The Rings of Power Season 2 Ep 1 – Guess What? It’s Still Bad
“I am the Elder King: Melkor, first and mightiest of the Valar, who was before the world, and made it. The shadow of my purpose lies upon Arda, and all that is in it bends slowly and surely to my will. But upon all whom you love my thought shall weigh as a cloud of Doom, and it shall bring them down into darkness and despair. Wherever they go, evil shall arise. Whenever they speak, their words shall bring ill counsel. Whatsoever they do shall turn against them. They shall die without hope, cursing both life and death.
And I have a really great screenplay that would be perfect for a progressive forward-thinking streaming service like Amazon’s Prime Video Ms. Salke “
It’s been two years since the first season of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was unleashed on a helpless and unsuspecting world. Seven hundred and thirty days has not been enough to dull the pain of the horrors it inflicted on the genre of high fantasy.
J.R.R. Tolkien was without question the greatest and most influential fantasy writer of the 20th century. Every writer that followed him had to consciously either embrace or reject Middle Earth. The Lord of the Rings was the story of a struggle of good against absolute evil. A story where the protagonist succeeds in his quest to take the One Ring to Mount Doom but ultimately fails in his mission to destroy it. He is saved by Providence and the self-destructive nature of evil.
In the 21st century, there has been a race on to turn as much of the fantasy genre as possible into a pastiche and palimpsest of Professor Tolkien’s life’s work, although a better term would be a mockery. This production is the pinnacle of that school of thought. There is no ultimate good or absolute evil there are simply shades of grey and at the end of the day everyone is the same and we are all equal. No one has the right to judge anyone for anything unless they are a white male, in which case they bear the sins of all the world and must constantly perform acts of contrition from morning to sunset.
Nowhere is this school of fiction more pervasive than in Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
*throws back a quick shot of Four Roses*
Let’s get after it.
The show starts with a recap of the first season. This is probably a sad necessity for its audience. I know that I personally had to (pauses to shudder) rewatch the entire first season because the brain cells that had been assigned to remember it had died of embarrassment. I’m not the only one, everyone who has to review this has been groaning about having to wallow through the acre of rotting of pig dump that is 2022’s Rings of Power.
You however, can just watch this Pitch Meeting:
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Within minutes of starting this new season, you know that Amazon has outdone the last one in terms of sheer incompetence.
The story starts at the dawn of the Second Age in the land of Forodwaith which has always been a frozen wasteland since Morgoth created it but looks pretty green and verdant to me. Tol-in-Gaurhoth, was Sauron’s fortress in First Age but they wanted to do something dumb with CG which they will in a minute. Anyway, a different frankly worse actor is playing Sauron in this scene. He’s trying to convince the orcs that with Morgoth gone he’s new big cheese in town. The Orcs aren’t cool with him, which is accurate to Tolkien, the Orcs have always hated their dark lords whoever they are. What they haven’t got right is Sauron. He wouldn’t try to convince orcs with oratory and they wouldn’t be inclined to listen to it.
However, Amazon Orcs seem devoted to Adar the First Orc, who is present.
Quick reminder, Adar was one of the Elves that Morgoth captured during the First Age and twisted into being an Orc. There is some controversy among Tolkien scholars over this matter, made no simpler by Professor Tolkien’s waffling back and forth on the subject himself over the decades of his life. Bottom line – This thing about Orcs being formed from captured elves was set into the lore by Christopher Tolkien after his father’s death. Adar appears to have retained the elves’ immortality despite being scarred and twisted. Since he’s the closest thing to a good character in this show I’m inclined to give him more of a pass than I probably should. You can read more about it here: The Trouble with Orc Souls
Apparently, Adar is still morphologically unstable because there is a new actor playing him. The old Adar had a contract for one season and had the good sense to bail out.
Adar picks up an iron and spikey crown (a reused design from the Jackson movies). Sauron kneels so Adar can crown him. Something else they got wrong. Kings were kneeling to the church when crowned. Sauron would just put the crown on his own head. Which he should have done because Adar stabbed him with it. The rest of the Orcs decide it’s the Ides of March run up to Sauron and stabby-stabby. Sauron’s body explodes and now Horodwaith is the frozen wasteland of the icy north. And I just realized that this ice fortress of ice they are at is the one Galadriel killed the ice troll in.
Sauron, with his body destroyed, is reduced to a CGI pudding puddle blob. The pudding puddle kills and devours rats and insects. We get to see it stumble and flop around in a manner that is meant to inspire pity I guess, but made me laugh. Finally, it devours a merchant which makes him strong enough to become Sauron-Halabrand.
This never happened in the books. Just in case you were wondering.
Sauron was Maia, in oversimplified terms a lesser god bound to a greater god. Unless there was something extra special about that crown, getting stabbed with it was unlikely to hurt him all that much. It wasn’t until he’d poured too much of himself into the One Ring that he had trouble creating a new body. Amazon doesn’t know what Sauron is.
We see Halbrand-Sauron stumping along headed toward the Southlands, where runs into a bunch of refugees led by a sage old man who will be spewing unwanted wisdom interminably.
This is the part that puts my teeth on edge. The sage convinces Sauron to give being good a shot. HE DOESN’T HAVE THE OPTION!!! He’s not human. He can’t become a penitent. Think of it in terms of corrupted software, the corruption can only continue to get worse, there is no reset button called, “I’ve decided to be good now.”
The refugees are headed to a port because “They say there’s places across the sea where a man can escape himself.” Why would they say that? And why in hell would Sauron of all people believe it? He helped the Valar build the world and there is no place across the sea except Valinor where men are forbidden to press foot and Sauron had seriously better not press foot. The reason he high-tailed it in the first place was that he didn’t want to be dragged before Mandos and face his judgment.
The old man is still rambling out folk wisdom at Sauron once they are at sea. “Find forgiveness. You are alive because you have chosen good.” No, he is alive because he fucking ate a merchant!
Anyway, a sea monster destroys the ship. Sauron lets the old geezer drown because he’s chosen good? This is so badly written. I mean if you are going butcher Tolkien’s intent and make Sauron a penitent then do it right! Have Sauron try to help the old man but he can’t be helped and he curses Iluvatar for not saving a good man.
As you probably guessed this is the point where he first meets Galadriel when she threw herself into the sea because the AI that was writing this thing didn’t know that was a bad idea in the middle of an ocean.
All Bad Reboot affiliates have a major problem with indicating the passage of time. With all the wasted footage in this thing, they could have spared some to indicate that Sauron the CG Pudding Puddle had been a formless blob for centuries, instead it comes across as a couple of days and you are left with the impression that Galadriel missed him by a few minutes when she killed the ice troll. It was a major problem with the first season and it’s already a problem here. Granted one among so, so many is easily lost.
We jump ahead to the present(?) and Galadriel is chasing after Elrond on horseback. She keeps trying to snatch at a pouch on his belt, which presumably has the three rings that shouldn’t exist yet.
Elrond escapes her and the show enters another time warp because Galadriel is IMMEDIATELY confronted by armed elf guards demanding she come with them and report to high king Gil-Gilad. With all the graciousness of a four-year-old girl having to go to church when it’s a nice and sunny out, Galadriel reports to her boss. They keep calling her “Commander” to let you know that she is a proper grrl-boss and not some stuffy old Queen. Which is what Galadriel was. Gil-Galad is very, very cross with her. The show frames her as being in the right but the fact is Gil-Galad has done everything right thing all along. Galadriel was the one who’d screwed up every step of the way during the first season. There’s no question that all of their actions were demonstrably evil and everyone would have been better off if she’d gone off to Valinor like she’d been ordered to.
Granted she wasn’t allowed to go there but the show didn’t know that.
Gil-Galad demands to see the rings and Elrond jumps off a cliff.
Sadly, his attempt to escape the show fails.
Gearshift! Time to check in on Not-Officially-Gandalf and his revolting pet Nori. They are lost in a desert and Nori is sad because there are no snails to eat. No. I’m sorry that really isn’t a joke. We are back to snails again with the Filthy Gully Dwarves. Nori tries to get Hobo-Gandalf to bring a tree back to life because that has always worked out so well for them in the past.
Not-Gandalf blows up a tree trying to bring it to life and Nori is overjoyed because the dead tree was filled with succulent, delicious, juicy cockroaches. Again, I’m not making a joke here. The feculent little slime goblin is going to gorge herself on roaches.
Sidenote: Look the wizards were never supposed to actually use magic. Because magic is bad. They just know a lot more about how the world functions because they helped make it. So they can weave their way around the natural laws of Middle Earth without breaking them, which resurrecting a tree would do.
Time to check on Sauron-Halbrand. He’s been captured and taken before Adar. Walreg the Slayer of Incelnor is now the prime minister of Mordor. He demands that people swear loyalty to Adar so they can be his slaves, a legal status that doesn’t usually require an oath of fealty on the chattel’s part. But if you don’t you get killed, so…
Halbrand makes an offer, ‘Let my people go and I’ll tell you what I know about Sauron’s return.’ Adar makes a counteroffer, I’ll just torture you until you tell me what I want to know.
Elrond has turned up at the Gray Haven and is talking things over with Cirdan. I can’t believe I’m about to say this but they haven’t gotten Cirdan wrong. Exposition time! Since it is utterly beyond the creators of this trainwreck to show that Cirdan is the oldest and wisest of the Eldar we have to be told it. Repeatedly. We also get to hear everything about the rings yet again. Just in case you weren’t paying attention when Elrond jumped off a cliff. Sure the rings can stop the Fading of the Golden Tree bullshit, so the elves can stay in Middle Earth. But they were made with Sauron’s influence so maybe badness?Certainly, it was enough of a worry I jumped off a cliff but damn my immortality, my brother had the right idea.
Cirdan agrees to dump the rings in the ocean.
Back to the Filthy Gully Dwarves and Hobo-Gandalf. Oh crap, there’s more of them now, Poppy caught up with them. Although, not Nori’s dad or mom. Is the cast getting pared down?
Anyway, she brought a Bad Reboot map so now they aren’t lost anymore and can go where the snails are plentiful once more.** I have to wonder if they will ever find their way to a REASON FOR GANDALF TO BE IN THIS SHOW. They couldn’t come up with one last season, the entire Harfoot subplot was nothing but a deeply resented time sponge. The only thing we found out was that the ancestors of the Hobbits were so evil they must have been another hobby of Morgoth’s.
Walreg the Slayer of Incelnor, is now Walreg the Torturer of Halbrand-Sauron. Sauron promises to kill him for it. Later, Adar turns Halbrand-Sauron loose so he can go get more information about Sauron. It turns out that Sauron didn’t know anything about Sauron and Adar was okay with that. Sauron’s cunning plan was to get captured by Adar so that Adar could let him go again?!?! You can’t make this stuff up but Prime Video can. Oh and a warg Sauron had been playing with eats Walreg. They are paring down the cast.
The Elves are having a big sad because they have to leave Middle Earth.
Gil-Galad gives an awful speech. “Like an ember that has been too long removed from a fire, our people must return to their home.”
It’s lines like this that have me convinced that Lord of the Rings: the Rings of Power is written by an AI. I’m completely serious. That line is exactly the kind of thing an AI generator comes up with. The words can be made to sound like wisdom by an actor trying his damndest but give it any kind of sapient thought and it falls into the uncanny valley.
Anyway, Cirdan shows up with the rings, he’s already wearing one. Galadriel puts on hers and then Gil-Galad. The Golden Tree gets CGI’ed back to life, the Fading is gone and the closest thing to a plot from the first season is resolved two years later. An hour and twelve minutes just to wrap up Season One.
Halbrand shows up at Eregion and Celebrimbor lets him in because Galadriel never told anyone that Halbrand was fucking Sauron!!!
Sauron’s trip to Mordor accomplished exactly nothing.
Elrond accomplished nothing.
Nori and Not-Gandalf accomplished nothing.
Theoretically, the rings accomplished something…THAT WAS NEVER IN THE BOOKS!
So what is the plot for season 2? How the hell should I know, they didn’t tell me!
I was briefly tempted to name this article The Rings of Power Season 2 Ep 1 – Morgoth’s Minimum Effort Shit Post. This show isn’t just bad it’s demonic. Rangz is part and parcel of the modern fantasy movement championed by such creative failures as George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss. It’s destroyed high fantasy and has hopelessly corrupted Dungeons and Dragons.
In my next post, I’ll be going into the details of just what this show is trying to accomplish and why it’s not so much bad as it is evil. And no, it’s not just because those bastards at Amazon dumped three episodes on me at once.
*It is a daming indictment of Grammarly that it had no objection to all those extra “Likes.”
** For the record I have eaten escargot as part of a delicious steak sauce at Le Cellier.
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