The Rings of Power Returns to Lay Bare Its Flaws

By the end of the first episode of the second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, I wanted to destroy the Rings of Power — and maybe also The Rings of Power. Amazon’s Lord of the Rings TV show, which purports to adapt events of the Second Age in J. R. R. Tolkien’s elaborate mythology (The Lord of the Rings depicts the Third Age and some of the Fourth), dropped the first three episodes of its second season this past Friday. They revealed that the show has thus far failed to earn back the trust of viewers (including me) who had come to doubt, after a disappointing first season, that it could reach the heights of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy — to say nothing of Tolkien’s work.

Part of this failure comes from the consistency between seasons one and two. The second season picks up shortly after the events of the first, continuing its various plot lines. The elves are debating what to do with the rings they have just created, with Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) still stung by her failure to realize the apparently human Halbrand was her ancient enemy Sauron (Charlie Vickers). The dwarves are struggling with the very geology of their great homeland of Khazad-dûm, while the dwarven king and his son feud over relations with the elves. The men of Númenor, and of what was formerly the Southlands but is now Mordor, deal with the aftermath of a battle that blinded the former’s ruler and destroyed the latter’s homeland. Oh, and “The Stranger” and two harfoots are in Rhûn, for some reason. Meanwhile, Sauron lurks and schemes in the background. With most of the same people behind and in front of the camera, the overall aesthetic (which is pleasant enough) and approach of Rings of Power differs little from the first season.

And about that approach: It doesn’t really work if the goal is to reproduce or even just approximate the spirit of Tolkien. In a prior age, I was willing to give the show’s inevitable deviations from the source material some leeway. But it’s increasingly clear that Rings of Power will consist mostly of deviations. This is to a considerable extent a structural issue: Amazon doesn’t have the rights to The Silmarillion, the primary source of information about events that preceded the Third Age. The show’s opening credits remind us that it is based on “‘The Lord of the Rings’ and appendices” — that is, reference material found elsewhere. Combine this limitation with other inhibiting factors, such as the relentless time compression into what is likely to end up being a couple of years of events that took place over centuries (flashbacks here and there excepted), and a faithful adaptation becomes literally impossible.

On a few occasions, Rings of Power approaches a textual fidelity that allows it to rise above these immense structural flaws. In these first three episodes, the best example of this is Sauron’s “revealing” himself to the elven ringmaker Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) as the otherworldly being Annatar, as well as the subtle manipulations on Annatar’s part that motivate Celebrimbor to begin making more rings of power. But, on the whole, the show is likely irrevocably marred. When it nears genuine quality, some big-picture defect rears its ugly head. In the Annatar scenes, it is the fact that the elvish rings of power already exist — they were made in the previous season with Sauron’s aid. In Tolkien lore, they were made after every other ring of power and without Sauron’s direct assistance.

And these are the moments when Rings of Power is at its best. The rest of it is full of what Patrick McKay, one of the show-runners, euphemistically called “discovery,” which is “one of the joys of creation,” as he put it in an interview with Deadline. What he means by “discovery” is “making things up.” And it turns out that the people behind Rings of Power are not as good at that as Tolkien was. Some of their inventions can be interesting, such as the almost Stranger Things–esque manner (to borrow a friend’s comparison) in which Sauron survived an apparent demise in a prior guise, which is shown in the opening moments of the season. But this moment is, again, only possible because of something Rings of Power has made up: Adar (Joseph Mawle in season one, Sam Hazeldine in season two), one of the first elves to become an orc, who contests with Sauron for leadership of the forces of evil. (Something tells me this Adar fellow is not long for Middle-earth.)

There are also awkward mash-ups of invention with superficial lore fidelity. Isildur (Maxim Baldry) is lost in Mordor? Hey, Shelob ends up there, doesn’t she? Let’s have them fight. Hey, eagles are a thing, right? Let’s have one show up in Númenor for a few seconds, as an omen that is drastically misinterpreted by those who see it in a way that exacerbates the island’s ongoing political tensions. Hey, Tolkien sometimes hints that orcs are, for example, scared of the Nazgûl, right? They must be more human than we give them credit, so let’s provide a bizarre and (I hope!) pointless glimpse of an orc family. Maybe these moments were meant as fan service (along with forced callbacks to Jackson’s trilogy). As executed, however, they’re sacrilege.

All of this means that it will be necessary to assess Rings of Power on two separate criteria going forward. The first, higher criterion is faithfulness to its source material. But it is already close to failure here, if it is not there already. The second, lower criterion is its more basic feature, irrespective of what it’s based on — that is, its quality as a generic fantasy series and not as something that is trying to be Tolkien. On that metric, it’s doing . . . not as badly but still not spectacularly. There’s a lot going on in the world that it shows. But that world and its events are not rising to the lived-in plausibility of the best fantasy (and not just because the show rarely thinks seriously about what travel entails).

But come on. This is The Lord of the Rings we’re talking about — or, at least, it’s supposed to be. It seems only fair to hold something like this to a higher standard, one that the show seems incapable of meeting. Return to that seemingly small but actually fundamental error Rings of Power has already made concerning the sequence of the rings’ construction. Showing Halbrand directly influencing the creation of the elven rings of power before any of the other ones are made changes the nature of that entire story in a way that season two (which seemingly tries to emphasize that Halbrand didn’t touch the elven rings) can’t salvage.

It’s such an egregious and emblematic error that I was briefly thrilled by the possibility that Círdan the Shipwright (Ben Daniels), an ancient and wise elf who is one of the few interesting characters introduced in these first few episodes, would just straight up destroy the elven rings and force that story to start over. Yes, it would have been a bit ridiculous for him to have done so, but no more so than the myriad deviations that have already occurred in the show.

Alas, he did not, and Rings of Power continues along its flawed course. I intend to see it through to the end and to continue writing about it. I do so more from a sense of duty than from any hope I might have (now vanishingly small) that the show, with all its limitations and defects, will turn out to have been worthwhile. But I understand if others do not wish to come with me. At this point, I cannot recommend that anyone else do so.