Rings of Power Season 2: Mid-Season Review

Critics of season one of Amazon’s billion-dollar Rings of Power complained that the show was “woke.” I disagreed. Sure, it wasn’t great (I was very disappointed in the final product). But woke? I wasn’t convinced.

Well, whether Jeff Bezos’s lavish foray into the world of J. R. R. Tolkien was woke or not, that critique is now moot: season two is out now, and it’s worse than woke. It’s awful.

Straight-up awful.

As a die-hard Tolkien fan, it pains me to admit this. The Lord of the Rings is my favorite work of fiction, bar none. Peter Jackson’s adaptations are my favorite movies. I wanted (and still want) this show to be good, even great. Unlike other detractors, I did not dismiss the project out of hand. I even enjoyed the most recent trailer for season two.

But alas, my faith was misplaced.

Thus far (Lord, have mercy on us, we’re only halfway through the season!), watching The Rings of Power has been like watching deadpan, Tolkien-illiterate, amateur cave trolls gracelessly slaughter the precious source material, and they are not even having fun. Of course, I was skeptical that Amazon — Amazon! — could get Tolkien, what with his intricate, Catholic musings about good versus evil, right. But I expected they would at least have a good time trying. I was wrong. Showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay have failed on both counts. Rings of Power bungles Tolkien’s work… and it’s boring.

It takes a special kind of non-talent to make Middle-earth unimaginative, lifeless, and dull. But that’s exactly what Payne and McKay have done. And what makes it all worse is that they lied to us about it.

Season one was slow and prosaic. Season two, with every trailer and cast interview, promised to fix that problem. One might say they swore on the Precious. The trailers mercilessly buried the first season’s most unlikeable characters and extraneous plotlines, many of which did not appear at all or only briefly, in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, 0.3-second clips. Then, Amazon rolled out the cast to admit, “Yeah, season one was bad, but that’s because we were laying the foundation for an even more action-packed round two!” (Watch how many times the actors and actresses say basically that in this one clip.)

But, in the end, it was all a ruse. Like Smeagol, they lied. After promising a bigger, better, edgier second entry, ROP returned with four of the most bland hours in Middle-earth ever. Oh, and remember all those characters Amazon sidelined in the promotional material? Guess what! They almost all reclaim centerstage within the first episode, sucking up an exorbitant amount of screen time. Yay!!

The worst part of the show is, no doubt, its ungainly pacing. I have never watched anything that felt so simultaneously laborious and rushed.

On the one hand, it feels like the showrunners think they have 54 seasons to tell their story (at this point, they’ll be lucky if they get even three). The actual plot crawls. Things happen. We watch unimportant characters chase horses and stars (for four episodes!) and run into new, equally unimportant characters along the way. Then, we hit the halfway checkpoint flag, and frankly, I can’t even remember if unimportant character X has found his horse yet, or was he too busy falling in love with unimportant character Y until unimportant character Z showed up, creating an uneasy love triangle? I wouldn’t care one way or the other.

What happened to those big battles we were promised? Wasn't season two supposed to be “on a much grander scale.” “Don’t be hasty!” Amazon retorts, quoting Treebeard to us. Ah, right. I’m sure the good stuff — you know, the stuff we’ve been waiting for — is right around the corner. Any day now.

In the meantime, we will have to put up with the second half of ROP’s pacing problem: its utter lack of subtly. At the same time that Payne and McKay take their sweet ol’ time weaving their wearisome roman-fleuve, they also gallop through character “development” — if it even deserves to be called that — faster than Shadowfax when Gandalf bids him show us the meaning of haste. That is to say, they routinely introduce and complete entire arcs in two minutes flat. It’s bizarre. They make it a point to make a Very Obvious Point about everything. Characters tell you exactly what they are going to do before they do it. Or, alternatively, they do the exact opposite of what they just told you they were going to (because, you know, that’s super clever!).

For example:

Character A tells Character B, “I never want to see you again!” (I’m paraphrasing.)
Characters A and B are separated.
Character A and B are reunited, and they emotionally embrace (thereby proving that what Character A just said was wrong, and he learned his lesson, and now we can move on).

That kind of on-the-nose storytelling pervades Amazon’s caricature of Middle-earth. It’s immature, simple-minded, and jarringly blunt. It reads like a kids’ I Can Read! book, never showing or revealing the plot but simply stating it. “The Stranger said, ‘Let’s walk that way.’ The Stranger walked that way.”

Considering the source material, past cinematic successes with the source material (i.e., Peter Jackson’s trilogy), and the gargantuan budget behind the show, it should be the most dazzling triumph ever to grace the small screen. Instead, we’re treated to entire episodes watching flat, unlikeable characters wander around tiny sets and CGI environments, doing nothing of note.

If this was any other show, I wouldn’t mind. But this is Tolkien we’re talking about. Tolkien. He deserves better.

At a minimum, John Payne and Patrick McKay must be fired from the show immediately. I might also advocate for reparations from Amazon to the aggrieved fanbase. Only a trillion-dollar, E-commerce company could slaughter the greatest fantasy story of the 20th century so impudently, and I am of a mind to make them pay.