“There's a lot going on right now,” The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power co-showrunner Patrick McKay told me on the set in England in August 2025.
At the moment, McKay is catching his breath as the crew resets to shoot a quiet but key moment from the Prime Video series’ upcoming third season. The massive production has taken over a large section of Windsor Great Park, which has been used as an outdoor setting for numerous films in the past, including Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and The Huntsman: Winter’s War.
It’s a gargantuan setup, with dozens of vehicles, tents and trailers nearby, along with a small army of actors in full Orc and Elvish regalia. And it happens to be just one aspect of a massive logistical puzzle that has to happen to make the show possible. “It's a [huge] production every time we do this. We have four units running right now, including ours,” notes McKay. “One unit is over in a place called Frensham (about 25 miles south of Windsor), shooting [a scene] with the dwarf characters. Then we have another unit that is shooting various sundry action sequences back at Shepperton Studios, and a fourth unit is prepping [scenes] we will be shooting in a few weeks.”
When it returns for its third season on November 11, Rings of Power will be making a significant time jump in the storyline. Season 3 will be set five years after the events of Season 2, when Sauron did away with his disguise and sent the Elves into retreat as his armies overran Middle-earth. McKay embraced making such a pronounced jump in the narrative timeline, because it drops the viewer right in the center of the action, making them catch up to the story.
“We really love the idea of throwing the viewer in in a way that is a completely fresh start. J.D. Payne, my co-showrunner and I, we're huge admirers of shows that have done this kind of [time jump] before, like Battlestar Galactica and Halt and Catch Fire,” he says. “That can be really fun for a viewer.”
According to McKay, it’s also an opportunity to do a soft reboot and send the series in a new direction. “Hopefully, this season is a great jumping-on point for fans,” he says. “And it truly starts with people talking about the One Ring.”
He admits that filming the first two seasons back to back was an enormous strain on everyone involved, and believes the upcoming season will benefit from having more breathing room. “I think our goal for Season 3 is really to blow the doors off the hinges,” McKay says. “We're really proud of Seasons One and Two, but …for us, now, in some ways, we're starting a whole new story. This is turning the page on the show.”
The showrunners have already benefited from the fact that their series is not based on a detailed narrative like The Fellowship of the Ring or The Hobbit. While it’s a prequel to the LOTR stories set in the Second Age of Middle-earth, Rings of Power is not a direct adaptation of any single Tolkien work; instead it draws mainly on Tolkien’s background lore and appendices for inspiration. That has allowed the show’s creatives to forge their own path. Tolkien himself, in a correspondence published in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, said this era in Middle-earth was a dark age, where “not very much of its history is (or need be) told. “
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/rings-of-power-season-3-time-jump-orc-arc
