So, the first season of Rings of Power has been over for several months now, which means that I finally got around to watching it back in February, have just now finished writing my review of it, and, well…I’m very ambivalent about the whole thing. Frankly, the show kind of reminds me of the Star Wars prequels, where you have a good plot arc and a lot of good concepts, but the actual execution is rather lacking.
Note that there are spoilers ahead. (It’s an adaptation of material that is decades old.) Also, in the interests of making this easy to read, this review will come in multiple installments.
Culture Wars
Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way. Thanks to the extreme political, social, and cultural divide that exists within Tolkien fandom, one exacerbated by an incredibly terrible (or was it?) marketing campaign, this show became a battleground long before it even came out. A lot of people were predicting that this show was going to be “woke,” betray Tolkien’s moral universe, and just generally copy Amazon’s attempt to adapt the Wheel of Time series. News about things like “intimacy coordinators” did not help matters. I went into this series expecting to be disappointed in this regard.
And…I wasn’t. Yes, it becomes very obvious that there was definitely some DEI involvement with the overall cast of the show, but it’s not particularly intrusive. Well, except in the case of the Harfoots, who are a small nomadic clan that does not seem to have much contact with outsiders. In the real world, a group like that would almost certainly homogenize to a nice shade of light brown, not have skin colors ranging from “haven’t seen the sun in years” white to “never seen snow in my days” brown.
Yes, I do think it’s remarkalbe that most of the obvious villains are pale-skinned men while the protagonists strive to tick off most of the diversity checkboxes.
Yes, there is an obligatory pot-shot at right-wing populism.
However, it’s also very obvious that when the showrunners said that they’d been reading a lot of Tolkien, they weren’t lying. While I don’t think they really understand him, they get him in a way that Peter Jackson never did.
Also, so far our only androgynous character has been a villain.
Finally, sex? What sex? About the most passionate thing that happens is some lip-locking. Honestly, there’s more sexual content, implied and on-screen, in the LOTR trilogy than in this entire season.
So, now that we have that nonsense out of the way, we’re going to go through each episode, and look at what works, and what doesn’t.
Episode 1: A Shadow of the Past
I don’t blame anyone who hopped off after this episode. The entire thing simply reeks of “generic epic fantasy that happens to be set in Middle Earth.”
Let’s start with Galadriel’s storyline. It begins with a scene in which Galadriel is bullied by the other Elven children, who throw rocks at a little boat she makes out of paper until they sink it and are chased away by her older brother, who consoles her. We’re already in utter cliché territory here, that of the outcast protagonist who’s not like the other kids because they are Unique and Special and Creative.
This is followed by exposition on the wars of the First Age and the period immediately after, which isn’t badly handled (although the one large-scale battle scene we see is the kind of swirling every-man-for-himself melee that Hollywood loves and every commander goes to great lengths to avoid), which leads into Galadriel finding out that Sauron has slain her brother, who went looking for him. This sparks her quest to find him and bring him down, which involves taking a small band of elite warriors to the back of beyond. They finally end up mutinying when they don’t actually find anything besides a troll in an abandoned fortress (which involves a really goofy moment when Galadriel runs up the Zweihander sword of one of her comrades to deliver the killing blow to the thing), followed by her going back to Lindon with them. Oh, look, our protagonist is now The Only One Who Really Knows What’s Going On.
This is where we meet Elrond, who listens to her and begs her not to do anything rash at the ceremony the Elvenking, Gil-galad, is holding for their return, where they are granted passage to Valinor. Now, there are some issues with this—mostly the fact that for Elves, Tolkien does not treat such passage as something you earn—but in a moment of rare deviation from cliché, Galadriel holds her tongue and takes it.
When next we see her, she is on the ship bound for Valinor, and, just as they are about to pass there in a wonderful shot scene that really captures the transcendent nature of the journey to the West, a comet shoots across the sky and Galadriel jumps off the ship. In the middle of the ocean. Where there is no one else around, and no sign of land in any direction. Brilliant plan.
Meanwhile, Gil-galad informs Elrond that the magic tree that sustains the Elves in Middle Earth is dying (which has no support in the lore, but whatever), and that they need something to regenerate it or else they will have to leave Middle-Earth, and he has been assigned to help the master craftsman Celebrimbor figure something out. Okay, we have to save the kingdom now. What’s the next generic epic fantasy plotline for the show?
Next we come to the Harfoot/We all Know It’s Gandalf (who will now be called WAKIG) storyline, which is even worse. Our protagonist here is Nori (short for Eleanor) Brandyfoot, whose introduction is her taking the other children of the Harfoots, who are nomadic hobbits (which actually fits the established lore well), out past the safe zone to pick berries. She manages to get them back without incident after seeing wolf prints, and then has a conversation with her mother about how she wants an adventure and how the Harfoot lifestyle is stuck in a rut—literally, since they follow the same migration path every year. Oh, look, yet another Plucky Teenage Girl Who Feels Bound By The Restrictions Of Society. What is this, a YA fantasy novel?
This is followed by Nori seeing the previously-mentioned comet fall from the sky and hit the ground very near to the Harfoots, and she of course immediately goes there with her friend, Poppy, to investigate and finds WAKIG.
Then we have the Southlands storyline, which is a mess. First, we have a relationship between Bronwyn, a human woman and the local healer, and Arondir, a male Elf. Oh, look, not only is it Forbidden Love, but it’s double Forbidden Love, because not only is it between a human and an Elf (kudos to the showrunners here—the Elf Arondir discusses this with thinks it’s a bad idea because “both times it’s happened it’s ended in tragedy” not “the humans are inferior”), but it is also between occupier and occupied, for the humans of the Southlands are descended from those who fought for Morgoth, and they understandably chafe under the apparently intrusive Elf occupation, although one wonders how intrusive this occupation can be, since the Southlands are of ambiguous but apparently substantial size and the Elvish garrison doesn’t seem to be very large, numbering maybe a dozen at most.
Anyway, the Elves are leaving, Arondir goes down to tell Bronwyn (whose son, Theo, resents the occupying Elves) that they’re leaving, and a local shows up with a cow giving black milk, which is bad. When asked if the cow has done anything odd lately, he tells them that it had wandered off east to graze beforehand, so our intrepid not-quite-a-couple go off to investigate. Oh look, it’s an unknown threat that appears to be blighting the land. Good night, what overdone and overused plot have we missed?
The thing is, making this episode better wouldn’t be that difficult. In the opening scene with Galadriel, cut out the other Elven kids. Instead, show her making the little paper boat with her brother, which will help with the idea that their relationship is close enough that she would go to the ends of Middle-Earth to avenge him. With the Harfoots, have Nori be okay with the rules that they live by, even though she’s inclined to bend them a bit, which will then make her decision to help WAKIG a result of personal inner conflict. Finally, make the relationship between Bronwyn and Arondir a platonic one, based on mutual respect for each other’s skills, which would be something to set the show apart and would give off an indication that the showrunners are going to respect the lore instead of throwing it out the window. All of these storytelling choices would have, if not eliminated, then certainly mitigated the “yet another generic epic fantasy” vibe this episode gives. However, with the choices the showrunners made, we got a category 5 cliché storm that I’m positive caused a lot of fence-sitters to turn away in disgust.
The Soapbox Guild 