Dark Lords don’t do campaign speeches.
Nonetheless, season two of Amazon’s Tolkien adaptation, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” opened with Sauron trying to persuade a small band of surviving orcs into accepting him as the new Dark Lord after Morgoth’s defeat. Worse still, his “Who else can you go to?” campaign pitch fails.
This is a poor beginning to the new season, though it is, thus far, an improvement over season one. But this just means the show has elevated itself from bad to mediocre. Part of the problem is that even if the showrunners realize the need to improve, “The Rings of Power” is still stuck with the poor decisions of last season. For example, a confused Gandalf is wandering around with a proto-hobbit or two in tow, utterly disconnected from the rest of the story (or anything Tolkien ever wrote about Gandalf’s origins).
But even if the creators of the show were unburdened by their poor decisions last season, they would still not know how to make television for grown-ups. In fairness, they faced a great challenge. It is hard to portray Tolkien sagas on the screen; both internal moral struggles and grand epics are difficult to film well. Depicting both simultaneously requires skill, as well as trust that the audience can pick up on subtleties of character and dialogue amid a sprawling narrative.
Unfortunately, the writers do not trust the audience to stick with a mature story and well-developed characters. Instead, they rely on cheap drama to maintain interest. And so there are continually shifting relations and motives between characters — even the debates of the elven lords have a lot of angsty drama for a group of wise, millennia-old immortals. For instance, at one point Elrond rushes off to try to destroy the three elven rings in a stunt that the writers seem to have invented just to add a brief hit of drama and pad the length of the episode. The same character and plot development could have been had with a few lines of dialogue and some actual acting.
This sort of overstimulated script requires characters to constantly behave impulsively, which stunts characterization and therefore plot development — things don’t unfold so much as just happen. Thankfully, Galadriel has matured some, but her gain is Elrond’s loss. And even when characters sustain more consistent motives, the show beats the audience over the head with them. For instance, Sauron playing on Celebrimbor’s feelings of being unappreciated is presented in the bluntest way possible.
This crude approach is also manifest in many characters dumping their feelings all over the place while speaking fluent 21st-century therapeutic babble. Not only is this jarringly anachronistic, but it results in the charisma of many characters having an inverse relationship to how much they say. Gil-galad may be played with all the charm of a block of wood, but at least we don’t have to listen to him tell a stranger about his feelings.
When the showrunners do reach for adult themes, they do not know what to do with them. For example, from the opening scenes, they continue to ask whether orcs can be something other than orcs — that is, can they be redeemed? This is an interesting point that Tolkien never resolved, but the writers do not seem to have any answers themselves or even any real sense of how to reach them.
Likewise, they toy with the idea of Sauron repenting but never really grapple with the sin that prevented it. Per Tolkien, Sauron could not bear to be humbled and so returned to evil. That could have made for a good subplot in the show, but instead we get Sauron meandering back toward evil for no particular reason, doing so in a way that is neither particularly plausible nor interesting.
Another example of the immaturity of the show is found in the farcical politics of Numenor, which never feels like a great empire. For all the money they spent on the show, couldn’t they have spared some to make it look a bit grander? Perhaps the giant CGI eagle used up the budget, but for such a mighty kingdom, Numenor sure has a small crowd for a coronation, with lax security and plenty of rabble allowed in.
The show likely would have done better, both visually and narratively, to have shown less palace intrigue, which is always presented in a way that makes Numenor seem smaller. Instead, the showrunners should have focused on Elendil’s family, which was, per Tolkien, powerful but isolated. Not only would this have been truer to Tolkien, but it would have made for a much better show by establishing distance that would have created more suspense while managing the scale better.
Ultimately, the show’s failure is not just in infidelity to the source material but also in storytelling for adults. The showrunners take neither Tolkien nor their craft seriously. Yes, the demands of an epic, genre-spanning story are significant. But the resources were there; this may be the most expensive television show ever made, and there are moments when that budget is harnessed to create beauty and wonder in the viewer. But these aesthetics are overshadowed by too many instances where the show is adolescent and paint-by-numbers. Instead of treating “The Rings of Power” as an opportunity to create an enduring masterpiece, its creators seem to regard it as just one more piece of content to be slopped out to viewers.
Thus, even though the second season has yet to hit the abyssal lows of its predecessor, it is still a failure and will remain so as long as the showrunners love and respect neither their source material nor their audience.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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