranger forward on his way to becoming Gandalf. One of the last scenes of season 2 finds these two mystics sitting by a campfire and singing songs as Gandalf’s signature rune appears in the stars above.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.