This episode, which already marks the halfway point of the season, narrows the focus to roughly half of the at least eight (by my colleague David Zimmermann’s count) of the show’s storylines. Elrond (Robert Aramayo) and Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) lead a small band from Lindon to Eregion, where they suspect Sauron may be scheming. In Pelargir, Isildur (Maxim Baldry) and Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) track down their missing companion Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin). And having been separated in Rhûn, the Stranger (Daniel Weyman) meets a . . . stranger of his own, while the harfoots (almost literally) run into some harfoot-like “stoors.”
Each storyline involves some seemingly desperate twisting of Tolkien’s text to produce things fans will recognize on the apparent theory that they’ll love instead of hate them. Galadriel’s band comes across barrow-wights, evil dead spirits who reanimate corpses. But these creatures shouldn’t exist yet: They are stirred up by the Witch-King of Angmar, once a king of men who received a ring of power and then devolved into wraith form (men have not received rings yet in this show). Isildur and Arondir encounter two ents (including an entwife), supposedly called to their part of Middle-earth by the destruction of nature it has endured. The Stranger meets Tom Bombadil, who is on the other side of Middle-earth from the area he resides and draws his power. (But the Stranger nonetheless gets caught in a tree and is freed in the same manner as Tom frees hobbits from Old Man Willow in The Lord of the Rings.) He is also not the aloof Tom of The Lord of the Rings, but more like a Yoda to the Stranger, offering cryptic wisdom and hinting at a greater destiny for him. And I’m unaware of anything attesting to the presence of either harfoots or stoors as far east as Rhûn. All of this is more “discovery” (fabrication) by the people behind Rings of Power. You can only really understand what’s supposed to be happening if you know the lore, but they’re butchering the lore.
As I wrote last week, however, it’s not just that they’re making things up; it’s that they “are not as good at that as Tolkien was.” The storytelling is flawed in fundamental ways, separate from its lack of fealty to Tolkien. The dialogue is a clunky mix of faux-archaic and modern: Elrond starts a sentence by saying “according to lore,” while another character warns against “back sassing.” The story progresses by a series of coincidences and happenstances, as when the two harfoots, having been transported across a desert by magic, jump off a hill and run into someone of plot significance who just happens to be walking by. The pacing is also drastically off: This episode does not at all advance the storylines in Eregion, Númenor, and Khazad-dûm. Even the many walking trips, a staple of Lord of the Rings stories, seem contrived and aimless.
Halfway through its second season, Rings of Power is not getting any better. It is, if anything, deteriorating in lore fidelity and storytelling quality as an inevitable function of decisions its creators have already made. I have a hard time believing the next four episodes can salvage the season.
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