Second season of "The Rings of Power": Eternal flood of characters

Contents

Amazon's fantasy series "The Rings of Power" is the most expensive TV series of all time. We apparently liked the first season much more than most readers and viewers, at least according to comments on the internet. According to the Hollywood trade press, the second season lost a good half of its audience right from the start. Despite all its shortcomings, the first half of the second season gave us hope that this trend could be reversed.

Note: This review contains significant spoilers for the entire series.

"The Rings of Power" undoubtedly makes quite an impression visually. The second season also relies on grandiose special effects, lavish costumes and a good soundtrack. With a budget of just under 500 million US dollars for eight episodes in one season, this is to be expected.

But the actors and the characters they portray are also among the strengths of the series. In particular, Robert Aramayo as Elrond, Charles Edwards as Celebrimbor, Markella Kavenagh as Nori and Ciarán Hinds as the dark wizard (probably Saruman, but perhaps also Khamûl) are outstanding. In the second season, Rory Kinnear as Tom Bombadil is also pleasing, although his obviously artificial Cornish accent in the original English version takes some getting used to. In our opinion, the fact that many of these actors often lay it on thick in the best Shakespearean tradition and their dialog usually seems a little stilted fits in well with the setting of Middle-earth and is in the tradition of the Lord of the Rings films.

Unfortunately, the latest season of "The Rings of Power" does not manage to wrap up the characters painstakingly introduced in the first season in a rousing story. There are simply too many characters in the story and with some of them, such as Grand Elf Gandalf and the Harfoots (not-quite-hobbits-but-still-hobbits), it is not at all clear what they are doing in the series. They obviously run across the screen to give the viewer the feeling that they are watching a Lord of the Rings series, but don't actually experience anything interesting. But Gandalf is only Gandalf because he says clever things and solves problems in an epic way. But if Gandalf has nothing to contribute to the story, he becomes irrelevant. Similarly, the Harfoots, the Dark Mage, Isildur, Theo and Arondir could have been dropped from this season without losing any interesting aspect of the story.

The Sauron problem

The character development of Sauron (Charlie Vickers) turns out to be arguably the biggest misstep of the second season. In a series that otherwise struggles to deepen characters, this one is wasted on a character that shouldn't have one. Sauron is Sauron. Evil personified; more of a demigod than a normal mortal. There is no character development with him, at least not if Tolkien's original is anything to go by. Why the series makers came up with the idea that this particular character should be there for the viewer to identify with remains one of the biggest mysteries of the series.

But Sauron in particular is portrayed almost as a tragic hero in this season, who – for reasons we don't understand – vies for Galadriel's favor. After it becomes clear that the mysterious stranger, who in the first season even establishes something like the beginning of a love affair with Galadriel, is really Sauron, this aspect of the first season also makes even less sense in retrospect. The second season exacerbates this problem. These clumsy attempts to make Sauron seem human completely undermine the character's importance in the Tollkien mythos and cause the show to needlessly completely dismantle its main antagonist and one of its main anchor points.

Sauron's scenes with Celebrimbor at the climax of the season, at the most important historical moment in the entire story, feel heavy-handed and downright laughable. Instead of drama and tragedy, the series producers offer us slapstick comedy. Nothing about how Sauron takes power in Eregion or how he seduces Celebrimbor into forging the Rings of Power seems believable. The only thing about this story that is engaging is how bumblingly it lurches from one narrative and acting disaster to the next.

Eregion becomes the scriptwriters' Waterloo

Another problem with the climax of the season, which should also be the climax of the whole series, is the bunglingly staged siege of the elven city of Eregion. Very few things make sense in this sequence, which takes place over several episodes. It starts with the initial situation of the battle: Sauron is in Eregion, without an army, and tries to distract Celebrimbor so that he can forge his rings for him. Now Elrond wants to storm the city with an army of elves and Adar with his army of orcs to destroy Sauron. Instead of working together, they fight each other (mainly over Galadriel). In the meantime, the orcs bombard the city and the Elven defenders within its walls run back and forth screaming headlessly for several weeks – this impression is given by several scenes that are supposedly set weeks apart.

The actual battle for the city that follows seems even sillier. The orcs bombard a mountain, which then dries up the river in front of the city, making it to the walls with their siege engines. Apart from the fact that neither mountains nor rivers behave as depicted in the series, the military tactics displayed on all sides are also downright insane. Cavalry ride into a forest at full gallop, siege engines contain explosive barrels that can be detonated with a fire arrow and an overpowering giant troll can simply be killed by a couple of elves without doing anything worth mentioning in battle.

Complete disorientation

The battle scenes are exacerbated by another major problem of this series: despite all the CGI effects and great landscape scenes, you never really know which character is where, how far apart two places are or how a place (for example the elven city of Eregion) is actually structured. Where exactly is the orc army? Where is Elrond's cavalry in comparison? Is there a bridge over the river or two? Why doesn't anyone try to attack the city over the bridge (are there perhaps several bridges?)? Gil-Galad suddenly appears in the middle of the battle, attacks the troll and we wonder where he came from or even what he was doing the whole time before.

The series offers no answers to any of this. Is the cave with the Balrog under Khazad-dûm near the market or under the deepest mine in the dwarven city? When King Durin leaps towards the beast, how do his son and his wife manage to escape the monster? How exactly do they retrieve Durin's ring of power? You get the feeling that the scriptwriters don't know any more than the audience does.

Synopsis

The second season of "Rings of Power" clearly exacerbates the problems of the first season instead of fixing them. It leaves the impression that the creative minds at Amazon's production company were overwhelmed with pouring thousands of years of Tolkien's sparsely note-filled mythology into a storyline that is even remotely convincing. The characters they create seem meaningless or boring. The attempt to win the audience's favor by forcing characters like Gandalf, Bombadil and pseudo-hobbits into the plot, which is mainly based on memories of Peter Jackson's films, fails completely. No matter how meaningfully Gandalf strokes his iconic wand or how many famous swords, giant eagles or well-known names the screenwriters incorporate into their story. They can't hide the fact that this series does almost nothing that stands on its own two feet.

The story told here is choppy, uninspired in large parts and the big dramatic moments are poorly written and so confusingly staged that they almost all fall flat. "The Rings of Power" has already disappointed just about all die-hard Tolkien fans. For casual viewers, the story is too boring and implausible to stand on its own two feet. Especially when HBO's big rival series, George R. R. Martin's "House of the Dragon", is now clearly picking up speed with its second season after a rather unconvincing first season, while the "Rings of Power" is shooting itself further offside.

The eight episodes of the second season of Amazon's Tolkien series can be watched exclusively on Prime Video. Perhaps it's better to turn down this offer and spend your precious free time on better stories. Good actors and bombastic sets are no consolation for bad scriptwriters, no matter how much money Amazon has left to burn.

(dahe)