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Review: Shadow and Flame

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What a weird show.

P&M have finally figured out some of the fundamentals of drama. It would be easy (and somewhat unfair) to say they’re just learning how to do drama by drawing from Tolkien, but “Shadow and Flame” proves that the successes of this season weren’t a fluke. P&M have a creative vision, and it’s one they’ve realized more or less competently this year.

To a degree. Everybody has acknowledged that this show’s pacing is ass. But it becomes most clear in the season finales. I couldn’t tell you, two years on, what the hell happened in the first season of Rings of Power. And this season, while at least structured around three specific, thematically related events — the decline of Eregion, Moria, and Númenor — doesn’t do much better on the pacing front. By the end of this season, Númenor is… closer to becoming Atlantis. So is Moria. Eregion has the decency to actually fall. But the other two stories feel like they’re just waiting for a finale. It’s exhausting. I can’t imagine they’ll do more than another two seasons, but man. There are episodes where seasons happen and seasons where episodes happen.

And those are the three plots that more-or-less unambiguously work. The now-Gandalf/Nori plot doesn’t resolve so much as abruptly end, in a way Chris Chibnall might applaud. Once again, we’re getting a finale is mostly structured around teases of the next season. Ciarán Hinds makes a great Saruman, drawing more from the books’ tantalizing, seductive character than Christopher Lee’s operatic evil (a respectable, even necessary choice). But he’s there to abruptly displace the Stoors in an extremely contrived development — I’d say it’s out of character, but we don’t really have an idea who this version of Saruman is. Now-Gandalf concludes the season as he began it — wandering in the desert and having things explained to him.

That’s a running theme here. Galadriel also has a lot of things explained to her in lieu of doing things. Characters disappear from the story for long periods of time only to return and do… not much. Isildur returns and reunites with That Kid from Season 1 right before getting captured by Númenor’s Madison Cawthorn. And most egregiously, the promise of Adar gets thrown out the window when the Orcs — suddenly and without explanation — murder him (though apparently we can Simon Tolkien for Adar sticking around this long). We had a moment where we could have seen Orcs developing an agenda beyond that of Sauron, and that got chucked out the window.

At the same time, Adar’s murder by his own children is thematically in touch with the rest of the season. Durin watching his father sacrifice himself fighting the Balrog makes for the defining setpiece of the entire show. This season is about something in a way its predecessor wasn’t. And the death of Celebrimbor, at the hands of his tearful foster-son/brother/lover? Sauron, elevates both characters (even if it gives Celebrimbor an obnoxious title drop).…

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Doomed to Die Review

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maybe not. But also, what the fuck?

To Payne & McKay’s credit, they’re finding new ways to fuck this up. Instead of mangling a version of the show that wasn’t working anyway, they’re juxtaposing the best parts of The Rings of Power with… weirdly mean-spirited fridgings? Elrond/Galadriel incest? The A-plots of about five different episodes? There was a good 40% of this episode that worked, and the rest of it felt like a P&M script.

Celebrimbor is the part that works. Annatar keeping Celebrimbor in a time prison, where he forges rings as Eregion burns, is glorious, taking one of Tolkien’s most dramatic stories and injecting it with fresh human emotion. The scene where Sauron tells Celebrimbor about being tortured by Morgoth is the single best bit of writing of this show’s two seasons (Charlie Vickers starts coming to life when he gets to be a sneering villain). And Celebrimbor having to lose a part of his body to save his soul forms a nice parallel with Frodo and Maedhros. That part of the episode is genuinely phenomenal and tragic, everything you’d want from a filmed Silmarillion.

The rest of the episode is… so, what the fuck? We’re dealing with some George R. R. Martin-style plotting, where we’re constantly groping for new bits of plot. Tonally, we’re doing some weird stuff, and putting dramatic emphasis on bizarre things (the horse? the lady elf archer getting shot to death?). Galadriel continues to be The Rings of Power‘s Thirteenth Doctor, getting lectured at while breathlessly intoning words of motivation to men in despair. It’s not that Tolkien was innocent of making women the support systems of men, but like, Éowyn and the Witch-king this ain’t.

There’s not a whole lot to say here. It’s Part 1 of the finale. Part 2 is the episode where we get to have opinions. But in the meantime, we’re stuck waiting around to see just how badly P&M will fuck this up. …

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Where Is He? Review

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Like not-Gandalf in “Where Is He?”, The Rings of Power faces a crossroads. Pre-season finales have a tricky part to play. They need to set the stage for the ending, synopsizing the season to date and making an argument for how it should end. By that standard, “Where Is He?” is a shining success that capitalizes on all the most compelling parts of The Rings of Power‘s second season.

Perversely, this makes me even more concerned about the finale. We haven’t seen a Payne & McKay script since Season 1’s final episode, which was… I think they revealed Galadriel’s squeeze was Sauron? Maybe Celebrimbor forged the Three Rings? They’ve gained some competence since then. Season 2 has proved they know how to staff a writers’ room. The season’s good episodes exist because P&M allowed them to. To deny their role in the better episodes of this season would be as disingenuous as saying that Seinfeld only worked because of Larry David. Do I trust these guys to land a season finale? After last time, basically no, but for the first time, I’m actively hoping — perhaps futilely — they don’t fail instead of surrendering to the seemingly inevitable.

Not that “Where Is He?” is a masterpiece. Galadriel’s role in the episode (and most of the season) is to get lectured at by Adar and other male characters. She gets leered at for the entire episode, making few decisions except spilling her guts to Adar and unwittingly helping him to besiege Eregion. The fascist dweebs whining about diversity should be assuaged by this move, which outdoes Tolkien on the reactionary front.

The series’ usual faults are present. Charlie Vickers remains positively ligneous as Annatar, even as the scripts handle his character pretty well. The not-Gandalf and Harfoot subplots lack any momentum (The Rings of Power‘s pacing has only improved since Season 1 by dint of things actually happening this season). The Stoors evoke (probably on purpose) the quasi-Aboriginal children from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome in a racially uncomfortable way. And not-Gandalf getting the Dagobah treatment from Tom Bombadil is a downright grating piece of Hero’s Journey-ism that contributes nothing to the season’s saga of complicity, guilt, and sundered families (I yelled at my TV when I heard Tom Bombadil say “many that live deserve death”).

But once again, these flaws are mostly frustrating because the meat of the episode is so solid. Sanaa Hamri is TROP‘s best director to date, creating drama with her shot choices that aren’t there in the script. An aerial shot of Númenor that directly parallels the island with Minas Tirith is downright jaw-dropping, as is the night-to-day rotating shot of Sauron in Eregion. Hamri even draws out some tension in the not-Gandalf/Bombadil scenes with a slightly unnerving low angle. And the Jaws homage on the shores of Númenor rivals anything Peter Jackson ever shot.

The rest of the episode is fairly excellent. Celebrimbor takes an Othello-like turn as his Iago Annatar coerces him into creating the H-Rings, torn apart by guilt and gaslighting.…

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Halls of Stone Review

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“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.…

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Review: Eldest

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A week ago, I would have expected much worse from The Rings of Power than “slight structural mess.” I’m shocked the show has graduated to “collection of good scenes with some real gems in the mix.” If last week’s episode was an unexpected step in the right direction, “Eldest” stumbles off the trail a little bit before more or less getting back on track. I’m still not optimistic for the season finale, but seeing The Rings of Power embrace quality even for a minute is pretty unexpected.

After “The Eagle and the Sceptre” spent its runtime exploring how power changes families, “Eldest” goes smaller, focusing on the development of Tolkien’s characters before they became legends. The episode puts its characters in early chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring, essentially turning them into fantasy protagonists embarking on a quest. The strongest scenes are the ones with The Stranger and Tom Bombadil (and having Rory Kinnear play this role so soon after Men is funny). Letting not-Gandalf be a confused Istar in a post-regenerative haze figure out his purpose works better when Bombadil is leaning over his shoulder, instead of a couple of hobbits constantly asking “who is the Stranger?” Bombadil could easily be fanservice, especially in this show, but here he serves a thematic purpose, as the “Eldest” who shows not-Gandalf the nature of names and substance (“Who are you?” “Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer”). It’s a nice little rebuke to this show’s exhausting tendency towards guessing games about a character’s identity – or at least a redirection. We’re graduating from JJ Abramsesque puzzle boxes to Steven Moffat-ish games.

Sadly, there’s still fanservice. Galadriel and Elrond’s encounter with the Barrow-wights adds fuck all to the episode, doing little other than extending the runtime and homaging one of the least interesting chapters of The Lord of the Rings. The whole sequence fucks the episode’s pacing. While things are finally starting to happen in this show, fewer things are happening this week than last. That would be fine, but four episodes into an eight-episode season, it constitutes a massive pacing problem.

There are other nice bits. Galadriel talking about her experience of Nenya actually lets us understand what the Three Rings do. The encounter with the Stoors is funny, and shows that tyrannical matriarchs are a hereditary problem in their tribe long before Sméagol’s grandmother comes along. And it’s always good to see some Ents. This episode isn’t great, but I’m shocked it doesn’t suck either.…

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Review: The Eagle and the Sceptre

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Shit. I liked it.

That was a nicely done hour of television about how the lure of power thwarts family relationships and uses good intentions for evil ends. It’s the best original work to come out of the Legendarium in 12 years. Did The Rings of Power always have the capacity to do an episode like this? I’m not sure, but a Hannibal writer sure was able to pull this off.

Perhaps the main thing this did right was focusing on the show’s more interesting plot threads. We’re finally back to the Númenóreans, who provide some really strong drama. The scenes with Isildur are genuinely moving, showing him as a guilt-ridden young man desperate to make a mark. It turns him from the corruptible scapegoat of The Fellowship of the Ring‘s prologue into a tragic figure.

Helen Shang makes similar overtures with Celebrimbor and the Durins. They fall prey to Annatar’s machinations because of their desire to make a mark or survive. The Durins want to save Khazad-dûm and preserve their way of life, so they provide Celebrimbor with materials to forge the Seven Dwarf-rings. Celebrimbor is willing to lie to Gil-galad to save his legacy. Characters who come across in appendix form as tools become sympathetic, even noble figures whose attempts to help are doomed by history.

There are lots of neat details too. Adar having an Orc family humanizes the Orcs in a way I would never have imagined last season. The Ents showing up is nice, and the Eagles get established as a crucial symbol for Númenor instead of the deus ex machina they’re (somewhat unfairly) tarnished as. This episodes positions the Rings of Power that characters try to use to redeem themselves. And it screws them all in an act of glorious tragedy. This episode reaches into the Legendarium, seizes on Tolkien’s themes, and finds new things to say about them.

I can’t believe it. Just this once, The Rings of Power has elevated The Lord of the Rings.…

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Review: Where the Stars Are Strange

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It’s praise with faint damnation to say that McKay and Payne’s best recent decision is to front-load this season with the show’s two best writers. Jason Cahill isn’t going to magically turn this into The Sopranos or Halt and Catch Fire, but having an actual writer at the helm helps this intangible sludge become somewhat potable for 62 minutes.

“Where the Stars Are Strange” spends its runtime dealing with the consequences of Season One. Galadriel’s past friendship with Halbrand/Sauron puts her at odds with Elrond and Gil-galad, Sauron entices Celebrimbor with the promise of greatness, and Durin and Disa rebuild their lives after their estrangement from Moria. There’s a semblance of thematic togetherness to this episode. It broadly deals with characters trying to redeem themselves after dire falls from grace. Sauron’s transformation into Annatar is thematically solid. And the tease at the end indicating that Celebrimbor will give the Rings of Power shows that this season might actually head somewhere. No doubt this show will find some way to drop the ball, but as television, this was fine.

More or less. The subplot about “The Stranger” and the Harfoots remains tedious. It’s completely separate from the rest of the show and continues to labor under the delusion that Gandalf not yet being Gandalf is interesting. And the bits where not-Saruman shows up are a bit of a waste of screentime. And we still get lines like “we may be able to crush two spiders with one boot.” This is the same old Rings of Power, with its lack of drama and pacing, but these next few episodes might fool some viewers into believing that they’re interesting.…

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Review: Elven Kings Under the Sky

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Sauron

J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay have learned nothing in the 685 days since the first season finale of The Rings of Power aired.

20 minutes into the 77-minute long premiere of Season 2, there’s nothing resembling a dramatic hook, no explanation of why we should be excited about a season of The Rings of Power, nothing resembling an argument for why The Lord of the Rings matters in 2024. We just get a lengthy flashback of Sauron making his way towards the events of last season. There’s no drama, no cutting aesthetics, no beauty that pierces like a sword or burns like cold iron.

Payne and McKay have completed the Marvelization of The Lord of the Rings. In 2024, The Lord of the Rings matters because it’s an established IP, and established IPs are exciting. Amazon wants you to be invested in this show because sometimes it’s recognizable, even if it takes great pains to avoid emulating the most visually appealing parts of the Peter Jackson movies. Nothing has tarnished Tolkien’s legacy quite like The Rings of Power since Peter Thiel or Camp Hobbit. But as long as Amazon can keeping profiting off Kiwis in a post-pandemic world, that’s probably fine.

Beyond that, I guess there are a few meaninglessly positive things you can say about this piece of shit. “Elven Kings Under the Sky” is the show’s best episode to date. At 77 minutes, it’s a slog where nothing happens, and it’s still failing to bring any of its plot threads together, but hey, McKay and Payne let Gennifer Hutchison write an episode, and she actually has a sense of drama, character, plot structure, and theme, not to mention any prior writing experience. The fact the showrunners only wrote the last two episodes of this season doesn’t exactly give you the idea they have any confidence in themselves, but hey, we got an actual writer this time around.

And for a minute, this pays off. The flashback section of the episode that explores Sauron’s past, while failing to make much sense at all (Sauron got killed by his minions, turned into Venom, and shapeshifted after eating an old woman?), at least gives the sense that Hutchison has read Tolkien. The coronation-turned-assassination, where the recast Adar (oh god) flips Sauron’s crown upside down to stab him, is the first compelling beat of visual storytelling this show has done, and feels like it could actually have come out of Tolkien. You can’t see it, because this show can’t do lighting worth a fuck, but there’s a compelling moment here amidst the intangible sludge.

Otherwise, I guess we’re just dealing with more of the same joyless, disconnected, boring gruel we got served two goddamn years ago. Sauron continues to lack any character, Galadriel is an insipid Éowyn remix, Elrond continues to be absolutely nothing whatsoever, and not-yet-Gandalf is still not yet Gandalf. The episode ends without any sense shit has actually happened. And despite the $9 trillion budget, this still looks like The CW produced that miniseries The Bible.…

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The Rings of Power: The Great Wave Review

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After the crescendoing disaster of “Adar,” The Rings of Power vaguely rights itself with this week’s “The Great Wave.” This episode actually had some themes, and a plot structure, and even a sense of momentum propelled by character moments. I’m vaguely shocked to report this after declaring The Rings of Power the worst TV show I’ve ever seen. The show’s inherent shortcomings are on full display, but “The Great Wave” shockingly takes advantage of its limits rather than surrendering to them like “The Shadow of the Past” or exacerbating them like “Adar.”

“The Great Wave’s” primary success is actually its plot structure. While some previous episodes were inhibited by the cast being separated by geography (and, to be honest, by a lack of drama or any connection between A, B, and C plots), this week’s episode deftly maneuvers between its myriad plots. The episode sagely pairs up characters in separate geographic locations, not unlike The Wire or Game of Thrones (though that’s not say it rivals even the intensely flawed Game of Thrones in quality, despite Bryan Colman’s fleeting presence). Galadriel and Míriel work out their problems in Númenor, Elrond and Durin rekindle their friendship in Moria, while Bronwyn and Theo… well, they do something, I guess.

This is genuinely hard to do. Having a geographically separated ensemble is often a recipe for disaster which even Tolkien only narrowly pulled off. It increasingly hampers George R. R. Martin, whose influence weighs heavily on The Rings of Power. The show has already botched the formula at least twice, although it partly circumnavigates the problem this week by altogether leaving the Harfoots out (thank Yavanna). Last week’s hour felt like a slog, while this one has a clear plot direction moving forward.

In “The Great Wave,” the show finally feels like it’s working towards something. The introductions of mithril and palantíri are irritating in how they expect the audience to care about them simply because they’re vital Rings lore, but they’re steps towards a larger project. Galadriel and Míriel are slowly founding the Last Alliance of Men and Elves in the face of Númenor’s destruction, while the Eregion-Moria plot is a well-paced tragicomedy where Elrond and Durin’s friendship is subject to history. Characters are trapped by their ancestor’s machinations, a thematic concern of Tolkien’s that the show finally seems aware of.

Indeed, theming is strong this week too. The protagonists are slowly drifting away from their people in the face of apocalypse. Númenor, Moria, and Eregion’s doom is a given, so the characters are tasked with surviving the apocalypse. This is a deft way to handle Tolkien’s themes in 2022, when the seas are boiling and the ice caps are melting. Míriel’s apocalyptic visions are powerful and feel more like The Lord of the Rings than much this show has done so far. In spots, the lore even becomes a machine for character drama, something I never expected The Rings of Power to do.

The show’s problems are still present, of course.…

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The Rings of Power: Adar Review

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In its second week, The Rings of Power seems to settle into whatever flavor of awful it’s fucked to be. It’s a 69-minute slog that infuriatingly avoids being “nice,” dragging along on the assumption that elves and hobbits are inherently dramatically compelling, and accidentally breaking into three-minute spurts of interesting stuff. Wherever this is going, it highlights Tolkien’s flaws and manages to make them worse. “Adar” is probably marginally more competent television than “A Shadow of the Past,” but it is sinfully ugly, and possibly the single most unpleasant episode of television I’ve ever seen.

Seriously, did this need to be over an hour long? And what is the point of it? Nori and her family are slightly-but-not-totally estranged from the Harfoots, non-Ian McKellen has said a couple words, Arondir begins and ends the episode in an orc prison camp (of which more below), Elendil and his family are introduced and apparently matter because fans will recognize them, and Galadriel and Halbrand… make some babysteps towards a plot, so minimal kudos there. But on the whole, this episode is aggressively pointless and lacking in events. Even its title character, who is mentioned once and appears at the end, has no role whatsoever in the episode. I repeat my mother’s question: who the actual fuck is this for?

I can hardly claim to be a typical Middle-earth fan. No such person would write something as absurd and eccentric as Nowhere and Back Again. But when The Rings of Power puts Númenor and Ar-Pharazôn onscreen, and even I, who knows their significance in Middle-earth, am bored shitless, something has gone very wrong. There are moments of promise: Lloyd Owen brings a tragic, kindly gravitas to Elendil, and Númenor’s immediate moral ambiguity avoids traps this show might easily have fallen into. But the whole enterprise is so drab to look at (Alan Lee’s absence is glaring) and its realization of Númenor’s problems are downright malicious. Númenor isn’t bad because it’s an avaricious ethno-state: it’s bad because its working class is a bunch of murderous thugs, leading to a grotesque out-of-place mugging scene where Halbrand, almost the show’s most interesting character, graphically maims and kills several people. It’s appallingly, unwatchably bad, and cruel for no conceivable aesthetic reason.

Halbrand is particularly infuriating here. Starting out as a vagabond who saves Galadriel’s life out of pity for a stranger, his presence as a homeless descendant of Morgoth’s followers almost makes him a break from the Hobbit/Dúnedan/Sinda mold Middle-earth keeps clinging to. For a little while, Halbrand is a counterweight to Galadriel, a normal personal who’s compelling for his interiority rather than anything mythological significance. And then, quelle surprise, Galadriel figures out that Halbrand is a pseudo-Aragorn lost king. This show can’t even rip off Peter Jackson right.

Where do you go with this? Everyone onscreen is stumbling around in boots they have no reasonable chance of filling. Morfydd Clark remains the show’s best paltry hope by merit of doing things Cate Blanchett wouldn’t have done.…

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