The funniest character in The Rings of Power is an orc. He is also the strongest case the show has made, across three seasons, for giving orcs another look.
Marnûkh, played by Adam Young, arrives in Season 3 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which started rolling out on Prime Video on November 11. Four episodes into the season, fans can’t stop talking about him. On paper, he is the franchise’s new Gollum.
Two elves follow an orc into Gundabad
The premise is a road trip with bad odds. Marnûkh agrees to help Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) get inside the orc army at Gundabad. On the way, he gives them whatever he’s willing to reveal about the plan of Sauron (Charlie Vickers) to forge the one ring to rule them all.
For the whole trip, both elves wrestle with their instincts, which tell them an orc can’t be trusted. They follow him regardless, and that decision creates one of the strongest dynamics the show has had in its three seasons.
By the end of the quest, things go badly for Arondir (no spoilers here). Getting there is still the most fun the series has had with a trio of characters.
Why he works as a Gollum figure
A big part of what made Samwise Gamgee (Sean Astin) and Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) work alongside Gollum was how badly they fit together. The two hobbits knew each other completely, and then they had to travel with a creature whose mind ran on entirely different rules.
Marnûkh takes that same slot as he guides Arondir and Galadriel toward Sauron: the creature the heroes have no choice but to trust. Those are big shoes. Gollum is arguably the most iconic figure in the franchise and easily the most quoted. Any conversation about Lord of the Rings eventually lands on someone saying “My precious.”
The timing adds to the joke. Next year Gollum gets his own film, The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, directed by Andy Serkis, who played him in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit trilogy. That puts two untrustworthy creatures in Middle-earth, one at each end of the release calendar.
Orcs with an inner life
Marnûkh goes further than Gollum ever did. He gets viewers to feel compassion for a creature they assumed they already understood.
Jackson’s films treat orcs as monsters with almost no depth, a dark mirror image of the elves. They march behind Sauron more or less blindly, and until Season 3 that was the franchise’s standard take on them.
Showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have used orcs to add dimension to the Middle-earth creatures that tend to get the worst treatment in adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s story. In Seasons 1 and 2 that job went to Adar, played by Joseph Mawle in Season 1 and Sam Hazeldine in Season 2, and fans were obsessed with him. Marnûkh is the next orc to carry it.
He is compassionate and speaks like a poet. While other orcs give Sauron blind faith, he tries to do what he believes is right.
As the show tells it, orcs are looking for somewhere to belong. Marnûkh concluded that war wasn’t the route there and acted on his own, which is why he’s kind of the best.