About Season One of Amazon's The Rings Of Power

Internet behemoth Amazon purchased the rights to certain sections of J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork The Silmarillion for $250 million.  Their plan is to take 5 seasons or so and tell the story of the Rings of Power aspect of the vast narrative.  The story must very specifically focus on the Rings of Power and the Fall of Númenor in Tolkien's Second Age.  That's what Amazon paid for.  Apparently, the story of the Silmarils, of Beren and Luthien, of the War of the Jewels, of the various Elven kin, of Morgoth, and of the fall of Gondolin along with many other specific stories are still open for bid. 

Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is the result.  The Rings of Power and Númenor's doom are an interesting pairing.  In reality the Rings had little or nothing to do with Númenor.  Tolkien didn't mention any such relationship in The Silmarillion.  In his letters he wrote that “of course” Sauron has the One Ring when he becomes so influential in Númenor , but that was never explicitly written into the narrative.  Sauron does not use his Ring in Númenor.  

I fear he may end up using it to bring about the downfall of Númenor in the Amazon translation.  The showrunners have taken so many liberties with Tolkien's rich narrative that they are putting the wrong behavior into many of their characters.  Having survived Season One, I get the sense that this all looks Tolkiensque but it does not feel that way.  And that is a huge letdown.  It is also a warning to future plunderers of what remains of The Silmarillion.  Don't add to what Tolkien tells. 

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is the first streaming series that will ultimately cost about $1 billion to make when all the projected seasons are finished.  Season One was released about two months ago.  I watched the first two episodes with great anticipation.  I watched the third episode with growing disinterest.  I never made it to the end of the forth episode.  I started watching a detailed synopsis of each episode released each week on the Nerd of the Rings YouTube channel.

I don't fault the Tolkien Estate for attempting to better establish itself by selling rights to The Silmarillion for the first time.  Having such a flop as a result of these first sold rights risks devaluing the Estate in the long run, however.  Nevertheless, the whole of The Silmarillion is surely worth more than $1 billion for the rights to media providers looking for highly respected and authentic Tolkien.  No matter the result, a decent series or not, the media will jazz it up and the cultural ground will shift just a little bit.  Tolkien is still a part of the zeitgeist here twenty years after the great Peter Jackson trilogy.

For most viewers, only causally acquainted with Tolkien, this is a new story.  For Tolkien fans, like myself, there is new material introduced to the story we already know.  This is controversial, of course.  Messing with Tolkien's canon without violating it is a delicate balancing act.  Introducing new characters and material like Peter Jackson did (disastrously) in the The Hobbit Trilogy showed what happens when you try to “expand” the canon.  Supposedly, all such changes had the blessing of the Tolkien Estate.  So I guess the canon is not violated technically.

This series greatly compresses time in the Second Age and intermingles some of Galadriel's First Age experiences.  Moreover, Galadriel never goes to Númenor in The Silmarillion.  Her character is presented as a narcissistic bitch.  She is sent back to Valinor yet ends up in Númenor instead.  While it may not violate the canon (in the sense that it does not significantly change the larger story), Tolkien never wrote any of that.  That audacious handling of the source material unsettles me.

I don't like the Harfoots either, the proto-hobbits.  There is no reason for them.  I know the writers have “invented” a reason (likely it has to do with a wizard) but Tolkien only included hobbits on the very last page of The Silmarillion.  Hobbits have nothing to do with the Second Age though, once again, it is not technically violating the canon to put their lesser evolved ancestors there.  They have a mostly inconsequential role in Season One, except of a couple of them and another strange character brought to Middle-earth by a meteor.   Apparently he is a wizard, which most everyone thinks will end up being Gandalf.  Ugh on all of this.  Gandalf (or any other wizard) had nothing to do with the Rings of Power until the a thousand years into the Third Age.  It would be completely against the canon for Gandalf to appear in the Second Age.  I hope to see fewer hobbits (and no Gandalf) going forward.

The story of the Dwarves is compressed as well, with two major characters appearing at the same time when, in reality, they lived centuries apart in Tolkien's text.  Again, there's no reason these two characters can't know one another.  It does not destroy the larger story of the Rings for this to be true.  But there's no point to even doing this sort of thing.  Amazon (and the Tolkien Estate) walks a tightrope in many aspects of the way things are put together in The Rings of Power.

Of course, there is a seemingly mandatory romantic relationship between an elf and a human.  This is handled through two completely new characters, of course, because it has nothing to do with the Rings of Power or Númenor either.  It is a secret relationship (so far).  So the fact it happens does not violate the canon.  It no one knows about it.  The relationship itself has no impact on the central story.  Why is it in here then?  It feels rather ridiculous to me to force this additional material into what is already a rich, broad narrative.  This aspect of the series seems like a trope to me.

There is a larger problem with Season One than the additional material and liberties taken with the story.  The series is often poorly written.  It has some potentially wonderful moments in it between many characters.  The renewed friendship of Elrond and Durin is perhaps the best example.  Unfortunately, when these moments come, moments intended to make us invest in the story, they are tough to connect with because most of what is written around them is almost laughably bad.  

Maybe it will turn out like this: Many great series like Game of Thrones, Lost, and The X-Files had really terrible final seasons.  Towards the end they were often difficult to watch they were so bad. Maybe The Rings of Power is getting its crappy writing out of the way and the rest of it will be much improved.  The showrunners are already claiming that Season Two will be more “canonical.”  If that is true then maybe I will be able to get into the show.

The reception to the first season is not so much “mixed” as it is divergent between critics and the audience.  Rotten Tomatoes is a good barometer for the response.  As of this post the accumulated critic response stands at a respectable 85%.  By comparison, the audience rating is only 39%.  Which basically means at least as many people hate the series as enjoy it.  The television media likes it more than does its intended audience.  Or maybe corporations like to suck up to each other and that skews the numbers.  

There is a bit more detail over at the Amazon site where the series has elicited well over 26,000 customer reviews as of this post.  49% of them gave the series five-stars whereas 28% gave it one-star.  That is an enormous number of people rating it as a one.  It seems while the critics find the series at least entertaining, the rabid detractors and supporters are at war with each other.  Understandable so.  The series has not been justified to me.

There are things I liked about Season One.  It was often visually stunning.  I was awestruck when I first saw the Númenorean city of Armenelos and the living thriving Dwarven realm of Khazad-dûm.  I enjoy the way the Elven languages are incorporated into the show.  Just the right amount to spice things up and reveal the power of the Elven tongues.  The costumes and architecture and natural world all feel like revelations of Tolkien.  Season One took us through the forging of the Three Rings and that specific part of the story is told well.  It is almost everything else that is off-putting.

I did not care for the introduction of Sauron through a hitherto new human character.  Although it would explain why the Elves and Númenoreans found him to be “fair” at the time, it led to an unnecessary and often ridiculous story line.   Everyone figured out he was Sauron beforehand so the reveal was laughably mundane for such a momentous moment.  I would rather Sauron had been made known to us from the beginning.  I would have psychologically explored him throughout the season in the style of Dostoevsky.  That would have been a vast improvement on what we stomached from the show's writers.

The pacing of Season One is ultimately what frustrates everyone the most.  Tolkien's story was being racked across the coals as far as I could see.  There are this new material injected into it and nothing of consequence was happening.  It felt like the entire season was spinning its wheels.  Mount Doom first erupted and that was visually way cool.  Mithril was discovered and that was well done.  The Three Rings were forged and that was a worthy effort.  But, for the most part I was bored to death by the attempts to get me to invest in Amazon's version of Tolkien's story.  I admit that I need another season under my belt to make a definite opinion, however.  More “canonical” sounds like an improvement.  But the basic character writing has to improve as well.  Otherwise, as I said, while it is visually stunning and the essence of the story is intact, there is much doubt about the future of the series.

My sister-in-law is the only other person I know who is as much into Tolkien as I am.  We are able to speak about all the main characters from across all the Ages, not just what's in The Lord of the Rings.  Like me she was excited to watch this series on Amazon Prime.  Unlike me, she remained somewhat enthusiastic about the whole season.  She thinks Galadriel is exactly how she should be and has no problem with her going to Numneor.   

That is not my experience of Season One.  There is nothing about it that makes me want to rewatch any of it, no matter how cool some of the visuals are.  They are mixing the narrative up too much, the new material feels wrong, and only a couple of characters are worth getting to know.  For the scarcity of excitement, there is no shortage of content on YouTube bashing the series.  The opinions range from “slow and boring” to “an unmitigated disaster.”  More lean toward the later.  Reaction to this season has been brutal except for the media critics themselves, apparently.  But that might be about to change.  Even The Guardian calls it a “stinker.”

Shortly before the season premiered I started searching for Tolkien content on YouTube.  That is how I discovered Nerd of the Rings which is a treasure chest for Tolkien fans.  This guy goes into meticulous detail about every Age, event, place and character in Tolkien's vast narrative.  It is literally more content than I have been able to absorb so far.  I have many more hours of viewing ahead of me and all of it is worth it.  It makes for something perfect to watch right before bed.  I strongly recommend Nerd of the Rings, whose opinion of The Rings of Power seems to be about like mine, hopeful but epicly disappointed.