For the last couple of months I've been watching The Rings of Power on Amazon, and witnessing social media losing its mind over the show, mostly to dunk on it. Some of the dunking seems to be the usual bad faith, alt-right complaining that a fantasy show featuring magic and Elves shouldn't also feature people of color, but some of it comes from SFF authors I generally admire, or at least appreciate, poking justifiable holes in the teetering edifice of plot that the show runners have erected here.
So is it a good show or not? Should you watch it? I've just finished the last episode of Season One, having essentially had the big reveal spoiled for me (thanks a lot, juxtaposition of pictures with oblique headlines on episode recaps), so I'm going to wade in. Spoilers abound, as noted in the title.
I did some reading up on the show before I watched it, with someone on CNET speculating that the mysterious Stranger is actually Gandalf, and a few other sources explaining when exactly the show is meant to be set: in the Second Age, after the fall of Morgoth and before the events of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. A few sources suggested it would jump to important points in time, because the first season seems to be set way too early for all the stuff that's depicted in it.
Watching it from the start, there were a lot of familiar names, like Elendil, Isildur, Galadriel, and so forth. We also get introduced to a tribe of nomadic proto-Hobbits, called Harfoots (canonically one of the three tribes of Hobbits, the others being Stours and Fallohides), and to a group of humans in the Southlands, with their protectors/jailers the Elves, in the form of an order of Ranger/Dunedain-like warriors. We also see some business about the relationship between the Dwarves and the Elves, as represented by Durin and Elrond. Most importantly, there are also prophecies about the Fall of Numenor, some weird individuals hunting the mysterious Stranger, and a lot of speculating about which of three possible characters is actually Sauron in disguise.
This is A Lot, and I have to agree that the show doesn't necessarily juggle all of it as well as it could. The Durin/Elrond storyline was a bit lackluster, since there's a bunch of back and forth about Durin's mad that Elrond didn't come to his wedding, and Durin's dad (also named Durin) is mad at the Elves in general. If the intention was to get to the root of why the Dwarves and Elves are mistrustful of one another in later stories, this plot line was a failure. The only way it moves the story forward is in relating it to the search for mithril, which the Elves apparently need so that they don't die. It also lets us get a cameo from the Balrog of Moria, which was fun.
As an aside, throughout the show I've been curious how related it is to the LOTR movies (answer being, only slightly), but an intriguing synchronicity is how Elrond just shows up at Moria, expecting Durin to welcome him with open arms after 14 years of not being in touch. This is just like how in Fellowship of the Ring, Gimli has no idea that Moria fell to the Orcs and the Balrog ages ago. That is to say, everybody seems to be dumb in exactly the same ways.
There's also the storyline in the Southlands, where the Orcs are picking off the humans, and the Numenoreans come to the rescue even though they're super snobby about the Southlanders, who apparently sided with Morgoth in the war. This plot line features a lot of Northern English accents, to the point where it feels like they're channeling Game of Thrones, as well as another MacGuffin in the shape of a weird, evil sword that eventually lets the Orcs create the land of Mordor through a complicated and already existing system of pulleys and tunnels. This storyline is a little more worthwhile, since it touches directly on the question of where and who Sauron is.
We have the proto-Hobbits and the Stranger, which is another plot line rife with misdirection about Sauron. The Stranger's fiery fall to earth leaves him in a crater that looks like the Eye of Sauron from the films, and his magic in subsequent episodes both helps and harms the Harfoots. They then throw us a curveball in the first minutes of the season finale by having the people who were hunting him call him Sauron, but it's all misdirection. It turns out he's an Istar - or wizard! Again, this monkeys with Tolkien's own timeline, but maybe that's not a terrible thing, as this show should be allowed to make its own decisions and surprise us from time to time.
Of course, the question remains of which wizard he is. It seems like they're positioning him to be Gandalf, including giving him Gandalf's lines from the books, but it's also likely that he's Saruman, who was said to be the first and greatest of their order. Personally, I'm hoping it is Gandalf, so that we can see him developing his bond with the Hobbits, but I'm hoping that Season Two gives us the other Istari: Saruman, Radagast and the two unnamed Blue Wizards.
The most time seems to go to Galadriel and her quest to find Sauron. It takes her to Numenor, then to the Southlands, and finally back to Lindon, to witness the treachery of Sauron and the birth of the Three Elven Rings. It turns out Sauron's been with her the whole time, in the form of Halbrand, the mysterious man who rescued her from the sea and has claimed to be the King of the Southlands. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but at least in the first couple of episodes it was fun seeing Galadriel being a woman of action, climbing mountains and killing trolls. The actress who plays her brings an elfin quality doesn't exactly look like Cate Blanchett but feels appropriate.
In terms of how well it all hangs together, I don't think it will stand up to close scrutiny (which is not what I'm doing here). It would have been nice to tie in the Harfoot storyline better to the rest of it, beyond the fake-out about the Stranger being Sauron, but that's for Season Two, I guess. The Elf/Dwarf business, as I said, left me a little cold and I'm glad it didn't feature in this final episode.
Much more positive is the aesthetic. It ties in with the movies really well, apart from the Southlands and the Harfoots, which are justifiably less developed than in the later works. What I like about how the show looks is that it's immediately recognizable as Middle Earth, and it pulls you in with that familiarity.
So do I like the show? Yes, I do. The first couple of episodes were, perhaps, the strongest and the best at pulling me in, both with the reassuringly familiar aesthetic and the central mysteries, to the point that it didn't really matter if everything else was a bit silly. And as I pointed out earlier, while there are spots that don't seem to jibe with what I know of the Second Age in Tolkien's writings, it's more important that the show tell its own story. So for example... Isildur dies in this, or seems to, but is that going to be walked back, or is it a different Isildur? In Tolkien's legendarium the same names appear many times over different epochs.
Another thing I appreciate is that it's not a retread of Game of Thrones, apart from some of the Southlands business. We see characters that we know, at different points in their lives, but I think that overall it feels like every cultural aspect could lead into the Hobbit culture or Gondorian culture we'll see later in LOTR. There's some politicking in Numenor, but it's not reduced to the same parade of sociopaths that populate Westeros, so I'm happy with the tone overall.
If I had to give the show a rating, I'd say 3 out of 5, with potential for better in the next season. I want to see what Halbrand does now that he's been unmasked as Sauron, how he creates the Seven Dwarven Rings and the Nine, to create the Ringwraiths, and I also want to see what Nori and the Stranger get up to on their trip to Rhun. I'm also curious if they'll show the founding of Gondor and the Dunedain and the Shire.
If they keep me coming back week after week, as Season One did, then I'll be happy. Middle Earth is a secondary world I never seem to tire of, so it's been a pleasure seeing it again.
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