*comic book nerd voice* worst. TV show. ever.
nitpicky nerds may be annoying, but at least we care
For my sins (the book I’m working on) I have now watched the entirety of Rings of Power, Amazon’s attempt at a Lord of the Rings prequel. The show originally aired last fall, which was when I saw the first two episodes; the experience filled me with a kind of profound aesthetic despair, and I stopped watching. I didn’t like it, and I’d also immediately guessed who Sauron and Gandalf were (the show’s major gimmick is the Mystery Box reveal of which random dude is secretly an important Tolkien character.) Internet spoilers soon revealed that I’d guessed right for both characters, so there didn’t seem any point in enduring the rest.
Thanks to other internet spoilers, and humorous recaps from friends (hi Rennix and Emma), I ended up forming a kind of imaginary picture of what the remainder of the show was like. Since I’m a hopeless Tolkien fangirl, I must have also unconsciously filled in other gaps with the source material (the appendices to Return of the King, which Amazon had the rights to, and The Silmarillion, which they didn’t.) Usually, when you hear a lot of jokes and negative chatter about a TV show or a movie, you end up creating an unfair picture of what it’s like; you’re insufficiently generous to the thing as it actually is. But it turns out that my imaginary, unintentional version of Rings of Power was actually too generous, and a lot more coherent.
Rings of Power, as a whole, simply sucks. Major plot points require huge coincidences or off-screen explanations, character motives are mixed up and implausible, much of the dialogue sounds AI-generated, and the world-building is skimpy at best and silly at worst. Here and there, the show gives us a few interesting ideas that engage with and critique the source material; they’re dangled in front of the camera like shiny toys, and dropped immediately for the next incoherent set piece. Sometimes, bad storytelling can be forgiven if the visual imagery is sufficiently beautiful (i.e. Miyazaki’s messy but gorgeous adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle), but Rings of Power doesn’t even look good. The costume design is fine, and the set design is occasionally all right, but the CGI is laughably bad and the cinematography is amateur hour. The whole effect is thoughtless, sloppy, cheap, and rushed. The actors mostly look miserable. I felt miserable. Rings of Power is the most expensive TV show ever made, and yet it looks like shit and it sounds like shit. It’s a careless, almost contemptuous turd of a program, crapped out by a legendarily avaricious corporation who couldn’t care less if they create beautiful things, but only that they sign up more subscribers.
The show, when it aired, received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics. This is where it becomes an interesting subject for the book, which is partly about the intersection of art and politics. When is a TV show just a corporate exercise; when is it cynically calculated to the point of being dangerous? In the case of Rings of Power, some progressive critics seemed to have rallied around it because far-right assholes complained about the multiracial cast. The diversity of the casting is certainly one of the show’s strong points, and something that Tolkien’s work badly needed—Peter Jackson’s decision to replicate Tolkien’s awful racial politics is one of the major failures of the LotR movies. But the show is still bad; it may have a diverse group of actors who are trying very hard but they’re given absolutely nothing to work with. Anyway I get into a lot of this in the book, but for reasons such as “word count” and “reader interest” and “please just stick to the goddamn thesis” I can’t just fill hundreds of pages with all the reasons that Rings of Power sucks. Fortunately, I have this here newsletter, so enjoy the following extensive (extremely extensive!) list of My Complaints.
(A caveat, in case you watched the show and liked it: I do think it’s possible to have watched RoP and mistaken it for something good—but only if you weren’t really watching it. If you were on your phone and half-paying attention, then you could have easily done what I did with internet spoilers and recaps: you created an imaginary narrative in your head that threaded pieces of the story into something that made sense. But if you were actually paying attention, by which I mean watching the screen and thinking about the story and how the scenes were actually constructed, then I think it’s almost physically impossible to think it’s a good show. I really did try to watch RoP, though the experience was agonizing: some scenes were so boring and nonsensical that my attention wandered. It’s possible that some of the parts I found confusing and incoherent were actually explained, but done so in such a tedious or offhand way that I missed them. Listen, I’m only a human being over here, suffering through terrible TV for your entertainment.)
Serious opening problem: the elves are miscast. The far right may have freaked out over Black elves, but Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova, aka Grey Worm in Game of Thrones) is both 1) the only dark-complexioned elf in the whole show and 2) the only one of the elves who feels remotely elf-like. Young Elrond is ugly and uncomfortable. Celebrimbor is old. Gil-galad is also ugly and his lines are excruciating, possibly the worst in the whole show. At one point Elrond uses the phrase “mere hope” and Gil-galad thunders back “HOPE IS NEVER ‘MERE.’” At this point I turned off the TV, I had my phone out and I was dialing 911 before I realized it. Obviously police abolition etc but someone needs to pay for that line.
Most of the elves have short hair, and short hair on elves is homophobia. I don’t believe I need to qualify this. All elves should be mean girls, including the guys (especially the guys.) We get one lady dwarf, and she’s perfectly fine, but she doesn’t have a beard. Obviously depicting lady dwarves without beards is also homophobia. All dwarves are masc 4 masc. Once again, I do not believe I need to explain.
Most of the fantasy creatures lack a sense of “magic.” The elves especially: with the exception of Arondir, they all just feel like humans with prosthetic ears. Peter Jackson was always careful to film the elves in a way that made them seem ethereal, otherworldly; the cinematography in RoP is mostly just flat. Obviously it’s tougher when so many elves are major characters but it’s not impossible to pull off; Orlando Bloom still managed to look fey and mysterious and he can’t even give a credible line read. PJ and his team were smart enough to give Legolas pretty hair and let him squint meaningfully into the distance or perform sick acrobatic battle moves in midair. There’s no grace to Amazon’s elves, no lightness of movement. Galadriel gets a scene in Numenor where she’s training human soldiers (it’s meant to emphasize, like most of her scenes, that she is a Bad Ass) but the choreography is slow, labored, and clumsy. The camerawork doesn’t help; one cutaway shot was filmed half behind a pillar. I noticed! I was paying attention!!! I don’t think anyone else was.
This is very minor but: during another of the interminable scenes set in Numenor, Galadriel is wearing an absurd amount of blush. The makeup artist went HAM on those cheekbones and did NOT try to blend. This is not important, I am just bothered that no one noticed. No one looked at this show as it was being made, or afterward either.
A much bigger problem with Galadriel: she is terrible. She’s unlikeable and unsympathetic, constantly making terrible choices for inexplicable reasons. “Gasp!” you may be gasping. “Isn’t that a misogynist thing to say about a female character???” Sure, it can be. If the showrunners—both men, incidentally—were trying to depict her as a complex and interesting person who can also be selfish and difficult sometimes, then it would be wrong and misogynist to condemn her for unlikeability. But Galadriel is stupid, and stupid in the way that men think women are stupid: she’s entirely a prisoner of her emotions and can’t plan ahead. She suddenly dives off a boat in the middle of the ocean with no other ships around. She decides a random guy she just met is a king based on the fact that he happens to be carrying a pouch with a symbol on it. (“I took it off a dead man,” he says, which turns out to be true, and was always a highly plausible scenario!) In the end, she finds out that the random pouch guy was secretly Sauron all along; finding Sauron and stopping him has been her primary mission throughout the show. BUT THEN SHE DOESN’T TELL ANYBODY ABOUT HER DISCOVERY FOR NO DISCERNABLE REASON. You could, if you liked, invent reasons for her actions; you could do work the show isn’t doing. But why would you do that? The show cost like a billion dollars. The least they could have done was write it.
What they decided to write, or at least pretend to write, was the Mystery Box Character Reveals. The Gandalf reveal was too obvious and too annoying to even mention. The Sauron reveal was a little subtler; or at least, I thought it was at first. Galadriel, having jumped off the boat in the middle of the ocean in episode one, is lucky to be rescued in episode two by a boat full of humans which includes random pouch guy (aka Sauron). Their ship is wrecked by a beastie; she and the guy are the only two survivors. He speaks to her challengingly, he’s clearly important and hiding something. This was where I was sure he was Sauron and that I had solved the mystery box. If you know a little bit about Middle-earth—or, in my case, a lot—then you know that there aren’t too many people in that world who look human and could locate someone in the middle of the ocean. There are a handful of human sorcerers running about, but we don’t know much about them. There are also the Maiar, semi-divine beings who can change their shape, a group which includes Sauron, Gandalf, and the other wizards. Any one of the wizards would know who Galadriel was (spoilers for The Silmarillion but her whole family’s kind of a big deal) and they would be on her side, so they would have revealed themselves to her. Only Sauron could both have found her and would have had reason to keep his identity secret (he killed her brother, sort of). The only other possible explanation, I figured, was that he was a different important character, one with which she had no previous personal connection, and their meeting—again, in the middle of a vast ocean—was pure coincidence. That, I decided, was too stupid even for these writers.
By the end of the show, however, it’s still unclear whether their meeting on the boat was a coincidence or not. Sauron, in his Villain Reveal Scene (actually not a bad scene, if viewed out of context of the rest of the show) gives multiple conflicting explanations of his behavior. He claims he didn’t want to be a bad guy anymore, or even active in world affairs, until Galadriel found him; but he also implies that he manipulated events to serve his purposes. Again, this is almost good, and it almost works: one of the hallmarks of a genuinely bad and manipulative person is that they tell multiple self-justifying stories about their behavior. But a good villain (i.e. a person who is good at being a villain; some people suck at being bad, and require a distracted Amazon viewer-level of inattention in order to make their lies believable) usually takes the trouble to make sure that their stories are at least minimally plausible. None of Sauron’s stories check out even a little bit. If he was scheming all along—specifically to get to the island kingdom of Numenor where he could to trick the Numenoreans into defeating some of his enemies in Middle-earth for him—then he didn’t need Galadriel; the Numenoreans are anti-elf racists and she’s mostly a liability to the cause. In fact she’s about to be kicked out of Numenor when the White Tree loses some petals—a symbol that the Numenoreans decided to interpret as a sign of divine disfavor with Galadriel’s exile, which is very convenient and also implausible, unless the Numenoreans had been previously established as both extremely religious and highly credulous, which they weren’t. Vague signs are usually interpretable in multiple ways, and in the end we don’t even know how we—the audience—are supposed to read this one. Did the gods make those petals fall? If so, why? The Numenoreans just end up walking into a trap and helping Sauron out. Did Sauron do it? We don’t actually know the limits of Sauron’s power any more than we know his motives. He could really have been a dude just trying to get out of the villain game: maybe he really was swept along by Galadriel and circumstances, and only chose to start manipulating events in small ways relatively late in the proceedings. But this means that he and Galadriel did meet on that boat in the middle of the ocean by some enormous, improbable coincidence, and that, once again, is too stupid to be allowed.
Ok fine, so they didn’t spend the budget on writing or editing. What did they spend the money on? I literally don’t know. The CGI is dreadful. I started out watching the show on my laptop, and then later switched to the TV in hopes that it would look better in higher definition. Reader: it did not. If anything the improved frame rate made it worse. There’s a scene where a warg-like beastie attacks some elves; it leaps into a hard obstacle and basically disappears into it. This isn’t a 1990s SyFy channel special! This is the most expensive TV show ever made!!! The rights cost a bit but where did the rest of the money even go?????
I really have so many questions. Why was the music contentless? Bear McCreary did the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack, my man knows how to write a melody. There were no melodies, only phrase bits; only Howard Shore-like music-shaped materials. Why did the opening credits look like kitty litter? I guess they were supposed to be bits of gold dust but the three elven rings ended up not having much gold in them. Was Amazon trying to remind me to buy kitty litter? (I should really buy kitty litter.) Why did they film the show in literally one field? The LotR films had variety; that’s why they were filmed in New Zealand, which has green hobbit-country plus many other landscapes. RoP was also filmed at least partly in New Zealand but every location looks the same, except for island Numenor, which looked like CGI. The Harfoots could have been wandering through the same ten square miles.
Death to the Harfoots. They’re nomadic hobbit-like beings, and they suck. One of their guys hurts his ankle and they’re willing to leave him behind; they could literally stick him in a cart and it would be fine, but they’re like, nah. They offer up some reasons but they don’t make any practical sense; like Galadriel they are obstinate to the point of idiocy. I will punt the Harfoots. I will ride up on them like the orc king whose severed head flew down a hole and invented golf. That story is in the appendices I think, and it’s a great gag. The Harfoots have no gags. Death to the Harfoots.
The humans also suck. There’s a whole thing about the Numenoreans being worried that elves will take their jobs??? as if elves would want their jobs???? as if any elf would rather work for a wage than be an immortal mean girl all day??????? Elves should be worried about humans taking THEIR jobs (being immortal mean girls.) This is the actual plot in the source material and it works much better.
The dwarves are okay. We sure hear a lot about half-elf Elrond and dwarf Prince Durin’s epic friendship, but we never actually see it. “Show don’t tell” isn’t always the best advice, but it’s a good starting point for visual storytelling. So is intelligent camerawork. Most one-on-one conversations in the show are filmed with the “over the shoulder” technique—meaning that when one character is addressing another, the camera is placed over the listener’s shoulder to show the speaker’s face. But they do this even with Elrond and Durin’s conversations, which means that when Elrond is talking, the camera is pointed up over the dwarf’s shoulder at Elrond’s face, and since the scenes are usually badly lit, poor ugly Elrond just looms over his dwarven pal, looking creepy and menacing. This would be fine, if it were intentional and worked with the meaning of the scene, but mostly these guys are just vowing their endless friendship endlessly. Boring! Amateurish!!! I am telephoning the police!!!!!!
The camera angles are frequently off. The actresses who play Galadriel and the Numenorean queen Miriel are both pretty ladies with a touch of real presence, but they’re often shot low and from the side, which is a weird angle and NOT what they tell you to do on the ‘gram for a reason. There’s also a random scene where Galadriel is galloping in slow motion, and the camera angles make both her and the horse look outrageously, hilariously ugly. I must once again emphasize that this was not the intent of the scene.
There is a whole Horse Thing happening that makes no sense. There is absolutely no reason to establish that Numenoreans and elves have a super-special bond with horses unless you fed the LotR movies into an AI and asked it to emphasize the Rohan parts as well as that bit in The Two Towers with Aragorn and the horse that made no sense anyway and was unnecessary. Not everybody in Middle-earth has a hard-on for horses Jan!!!!
At one point, the music-ish sound elements heighten, and turn sad. It’s Slow-Motion Time. (It’s Slow-Motion Time way too often.) Orcs are pursuing Arondir and his girlfriend’s terrible son through the misty woods. It looks and sounds and is filmed exactly like the scene near the end of Fellowship where Boromir tries to rescue the hobbits and gets shot with arrows. Is that what happens here? No. Arondir and the terrible child escape. The music doesn’t lighten or turn heroic; there’s no sense in which this is a meaningful riff on a scene from Fellowship, no interesting change or development or ironic inversion. It’s just a quote, a visual sampling of better material. It is embarrassing. I am embarrassed for the people who made this.
Why does the Terrible Child find the Mystery Sword Key under the human town? Who left it there? Why? Why did the kid need to find it? I guess the sword-key needs human blood to work or something but it’s literally so easy to kidnap a guy and cut his arm a few times. Why not do that instead of sticking the sword in an abandoned place hoping a random terrible kid will find it? If an orc dropped it (maybe I missed that, idk) then why was the orc carrying it? Why doesn’t Adar, the boss of the orcs, just hang onto this sword key, which is the literal key to his plan? You know, if Tolkien’s work is about one thing, it’s about people tossing precious objects over their shoulder and saying “Why? Why should I keep it?”
Why was the Terrible Child named Theo? That’s a normal earth name. Why did Pharazon’s son’s name sound like “Kevin”? (It isn’t actually Kevin.) Why don’t Theo and Kevin open a surf shop? (They can’t because the elves are coming to take their jobs!!!!)
Pop quiz: describe the physical differences between the elven cities Lindon and Hollin. Just kidding: it’s the same CGI blandscape. Rivendell and Lothlorien looked different from each other, and we got a sense of how they existed in space and time, even though they were inhabited by the aforementioned immortal mean girls. Building highly detailed scale models helps: so does having an aesthetic, and giving a shit.
But hey, is this just the nerd thing of nitpicking everything to death? Am I just annoyed by deviations from the films and from the source material? When RoP introduces the whole thing about a lost Silmaril…which got stuck in a tree…and a lightning strike made the Silmaril’s light race through the earth and get trapped in mithril…ok fine, I’ll play ball, whatever. I won’t even ask how the Silmaril got stuck in the tree in the first place. But where was this tree? Near Moria? The mithril is in Moria, that’s kind of important, because only the dwarves can access it. Did the light go….sideways and underneath the mountains? Ok fine, whatever, the light’s in the mithril now, and the elves need a bunch of mithril or otherwise they’re going to fade. Not slowly, but super fast: if they don’t get mithril they’re going to expire in six months like organic mayonnaise. Gil-galad does have a certain organic mayonnaise energy…you know what, I’m going to allow this.
Prince Durin’s dad has simply never played Civilization. Your allies come to you with “oh hey we really need this mineral or we will DIE, we’re willing to trade for it with natural resources you can’t acquire yourself” and you’re just like “nah, I think you should die.” Once again, we get a “stubbornness to the point of idiocy” explanation, which would begin to be a Theme, and a potentially interesting one, if only it had been properly explored. But it isn’t, so instead of tragic depth we get a dwarf king with no sense of geostrategy or ability to plan ahead; if the elves all vanish it doesn’t seem to occur to him that the balance of power on the continent will be upset and his ability to access resources outside his kingdom will be imperiled. Play Civilization, King Durin!!!!
Really just about everything in the show is only explicable through the mechanism of the Idiot Plot. Some of the storylines could and should be interesting: Rennix pointed out to me that there was a certain potential in the Pouch Guy plotline, specifically the dangers of accepting a random guy who claims to be a lost heir as your king. The showrunners seem to be somewhat aware of this; the guy they cast as Sauron/Pouch Guy looks like a cut-rate Aragorn. But not everybody in LotR (movies and books) accepts Aragorn at face value; Denethor accuses Gandalf of propping up a fraud, which is incorrect, but arises from a reasonable and intelligent amount of suspicion and self-interest. Denethor may be a bad person, but he’s not an idiot. Bad people are fun to watch; idiots are exhausting. Galadriel has absolutely no proof and no evidence that Pouch Guy is really a king; the line of the Southron kings who used the symbol on the pouch turns out to have been extinct for 1000 years, and she hasn’t been keeping tabs on the family (as Gandalf and Elrond have for Aragorn.) Her only proof is “my mans has a pouch” one which is clearly not 1000 years old, or it would have disintegrated a while ago. But the Southrons also believe in him immediately; when Pouch Guy is introduced to them, they’re all like “hurrah! our king!” The Southrons seem insanely easy to scam. Adar didn’t need to wreck their village, he could have signed them up for his MLM.
How come there’s only one Southron village? How did the showrunners fail to give us any sense of scale? How come it takes approximately 5 minutes to get from Moria to Lindon (which is west of the Shire)? How come the Harfoots are trudging around the same field for what is supposed to be weeks, while only one or two days pass for the Southrons during the same episode? How come no one was editing anything ever?
Speaking of editing, let’s talk about Isildur. In the show he’s a whiny late teen with a boring plotline; at some point he ends up as a stableboy. He then has a stiff conversation with Galadriel about being a soldier which is uncomfortable and seems to glorify war (a fraught subject at minimum in Tolkien’s work.) But soon afterward there’s a battle scene; Isildur appears in full armor at Queen Miriel’s side. They get a Heroic Moment where the queen tells him to go gloriously into the battle. But as far as I remember, Isildur and Miriel never had a real conversation prior to this moment. Does she know who he is??? Did we lose a scene???? Did we lose an editor????? Did anybody watch this before it aired????????
I respect that the costume designer showed up to work every day and served some real looks (Miriel’s crown was especially pretty). But I can’t imagine what it felt like to be the only crew member on that set who was actually trying.
There’s one costume/prop element that was an absolute and special disaster, which I found to be strangely the most offensive element of the entire production: the three elven rings themselves. They’re TERRIBLE. The gems might as well be rock candy. The settings are clumsy. They look like something you’d buy at a Medieval Times gift shop. Look, fantasy is hard; magical landscapes are difficult to render convincingly; magic itself can often look like light effects being tossed around. I can forgive CGI cities and disappearing-into-obstacles beasties; I can forgive even flat camerawork that doesn’t know how to render magical people convincingly. But human beings can actually make beautiful rings; we have the technology. In fact we use it all the time. There are more beautiful rings in a single Etsy store or behind a Zales counter than are dreamt of in this show’s philosophy. They couldn’t even be arsed to go out and buy some pretty rings! How could they have cared so little about what they were doing?
Ultimately, the people who made this show didn’t care, because there was no reason to do so: it only exists to get people to subscribe to Amazon Prime. And there’s something mortally offensive about that, something that goes much deeper than aesthetic nitpicking. It’s not just that the show is bad, it’s that it doesn’t care that it’s bad. It provides the minimal amount of Corporate IP Product, and it thinks the customer should be satisfied with that. This is what Amazon and other studios think we want; this is why they’re fighting writers and actors so hard on AI. Because they already think they can replace good writing with AI-generated nonsense, actors with bland recreations of human beings, practical effects with CGI. They think we like this shit and we’re not smart enough to know the difference. Death to the Harfoots; death to Amazon; death to the studios. I hope the writers and actors take them for all they’re worth.