The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend – Rings of Power Season 2
The incompetence of the people that put this show together shines forth like the Silmarils. Normal humans keep wondering how did something this hilariously awful got made. Truthfully it’s the end result of a fifteen-year toboggan ride down an icy cliff face.
It all goes back to the home video revolution in the 1980s. Disney as a perfect example was very leery about the possibility of killing the goose that lays golden eggs. Roy Disney and Jeffery Katzenberg were dead set against it. Eisner was indifferent at best.
But the math was inescapable. If we put Cinderella out on home video it kills the theatrical redistribution model… Maybe. But even if it doesn’t, Cinderella will make only $25 million during the course of four rereleases spaced over 28 years. Whereas if we put it out on VHS we will make $125 million this year, (it was closer to $300 million as it turned out). At the end of the day, there was no choice to be made.
Home video was the start of a twenty-year gold rush where home video became the primary market and theatrical releases were the way you covered production costs. When there were hundreds of millions to be made, budgets shot up to hundreds of millions because everyone in Hollywood wanted his cut of the pie.
Then in 2007, the goldmine ran dry. The home video model collapsed overnight. For twenty years everyone in Tinsel Town got used to ton upon ton of gold being hauled out of the ground every year and now it was back to a few pounds.
Everyone was determined to ignore the economic reality and the need to gear down. They all wanted to find some magic way of getting tons more gold out of a vein that was mined out. All of Hollywood decided to take up franchise farming. Warner Brothers had led the way with Harry Potter and Batman. Iger picked up that ball and ran with Marvel and Star Wars. For a while, it worked.
However, progressivism progressed its way through all of the studios. The “just one brick” request of entryists turned into a wall that blocked sane people out. Studios were taken over by the same “safe space” groups that have run Ubisoft into the ground. In the end, Amazon couldn’t make anything except an abortion like the Rings of Power.
There was a small effort made to dial it back with the second season of Rings of Power but the first season wrote the series into a corner. Or rather four corners.
Ideally, the main storylines of the first season would flow together in the second to become part of a much bigger story. I’m sure that’s what they wanted but they weren’t anywhere near good enough to make that happen. All of them will continue on their separate courses until the story flow runs dry.
It’s happened to a couple of subplots this year.
The Stranger’s storyline has turned out to be utterly pointless. Okay, it was pretty much pointless from the start. The Wizards didn’t show up until the Third Age. They literally have nothing they can do with the main events of the Second Age. The Forging of the Rings, the Fall of Numeanor, and the Last Alliance. There is even less that the Hobbits can do. In the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbits had the most important job in the story, but here? They just hang around a nameless Istar. Oh, wait! They did do something.
They started calling him “Grand-Elf.”
Get it?
That was as clever as this show was going to get. No, they didn’t do anything sharp with the Blue Wizards. I knew that was beyond them and I was right. The Stranger is Gandalf and The Dark Wizard is Sauroman, (who was always evil as it turned out).
At the end of the season, the Stoors and the Harfoots set out to find the promised land which is clearly meant to be The Shire.
That’s it. That’s all that was accomplished by this useless plotline. Gandalf almost gets his name and the Filthy Gully Dwarves decide to move.
The second pointless storyline was Bronwyn and Erondir the Elfagorn. It was always a hopeless soap opera but it was brought to a head when Bronwyn’s actress Nazanin Boniadi decided to “prioritize her activism.” And walked off the show. Since there was a demonstrated need to pare down the cast, Amazon didn’t recast the part. The remains of this storyline were used to assist Isildor in moping around Middle Earth before being put on a boat back to Numeanor.
I thought Elfagorn had been written out of the show in the seventh episode. That was when Adar ran him through with his big-ass Final Fantasy sword and dagger. They did the whole dramatic freeze for effect as the sword slides into him and then the dagger. However, I suspect the producers had an “Oh shit” moment. They had already killed off one black elf this season. By the laws and customs of their people, they can’t kill another one. Consequently, Elfagorn is able to shrug off a gaping, avulsed gut wound and leap into battle during the last episode.
The Dwarves’ story was equally flimsy. Sauron gives bad rings to the Dwarf Lords. Durin III gets greedy but then has a change of heart takes off his ring and charges the Balrog, thus turning his son into Durin IV. This was always going to be a fruitless story because the climax would have to be the Balrog destroying Kaza-dum, which can’t happen for another couple of thousand years.
I was wrong about Adar being Celeborn although I was right about him being healed by Nenya once he got his hands on it. I’m nearly astonished to say that Adar was that near impossibility in this show, a well-developed character. He was actually a sympathetic and conflicted king. He loved the Orcs as his family. Yet he had been born an Elf, twisted and corrupted by Morgoth and Sauron. He was going to have to pay a big price to defeat Sauron and it pained him to have to pay but he needed to in order to keep the Dark Lord from taking over the Orcs.
Adar dies stupidly in the final episode. As usual, whoever is running this show has no sense of continuity or how to build on existing plot points. Sauron whose will wasn’t powerful enough to enslave the Orcs a the start of the season does so effortlessly in the finale.
Sauron does get around to torturing and killing Celebrimbor but he does so with big tears in his eyes. Okay, show, you need to understand something. You can’t make a character who does consistently evil things a sympathetic villain just by making him cry like a bitch.
Finally, there is the big fight between Sauron and Galadriel. This is a fight with absolutely no dramatic tension whatsoever. Even the most ironclad normie out there knows damn good and well that neither character can die before the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Neither actor is a particularly good swordsman so there had to be a lot of quick-cut edits to make it look like they aren’t clumsy. Sauron is using the Crown of Morgoth, as a parrying device. No as a matter of fact it’s not explained how it got to Eregion from Mordor. I suppose it’s pretty much beside the point that the Valar turned it into a collar, put it around Morgoth’s neck, and then chucked him into the Void.
The reason it’s there is so that Sauron can stab Galadriel in the shoulder with it, in the same spot as Frodo, to repurpose yet another scene from the Peter Jackson movies.
It did lead to the most drop-dead hilarious moment, hands down, in the entire series. Galadriel is about to give Nenya to Sauron, (she got it back from Adar before he got shanked), but then she falls off a three-hundred-foot-high cliff. While that was funny, the truly hilarious part is that she would have been fine, it’s the stab wound that’s killing her. If she had fallen into a lake or river or something kind of wet, fine I guess, but she hit a tree.
I actually had to rewind it because I was laughing so hard I missed how she got healed. It was Gil-Galad’s ring that did that.
It’s not supposed to be able to do that but mostly these rings just do whatever to make the story happen.
Eregion is sacked, Celebrimbor is now being used as a battle standard, Pharazon who they have completely fucked up is planning his invasion. In theory the story is somewhere close to where it needs to be to match the Legendarium. In reality it is lightyears off course and could never find its way back.
And so dawn breaks on this second journey into the deepest night. Was there anything they got right? The effects. I will wholeheartedly grant they got that right this season. The acting was as good as it was going to be given the quality of the scripts they were given. The stories on the other hand were written for a junior high school level audience. As expected the fan (for values of the word “fan”) theories were more interesting than what the show delivered or could deliver given what was going on in the writers’ room. These scripts were on a par with Hercules the Legendary Journeys.
A few of you noticed that I wasn’t dragging this show nearly as hard as the first season. There’s a reason for that. You didn’t care about the show this year and truthfully no one else did either. The engagement is drastically down for this season. I was genuinely surprised by a Variety headline that read, Rings of Power Almost Certain to be Renewed for a Third Season. As of this writing, there has still been no renewal announcement.
The five-season story arc was supposed to be in stone. Clearly, it’s not. The original objective of Amazon having its own Game of Thrones is an abject failure. At this point, it has become an expensive exercise in humiliation. If they do renew it will be for a wrap-up season. Which will barely be long enough to cover the fall of Numenor, they will immediately have to jump from that to the Last Alliance of Men and Elves. All of that will be very effects heavy and consequently pricey.
I suspect this comes down to Jeff Bezos’s pride, his job title has been changed to Executive Chairman of the Board which means that he’s CEO when he feels like it and semi-retired the rest of the time. If that billionaire toxic robot still cares about it, the show will be renewed, if not it’s over.
The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend
