Welcome back to Middle-earth! This is the first of EW's recaps for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power; I hope you're all as excited for this journey as I am!

But then again, maybe "welcome back" is the wrong way to start off this story, because The Rings of Power is going to show us facets of J.R.R. Tolkien's mythology that we've never seen on screen before. To my delight, the premiere episode begins with scenes straight out of The Silmarillion. We meet a young Galadriel, playing with her friends in the utopia of Valinor — and then we see how that utopia was lost, thanks to the evil of Morgoth. Our glimpse of the Two Trees is brief, but their destruction (seen as darkness spreading from the roots on up) is very reminiscent of how they are undone by the monstrous Ungoliant in the pages of The Silmarillion. I love that homage, and I love the image of a gigantic mound of elven battle helmets to signify how much they sacrificed to protect Middle-earth from evil.