Customarily I am careful to avoid spoilers, or at least to provide ample warning to protect those who wish to have a pure experience of a work. In this case there is no need, because the work under review is already spoiled. The first half of the first episode of Season 2 of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” put to rest any vestigial notion that there is in it anything worthy of associating with Tolkien, or of consumption for mere entertainment’s sake—even in the idle desperation of severe boredom.
I watched the first season of Amazon’s calamity with guarded hope. And for a while, I almost convinced myself that there were some redeeming elements to the show. It was not quite as “woke” as I had expected, and I was intrigued to see the lands of Middle Earth in their splendor, before the tarnishing of Sauron: Mordor before it was darkened, the glorious vistas of Numenor before it became Akallabeth, the Elven lands at the height of their power, Moria before Shadow & Fire consumed it.
The music was good, the art direction, in places, was very good. Everything else—plotting, writing, acting—ranged from uneven, to aggressively mediocre, to inane and offensive. Very little of what passed for character motivations and world-building made sense, either when compared to the books or internally. Worst of all, the show’s writers perhaps out of some philosophical confusion had a tendency to invent mundane materialistic explanations for things that ought to have been subtle and mysterious matters, imbued with spiritual and poetic significance.
The power of the Elven Rings to amplify the natural authority of their king-bearers to protect and preserve their realms from decay was reduced to some nonsense about mythril’s pseudo-magnetic field curing tree blight. The darkening of Mordor and the awakening of Mount Doom was reduced to a Rube Goldberg device involving a broken sword hilt that functioned as a key to turn a lock in a dam that unleashed a lake that ran down into underground channels dug by orcs into the side of the mountain to turn the lava chambers beneath the mountain into a steam-pressure-based bomb. To be fair, the spectacle of Mount Doom exploding was cool, but why it exploded was dumb and not mysterious, or poetic, or subtle in any way.
One of the worst mistakes in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” was when he made Sauron’s Eye a literal, physical eye at the top of Barad-dur, which acted like a spotlight and swiveled back and forth scanning the landscape for intruders. It was too literal and too coarse and rather than amplifying the sense of foreboding, brooding power of the Dark Lord, reduced Sauron to something cheap and silly. Peter Jackson did so many things so well that he could be forgiven a few missteps. And he had to put something on screen to visualize the drama, after all.
Amazon’s interpretation made that kind of mistake over and over and none of the “good” parts of it were good enough to offset the silliness.
Then there was the mystery-box plotline around the secret identity of Sauron. Through the whole first season, Galadriel was trying to find Sauron, and as the audience we all knew that one of the characters must secretly be Sauron, and the show thought it was being very clever by obfuscating his identity. It was supposed to keep us interested in the show—in lieu of quality storytelling. So focused were the show’s writers on making the identity of Sauron a mystery, that they botched the entire character, who in the source material comes to the Elves in the guise of a gift-bearing emissary from Valinor to impart knowledge and aid them in fashioning the rings. Not only that, they botched the titular moment of the show: the Rings of Power are forged in a rush job at the very end the season with none of the build-up and gravitas required to embue the most important moment in the entire series with any sense of significance.
It would have been much better if the audience knew all along that this beautiful gift-bearer was secretly the Dark Lord, and that the Elves were deceived and working toward their own destruction. It’s called “dramatic irony,” and it can be quite effective and poignant. But the artlessness of the show’s writers suggests they are unfamiliar with such basic literary devices, or indeed of literature more generally.
By the end of the first season, the show, like Sauron, was thoroughly unmasked.
The writers seem to have realized that the nonsensical reveal of Sauron’s identity as some random human blacksmith from the Southlands was a significant error, an that it made no sense at all—because Season 2 begins with a super cringe sequence that is meant, I suppose, to offer some kind of explanation for how Sauron came to inhabit that identity.
Here again we see the fundamental philosophical confusion of the show’s creators. They cannot even get right the metaphysics of the world in which they presume to set their tawdry tale. Sauron, who is a powerful spiritual entity, is overwhelmed and stabbed to death by a bunch of ornery Orcs. His body then explodes. At this point I thought the show was implying the dissipation of Sauron’s spirit, which presumably would find another physical form in time—much like what happens in the prologue to the films. But, no. Instead, Sauron’s blood, it turns out, is like something from the recent “Alien” movies: a protean black goo that oozes down through cracks in the ground into a cavern. It congeals and begins consuming rats and bugs until it is strong enough to slither back to the world above and eat a human being, thus transforming itself into a Man. (Qua?)
What a confused mess. Why is Sauron alien goo? How could any human being who has read The Lord of the Rings think that idea a suitable addition to Tolkien’s mythology and in keeping with the nature of Middle Earth as a world? It’s the stuff of sci-fi horror—not high fantasy. I was half-expecting Kurt Russel to show up with a flamethrower and torch the Sauron-goo before it could re-coagulate. That would at least have been entertaining.
The writers of the show are, it seems, both talentless and in the thrall of a drab materialist worldview. They could not be further removed from the mind and ethos of Tolkien and his cosmos. They are, in their art, like the orcs, scouring the Shire—that lovely little land that they cannot understand, but can only dominate and desecrate.
The writing and the acting and the plot, if it were possible, had all gotten much worse in this second outing. I did not find it worth my time to finish the first episode, and I could not in good conscience recommend such self-harm to anyone else.
What a tragedy.
I shall now quote from the Master a few lines that can serve as an apt lament for The Lord of the Rings franchise, such as it was:
“Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the harp on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.”
Rating: ☆☆☆
(0 stars: wretched and harmful to humanity)