Before J. R. R. Tolkien created (or translated . . .) The Lord of the Rings, there was another work of fantasy that detailed an intergenerational struggle over a magic ring. But Tolkien denied that Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle influenced his creation. “Both Rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases,” he remarked of the supposed similarities between the two works. As season two of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power concludes, this remark increasingly applies to the relationship between the show and Tolkien’s own work. Rings of Power is largely failing, both as an adaptation of Tolkien, and on its own terms: the two-part test I laid out at the season’s beginning.
There might appear to be more than surface similarities between The Rings of Power and Tolkien’s work. Many of the characters are there: Galadriel, Elrond, Celebrimbor, Gil-Galad, the Durins, Elendil, Isildur, and Sauron himself. And there are moments when, if you squint, it’s possible to see glimpses of a decent adaptation. In “Shadow and Flame,” season two’s finale, they come right at the beginning: an unbroken tracking shot that conveys, for the first (and only) time in the three episodes over which the Battle of Eregion spans, anything like the scale and spatial awareness such scenes require; and the dying moments of the Sauron-broken Celebrimbor, the latter a character who became more interesting the more broken he got.
Things only deteriorate from there, however. Adar’s death at the hands of Sauron unfolds predictably (indeed, much as I predicted it would). Although it comes without any realistic portrayal of how Sauron persuaded the (pointlessly somewhat sympathetic) orcs to come over to his side, it’s a relief that this pointless character, created for the show for the apparent sole purpose of delaying Sauron’s becoming in charge of the orcs, is now dead.
Galadriel then engages in hand-to-hand combat with Sauron, for some reason thinking this would go well for her. It does not. She jumps off a cliff to prevent Sauron from getting her elven ring but survives. (Also fine: Arondir, brutally stabbed by Adar in the previous episode.) This essentially restages the end of season one, and makes about as much sense. With a convenient assist from some dwarves, the elves regroup in the valley that will become Rivendell.
The season finale hurriedly tries to tie up other loose ends as well. An age too early, Durin III awakens the balrog in Khazad-dûm, bringing the dwarf-king’s doom. Also an age too early, the ‘mysterious’ Stranger everyone figured out was Gandalf a season ago gets his staff, earns his name, and leaves the company of the harfoots, who continue to prove they don’t belong in this show. He also meets his enemy: a Dark Wizard who better not be Saruman.
In the world of men, Isildur begins his return to Númenor, a land that is turning its back on the Valar under Ar-Pharazôn’s rule. Elendil flees west, and Miriel gives him Narsil, for some reason. The rushed and forced nature of these other storylines (even if the Númenor plot still could ultimately be not terrible) helps clarify another defect of Rings of Power. Superficially, it seems expansive. But the relative shallowness of each story inclines one to believe the show has so many because it has so little to say about any individual one of them — though it found time in this finale episode to drop a few overly obvious (and perhaps overconfident . . .) hints about what next season might bring.
All of this adds up to a season that continues the show’s large-scale deviation from Tolkien. Aside from characters, absolutely basic plot rudiments, and many contrived attempts to evoke and call back to Peter Jackson’s trilogy, Rings of Power is too far removed from The Lord of the Rings to be worthy of the name.
But that seemed likely all along. Even worse for Rings of Power, a show I did not start out wanting to hate, is that it doesn’t work on its own terms. The world it has created doesn’t cohere. Its internal logic is defective. Its characters, created for the show and created by Tolkien, don’t make sense. It has a poor sense of pacing. Its spectacle is inert. Its attempts at fantasy transcendence crash quickly down to earth. In letter and in spirit, it falls far short of Tolkien’s work. It may have rings, and they may be round. But there the resemblance ceases.