Moral ambiguity doesn’t automatically make for a better story

The universe of The Lord of the Rings is extremely complicated. There are Valar and Maiar, magic trees everywhere, ambiguously powerful rings, and at least two Dark Lords who want to throw the world into chaos. One thing that J.R.R. Tolkien always made plain in his universe, however, is the difference between the right side and the bad one. Good people may get tempted by the powers of darkness, but at the end of the day the morality of The Lord of the Rings has always been black and white, a fundamental imperative for a story whose core is simply good versus evil. Which is exactly why it’s so strange that the prequel series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, insists on making all of its characters shades of moral gray.

It’s not alone in this trend. Over the last 15 years, movies and television have been obsessed with moral ambiguity. Walter White was pushed to break bad because of an unjust system, everyone in Game of Thrones had their ideals compromised by the realities of the world, and you can’t throw a rock in the Marvel Cinematic Universe without hitting a villain that we’re supposed to believe made a few good points. There was a time when these blurry lines between right and wrong felt like a sign of maturity, an indicator that what we were watching was for adults rather than kids. But now that this has become the default state for most shows and movies, it’s too often hollow and obligatory. Moral ambiguity has become a cheap way to paper over a story that doesn’t have anything meaningful to say, and superficial flaws have become camouflage for characters too flat to make concepts like morality feel relevant at all. Ergo, it should be self-explanatory why 0=The Rings of Power is so heavily invested in the concept.

This issue was certainly present in the first season of the show, but in the first three episodes of season 2, it’s become impossible to ignore. The entire series, it seems, has been built around questions of moral grayness that seem at odds with the universe they’re based in. It’s as if the writers are convinced that minor flaws and human mistakes are the key to relatability, and that relatability is important for all its characters. Scene after scene, characters debate the morality of certain issues that seem clear. It’s one thing to know that the elves freely used Sauron’s Rings of Power when they didn’t know who created them, but after a whole scene about how they’re the tools of the enemy, watching the elves put the rings on anyway felt ridiculous, a sudden introduction of ends justifying means that was simply foreign to Tolkien’s world by clear design.

Photo: Ben Rothstein/Prime Video

Take, for instance, the show’s wildly uneven portrayal of Sauron. The Rings of Power seems obsessed with the question of why we’d want to watch Sauron act if he was entirely evil. The answer is actually simple: Sometimes evil is interesting. Far from the childishness sometimes associated with good-versus-evil stories, a well-told story that closely follows some true evil like Sauron would be fascinating and horrific. Watching him needle at the subtle insecurities and exploit the weaknesses of some of Middle-earth’s most legendary heroes could be beautifully tragic, a Tolkien-esque reminder that anyone can fall to temptation. Instead, showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have chosen to make Sauron vaguely human, adding sour notes like his surprise that Celebrimbor would mislead Gil-galad, or the confusing scene in which he’s seemingly deceived by Adar to open season 2.

It’s the kind of choice that makes perfect sense on paper as a marker of prestige TV. Again, all the best shows of the last decade have complicated characters and understandable villains, full of flaws and imperfections. But in practice, adding superficial traits like that to Sauron doesn’t serve to deepen his character; it just weakens everyone around him. Their inability to see through his bumbling plot doesn’t feel like they were deceived by a master of evil, a powerful near demi-god who exists as a literal higher order of being than them, but rather that they were duped by an idiot because they themselves are just a little bit dumber.

This kind of faux morality is introduced all over the show. One side plot, barely introduced in episode 3, is about orc anxieties over the return of Sauron. Adar greets this with genuine concern. Canonically, orcs were created by Morgoth, Middle-earth’s greatest evil, as tools for his bidding and fodder for his army. But offhandedly suggesting they are supposed to be sympathetic and have feelings, without really delving into the topic, just feels like a complication of the lore for no real reason. It’s unclear what it could be setting up, or how we’re now supposed to feel about the thousands of orcs we’ve seen the heroes of Middle-earth slay.

Image: Prime Video

The same goes for many of the show’s supporting plotlines, which feel universally underbaked, confusing, and ignored. Ar-Pharazôn’s coup in Númenor, a major historic moment in the downfall of the kingdom, is relegated exclusively to episode 3, and makes almost no sense when it arrives. It’s hard to even tell in the scene why what he’s doing is bad or how exactly he’s wrong; rather than giving a villain a few good arguments, the show makes him more understandable than the characters we’re supposed to be rooting for. Similarly, The Rings of Power has a chance for a fascinating plotline with Celebrimbor as we watch Sauron draw out his ego and manipulate it for his own ends. But he gets tricked so quickly that it makes the smith seem easily duped rather than making Sauron seem like a subtle and brilliant manipulator.

None of this is to say that these plotlines being in the show at all is a bad thing, but rather that they seem like afterthoughts. Moments like Queen Míriel being tempted by the Palantir, Celebrimbor deceiving Gil-galad to feed his own ego, or even the anxieties of a concerned orc could make for meaningful, complicated moments that further our understanding of both the character and Middle-earth. But they’re rushed through so quickly, and with so little setup, that these flaws just feel like hollow gestures at storytelling rather than meaningful additions to the narrative.

What’s worse, the one morally complex plotline the show does spend time exploring — the elves’ use of the Rings of Power — has so many changes from the source material that it feels like it comes from a different fictional universe altogether. In Tolkien’s original version, the elven rings aren’t made by Sauron, just vaguely crafted using techniques Celebrimbor learned from him. The Rings of Power’s rings are created with his involvement and the elves know it. It’s a precise shift, moving the storyline from one of the subtle ways that evil can deceive good people into one about how indulging evil is worth it if there’s some personal gain to be had, like the revitalization of Linden.

Image: Prime Video

It’s a patently ridiculous idea, but it also muddies one of the most important moral ideas in the series: that goodness isn’t relative, and that an inherently evil object shouldn’t be used for good because it shouldn’t be used at all. Isildur being tempted by the power of the One Ring to believe that he could avoid Sauron’s influence is supposed to be a defining moment for the world of Middle-earth, the final tragic moment to the end of the Second Age. To have the elves simply make such a similar decision, knowingly, years before robs the future of the story all its gravity.

Watching this debate play out among the elves in the first few episodes of season 2 feels utterly baffling. It’s so fundamentally un-Tolkien that it’s hard to imagine how it could have made it into a series so ostensibly beholden to honoring Tolkien’s vision and world. The Second Age is largely one marked by deception. Sauron roams the world deceiving everyone he can in an attempt to return to his former power. Throughout this time, the whole of Middle-earth comes to be swayed by him in one way or another, some much more cataclysmically than others, but the deception is the key. Having the elves make this choice willingly only further robs Sauron of his deceptive power. More importantly, though, it also betrays the heart of Tolkien’s message about the subtle ways that pure evil can corrupt even the greatest and most brilliant people.

Photo: Ben Rothstein/Prime Video

No one character suffers more from this idea than Galadriel. Her being deceived by Sauron in season 1 was one thing, an understandable and established fact: Sauron is a master of evil and trickery, and he’ll prey on any weakness he sees and exploit it to twist your mind into doing his bidding. But in season 2 — when she understands that she aided Sauron, and that Sauron had a hand in making the three elven Rings of Power — she pushes for them to be used anyway. It’s a complete reversal of who she was in the first season. The show opens with Galadriel as the only elf who still believes Sauron is alive, and also believing that he’s so dangerous that he must be hunted down at all costs. Now, a season later, she’s begging for the other elves to use Saruon’s magic. Getting deceived by him once while he was disguised is one thing, but getting tricked by him when she knows that’s what he’s after feels foolish beyond forgiveness for such an important and heroic character.

And the greatest tragedy in all of this mess is that none of it was necessary in the first place. Tolkien’s story, and the entire Legendarium universe, isn’t built for moral grays — and that’s not a bad thing. It’s the foundational modern fantasy universe, and one of the greatest backdrops ever for stories about good versus evil. And it shouldn’t need to be more than that. The struggle to remain good in a fallen and complicated world is compelling enough on its own; they don’t need extra arguments for evil or the prestige TV insistence that there’s no such thing as good and bad. By trying to turn The Lord of the Rings into great TV, all Payne and McKay managed was to rob Tolkien’s universe of what makes it special.