"Rings of Power," Year Two

Minor spoilers ahead.  

Back to Middle Earth we go, and I'm happy to report some improvements in the second season of "Rings of Power."  There's a lot less focus on the boring human storylines this year, for one thing.  Bronwyn was killed offscreen because her actress left the show, so Arondir goes on the road with Bronwyn's son Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin) and Isildur for a few adventures.  Numenor's war over the throne continues, and the Stranger's journey with the harfoots brings them into contact with Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear) and a Dark Wizard (Ciaran Hinds).

However, the bulk of the attention is given over to Sauron, who takes on a new form to help him manipulate the smith Celebrimbor and facilitate the forging of more magic rings.  Charlie Vickers emerges as an excellent lead, playing Sauron as an ambitious anti-hero.  Flashbacks fill in his history with Adar and Morgoth, and in the present, Sauron's actions in the elf city of Eregion become the major crux of all the elf and dwarf-related storylines.  Galadriel and Elrond clash over how to respond to Sauron's seizure of the Southlands.  Durin faces a crisis as his father (Peter Mullan) falls under the influence of one of the rings.  Things escalate to an impressive battle episode at the end of the season, and several major characters get an excuse to don armor and wield weapons. 

The show still suffers from having showrunners who have never done anything remotely on this scale before, and are still struggling mightily with the learning curve of creating episodic television.  There are still story turns that happen way too fast, characters who feel inconsistent, and muddled motivations everywhere you look.  Some of the editing choices are downright confusing.  The show is now much more engaging, but it's leaning as hard as ever on tropes and imagery established by the Peter Jackson "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.  This year, multiple characters struggle against the influence of magic rings, and the show tries its hand at large-scale warfare spectacle with the conflict at Eregion.  It all looks great thanks to Amazon's deep pockets, but it also pings as awfully familiar.  

However, I appreciate that the people in charge are clearly Tolkein fans who are willing to get nerdy.  There are the elves and orcs with dialogue in their own languages, and a couple of scenes in English where everyone really commits to trilling all their R's.  There's the episode that features multiple characters and locations from "Fellowship of the Ring" that didn't make it into the film version, including Tom Bombadil and his wife.  An entirely different group of not-Hobbits called Stoors are introduced.  At the same time the creators are not afraid to depart from Tolkein's writing for dramatic purposes.  The condensing of thousands of years of Middle Earth history continues at breakneck speeds, with significant pruning to make it all fit together coherently.

The second season is an improvement on the first largely because it has figured out what's working and what's not, and is adjusting accordingly.  However, it's also going off of a five season plan that is going to involve a lot of the characters who didn't get much of the spotlight this year.  Frankly, it's going to take some effort to get me to care about Elendil or Isildur or anyone at Numenor the way I care about Elrond and Durin, who still have the most watchable and interesting relationship out of anybody in the whole show.  But now that the writers are on better footing, maybe they can do better with the humans than throwing random love interests at Isildur or cramming everything for Elendil into one episode.    

In any case, I have every reason to believe that the show will continue to entertain me.  "Rings of Power" isn't up to the level of the film trilogy, but it's doing a decent job of being a television show set in this universe. 

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