Prime Video’s fantasy black hole has limped to a conclusion – and we can’t say we’re too impressed. Here’s our The Rings Of Power season 2 episode 8 review.
It’s worth mentioning at the start of this review that Richard Taylor and the Weta Workshop team were/are very good at their jobs.
Their orc designs on the original Lord Of The Rings trilogy have aged like an elf. It’s difficult to think of a fantasy race that’s even comparably successful, let alone one that transforms its actors so completely with so few visual effects.
Weta contributed to the beautiful prop and costume work on The Rings Of Power, too, but watching the finale of the show’s second season, it’s the workshop’s historic work that stands out the most. Because for all the production value of the latest series in the Tolkien-verse, anything new can’t help but suffer by association with what is, for my money, the least consistent instalment of the franchise ever committed to the screen.
The season two finale, frankly, is a mess. It starts with a huge emotional climax that has no place in the first few minutes of an episode. Instead, the conclusion of Prince Durin and his father’s arc reeks of a plot point originally written into the end of episode seven arbitrarily bumped into this one to even out the runtime.
Elsewhere, the strands making up the rest of the show aren’t so much tied off as arbitrarily severed. Nori, Poppy and The Stranger seem to have completed their arcs in Rhun offscreen. Isildur is saying goodbye to Theo and heading back to Numenor. The conclusion of the battle of Eregion comes so out of the blue it’s difficult not to laugh. At multiple points I had to dip out of the show to check I hadn’t missed an episode. From a storytelling perspective, episode eight is so much more bizarre than a disappointing finale – it’s almost completely incoherent.
There are a few pretty moments thrown in – a long shot fighting through the ruins of Eregion and a final confrontation between a couple of familiar faces show of some of the series’ best action sequences by far – but it’s difficult to care when the show’s characters are still so thinly drawn.
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Prime Video have said they’re committed to another three seasons of The Rings Of Power, and maybe this acceleration of character arcs is designed to give the show an opportunity for a fresh start in the next instalment. But then this season, too, was supposed to be a fresh start. From the first few episodes, it even looked like showrunners Patrick McKay and John D. Payne might have pulled it off.
But at season two’s end, the duo’s greenness (not just as showrunners, but in the world of TV and film writing in general) is really starting to show. Bringing together hundreds of pages of dense Tolkien lore and crafting a compelling narrative would have been an overwhelming task for anyone – without some extensive experience behind the camera, it might have just proved itself impossible.
The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power is streaming on Prime Video now.