The Rings of Power: season two is a vast improvement – and a meditation on the dangerous allure of AI

At the beginning of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo Baggins attempts to describe how he feels about his unnatural lifespan, extended by his ownership of one of the magical rings. He likens it to too little butter being spread on too much bread.

That quote came back to me as I sat through Amazon Prime’s first series of The Rings of Power in 2022. For all the hype, and budget, it repeatedly felt like too little content was being drawn out across too many episodes.

The show’s writers faced the problem of only having the rights to the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, in which Tolkien gave brief histories of the two ages prior to the setting of the novels. Whereas director Peter Jackson had three volumes to draw from for his Lord Of The Rings film trilogy (2001-2003), the writers of Rings of Power had only a hundred pages or so.

There are six appendices, but in effect only two of them provided much to base a plot around. The age-old issue of how to adapt a lengthy book to a screenplay was reversed for Rings of Power – it was like creating a mini-series from a few entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (a pre-Conquest text which in some cases would summarise the events of an entire year in half a dozen words).

On the plus side, the first series was beautifully imagined, with strong acting from key leads (notably Morfydd Clark as Galadriel and Charlie Vickers as Halbrand). But what cannot be overlooked is the most obvious problem from series one: that it was, to put it bluntly, boring.

The “twist” (which I won’t reveal) around the identity of a key character seemed somewhat obvious, so relying on it as the driving point of the narrative was ineffective. And audiences who are accustomed to unexpected plot turns in nearly every episode of series such as Game of Thrones seemed to find the laborious world-building of series one a strain.

So, it was with some dread that I sat down to watch series two – surely the butter tub was all-but-empty now? Thankfully, this is not the case: so far, the writers, directors and producers seem to have learned their lesson.

A little less conversation, a little more action

Both episode one and two open with excellent hooks – the main villain of the Lord of the Rings series Sauron’s backstory, and something rumbling deep in the bowels of the dwarf kingdom. Already this series is lining itself up to be a struggle, and one to savour, between the brave-but-flawed elven woman Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and the increasingly interesting Sauron.

Some of the subtlety around the latter inevitably suffers from the fact that fans already know what Sauron will become (the dark lord of the rings), but his journey to that injects a level of interest into the character that is not easily gleamed from the appendices of the book.

Also pleasing are the subtle references to the Jackson films. Galadriel and Elrond’s horse chase through the woods is a direct a homage to the Ringwraith’s pursuit of Frodo and Arwen in the films, while the donning of the rings by the three elves is straight out of the prologue to Jackson’s Fellowship.

Even the bad guys get more depth. In 1956, US literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote an ill-informed analysis of Lord Of The Rings, calling it “juvenile trash”. He took aim, in particular, at the seemingly one-dimensional dichotomy of good and evil, especially as witnessed in the orcs.

Tolkien was perplexed by this, arguing that you do get insights into their thinking, and this is already being explored in series two. Here, the orcs are not simple cannon fodder – or at least have a view on whether they should be. While clearly they are still “bad”, they are seen showing feelings we can identify with (fear, mistrust of silken-tongue leaders, the anger of an oppressed underclass), even if these are accompanied by group hissing and snarling.

The desert lands of Rhûn to the east also now take on a more developed role than simply providing more men to fight for Sauron.

AI as a theme in The Rings of Power

One emerging theme in the show was also central to Tolkien’s concerns. He warned against the rise of the machines, their seductive nature and the desire for power that comes with them. In a letter to his son, Christopher, in 1945, Tolkien wrote of a “war of machines” and his fear they would become “enormously more powerful”. Series two of Rings of Power is concentrating on this idea.

The elves have become bewitched by the rings, which seem to offer infinite possibilities and unimagined power, but – crucially – they do not understand them. They see only the good, not the potential bad.

Moreover, the cunning designer of these rings, Sauron, is without scruples and seemingly guided only by a desire for domination (over “flesh”, as is often repeated). Any dissenting voice of reason, such as from Elrond (Robert Aramayo), is ignored or chased away.

In our AI-driven world, there are lessons to be learnt here. If you push things too far, if you invest too much power in a technology you do not understand, or if, like the dwarves, you literally dig too deep out of greed and the need to satisfy demand for precious resources, then beware. Tolkien knew this, and we now have promising signs from the writers of Rings of Power that they have recognised it too.

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