by Robert Bouffard, Editor
Season One of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was a massive heap of meh. For every interesting plot thread, character, or moment, there seemed to be two more which were completely baffling. For instance, we have young Galadriel and Elrond in the Second Age of Middle-earth, yet we’re following some Hobbit-adjacents? Or, while we’re seeing the glory days of Khazad-dûm, yet we’re spending time with completely fabricated characters in a region dubbed “The Southlands”? It was just frustrating as a Lord of the Rings fan that when we had the chance to see a long form adaptation of a fascinating time in the world’s history, it was in the hands of two guys — J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay — whose most notable Hollywood experience was uncredited writing on Star Trek Beyond and Jungle Cruise. The inexperience was evident, and it was worrisome.
Thankfully, while Season Two harbors a lot of the same issues as its predecessor, it is a step up. Without the need to introduce and develop roughly half a dozen storylines, it can hit the ground running. After a season of poorly done intrigue about who and where Sauron is, the opening scene shows how he gained his Halbrand (Charlie Vickers) form, and came to encounter Galadriel (Morfydd Clark). It was refreshing to see, and fully acknowledging that Halbrand is Sauron fully lets him loose, allowing his plot thread to be far and away the best of the season.
After Sauron heads to the newly-formed Mordor to trick Adar (Sam Hazeldine, taking over for Joseph Mawle) into bringing his Orc army to the Elf city of Eregion, Sauron arrives at said city’s doorstep looking to partner up with Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) to create more Rings of Power, on top of the three Elven ones which were created at the end of Season One. In another uneven season (less so than the prior one), the dynamic between Sauron and Celebrimbor is unwavering in its quality, displaying the heights that the show can reach. Their scenes are no more than tense conversations inside Celebrimbor’s forge, yet they’re the most riveting, edge-of-your-seat filmmaking that the show has to offer.
Sauron worms his way back into Celebrimbor’s good graces after their dramatic falling out by telling him half-truths, saying no, he’s not Halbrand, but Annatar, an emissary from the Valar. Celebrimbor, who obviously enjoyed Halbrand’s company in the Season One finale, is all too eager to accept this deception which allows Sauron to begin earning his mantle of Sauron the Deceiver. Their interplay is fascinating, as Celebrimbor has a poorly concealed hubris and drive to overtake his grandfather Fëanor as the greatest Elven smith to ever live. And Annatar knows how to play right into this, as over the course of the season, he subtly manipulates Celebrimbor to help him forge more Rings (which also leads to some of the season’s best visual work).
Again, this is the show at its best. Season One had Sauron playing into the depths of Galadriel’s desires, and Season Two has him playing into Celebrimbor. Displaying his power as being more than just of force is effective. His threat is more existential than an army of Orcs — it’s about twisting people to do his will when they think they’re doing their own. Vickers and Edwards’ interplay is perfect as well. It’s as Shakespearean as any live action adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing has ever felt, with two powerhouse performers bringing their all to the material. Vickers is conniving yet gentle, evil yet charismatic. A far cry from the giant, black armor that we know from the Peter Jackson films, but we’re reaching the place where we can start picturing how this guy got to that point. And Edwards brings nearly all of the pathos to the season, as we see his muddled desire to do right by the peoples of Middle-earth intersecting with his own ambition, while both are being undercut by Annatar’s manipulation. Since it’s so character-focused, getting the time to develop over eight episodes, I have a hard time imagining this performance topped throughout the rest of the series.
It’s quite important to the overall quality of the season that Annatar and Celebrimbor are as deeply compelling as they are, because like Season One, a lot of the rest of what’s going on is hit-or-miss.
Khazad-dûm was a standout in Season One, yet the departure of Elrond (Robert Aramayo) takes away a lot of the heart that was present in that storyline between him and Durin IV (Owain Arthur). Even still, Durin IV’s relationship with his father (Peter Mullan) being the sticking point is compelling enough. After their falling out in Season One, we get a neatly human story about fathers and sons and the pressures of family and leadership. Durin IV’s wife Disa (Sophia Nomvete) adds a lot to this, often playing the interceder between the men. And on a more meta level, it is nice to see Dwarves taken this seriously in a Middle-earth adaptation, as they’ve been portrayed pretty goofily in the six theatrical films. It’s nice to see their agency and desires placed on the same level as the Elves or Men. The latter is where Season Two really gets iffy.
In Middle-earth, just outside Mordor, there’s Isildur (Maxim Baldry). Presumed dead after the explosion of Mount Doom, his father and the rest of the Númenóreans left, so he’s forced to find a way to fend for himself while alone and apart from everything he’s ever known. When he makes his way to the Númenórean colony of Pelargir and starts telling the people about things like aqueducts, things start to look up. Isildur looks like the guy who will go on to co-found Gondor. But once it becomes clear the show is more interested in his will-they-won’t-they relationship with newcomer Estrid (Nia Towle), Isildur’s storyline unfortunately becomes a bit dull. It doesn’t help that he’s often paired with Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin), whose moody teenager shtick doesn’t fit inside the larger world of Middle-earth. Granted, he’s markedly improved from the previous season; it’s just not what I’d like to be spending time with when there are fantastical concepts and ideological machinations which are given a short shrift.
Most notably, Númenor, which has the potential to be one of the cooler and more intriguing parts of the entire show, given that it covers Aragorn’s descendants such as Isildur and his father Elendil (Lloyd Owen), has consistently been a letdown. McKay and Payne are clearly more adept at tackling the more existential and spiritual themes that arise between Celebrimbor and Annatar than the political push-and-pull within Númenor. After the death of the star-shaped island’s king, there’s a power struggle between the king’s daughter, Queen Regent Míriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), and Pharazôn (Trystan Gravelle). How each one gains or loses power is never quite clear — there are Eagles and sea beasts and pieces of paper, and small crowds made up of what seem to be the most fickle people to exist. While Owen is one of the best performers on the show, and Addai-Robinson is no slouch either, it’s really a bummer how much the palantír has been dropped on Númenor thus far, especially knowing where it goes in the source material. If anything, the Nicholas Adams-written Episode Five, “Halls of Stone,” shows that he should’ve been kept on, if not given more episodes to write on, after the show’s writers’ room purge. Adams also does great character work, setting up Kemen (Leon Wadham) as a Joffrey-like figure in the same episode, and gives some favorites good moments to shine. It’s the most politically and narratively lucid episode of the season, showing he knows how to take McKay and Payne’s broad ideas and crystallize them into a good script. It’s troubling that he’s gone.
It’s also no coincidence that the only Adams-written episode is sans Harfoots, which for my money is the worst creative decision the show has made. I understand the desire to throw Hobbits into the story because of the audience’s wider familiarity with them, but they are so wildly incongruous with literally everything else about the show that it’s hard for me to invest in them, let alone not be angered by their mere inclusion. Part of the reason the Númenor plot is a head-scratcher is because it feels like we get five to 10 minutes at a time on that island. Not nearly enough time to adapt the events that Tolkien actually came up with. It’s a cool concept to explore Rhûn, the eastern, desert part of Middle-earth which Nori (Markella Kavenagh), Poppy (Megan Richards), and The Stranger (Daniel Weyman) explore and get into hijinks throughout the season. But it being so disconnected to everything else going on — apart from vague mentions of The Stranger’s (who Season One’s finale identified is a Wizard) destiny being to help Middle-earth in some way — stops any momentum the show builds dead in its tracks. And this is mostly because it took two full seasons for the show to finally, officially reveal the identity of The Stranger, whose name is spoken in the Season Two finale. There are plenty of hints dropped about who it might be, but while Sauron is gaining strength and his enemies are mobilizing to fight him, watching a Wizard bumble around, gaining one part of his identity per episode like Han Solo getting his dice or whatever in Solo, is frankly maddening. Instead of being able to connect to some characters, the show seems to think there needs to be a dully contrived mystery to follow to keep it compelling, when the ideological and physical fight against Sauron is plenty compelling in its own right.
This leads to two of the show’s larger issues: its pacing and its proclivity towards references for their own sake. As for the former, the showrunners said on the House of R podcast that they see people’s criticisms, but want to be clear that they obsess over pacing. That’s great and all, but obsession doesn’t always yield positive results. In this case, they’re less Shohei Ohtani obsessing over baseball and more New Girl’s Winston obsessing over his puzzle. Putting aside whether Hobbits and Wizards are “supposed to” be around in the Second Age as an abstract discussion of fidelity to the source material, it’s just a blatant, transparent attempt to show audiences the signifiers of what they know a Lord of the Rings story to be. Throw in Episode Four, “Eldest,” which is just “(Not So) Deep Cuts for Their Own Sake” the episode, with Ents, Barrow-wights, Shire mentions, and the inclusion of Tom Bombadil (an admittedly delightful Rory Kinnear, who deserves Amazon money for his role(s) in Men alone), and it’s difficult to not feel cynical over a large-scale production which otherwise seems to come from a place of genuine respect and love for Tolkien’s writings.
Ultimately, I tend to talk myself off that ledge precisely because of that palpable love, so instead of cynicism, I just feel let down. Especially since there are so many flashes of brilliance in the show — Vickers and Edwards’ performances, the gradual development of Galadriel, the general depiction of the Dwarves, the sense of fighting evil despite insurmountable odds — it just becomes that much more disappointing when, as a viewer, you can’t get the geography or time span down, it feels like Middle-earth is sparsely populated outside our main ensemble, new mysteries are introduced (now that we know who The Stranger is, we get to wonder who Rhûn’s Dark Wizard is! Yay!), or when compelling concepts aren’t given the time they need to breathe. I mentioned Númenor, but another example is how the show keeps teasing Adar and his love for the Orcs — their agency is repeatedly touched upon, but events in the finale show we might not get that anymore, making me wonder what all the setup of that concept had been about for two seasons.
I didn’t think I’d get to this point so quickly, but my enthusiasm for the whole Rings of Power project is dwindling. As I found myself shrugging during the lows of anything not involving Celebrimbor and Annatar in the finale, I was almost forgetting the highs of the previous episode’s battle, which is just indicative of how much the show’s quality can vacillate. If there are just three more eight-episode seasons to go, I’ll likely stick it out, as, much like the mafia, those highs pull me back in. With more iconic moments to adapt, and yet another season under their belt, I’ll keep their obvious love and admiration for Tolkien in mind and give the showrunners the benefit of the doubt.
Rating: It Was Just Okay
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video
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