Meteor guy (RoP and LotRO spoilers)
One of several mysterious elements in the Amazon episodes is an apparently human-looking figure ("The Stranger") who arrives in Middle-earth as a blazing meteor.
In an unsubtle message that may well be a red herring, the impact crater vaguely resembles a flaming eye, but the fire in it isn't hot and doesn't burn.
Searching the interwebs turns up a lot of speculation about who the unidentified figure might be, including Sauron, one of the Istari, or Tom Bombadil.
One thing I didn't see mentioned in the articles I found was the Stranger's actual words. He is incoherent, but I was watching with sub-titles, which revealed that he was attempting to use words of Quenya:
"úrë-"
and
"mana-"
From what I could find, the first is the root meaning "fire" or "heat" (thus appropriate in context), and the second means "who".
I don't think it can be Sauron, who would, as Sam Gamgee might say, "look fairer and feel fouler", and wouldn't arrive in Middle-earth as a meteor-riding amnesiac stammering in High-Elven.
The Istari we know of arrived thousands of years later, and I originally thought the appearance of Gandalf in LotRO's Mordor Besieged was taking rather egregious liberties with the lore, until I found (I can't remember where, but I think somewhere in The History of Middle-earth) that Tolkien himself wrote that Olorin/Gandalf had gone to Middle-earth before, in different guises, and provided counsel to those resisting the Shadow.
Could the show-runners have seized on the same hook as the Mordor Besieged quest writers? Gandalf the White says he was sent back naked (like the Stranger), and also seemed to need some time to fully recover his memories.
But Olorin was a maia of Manwe (associated with air, not fire) and Tolkien suggests Gandalf's fire-affinity was tied to Narya, the elven ring (although he refers to himself as a servant of the secret fire, this is the sacred life-force of Arda that Melkor sought unsuccessfully because it resides with Illuvatar, rather than simple fire itself...). But anyhow, Olorin doesn't seem like a great fit for the Stranger either. The Stranger, while not reeking of evil as one might suppose Sauron should, is still fairly creepy.
