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the rings of power review

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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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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