Sara Zwangobani Archives - Page 2 Of 2

September 6, 2022

“The Rings Of Power” Episode 2 Reminds Us What Tolkien’s Writing Is All About

**MINOR SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER EPISODE TWO AHEAD!**

“There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow….[Frodo] thought he had come to the end of his adventure, and a terrible end, but the thought hardened him. He found himself stiffening, as if for a final spring; he no longer felt limp like a helpless prey.”

– The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring, Fog On The Barrow-Downs, p. 140

There is a hint of irony in the title of The Rings Of Power‘s second episode, Adrift – for while we find our main characters cast off-course both literally and figuratively in episode two, this is also where the The Rings Of Power finds itself, and begins to deliver on its initial promise of unprecedentedly epic storytelling grounded in relatable human dynamics. As our characters drift further from familiar shores into dark and dangerous waters populated by the foulest of beasts, each of them transforms before our eyes into capable heroes, moved to decisive action by the sudden germination of that “seed of courage” within their hearts – a seed which in some cases, is buried deep in darkness, as Tolkien wrote. But as Elrond (Robert Aramayo) says of a mallorn sapling growing in the underground kingdom of Khazad-dûm, “where there is love it is never truly dark”.

And it is love – in all its varied forms – that drives the characters throughout the second episode, leading them to do both great and foolish things in its name. For love of Middle-earth, Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) abandons the ship that would have taken her safely back to Valinor and swims the entire breadth of the Sundering Seas. For love of Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi), and to a lesser extent for her kinsfolk, Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) investigates a network of tunnels built by orcs underneath the village of Tirharad, while Bronwyn, for love of her son, Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin), takes on an orc that got into her home. For love of a complete stranger, Elanor Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh) hides a secret from her family – one which could put all the Harfoots at risk.

Coming on the heels of a pilot episode that struggled to eloquently and concisely convey what The Rings Of Power was actually about, or how it stands apart from House Of The Dragon, The Witcher, and The Wheel Of Time, among other fantasy series’ currently on television, this episode’s clear focus on love as a catalyst for acts of courage ensures that there will be no doubt in viewers’ minds as to what kind of story this is – a decidedly earnest fantasy that seeks to uplift its audiences. That’s not to say The Rings Of Power doesn’t have dark and occasionally disturbing moments throughout, or that it won’t gradually become darker in future seasons when we get to the bits with human sacrifice and genocide in them, but there’s a fine line to be walked between exploring the darkness and actually reveling in it – one which Tolkien arguably never crossed, and which I don’t expect Rings Of Power to cross any time soon, either.

Besides, when so many of these characters are as endearing as they are because they love deeply and unapologetically, there’s no rush to put them in situations just yet where their love and unwavering faith in something greater than themselves isn’t enough to save the day. There’ll be plenty of time for that in later seasons. Right now, it’s crucial that our protagonists understand what it is to triumph, even if those triumphs are small and short-lived, so that every setback on the path ahead will hurt them – and us – twice as hard as it would otherwise. To use an example from The Lord Of The Rings, it would be a lot harder to empathize with Frodo’s suffering under the oppressive weight of the One Ring if we hadn’t already seen him at his strongest, spiritually, when that seed of courage awoke within him beneath the Barrow-downs.

The brief, triumphant moments we share with our characters in this episode hit me in the feels, though to varying degrees depending on which storylines I felt were generally well-executed and which needed a couple more refinements. Elanor Brandyfoot’s clumsy efforts at communication with the mysterious Stranger (Daniel Weyman) who fell out of the sky in episode one, culminating in her earning his trust enough that he no longer wails in fear every time she spooks him, belong squarely in the former category, because while not the most action-packed subplot by any means, there’s real emotional heft to every interaction between the two.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Galadriel’s victory over the perils of the Sundering Sea didn’t resonate with me as strongly, because the perils in question turn out to be weightless in comparison to everything she’s already confronted and conquered in her life (even her hotly-anticipated underwater encounter with a sea monster lasts all of ten seconds before she escapes by simply…swimming in the opposite direction), and because the only thing gained from this subplot is Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), a shipwrecked Southlander who shares with Galadriel the first hard evidence that Sauron has returned. Given that Halbrand’s character is fairly unimpressive, and that Vickers’ performance gets only a “let’s wait and see” out of me, I’m not sure that we gained more than we potentially lost in the ten to fifteen minutes this subplot eats up.

And I’m still salty that the sea monster fight never materialized! As someone who’s equal parts fascinated by the sea and terrified of what lurks beneath its surface, I was really looking forward to an action-sequence like nothing we’d ever seen before in the legendarium or its adaptations – but either the budget couldn’t support such an action-sequence (I find that hard to believe), or it got cut for time (which I can believe, because television executives are always making stupid decisions like that). At least the monster took out all of Halbrand’s equally irritating crewmates before vanishing back into the ocean depths.

While we’re on the subject of action, I must admit that The Rings Of Power is severely lacking in this department – and it can’t exclusively be due to budgetary concerns, because even action-sequences requiring relatively little CGI fizzle out before they get started. My best guess is that, in an effort to conceal instances of poor fight choreography and protect the dignity of actors still mostly new to wielding swords and axes, these sequences were edited to the point where they now hardly exist. The exception to the rule is the second episode’s fast-paced, close-quarters brawl involving Bronwyn, her son Theo, and a single orc that claws through the floorboards of Bronwyn’s home. A single orc might not sound so bad when we’ve seen swarms of them onscreen before, but through the lens of The Orphanage director J.A. Bayona, this orc has all the presence of a slasher-movie villain; its movements slow and purposeful, its design genuinely grotesque (those practical effects are just…*chef’s kiss*), and its fate appropriately gruesome.

But the sequence is still too short, and the orc doesn’t rack up any kills the way a slasher-movie villain should. I mention this only because I think The Rings Of Power‘s stakes are still somewhat unclear after two episodes (a little Sauron does not go a long way, as I wrote in my review of episode one), and a minor character’s death at the hands of an orc would have made a big difference. I suppose there’s still time for that, but the stakes diminish slightly whenever characters walk unscathed from a fight, and so far that’s all they’ve done (well, with the exception of Galadriel’s brother Finrod, but we hardly knew him and he died offscreen). Arondir gets captured by orcs, but I’m fairly certain he’ll escape by the end of episode three and return to Tirharad to help Bronwyn muster the Southlanders to her cause.

Theoretically, however, the stakes are ridiculously high right from the get-go – we’re talking end of the world, end of life as we know it, all that good stuff. That’s what Galadriel claims will happen if Sauron’s imminent return is unchallenged, and although we have yet to see much (or, come to think of it, any) proof of her claims, I’ve read The Lord Of The Rings and its appendices, so I know she’s right, and I know there will be many opportunities in the near future for us to see Sauron in action, so we never have to end up in a Game Of Thrones type situation where they keep telling us a bad thing is gonna happen, but then when it happens, it’s actually not that bad.

In this case, the bad thing really is gonna happen and it’s gonna be worse than Galadriel could have possibly predicted (the source material being written already makes that a guarantee). But that’s several seasons down the line, and The Rings Of Power needs to start laying the groundwork now for the bad thing to happen then, so that viewers who haven’t read the books and don’t remember the movies know what this is all building towards. So far, the prologue’s attention-grabbing aerial battle between Morgoth’s fell beasts and a giant eagle of Manwë is still more visually impressive than anything Sauron has done (onscreen, to be clear), even during the First Age of Middle-earth.

On the margins of the main story, where the stakes are still high but not quite so unfathomable, it’s easier to convey the consequences a minor slip-up could have, and this ties into my earlier point regarding the joyful and triumphant moments we need to share with the characters – because while you can kinda get away with being vague about what the end of the world really means (the fantasy genre’s been doing that forever, and the appeal hasn’t worn off), when the stakes are small they need to be clear. And The Rings Of Power mostly succeeds on this front, especially where the Harfoots are concerned: from the moment they’re both introduced, we’re first shown and then frequently reminded that the Harfoots are a nomadic people who survive by moving out of harm’s way in a twinkling. So when Elanor’s father, Largo Brandyfoot (Dylan Smith), breaks his ankle, we understand immediately that the consequences this could have on Elanor’s family and the entire community are devastating.

Likewise, I’m invested in Elrond’s storyline not because I particularly care whether he’s successful in brokering a deal with the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm on behalf of Lord Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards), but because it turns out that there’s a lot more at stake here for Elrond than he let on – his friendship with the Dwarven prince Durin IV (Owain Arthur) is riding on this, and Durin already feels betrayed by Elrond for missing his wedding, the birth of his children, and a whole bunch of other milestones in Durin’s relatively short life that Elrond, as an immortal Elf, forgot were important. Whether or not you can relate to that exact experience, most of us have been in roughly analogous situations.

And if you’ve ever had to mediate between two estranged friends (or frankly, even if you haven’t), I think you’ll be drawn to the character of Disa (Sophia Nomvete), Durin’s wife and Elrond’s only other close acquaintance amongst the Dwarves, to whom both turn for help in getting through to the other over an awkward dinner. Mediation is Disa’s primary role throughout this episode, where she indeed appears only briefly, but we learn so many interesting details about her, and Nomvete’s performance is instantly so warm and heartfelt, that I feel as though we’re only scratching the surface of what could be done with her character – a “Resonator” responsible for singing to Khazad-dûm, not its people but its stones.

Resonators like Disa are a welcome new addition to the lore, which has surprisingly little to say regarding Dwarven culture and customs even in the Third Age, much less the Second. If The Rings Of Power freely invents original material here and in other corners of Middle-earth, it’s because there’s plenty of space in this sandbox to flesh out all the characters that to Tolkien were just names on a family-tree, and reconstruct from imagination all the great cities that the Fellowship of the Ring never got to see when they hurried across Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age. It’s not lore-breaking to let “other minds and hands” add to the great tales Tolkien left behind.

In one particularly beautiful example of this, The Rings Of Power‘s unconventional (but decidedly charming) version of Celebrimbor regales Elrond with a story of the First Age that comes to us not from The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales, but from the writers’ own imagination – and the potent simplicity of the story they’ve created, one in which the Great Foe Morgoth gazes so long upon the beauty of the Silmarils that he weeps a single tear in which his terrible visage is reflected, finally breaking the spell Fëanor’s work had cast over him, is so evocative of Tolkien’s own writing that I had to double-check to make sure this detail wasn’t mentioned in any of the published works. The deliberate caveat that this story is merely a legend amongst the Elves means that you can integrate it into your readings of The Silmarillion or disregard it entirely, if for whatever reason it doesn’t work for you.

So, as sacrilegious as it may be to say this, maybe original content can be good sometimes, actually? Maybe there’s beauty to be found in these stories that don’t have a basis in the canon but still encapsulate the integral themes of Tolkien’s Second Age writings, besides being – for the most part – really well-written, well-acted, and visually spectacular in their own right?

I don’t know about you, but I’ll not soon forget the experience of seeing Khazad-dûm revealed in all its ancient glory on the biggest screen possible (I was lucky enough to attend a theatrical screening of the first two episodes). As Bayona’s camera swooped through an underground wonderland awash with blazing sunlight, capturing and crystallizing every last detail at which the author’s pen can only hope to indicate, all the while accompanied by Bear McCreary’s bellowing Dwarven theme (which has been stuck in my head for the past several days), I realized that whatever other sensations The Rings Of Power evokes in me, first and foremost among those will always be love for Middle-earth – of that, I’m already confident.

I love being back in this world where love is a power innate to all people that can awaken in them the capacity for earth-shaking heroism, and the fact that The Rings Of Power conveys all that in just the first two episodes is why my eyes are brimming with tears just writing these words, because even if all the new fans introduced to Middle-earth by way of this series never continue on to the books (though many will, I’m sure), in the end I believe The Rings Of Power is worthy to stand alongside a handful of other great adaptations of Tolkien’s works that get it. This is a story about love. I sincerely doubt that Jeff-I-Want-My-Game–Of–Thrones-Bezos knew when he commissioned this project that what he’d get would be the literal antithesis to the harsh cynicism of Thrones and its successors, but based on The Rings Of Power‘s global viewership numbers, it looks like love wins.

Episode Rating: 8.5/10

September 2, 2022

“Rings Of Power” Episode 1 Sets The Stage For An Epic Tale

**MINOR SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER EPISODE ONE!**

“Among those of [Morgoth’s] servants that have names the greatest was that spirit whom the Eldar called Sauron..,.in all the deeds of Melkor the Morgoth upon Arda, in his vast works and in the deceits of his cunning, Sauron had a part, and was only less evil than his master in that for long he served another and not himself. But in after years he rose like a shadow of Morgoth and a ghost of his malice, and walked behind him on the same ruinous path down into the Void.”

– The Silmarillion: Valaquenta, p. 23

Although Amazon was denied access to the contents of The Silmarillion (and it’s evident from the opening scene just to what extent this has hindered their ability to tell a coherent story), The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power is best described as a Silmarillion sequel of similarly gargantuan proportions, and not as a prequel to The Lord Of The Rings, despite how Amazon and the mainstream media have jointly marketed the series, and what its long and unwieldy full title would perhaps lead you to believe…and I mean that not merely in the sense that The Rings Of Power picks up right where The Silmarillion left off, with the great enemy Morgoth defeated and his lieutenant Sauron still evading capture in Middle-earth, but in that the writers have constructed an original story around these events that feels almost too large for even this largest and most expensive of television series’ – a grand and somber narrative spanning centuries, with a massive ensemble cast given precious few moments to leave a lasting impression in these first two episodes.

Yet on that note, there are hundreds upon hundreds of named characters in The Silmarillion, many of whom only stick around for a couple of pages and some of whom are mentioned just once or twice in a single paragraph, and these characters have nonetheless made an impression on people – so I firmly believe that the protagonists of Amazon’s epic series will do the same, especially seeing as the main cast already have more screentime in just two episodes than most of The Silmarillion‘s main characters had in a whole book. Still not as much as they deserve, mind you, but just enough that you’ll know going into episode three which of these characters you’ll want to spend more time with – and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that, for me, those characters are Elanor Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh), Elrond (Robert Aramayo), and Disa (Sophia Nomvete), the latter of whom I’ll speak about in my review of episode two.

Collectively, these three characters represent almost all the Free Peoples of Middle-earth – Harfoots, Elves, and Dwarves, respectively – and at this point I’m just waiting for a charismatic human character to come along and give me a reason to get invested in the dealings of Men. Nazanin Boniadi does her level best with the character of Bronwyn, a shy and unassuming single mother from the Southlands who falls in love with a Silvan Elf, but humans in The Rings Of Power are the most underwritten of all the races that make up Middle-earth’s diverse population. To some extent, that could be interpreted as a reflection of their current social status in Middle-earth and an unconscious bias on the part of our Elven protagonists and narrator, but I have a feeling it’s probably not intentional.

Nonetheless, with so many different peoples represented in just the first two episodes, even if only briefly, the scope of this series is quite large – as I said, almost too large. In episode one, following a necessarily vague and therefore somewhat unhelpful prologue that is memorable mostly for the fact that it’s the first time we’ve seen events from The Silmarillion adapted for the screen, we flash-forward to find our main characters scattered far and wide across Middle-earth, each isolated to their own little corner of the map where they can pursue their own agendas untroubled. And while I’m hardly the first person to say this, it bears repeating that each location we visit is distinct and extraordinarily beautiful, from the rolling hills of Valinor bathed in unearthly light to the cliffs of Lindon overlooking the young sea, and the tumbling ladders of crystalline ice suspended from mountaintops in the Forodwaith.

In fact, not to get side-tracked or anything, but I can’t overstate it enough that The Rings Of Power is beautiful; genuinely some of the most beautiful television ever produced. Director J.A. Bayona definitely got the memo that Middle-earth is as much a character in Tolkien’s stories as any Elf or Hobbit, and just as deserving of flattering close-ups every now and again. If there’s one fault with Bayona’s direction, it’s that whenever his camera comes to rest just over a character’s shoulder during a reverse-angle dialogue sequence, he has a tendency to leave it there for the duration of the scene, which grows especially frustrating when the environments in which these characters are placed are clearly practical sets demanding – nay, pleading – to be interacted with and walked upon! I’m not feeling the energy that these sets inspired in the actors, and which they could have used to their advantage if they were allowed to ever move about.

Anyway, forgive me my occasional tangents. We’re first introduced to the Elves – an immortal race of beings from beyond the Sundering Seas who reside in Middle-earth partly out of genuine love for the land, and partly because the land was bought with their own blood. Characters like Elrond, who are relatively young in Elven years, have a vision of what Middle-earth could be if the Elves finally laid down their weapons and allowed themselves to be at peace for once in their lives, while Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) is still poking around in dark corners, searching for any sign of Sauron, the undefeated enemy responsible for so much of her sorrow.

Conceptually, Galadriel’s arc is quite the compelling one – and the idea that there are Elves who wish for her to stop, and would even conspire with each other to send her packing and put an end to the war she insists on prolonging for her own purposes, is all rather fascinating. In execution, it only works half the time. Legally, The Rings Of Power can’t plumb the depths of Galadriel’s trauma without encroaching upon territory covered exclusively in The Silmarillion, including the gruesome details of her elder brother Finrod (Will Fletcher)’s death at the hands of Sauron. We only spend a few moments with Finrod in waking life before he’s dead, suddenly, at which point Galadriel embarks on her quest for vengeance.

Galadriel has been hunting Sauron for centuries by the time we catch up with her in the Northern Wastes, and is still hot on his heels, but we as the audience are only allowed one quick glimpse of the Dark Lord (conveniently wearing a familiar suit of full-body armor) – and while we can all agree that he looks absolutely fantastic, I can’t help but wonder if one shot is enough to convince fans, particularly casual fans who aren’t aware of the atrocities Sauron committed while serving under Morgoth, just what a threat he poses to Middle-earth. Sure, poisoned cow’s milk in Tirharad and decayed mallorn leaves in Lindon are an indication that he’s probably up to no good, but until orcs start popping up in the Southlands in episode two, the only tangible antagonist is a single hungry snow-troll that stupidly attempts to ambush Galadriel in a cave.

Still, one could argue that the Elves are the antagonists of their own story – for indeed, it’s their pride, their stubbornness, and their misplaced confidence in their own might that leads the High King of the Noldor, Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker), to dismiss all of the evidence piling up as just a string of coincidences out of which Galadriel has constructed a false narrative that Sauron has returned. In that sense, too, The Rings Of Power is much like The Silmarillion: for at their core they are both stories of Elven failings. Where the stories may differ slightly, and where The Rings Of Power certainly differs from previous adaptations of Tolkien’s work, is that The Rings Of Power doesn’t depict the Elves as ethereal or untouchable to the point where their aloof attitude is ever justified.

Nor are they capable of the same gravity-defying feats that Peter Jackson’s Elves effortlessly pulled off in The Hobbit trilogy. In fact, physically, they’re almost indistinguishable from humans. Some might consider this a downgrade – personally, I find it to be an intriguing stylistic choice that unexpectedly serves a thematic purpose in the story. For if Elves look just like humans, and they act just like humans, then the only thing differentiating them from humans is their immortality – and for a human, to look at an Elf and see nothing there so vastly different from themselves that it could be said to warrant the gift of immortal life being bestowed to one and not the other, that would be weird and a little conflicting. On top of that, the Elves and humans are still pretty close in the Second Age, so these are people the humans know well, and regard as friends, if not nearly family.

Well, mostly. In Middle-earth’s Southlands, where Elves were assigned to watch over the descendants of humans who followed Morgoth during the First Age, there’s a clear divide between the two peoples that is widening with each passing day – and only Bronwyn and a Silvan Elf named Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) have any interest in bridging that divide. While their relationship is described in romantic terms by supporting characters in-universe (Arondir is harshly reminded by his Elven compatriots that two prior unions between Elves and Men ended tragically), I have not yet discerned this apparently palpable chemistry of which they speak. It’s only when the two characters find themselves suddenly standing on the front lines of the war for Middle-earth that I was even convinced they cared for each other.

Still, while neither Arondir nor Bronwyn is particularly high on my list of characters I cared about deeply after watching the first two episodes, I’m nonetheless curious about life in the Southlands for both the Silvan Elves and the descendants of Morgoth’s worshippers, and I wish The Rings Of Power used its time as wisely as it did its enormous budget; perhaps then we could have explored the conflict between Elves and Men with some proper nuance and avoided awkward moments…like when a kid refers to Arondir by the name “Knife-Ears” (I need writers to stop inventing fantasy slurs, please for the love of Eru, stop), or when Arondir tells Bronwyn that the residents of a nearby village were especially loyal to Morgoth in the old days, as if it hasn’t been over a thousand years since then – you’re telling me that the people of these two neighboring villages didn’t intermingle and intermarry to the point where such labels would be meaningless after a few generations?

I suppose it’s not so bizarre that an Elf would think that way, but that one line – well, that and Bronwyn’s immediate rebuttal that the people in the village are “good people”, close kin of hers – doesn’t make for the most thorough exploration of the subject. And unfortunately, Bronwyn is interrupted before she can say anything more, when she and Arondir find the village in question deserted. That’s the end of that conversation, and as of episode two the writers have not yet picked up this story-thread again.

That sort of thing happens a lot in the first two episodes of The Rings Of Power (not that specific scenario, just scenes being interrupted before they can reach their seemingly natural conclusion), which is why I take issue with complaints that the pacing is slow. I felt as though the first episode raced by! The moments that stand out to me in these episodes, generally, are the still and contemplative moments that have been given space to breathe – when the show isn’t rushing on to the next thing but instead allowing us to live in the present with characters we adore, set amidst beautiful scenery or on any of those magnificent practical sets I mentioned before. I think that’s one reason why both Elrond and Elanor got through to me, because they’re the two characters who benefit most from such moments in the first episode.

The time we spend with the Harfoots in episode one, for example, is time well-spent establishing characters and character dynamics that will be easy to remember going forward. Elanor Brandyfoot is an inquisitive young Harfoot who wants to see the great wide world off the beaten path that the Harfoots take each year as they migrate back-and-forth across the same familiar patch of land in Rhovanion (a patch of land that by the time of The Lord Of The Rings had become an “unfriendly waste”, blasted by some “pestilence or war or evil deed of the Enemy” – so make a mental note of that). Her best friend, Poppy Proudfellow (Megan Richards), is the prehistoric Samwise Gamgee to her prehistoric Frodo Baggins; well, perhaps not quite as fascinated by Elves as Sam would be, but no less willing to help her friend out of a tight situation at a moment’s notice.

Even outside of these two characters, I felt that we really got to know the Harfoots, individually and collectively, who they are and what they stand for, as they spend the entire first episode preparing for a festival to mark the end of summer (who wants to bet it’s held on September 22nd?), while avoiding “Big People” and other dangerous creatures wandering across their lands. There are several character actors with small but memorable roles sprinkled amongst the Harfoots, including legendary British comedian Sir Lenny Henry as an elderly sage named Sadoc Burrows who is in possession of the Harfoots’ only book – and is the only Harfoot capable of reading it. Thusitha Jayasundera is also delightful as Malva, a gossip constantly prophesying doom who hangs around Sadoc in the hopes that he’ll spill some secrets from his dusty old book.

Because it’s not until the very end of episode one that something momentous actually happens to the Harfoots in the form of an old man falling from the sky (more on him in my review of episode two), the Harfoots are, for the time being, relatively inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. As Elanor’s mother Marigold (Sara Zwangobani) tries to explain to her, the Harfoots don’t need to get involved in Big People business because they have each other, they always have and they always will, and that’s always been enough. Therefore, while it comes as no surprise that the Harfoots are easily the most endearing characters in The Rings Of Power, I was personally shocked to discover that their subplot is also one of the most interesting, even before the arrival of the aforementioned Stranger (Daniel Weyman).

Of course, it’s because the Harfoots make the most of their limited screentime that this is the case – and I’m sure I’d feel the same way about Elves or Men if we had spent a little more time getting to know them as actual characters – but I think part of it, at least for me, is that the Harfoots, alone of all the Free Peoples we’ve met (with the possible exception of the Dwarves, but they don’t show up until episode two), are unfamiliar in a way that is particularly immersive, because it underscores how far removed this story is from the events of The Lord Of The Rings.

To put it another way, when we first enter the Elf-kingdom of Lindon in episode one, I felt at-home right away because The Rings Of Power uses all the same design cues for the Elves and their architecture that Peter Jackson did – Lindon is, much like Jackson’s interpretation of Rivendell, a web of open-concept porticos and colonnades draped across cliffs and autumnal woodlands. It’s beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but it does make me feel as though I’m returning to Middle-earth the way that Peter Jackson conceived it, when really I want to see something different, something new (is it any wonder Elanor is my favorite character?). When we meet the Harfoots, living not yet in cozy holes in the ground but in tents and small carts in the middle of the woods, rather like the Nelwyn from 1988’s Willow…that was the moment Rings Of Power first pulled me out of my comfort-zone, and it felt wonderful.

In that moment, I wasn’t returning to Middle-earth – I was being reintroduced to this world and these characters as I’ve never seen them before onscreen or even in the pages of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. I can predict each step the Harfoots will have to take for them to transform over time into the Hobbits of the Third Age, but I’m enjoying this take on the Harfoots so much that I don’t need to see them evolve any time soon – and in just five seasons, I don’t know that The Rings Of Power could even believably get them to the point where they’d be recognizable from The Lord Of The Rings, decked out with late 19th Century accoutrements like pocket-watches, parasols, and floral-printed waistcoats with brass buttons.

That being said, The Rings Of Power covers over five-hundred years of Middle-earth’s history in a prologue under five minutes long (though there’s enough intentionally vague imagery in there that you’ll still want to check out my recent Silmarillion summary so you can pick up on easily-overlooked details) before jumping forward a few thousand years to an indeterminate point on the timeline somewhere near the end of the Second Age, so it’s clear now that the writers are taking many liberties with the chronology where they feel it suits their story to have, say, Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) alive simultaneously to the last Númenóreans.

I can’t honestly say that it bothers me every time the Tale of Years has been slightly altered, but I do find it strange that the character dynamics amongst the Elves don’t at all reflect their canonical age differences – Elrond and Galadriel, for instance, speak to each other as if they’re roughly the same age, when in truth Galadriel is anywhere between 5000 to 24000 years old in The Rings Of The Power, while Elrond, at a mere 1500 years old, is young enough to be her future son-in-law. Gil-galad and Celebrimbor are a generation younger than Galadriel, yet both are played as if they’re much older, and portrayed by middle-aged actors to boot.

I have no desire to dissect every moment in the first episode that I would consider “lore-breaking”, because inevitably that will turn into nit-picking and in fact I’m quite satisfied with how The Rings Of Power has turned out, so if that’s the kind of coverage you’re expecting I urge you to continue your search elsewhere besides my blog. Just to give you a sense of what kind of thing irritated me, and because I think it will irritate me for a long time yet and I need to share this burden with my readers, I was…deeply conflicted when Gil-galad granted Galadriel permission to return across the Sundering Seas to Valinor, as if he possessed the authority to do so. On the one hand, I understand that it would be exceedingly difficult to explain why Galadriel is banned from heading west without mentioning her crimes against the Valar in the First Age that Amazon can’t legally mention, but also…it just felt so wrong.

On a more positive note, while I expected to be extremely critical of the original dialogue written for The Rings Of Power, I can only think of a few instances from the first episode where a line was poorly-written or its delivery fell flat. For the most part, Amazon’s writers did an admirable job of mimicking Tolkien’s signature style without ever reusing or misappropriating lines from The Lord Of The Rings. But given how high the bar is that they’ve set for themselves, every occasion on which they fail to clear that bar – in the first episode, the worst line of dialogue is undoubtedly “Elf-lords only” – will momentarily break the immersion.

What will draw you back in again, whether you’re a diehard fan or someone just looking for a cool new show to watch over the weekend, are the characters (whom you really can’t help but root for), and the visual splendor on display in every frame of these first two episodes. After finishing these episodes, you may feel – as I do – that the story still needs a little more time to solidify into the firm backbone required of a multi-season series and a potential billion-dollar investment on Amazon’s part, but if Amazon (and audiences) are willing to give The Rings Of Power the time it needs to do just that, it could quickly grow to become what it already aspires to be: a worthy sequel to The Silmarillion.

Episode Rating: 7.5/10