Thoughts below, including several cases where my speculations based on the teaser proved wrong…

-first off, people checking out the French language version of the teaser have reported that the line about “he worms his way inside your head” line is delivered by the French dubbing artist for Adar, so my own speculations were off base there.

-secondly, most internet reactors seem to think Weepy McPermastubble, from the opening of the teaser is Charlie Vickers as Halbrand/Sauron. I bow to their superior knowledge of and interest in this man’s incredibly bland face.

-thirdly, most commentators are linking the teaser’s icy explosion to the evil fortress of Forodwaith, and Galadriel’s kind of lame expedition there. (I confess I disliked all the low-rent wannabe-PJ action baloney in that segment, and had largely blocked the sequence out except for the three or so seconds where Galadriel’s channeling Abraham Van Helsing instead of Movie Legolas).

-fourthly, the closest analyzers of the shot of the person holding onto the rope in the windstorm think it’s our two young harfoot ladies. Yay for Poppy being part of the gang again.

-fifthly, when Sauron is being arrested and gestures with his hands, two of the elf arrestors turn and attack a third, who stands in between them. Some are interpreting it as Sauron puppeteering random innocent people with the One Ring (which is kind of a lame and unsubtle way of interpreting how the Evil Maguffin works but par for the course with Tolkien adaptations). But it could just be that he’s corrupted those two particular elves with his powers of persuasion. Now, onto the behind the scenes video

-first twenty seconds of behind the scenes: Morfydd Clark saying that Galadriel is now driven by a higher purpose and becoming more connected to the peoples of Middle Earth. Potentially good news, as a quasi-acknowledgment that the character in season one was laser-focused on her own priorities with a very limited degree of sensitivity towards the needs and troubles of others. Potentially bad news, as it could make the character even more self-righteous and annoying. Could go either way.

-In related news, we discover in these first twenty seconds that Gil-Galad has expanded his wardrobe but the crew members in charge of said clothes still hate Benjamin Walker (Gil-Galad’s portrayer) and are trying to make him look bad. (Is it because he’s American…?)

-Random blah blah from Charlie Vickers about Sauron, over footage of Halbrand on a horse and separately, orc footage. Voiceover emphasizes Sauron being out in the open this season; seemingly meant as a reassurance that we’re not going to get a replay of the bait and switch about Sauron’s identity that we saw in the first season.

-0:31: Recast Adar seen in profile in daylight. Makeup looks much better from this angle.

-0:48: Ismael Cruz Cordova talking about his character Arondir being touched by darkness and suffering a massive emotional hit. Footage of Arondir at a funeral pyre. Nazanin Boniadi, who played Arondir’s love interest Bronwyn, took a break from acting starting in 2022 to focus on her advocacy for oppressed Iranian women, which I suspect is code for “Hollywood doesn’t like me talking about bad things happening in Iran, so I can’t get roles anymore.” All this, not to mention Weepy Theo from the teaser, seems to point to an early death for Bronwyn, a character who started out promising and seemed to get worse and worse in terms of coherent characterization as the first season went on.

-0:49 to 0:53: brief glimpses of the Numenorean court; Pharazon is dressed as in the confrontation with the Eagle in the teaser. Earien’s actress talks about the chessboard being set and now the pieces are starting to move. Again, feels like it is meant as a reassurance to people who had problems with the pacing of season one, as with Benjamin Walker’s next comment about “It really feels like the gloves come off.”

-0:57 to 0:59: filming of Dwarf characters on an interior set; seems to be Durin IV/Disa’s experiences during the structural collapses in Khazad-dum which were seen in the teaser. Unclear whether Disa’s line “brace yourself” is in or out of character. If in character, it seems to imply that she’s engineered this situation somehow, continuing her Lady Macbeth of Moria vibe from the end of the last season.

-1:00 and following: Galadriel and other elves riding off an Elvish causeway or bridge to an area with a couple of quaint, not very Elvish looking buildings. Pretty white horsies.

-1:02: footage of Gil-Galad standing there with his lips moving while a posh British voice that doesn’t sound like Walker’s Gil-Galad talks about “he must not escape.” I assume they’re talking about Sauron/Annatar. Maybe the line just sounds weird to me because Tarkin’s “He must not be allowed to escape” (about Kenobi in A New Hope) is burned that deeply into my brain and the similar but different phrasing is throwing me.

-1:06: Cleanshaven actor with Sean Connery like face, gray wig, gray velvet robes, and elf ears rises to his feet, looking concerned. Cirdan? Celeborn? Adar flashback? Most people seem to think this is Sam Hazeldine, the recast Adar, enacting some flashback scene in Forodwaith pertaining to Adar’s claims in season one to have killed (“split in two”) Sauron. This elf does have a similar face shape and mouth to the actor (nose seems off somehow), but his cloak and hair look genuinely silvery to me rather than just snowed on, and that does not seem consistent with the kind of look the dark-haired, scar-faced proto-Orc would be wearing as recently as “whenever he thought he killed Sauron.” Looking over the known new male cast members, it seems like Rory Kinnear is the only sort of plausible candidate besides Hazeldine.

-1:11: Celebrimbor talks about having an unexpected visitor. Not unexpected to us, buddy.

-1:17 and following: Durin III hefting a battle axe with one of the Seven Rings on his finger. Then the Durin III and Durin IV portrayers engage in a little lame humor. I hear good things everywhere about Owain Arthur, Durin IV’s portrayer, but I get a vibe of him not being quite in sync with Peter Mullan (Durin III) here. He’s like “haha, whatever, dude.”

-1:28: Nori’s back.

-Random footage of the crew shooting in what looks like the spaghetti western parts of Spain (not necessarily Almeria). Some viewers think they can spot Poppy as well as Nori here.

-1:36 and following: Elendil in simple clothes on a rocky seashore, surrounded by armed men. His clothes seem similar to the sea monster bait person in the teaser.

-1:39 and following: Behind the scenes on a sequence involving a cave set with webbed up orcs. Isildur’s portrayer talks about how the set is almost too scary to go into while trying to distract us from the fact that the storyboard looking thing behind him includes a spider. Shelob?

-1:45 and following: Behind the scenes on the Stranger levitating someone in a desert setting. (For the record, telekinesis is not a confirmed power of the Istari in the books. ROP probably borrowed this from the wirefu wizard’s duel in PJ’s Fellowship of the Ring movie.)

-1:50: Nice glimpse of an Elvish courtyard, possibly Ost-in-Edhil, probably at Bray Studios based on previously leaked images. Something about the layout of the set more than the decorations make me think of Hammer’s old Mitteleurope village at Bray, built for Brides of Dracula and expanded over the years.

-1:52: I tend to regard the writer-producers of this show as a couple of well-meaning bumblers who are out of their league in dealing with the complex mythos and overbearing studio execs. This moment, where one of them half-joking claims to have gotten lost in his own set complex, is not helping.

-2:07: Singing Dwarf-women. Somehow I don’t think they’re performing anything as catchy as “Heigh-Ho!” (No, I was not a fan of “Hymn to the Rocks” from the previous season, why do you ask?)

-2:12: In between bits of pointless battle scenes, Robert Aramayo (Elrond) once again tries to reassure people who had problems with season one’s pacing. Shortly after this, we see Celebrimbor and Durin IV together on a set that seems a bit angular for Ost-in-Edhil and a bit overlit for Khazad-dum.

-2:19: To me, this bit looks like Isildur’s horse upstaging him once again, but others claim that it’s Galadriel or one of the elves riding with her who’s being dragged by the horse.

-2:27: Woman in white robes plunges into the water. The equivalent scene in the teaser seemed to be Miriel, but this woman looks a lot paler. Cut to a zombie clown king reacting to the presence of a blonde, seemingly injured elf in the forest. Cut to Disa screaming indoors somewhere holding a roundish stone that some people take to be a palantir; IMO it looks too ovoid for that. Cut to Galadriel on horseback in the forest. End of behind the scenes video.

Main takeaway: the glimpses of scenes are generally cool rather than annoying, FWIW. It’s interesting how much of the voiceover and soundbiting is devoted to carefully worded variants on “no, really, this time it’s cool. Stuff is happening, pacing is faster, and Galadriel is less of a jerk,” with a couple of nods to the production design, which is probably the most widely praised thing about the show.