Amazon’s fantasy behemoth looks as expensive as ever, but struggles to escape the pitfalls of the first season. Here’s our review of the first three episodes of Rings of Power season 2.
When Prime Video hired a pair of showrunners with no television experience to make the most expensive TV programme ever made, I’m really not sure we acknowledged the scale of the gamble the conglomerate was taking.
The Rings Of Power’s first season was, after all, an incredibly ambitious undertaking. Set in Middle Earth’s second age and telling the origins of Sauron, Galadriel, Elrond and a host of other characters from the depths of The Lord Of The Rings’ appendices, the challenge was always going to be adapting the dense and academic source material in a way that justified the record-breaking budget Amazon assigned to the task.
It’s an effort that might just have proved impossible. Patrick McKay and John D. Payne’s first season as showrunners was beautiful to look at, but felt curiously empty under the hood. From forgettable characters to a meandering plot, the foundations of what makes a gripping TV show did not, in all honesty, feel strong.
Season two might have been an opportunity to course correct. With Sauron’s identity finally revealed and a trio of our titular rings still cooling on the blacksmith’s bench, it looked like that much-needed focus could be on the horizon. The first episode, taking pains to give each character their goals and reintroduce us to Tolkien’s world, is even a promising start.
But as the trio of episodes, which debuted on Prime Video last week, go on, the show seems to fall back into the familiar, plodding rhythm it established in 2022. The first three episodes more or less focus on introducing a single group of characters each: Galadriel and the elves, Durin and the dwarves, and Isildur and the human-folk, respectively, with Sauron and Nori the Harfoot sprinkled in when they have the time.
Except the elves also turn up in episode two, but not three; the dwarves are in episode three, but not one; and the entire Kingdom of Númenor doesn’t react to the events of the last season until we’ve already been in the new one for more than two hours. Characters like Elrond and the elven High King, Gil-Galad, seem to have simply swapped personalities since the last season aired, and few among the rest have done much to inject a little more life into proceedings since last time. If this sounds confusing, try watching the show. With as many plotlines as it has, spending even one episode without at least checking in on every thread makes keeping up with who’s who and who’s doing what feel a lot like homework.
The Rings Of Power isn’t, for want of a better phrase, TV show-shaped. Every episode so far ends with what feels like a perfect “tune in next time” cliffhanger, before diving back in by visiting another plotline or two to end each instalment with a whimper. Where The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit succeeded because they told emotional, simple stories backed up by astounding world building, here the dense fantasy lore of Tolkien’s world takes centre stage. There seems to be little interest in telling a story, here, so much as taking a fantastic literary landscape and posting it to a VFX house with all the adjectives underlined.
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That’s fine, of course, if that’s what you want from your TV fantasy. Like the first season, Rings Of Power is frequently stunning to look at – from the golden glow of Lindon to the ashen wastes of a newly-decimated Mordor. Taking its visual inspiration from Peter Jackson’s epic labour of love and with a billion dollars under its belt, it would be hard for it not to be. If you’re the kind of die-hard fan who read The Silmarillion and all of The Lord Of The Ring’s appendices and simply wants to spend more time in those worlds, this is still the show for you. From early reactions alone, it seems you’re not without company.
But for a casual audience more interested in characters and plot than the nuts and bolts of world-building, the start of season two repeats the same mistakes which saw the first season’s viewing figures collapse after the first few episodes. Though The Lord Of The Rings as an IP seems pretty mainstream, the way McKay and Payne have gone about structuring their flagship series is not. To Jeff Bezos and the producers behind it: the audience for a show like this might be smaller than you think.
The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power is streaming weekly on Prime Video.
