Powerless Ringing

I’m a Tolkien fan. I used to be a Tolkien fanatic, but now I think I’m settled down into a fan.

There’s a difference.

It wouldn’t exactly be wrong to write that I wasn’t excited about Rings of Power, the Tolkien-inspired streaming series. I was—indeed—anticipating the series, but I was really let down by The Hobbit trilogy of movies. I saw the first two in the theatres, but only saw the last because my daughters had loved the Lord of the Rings movies and actually really enjoyed the first two Hobbit movies (don’t ask me what they are called, I don’t remember and don’t really care). We got the three movies from the library and I was happy to take them back.

My daughters still enjoy that series, but they thankfully have more enthusiasm for the LotR movies. Or maybe they just tell me that because I have a really good “disapproving dad” stare.

So, yes, I was anticipating Rings of Power (RoP?) but had a hearty skepticism.

I got just over halfway through the first season. I didn’t exactly give up, it’s just we were watching it as a family, and it got to the point where there were a bunch of other things we were excited to watch together and no one was clamouring for more RoP.

Then I got a free month of Amazon streaming (did not pay for it and will not pay for it), and decided to give the second season a shot.

I had steeled myself, and approached it with really low expectations. That may be why I kind of enjoyed it for at least the first half of the season. But it wasn’t great. It wasn’t exactly an idiot plot—a story that only works when everyone acts like an idiot—but there were certainly a few . . . idiot scenes. There wasn’t a lot of nuance in the characterizations, something that the movies often faced as well (and I would argue that is absolutely not true of the Lord of the Rings novel[s], but that is an argument for another time). In order to move the plot forward and get the events to happen as they needed to happen, the characters sometimes acted contrary to what I had expected based on their previous characterization—which could be on me—or a motivation or justification was stated but didn’t stand up to scrutiny.

I mean, how did people so dense survive so long? How did people who lacked even a basic understanding of politics or people create powerful kingdoms? It just didn’t bear even a basic examination.

This got unbearable in the last three but especially the last two episodes. Those episodes indeed entered idiot plot territory. And that became all the worse when the series faced the same problems as the movies—no one on the staff apparently understands even the basics about fighting a battle. I mean, I’m not saying there needed to be ditches, but MY GOD that was stupid. Really, really stupid. Yes, that was also a problem with the LotR movies, but at least that wasn’t layered on top of characters acting like idiots. You put those two together and it is painful to watch.

I kept hoping they would pull it out, that the story would turn out to actually be clever. Nope. Just bad writing.

Will I watch a third season? If I’ve got absolutely nothing else to watch, maybe. It’s fun to see an interpretation of Middle Earth. But I probably won’t be able to make it through to the end. If I make it past half-way, that’ll either be a testament to my thirst for the Tolkien adjacent or that it actually improved.

I wouldn’t recommend Rings of Power and give it 2 unfathomably silly siege engines out of 5.