TheQuartering
According to BoundingIntoComics:
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power showrunner J.D. Payne provided another bogus answer as to why he and his co-showrunner Patrick McKay and Prime Video decided to include a wizard in the show.
The Rings of Power includes a character the show calls The Stranger played by Daniel Weyman.
A portion of the story follows this character’s story as he arrives on Middle-earth as comet or meteor and then aids the Hobbits in their migration and eventually defends them from a number of minions of Sauron who were tracking him and believed he was Sauron.
When asked by Vulture’s Jackson McHenry as to why one of the Istari is included in the show that is set in Tolkien’s Second Age, Payne replied, “When we were laying out the menu, so to speak, that we felt would be in a classic Tolkienian epic, there were certain ingredients that would have to be part of it: Elves, dwarves, halflings — in the form of Harfoots. It was hard for us to think of a Middle-earth tale that did not have a wizard in it.”
Payne continued, “We also found hints within the text that, while the wizards’ most prominent role was in the Third Age, some of the Istari wandered unknown among the beings of Middle-earth even earlier than that.”
Finally, he concluded, “Whether that’s one of the ones that are named, like Gandalf or Saruman, or other ones, we will leave to the series to unveil.”
This answer is completely bogus as it directly contradicts Tolkien’s writings. Not only that, but it is another piece of an ever-growing mound of evidence that Payne and his co-showrunner Patrick McKay are simply liars.
First, McKay and Payne previously indicated the show did not have the rights to a number of Tolkien’s writings such as The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales, but they did have the rights to The Lord of the Rings books proper as well as their appendices.
