[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Okay, once again apologies for making one post after another, but for neatness's sake, I hope that this is acceptable.

So when watching episode 4, there were some "dun dun" moments that however on the surface conflicted with each other. The chief of them being Mr. Evil Barliman Butterbur saying, in the final scene, "Sauron is coming, you saw him falling from the sky few days ago". So is the Meteor Man Sauron after all? Not Gandalf? But is that then a horrible red herring?

And what about Adar? He looks like he could be Sauron, speaks like he could be Sauron... I said on the other thread that it was Sauron's "ability" at the beginning of the Second Age to seem to others the way he wanted, or like "one of them". So Arondir sees Adar like an Elf, maybe the Orcs see him as an Orc, we just don't see their point of view.

But then, Adar AND the Meteor Man cannot both be Sauron, could they?

And what more. Sauron must appear rather soon to chat with Celebrimbor and make the Rings! How can he be in two places at once? In three places at once? Four? Twenty? Unless...

Unless the plotlines were all taking place in different times.

So far (I belive) there was nothing (except Elrond and Galdriel in the beginning) that would indicate that the storylines we are following have anything to do with each other. In fact, that was one of the things that has been annoying me for a while, that these stories all are completely separate from each other (especially the hobbits).

But oh wait! You say. There WAS one thing connecting them. It was the meteor. Everyone saw the meteor. Gil-Galad saw the meteor, the Harfoots found the meteor...

Well, unless it was a different meteor. At a different time.

So here goes my theory.

In the story of the Southlands, the meteor Mr. Evil Butterbur saw falling WAS actually Sauron. Sauron is Adar. He is leading his Orcs to dig, to build Mordor - which has totally not been built yet.

In the story of the Harfoots, the meteor was Gandalf - an age later. It is somehow an epilogue to the entire thing, and it will be tied to the rest of the story somehow differently.

In the story of Elrond and Celebrimbor, Sauron will appear as Annatar. He has already made an ouverture to Celebrimbor, something like "I will come to visit you next spring", which is why Celebrimbor the Elf was suddenly so impatient to have a forge built by next spring.

The story of Galadriel and Mr. H. takes place later than the Southlands story. Sauron has meanwhile finished building Mordor, and we will see the Númenoreans arriving to meet Mordor already fully armed and operational. Bonus: Mr. Halbrand is actually not Theo's father. He is Theo's son, or he is Theo himself. See, Theo actually claimed the Lurgom sword (thanks Oddwen), then was asked by Sauron to join him, but somehow his good side prevailed, he refused the kingship of Men that Sauron offered him, and instead ran away on a raft and changed his name to Halbrand. Or somesuch.

***

This would actually solve also a lot for the problems perceived to be a violation of canon: Gandalf would, in fact, NOT appear at the beginning of Second Age. The timeline-compression would not be so massive, in fact, it would allow for inserting everything that is still in the Appendices (thus Amazon should have rights to it) but doesn't seem to have been addressed in the show so far: the fact that Sauron is supposed to first help forge the Rings, then go to Mordor, then conquer everything up to Lindon, then be beaten back by Númenoreans, and only much later after that the whole Númenorean imperialsm and Ar-Pharazon shenanigans and Sauron on Númenor should occur. You could shuffle the plotlines around (ideally with some timejumps, mainly where Galadriel is concerned) to make them make sense in this system.

It is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek theory still, but actually it would make a lot of sense in many ways.