Halls of Stone Review

“Here, we bring the sun to us. At last, it is daybreak once more in our mountain!”

In its own way, The Rings of Power perfectly demonstrates Tolkien’s contention that all good things can be used for evil purposes. The show has some strong writers turning in good scripts and great scenes. A handful of actors — particularly Charles Edwards, Owain Arthur, and Lloyd Owen — routinely give strong performances. The second season has even had moments that elevate the source material. On weeks like this, it’s even almost good. But the show’s flaws are so gaping that even the light of Ëarendil can’t lead it out.

Perhaps the show’s biggest onscreen problem — aside from its aesthetic flaws — is Sauron. Charlie Vickers has the range of a two-by-four, walking through each scene with the same vacant facial expression that somebody on the set has mistaken for ambiguity. You could argue that Sauron is pretty much a void himself, but the show wants us to believe that Annatar is a seductive, beautiful force. Vickers would be a problem if he played Isildur or even Arondir. The fact he’s playing the fucking Lord of the Rings is show-breaking.

And that’s a shame, because it means that this week Vickers is ruining one of this show’s two actually good scripts. Vickers isn’t making Annatar the warm, seductive, dangerous figure he’s supposed to be, but the character on the page is an excellent foil for Celebrimbor. Annatar forces Celebrimbor into what amounts to a stupor of guilt, forced to craft the Rings because he’s cut himself off from the outside world. It’s a damn good depiction of gaslighting, not least because somebody on the set was clearly gaslit into believing that Vickers can act.

The whole episode is dramatically united around moments of hope before the Fall, generally with fathers and sons having their relationships torn apart. The scene with Durin’s Door is quite good, making one of the great scenes of The Lord of the Rings even more tragic (a sign of the lost friendship between Dwarves and Elves). It’s good stuff dramatically. Visually, it has all the pitfalls this show tends to suffer from (weak directing, awful lighting), and that certainly prevents this from being a strong episode of TV. But let’s call it the second best episode of this probably doomed season.