JRR Tolkien’s beloved writings on Middle-Earth have inspired countless great works of fiction, but alas, the first season of Rings of Power is not one of them. Amazon’s attempt to cash in on the Lord of the Rings phenomenon has audiences and critics divided in regards to its quality, and there is evidence that Amazon had at one point culled negative reviews from IMDb (a website they own). Suffice to say, reception was mixed; to quote Washington Post, “the Lord of the Rings franchise was meant for all ages. But it’s not clear who ‘The Rings of Power’ is for”. With a baffling budget of nearly half a billion dollars– which doesn’t account for the $250M price tag on the IP, not to mention marketing costs and bribing reviewers and funding Central American dictatorships– Rings of Power is the most expensive TV show ever made, well on its way to be the first show with a billion-dollar budget. Much of this extravagance is due to the fact that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a fan of LOTR. Well, if a classic TV show could be produced by the sheer power of cash alone, every billionaire would be doing it… but we live in a timeline where artistic vision and merit determine a show’s quality. In this article, we’ll be examining what dragged down the first season of Rings of Power and determine if the second season will earn redemption– or flounder in excruciating disappointment.
(Spoiler warning for Rings of Power season 1 and Game of Thrones season 8!)
Payne and McKay
The first problem people had with Rings of Power was with the creators, JD Payne and Patrick McKay. Who the heck are these people??? Aside from ghostwriting a few mediocre blockbusters, the duo have had no major footprint in the film industry prior to Rings. Considering the gargantuan budget Bezos afforded the show, it’s telling that he chose two underqualified screenwriters as his showrunners. Predictably, rookie mistakes abound throughout the series. McKay and Payne exhibit a tenuous grip on the realism of scale; for instance, when Galadriel assembles a small army of 300 Numenoreans, the showrunners opt to give them a mere three ships for all the men and horses and supplies needed. This leads to hilarious illustrations like this:
While a grand scale is admirable, the writers sacrifice much of the show’s realism to set up a climactic cavalry charge. They must’ve been feeding those horses rocket fuel, because according to history professor and professional pedant Bret Devereaux, the Numenorean army traverses “some three to four hundred miles, half by land and half by river, accomplished in 24 hours”. The downside of working with an intellectual property like LOTR is that Tolkien was methodical in his consideration of space and time, and there are several maps of Middle-Earth that give the lie to the show’s laughable timeline. These inconsistencies are reminiscent of late-stage Game of Thrones, where by the powers invested in him by lazy writing, Euron Greyjoy teleports his giant naval fleet right where the plot needs it with zero explanation.
Payoff With No Setup
What do people come to LOTR for? Legendary battles, fantasy action, grandiose cavalry charges, sure– but the majority of fantasy fans appreciate LOTR for the smaller moments as well. Sam’s bond with Frodo and every character’s respect for the sanctity of life are as instrumental to the IP as the grand scale. Now imagine, if you will, a television show where the small moments only serve to bore or confuse its audience, and depicting epic climaxes are prioritized over actually setting up those climaxes with interesting characters. We know it’s hard to picture, but just try for a second.
Worse still is how disappointing the climaxes turn out to be. When the script calls for a village defense in episode 6, all the tricks our hero Arondir pulls out of his hat come from the fantasy movie playbook: Exploding forts! Towers rigged to fall! Fire everywhere! It’s safe to say that if you’ve watched a fantasy blockbuster in the last twenty years, you’ve seen the battles in Rings of Power (and if you’re looking for a deeper analysis of this silly battle, once again Professor Devereaux has you covered). Despite having Hollywood physics on his side and the orchestra swelling every time he picks his nose, Arondir loses the battle against the vaguely large evil horde. Guess he forgot to capture the orc spawn point in Zone B and now they’re free to spawncamp Base.
Gal-Power Galadriel and Hippy Harfoots
The sloppy construction of action sequences is mirrored by the show’s sloppy construction of dialogue. When you have such pseudo-profound lines as ‘the sea is always right’, ‘our hearts are even bigger than our feet’, and ‘you have not seen what I have seen’ (some of these are repeated… as if they were all so cool the first time…), you start to get a sense that the dialogue is more concerned with sounding badass than being badass. This problem is especially prevalent with the ostensible protagonist Galadriel, a fan-favorite character who should’ve been the lynchpin of the show but is instead reviled for “ticking off a dangerous number of boxes on the Mary Sue checklist” and being a lawful good nightmare. Audiences read her as an annoying, two-dimensional character who is arbitrarily good at everything, possesses zero flaws, and– despite constantly endangering everyone around her– is always somehow proved right.
No LOTR property would be complete without Hobbits, small-bodied but large-hearted people who humanize the high fantasy, and Rings dutifully includes its own version of ‘proto-Hobbits’ known as Harfoots to serve as the story’s emotional core. The show’s depiction of Harfoots cleaves closely to real-life Irish travelers, complete with fake Irish accents and itinerant lifestyles. According to the Guardian, the portrayal is a “clumsy, tone-deaf cultural appropriation and a reinforcement of negative stereotypes” that pleased neither Irish audiences nor die-hard Tolkien fans. If Rings didn’t already have a reputation for cashing in on the popularity of LOTR, perhaps the Harfoots could’ve been accepted as the emotional core they were meant to be– but their hollow depiction only reinforced the hollowness of the show overall.
All these issues, each individually small in their own right and easily ignorable in a better show, coagulate to form a body of mediocrity with million-dollar camera shots (literally!) and cheap as hell writing. But can we expect more of the same for the upcoming second season?
Rings of Power 2: Electric Mary-Sue-galoo
Slated to air on August 29th, Season 2 of Rings is well underway to being one of the hit TV shows of the summer. The teasers and recently released trailer promises several elements to look forward to, showcasing Sauron in full villainous glory and the eponymous Rings of Power. Tom Bombadil, Balrogs, Saruman, a Dark Numenorean that could be the Witch-King, some kind of kraken that could be the Watcher, and a marvelously eyebrowed young Gandalf will all make their debuts. Galadriel appears mostly unchanged from the first season, declaring in typical fashion “I will not stop until this is put right”, the most memorably unmemorable line perhaps in all cinema. By all accounts, Season 2 will be a dramatization of the buildup to the War of the Last Alliance, but how it chooses to conclude is currently a mystery; my speculation is that it will only delve into the beginning stages of the aforementioned war, saving its climax for a Season 3 already in production. The action and setpieces displayed in all promotional material certainly live up to the first season’s standards (if they don’t surpass them!), and there is an equivalent sense of scale that may or may not be earned.
There is still hope that newbie team Payne and McKay can pull off this second season. Now that the showrunners can play with Sauron at his best, they can potentially ruin Sauron at his best– a spectacle we at Poppins Productions will be thrilled to behold.
Written by Lucas Beverley, @americanskald on Instagram.
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Sources:
Andy Welch. “‘Irish People Have Faced Centuries of Discrimination’: Why Are Lord of the Rings’ Accents so Offensively Bad?” The Guardian, 28 Sept. 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/28/irish-people-have-faced-centuries-of-discrimination-why-are-lord-of-the-rings-accents-so-offensively-bad.
Bret Devereaux. “Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part II: Falling Towers.” A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 27 Jan. 2023, https://acoup.blog/2023/01/27/collections-the-nitpicks-of-power-part-ii-falling-towers/.
---. “Collections: Why Rings of Power’s Middle Earth Feels Flat.” A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 16 Dec. 2022, https://acoup.blog/2022/12/16/collections-why-rings-of-powers-middle-earth-feels-flat/.
How To Make Boring Characters — Rings of Power. Directed by The Closer Look, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtZH5q2ptM0.
Inkoo Kang. ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Is Beautiful, Banal Boredom. Washington Post, 31 Aug. 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/tv/2022/08/31/lord-rings-tv-show-review/.
Janelle Ash. Amazon Spends $465 Million for First Season of “Lord of the Rings” Spinoff Series. Fox Business, 22 July 2022, https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/amazon-spends-465-million-first-season-lord-of-the-rings-spinoff-series.
Riley McAtee. How Euron Greyjoy Embodies the Late-Season Plot Failures of ‘Game of Thrones.’ The Ringer, 8 May 2019, https://www.theringer.com/game-of-thrones/2019/5/8/18536167/game-of-thrones-season-8-euron-greyjoy-rhaegal-scorpion.
Sean K. Cureton. Star Trek 4 Is Officially a Go; Synopsis & Writers Revealed. Screen Rant, 18 July 2016, https://screenrant.com/star-trek-4-synopsis-casting-writers/.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power | Season 2 – Official Trailer | Prime Video. Directed by Prime Video, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9fsBy45YTQ.
The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power - Official Teaser Trailer | Prime Video. Directed by Prime Video, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCwmXY_f-e0.
unknown. “IMDB Have Deleted All the Negative Reviews for ‘The Rings Of Power’. Out of 76 Current Reviews the Lowest Is a 5/10 and 65 of Them Are 8+/10.” Reddit, 2 Sept. 2022, https://old.reddit.com/r/lotr/comments/x46870/imdb_have_deleted_all_the_negative_reviews_for/.
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