The Very First Halbrand's Line Foreshadowed That Big Sauron Reveal
As everyone who watched The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, or at least skimmed online discussions, knows by now, our old friend Halbrand is actually Dark Lord Sauron under a guise of mortal man.
Not that Halbrand wasn't commonly identified as Sauron by fans, even before his reveal in the final episode. And why he was identified? Well, let's look at some of Halbrand's earlier lines. Starting, in fact, with the very first couple of lines he spoke on screen in Episode 2.
What was his second line? Oh yeah: "Looks can be deceiving". Sure they can, buddy. Sounds even better in the context, given that Halbrand said with an obviously malicious intent, overly pointing out that Galadriel, just fished out of the water by bunch of shipwreck survivors on a floating raft, short of supplies and hope, was not as harmless as she looked, and covertly prodding the fellow survivors to discover the fact which he probably noticed already – that she was an elf.
The very first line, as well as what accompanied it, was, however, even better. What he said to Galadriel, as she was grasping to the edge of the raft? "The tides of fate are flowing. Yours maybe heading in…. Or out."
And he said so while making a hand gesture almost identical to the Jedi mind trick, familiar to every geek out there, after which Galadriel obviously started losing consciousness and nearly drowned, until getting pulled on the raft by another survivor.
Yeah, yeah, never mind giving a ton of material for fanfic-writing shippers, for whom the choice of words would be way more important that one half of their preferred romantic pairing starting their relationship with an attempt to murder the other half for a few scraps of food. This phrase alone was sufficient to place an arrow of suspicion pointed firmly at Halbrand, and the second phrase above cemented the suspicion to the point that a lot of more attentive viewers identified him as Sauron right away.
In fact, we can only ponder what excuse Galadriel might have for failing to do so. It is not like she was exhausted to the point where you barely notice what's going on around you – about half a minute later she was back to her full vigor. No wonder one the chief complains about the series is "Halbrand/Sauron's schemes work only because he's a one-eyed (no pun intended!) creature in the land of the blind".