The first season of Rings of Power (RoP), Amazon Prime’s lavish unpacking (and to some extent re-imagining) of the events of Middle-earth’s Second Age, met with mostly harsh disapproval from fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works and a generally tepid response from otherwise uncommitted viewers and critics. Season two debuted last month, along with an express promise from the showrunners to do a better job representing the source lore, including its Catholic/Christian underpinnings. Amazon even hired a faith-based Hollywood marketing firm to win back would-be viewers who thought season one let them down.
I certainly fall into that category. Have I been won back? Now that we are halfway through the eight-episode second season, let me offer three ways that RoP has improved and three in which it still lets us down. (Prepare for SPOILERS, ye who enter here.)
1. Sauron is still pure evil.
Moral equivalence and antiheroes are hallmarks of modern pop entertainment. Good guys must always have a dark secret or employ questionable means to their ends, and bad guys need a sympathetic side or must be portrayed as conflicted or ambivalent or partly justified in their badness. Early in season two, RoP feints in this direction with uber-baddie Sauron, suggesting that he desires to reform from his evil ways. (He even gets a nice Thomistic lesson in the formation of virtue from a passing wise peasant.)
But this turns out to be a ruse. Like any devil, Sauron is shown to be a tempter and a deceiver, adept at exploiting others’ weaknesses, and even their virtuous sympathies, for his ends. There will be no pretext of reformability for him, after all. Bravo to the makers of RoP for not yielding on this point.
BUT,
Other characters are made needlessly complex.
The most egregious example of this is the humanization of the orcs. In Tolkien’s universe, they are creatures of pure malice with little or no individual agency. In RoP, though, they are at times presented as sympathetic persons, desiring only to live in peace and order within their own land. We even get a glimpse of an orc-family: a doting, protective orc-dad embracing his orc-wife as she swaddles their orc-baby. Yet the idea of orcish conjugal love seems insupportable in the orthodox Tolkien universe.
Apart from that, many of the characters in season two continue their uneven presentation from season one. Millennia-old elves act as petulant and mercurial as teenagers (even if central figure Galadriel seems to have matured a little). Isildur, scion of the noblest human bloodline in the history of Middle-earth, wrestles with childhood neuroses and follows a fetching forest-maiden like a puppy dog. I guess when you’re mapping out forty-plus hours of programming over five years, you think you must invent a lot of contrived character arcs.
2. The basic lore is presented in some satisfyingly creative ways.
The Rings of Power is built upon the barest skeleton of intellectual property: the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. That means there’s a lot of muscles and organs and skin and hair that the show’s creators have to add. And not just in terms of supplementary characters, places, and plotlines, which abound; there is also the need to take the events and outcomes that are only sketched in the source material and string together scenes showing how they came to be.
In this, RoP season two has offered some really compelling concretizations of Tolkien’s basic bullet points. Take the central plotline of Celebrimbor and Sauron, masquerading as the luminous and helpful Annatar, and their collaboration on forging the rings of power. We know from the source material that Sauron was able to project a pleasing form and that he deceived the elven smith into making the rings for men and dwarves—which Sauron tainted and used as instruments of domination. But how that all happened is not detailed in the appendices. RoP’s vision of the details includes some powerful scenes where Sauron displays demonic manipulation of Celebrimbor’s character, preying on strengths and weaknesses alike. It’s subtle and realistic. You’re left thinking that it could have happened just like this.
Similar, if not quite as compelling, is the imagining of the political machinations behind the corruption of Númenor, which we know will lead eventually to that great realm’s prideful rejection of and then hostility toward the angelic Valar, precipitating its destruction. Although the scale of both time and space is greatly compressed (this is TV), the events are fleshed out in thoughtful and satisfying ways that do justice to the source framework.
BUT,
It’s not always faithful to the source, in ways that probably matter.
Every screen adaptation of Tolkien’s writings causes the spilling of a great deal of ink over its deviations from the original. Some of these have been defensible for practical reasons. (The omission of Tom Bombadil from Peter Jackson’s Fellowship film is a famous example.) Others have seemed avoidable or, worse, ill chosen. RoP has some of each of these.
One major change of the egregious kind is the forging of the elven rings first, instead of last as in the lore. In Tolkien’s timeline, Sauron/Annatar infiltrates the elves to create, with Celebrimbor, the rings for men and dwarves, and only after his true identity is discovered and he is expelled do the elves, in secret, forge their own three rings, free of his influence. But the creators of RoP decided to have the elven rings forged first (while adding the novelty that the rare mineral mithril is the basis for their power). This opens up non-canonical and unsatisfying new plotlines, especially the silly, time-chewing arc in which the elves squabble over (and viewers are forced to wonder) whether their rings are good or evil. And it has insalubrious ripple effects on the fabric of character and plot across the rest of Tolkien’s universe.
3. There are some fun shoutouts and Easter eggs for the fan base.
Cinematic universe fan service is now pretty much obligatory in pop culture. We expect callbacks, mirrored plot points, character crossovers, inside jokes, and other titillating meta-references across the span of a series.
RoP delivers some fun ones. For example, Galadriel, her golden hair shining by torchlight against a dark forest backdrop, prefigures Gandalf’s warning to the Balrog when she commands a horde of advancing orcs to “go back to the Shadow.” And then, when the mutated elf/orc Adar captures her, he drops a juicy bone to the Tolkien faithful by deadpanning the formal elven greeting we learned from Tolkien’s books: Elen síla lúmenn omentielvo. A third: the nighttime glow from the high tower that houses Celebrimbor’s forge, flashing past your eyes at an ominous angle like a baby Barad-dûr.
When done with intelligence and restraint, and timed right, these things can make you bounce in your seat a little. I am not above such inducements!
BUT,
Sometimes bones are dry.
When fan service is clumsy or too on the nose, though, it has the opposite effect. Unfortunately, Amazon—no doubt thinking of its billion-dollar-plus investment and somewhat shaky reviews and viewership numbers—has decided to fling a bunch of these ill-fitting presents at the fan base, too. Barrow-wights make an appearance that is not only gratuitous but wholly out of proper time and place, for no other seeming reason than to get people to say, “I know those guys!” And the anticipated screen debut of Tom Bombadil (for some reason sojourning in the deserts of Rhûn instead of his native Old Forest) is off pitch, turning that beloved and whimsical enigma of a character into a dull oracle of exposition. When he and the mysterious amnesiac wizard re-enact (or pre-enact) Fellowship of the Ring’s encounter of Merry and Pippin with a ravenous tree, almost word for word, it comes across as lazy and pandering, not cool.
It seems to be the consensus with critics and fans alike that this second season of RoP is an improvement over the first, and I agree. The disparate storylines are gelling and coalescing. The substance of Tolkien’s grand Second Age drama—in many ways a more ambitious and edifying tale than The Lord of the Rings—is starting to fill out. Not every plot invention hits the mark, and the dialogue still too often comes across as fantasy-novel pastiche, but the first half of this second season still represents laudable progress for a production that got off to a shaky start.