When I wrote this review of Season 2 of “The Rings of Power,” I could think of a few memorable moments. A flock of butterflies merge into a humanoid figure. A choir of singers communicates with the earth in beautiful harmony. A horde of spiders approaches a helpless prisoner, their lair so fetid you can almost smell it.
What me can’t Think of the characters I particularly care about, or the emotions I felt as they crossed Middle-Earth. That’s part of this Amazon drama, the much-discussed prequel to ‘The Lord of the Rings’, which costs more than a billion dollars. The first season was first introduced two years ago polite praise by critics, who rightly praised the show’s visual world-building while noting that the actual story wasn’t yet the same. However, ‘The Rings of Power’ landed with the audience with a thud that would reverberate through the dwarf settlement of Khazad-dûm. According to the Hollywood reporterOnly 37 percent of domestic viewers who started the eight-episode series watched it through to the end. That’s not ideal for a standard release, let alone the most high-profile production in the history of anyone’s streaming service.
Season 2 offers no reason to believe this trend in viewership will be reversed. In terms of the creative quality of the season, the grace period for this lavish Tolkien tribute has passed – although it’s questionable whether a project that generated so many resources deserved it in the first place. (To be fair, reports that Jeff Bezos had demanded Amazon’s answer to “Game of Thrones” colored the perception of “The Rings of Power” long before its premiere, setting it up to be compared to more than just Peter’s trilogy Jackson.) By unmasking Sauron and spoofing the first set of the titular bling, “The Rings of Power” finally has the faintest hints of narrative momentum. But the second episode of this show, as beautiful yet flat as a kitchen backsplash, has the same problems as the first, without much confidence that these problems will ever go away.
Set during Middle Earth’s Second Age, between the mythical prehistory of “The Silmarillion” and the climactic battle of “The Lord of the Rings,” “The Rings of Power” faces the same challenge as many prequels. Even the greenest fantasy neophytes are aware that the elf Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) will fail to stop Sauron (Charlie Vickers) from creating the One Ring and establishing a power base in Mordor, and that when the human warrior Isildur (Maxim Baldry) takes the Ring from the hand of Sauron, it kills the villain’s corporeal form, but not his powerful influence. There is an enthusiastic but limited core of fans excited to see Isildur’s birthplace of Númenor, an advanced but soon-to-be-destroyed human city, or nomadic hobbits from before the Shire, then known as harfoots. For everyone else, however, it is necessary to generate tension or simply interest, independently of an already known outcome.
Other successful prequels, like “Better Call Saul” and – yes – “House of the Dragon,” have doubled down on the sense of tragedy and used that shared knowledge to emphasize the futility and self-destructive nature of the characters’ actions. But “The Rings of Power” definitely wants to be lighter and altogether healthier than this one not family-friendly peers. That’s the prerogative of showrunners Patrick McKay and JD Payne, as well as their corporate sponsors; it’s also consistent with the source material, which started as a children’s novel with “The Hobbit.” Avoiding these themes still puts more weight on character development and other ways to keep our attention – and that’s where ‘The Rings of Power’ continues to fall short.
Season 2’s most compelling strain is actually its grimmest. Having given up his disguise as Halbrand, human king of the Southlands and Galadriel’s ally, Sauron now poses as Annatar, a supposed emissary of the divine Valar. In this form, Sauron preys on the vanity and naivety of elven smith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) to manipulate his target into crafting the rings. The trio of objects created last season are a success: they save the Elves from decay and give their new bearers clairvoyant powers. Sauron builds on that triumph to persuade Celebrimbor to undertake a much riskier endeavor: making rings for dwarves and even men, with Sauron on hand to corrupt the process and thus the final results. The One Ring is still a gleam in Sauron’s fiery, all-seeing eye, but we are well on the way to its origins.
This storyline is an exploration of the insidious corruption of evil, sowing the seeds of mistrust and greed among the good. Edwards plays the increasing paranoia of Celebrimbor with poignant self-doubt, and in Khazad-dûm, Prince Durin (Owain Arthur) and his wife Disa (Sophia Nomvete) contend with the negative influence of a ring on the new greedy and risk-taking king (Peter Mullan ). . The inexorable decline of Middle-Earth, with dwarves and elves losing ground to orcs and humans, is all the sadder because “The Rings of Power” so effectively illustrates the majesty of what is at stake.
But “The Rings of Power” places this resonant conflict amid a dense thicket of lore that remains impenetrable to outsiders, a group to which everyone belongs without the time or inclination to delve into Tolkien’s deep wounds. A prologue shows an earlier version of Sauron, played by “Slow Horses” star Jack Lowden in a shocking cameo, facing an orc uprising led by Adar (Joseph Mawle), who will cause the eruption of Mount Doom and the creation of Mordor accomplished in one of Season 1’s breakout episodes. I couldn’t tell you why these two sides are at odds, nor why Sauron chooses not to reveal himself when he ventures into Mordor in the premiere before changing course to the home of Celebrimbor.
I also couldn’t explain the various political factions vying for control of Númenor, which only appear in one episode in the first half of the season and yet seem to have some importance that I couldn’t discern. (There are some religious motivations at play, and some anti-Elven prejudices, but the origins and motivations of both camps remain unclear.) I couldn’t even tell it apart Where various subplots unfolded in relation to each other, and I often found myself longing for a “Game of Thrones” style card to open each episode.
Rather than an exhilarating sense of discovery, “The Rings of Power” instead induces a vague disorientation, as if you’ve come to a college lecture without having done the required reading. Perhaps this confusion is a matter of user error, although anecdotally I’m not alone. When I told a family member that I was reviewing this season, they expressed surprise that they had never heard of a show set in Middle Earth. We quickly realized that they had watched the entirety of Season 1 and had forgotten not only the details, but its existence.
The difficulty “The Rings of Power” has in communicating its stakes or basic mechanics is directly related to its difficulty in creating fictional creatures with distinctive traits and memorable quirks. Sauron is one of the most iconic villains in popular culture, but in this story he’s no more interesting as a poker-faced sleeper agent than he is as an off-screen presence that looms large during Season 1. Main characters closely match the archetypes portrayed by Tolkien (naive young hobbits on a quest with a wizard) or the collective consciousness (the strong feminine charactera figure of speech that suits this younger Galadriel). Season 2 features several forced, abrupt romances and more wooden dialogue – “Strange how what’s left behind can be the heaviest burden to bear” – that keeps the viewer at a distance. I remain more aware that I’m meant to find the Harfoots charming than I am actually charmed by their antics. Nomvete’s Disa comes closest to fulfilling her assigned role of Fun Provider, but the rest of the show remains a dutiful tribute without spark or surprise.
Amazon preceded the series premiere of “The Rings of Power” with one of the more intrusive, ubiquitous marketing campaigns in living memory. That strategy has since been scaled back; When my laundry detergent arrived recently, the package was missing a brand ad for Prime’s most notable IP. Perhaps the series’ platform is starting to recognize the show’s limited appeal. If you’re the kind of person who’d like to meet Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear), the folksy, whimsical ghost from the Jackson films, then ‘The Rings of Power’ was made for you. If you’re not, then it isn’t – and it doesn’t even try to convince you otherwise anymore.
The first three episodes of “The Rings of Power” will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on August 29, with the remaining episodes streaming weekly on Thursdays.