Throughout much of the second season of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power , characters accuse one another of playing right into the hands of the dark lord Sauron (Charlie Vickers). And while they’re often right about Sauron being behind this sinister scheme or that one, after a point, he has to acknowledge he can’t take all the credit. “You think too much of me,” he scoffs to one foe. “The road goes, ever winding, and not even I can see all its paths.”
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Still, it’s hard not to blame the characters for feeling like pawns in someone else’s game. It’s just not Sauron’s, exactly. In its sophomore outing, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay’s fantasy prequel falls prey to one of the most common afflictions of its kind. It starts to feel like a story shaped backwards from events we already know will need to transpire, rather than one driven forward by the motives and choices of its characters.
The issue is largely one of imbalance. While The Rings of Power has always felt enormous, as befits both its continent-spanning plot and its eye-watering budget, its true secret weapon has been its emphasis on smaller, more personal plights. Lord of the Rings lore tends to slide off my brain like a fried egg off Teflon. But I found it easy enough in the first season to fall in with the friendship between the shrewd elf politician Elrond (Robert Aramayo) and the obstinate dwarf prince Durin IV (Owain Arthur), or the star-crossed romance between the valiant elf soldier Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) and the righteous human healer Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi). I became invested in the fate of Middle-earth because I cared about them, not the other way around.
With Sauron and three of the 20 eventual rings of power having been revealed in the last finale, however, this volume shifts its storytelling focus to the bigger picture. More iconic artifacts are brought forth. More bloody battles are fought. More fan-favorite names are announced — in one case, accompanied by a whole theme song performed by Rufus Wainwright. So much is happening that it takes the first three hours of this eight-part installment just to check in with all the main characters, and so much is at stake that every conversation seems laden with the potential to save the world or destroy it. In such an earth-shaking cascade of events, the little moments tend to get lost. And since it was those little moments that made this universe come to life to begin with, The Rings of Power is left feeling dull despite all that drama.
Take Sauron. His human guise, Halbrand, spent the first chapter criss-crossing the continent with Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), and striking up a flinty-flirty dynamic that made his ultimate betrayal that much more devastating. By contrast, his elven guise, Annatar, spends nearly this entire outing in a single building, manipulating Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) so easily that he seems almost bored; for an entity whose sinister aims set the whole plot in motion, this Sauron is oddly static. Or take the Stranger (Daniel Weyman). When he’s simply hanging out with his Harfoot pals Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and Poppy (Megan Richards), he’s as charming as he’s ever been — maybe more so, now that he has the language to express a wry sense of humor. But he spends too much of the season inching toward a name reveal that rivals Solo ‘s for superfluousness, and too much else of it trying to evade an ominous figure (Ciarán Hinds) even more mysterious than he is.
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I could go on. Political maneuvers that should add complexity to the realm instead divide it neatly into heroes and villains. Interpersonal dynamics are written so vaguely that I kept wondering if I’d missed a scene or ten. A few characters seem to be here solely because they’re going to be important to the mythology later, rather than because they have anything to do now. Others are conjured solely to be killed off — a way of inflating the body count to Serious Adult Drama proportions without writing off anyone we actually give a damn about.
When The Rings of Power does remember to check back in with more human-scale (or elf-scale, or dwarf-scale, or what have you) emotions, glimmers of its original charm return. Galadriel might spend too much of this outing obsessing over her shiny new jewelry, but she’s still blessed with Clark’s uncommon ability to generate chemistry with seemingly anyone. Durin IV and Disa (Sophia Nomvete) remain the cutest couple J.R.R. Tolkien never invented, and their warmth keeps the existential threats to the dwarven kingdom Khazad-Dûm grounded in real and relatable feeling. Surprisingly, the orcs emerge as one of the show’s more compelling factions — thanks in no small part to the bittersweet sense of tragedy underlying its vicious leader, Adar (Sam Hazeldine, replacing Joseph Mawle).
And for as much as I’ve complained about The Rings of Power missing the trees for the vast forests of Ents, its hugeness continues to impress. Its real-world vistas stretch for miles and miles, while its CG settings are awash in otherworldly beauty. Its action scenes, particularly the ones involving Arondir, can be as graceful as they are brutal. Its horrors look almost tactile, whether they take the form of undead warriors, Aliens -esque spider nests or a sentient black goo carefully extricating itself from deep underground. Here and there, it’s possible to get lost in the sheer thrill of getting to behold such incredible sights, created with such painstaking care, at such extravagant cost. All this? For me? Why, you shouldn’t have.
Then those moments march on, because this show has an epic endgame to get to, and it can only tarry so long before it needs to get back to getting its chess pieces into place. It’s too bad. At its best, television can bring us right into the action, until its characters’ joys or devastations feel indistinguishable from our own. Instead, by prioritizing grandiose lore over intimacy and heart, The Rings of Power puts its story behind glass. You’ll get to admire the series’ ambition and its beauty; you’ll come to understand how things happened and why; perhaps you’ll even formulate some ideas about what it all means. But precious little of it will feel like anything that might reach out and touch you.
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