I just finished the second season of Rings of Power.
Given the narrowness of what HBO is legally allowed to adapt - the appendices of the Lord of the Rings but not the Silmarillion or, you know, the Lord of the Rings (or the Hobbit) - there's a lot that the show needs to kind of make up and not draw directly from Tolkien, while attempted not to contradict what he wrote.
Consider, for example, that in Tolkien's canon, the Wizards (or Istari, a word that I assume gets bastardized into Wizard gradually) don't actually come to Middle Earth until the Third Age, after Sauron's initial defeat (or initial defeat as Dark Lord). Here, the show has wizards showing up in the Second Age primarily, I think, because if you made a Lord of the Rings TV show, you'd have people missing the presence of Wizards.
Adaptation of long-running stories can pose a big challenge. I've noted how Apple TV's Foundation series runs into this problem - in Asmiov's original stories, they function something like an anthology, with a new cast of characters every century or so, the actions of the previous era now being fully ingrained in the history of how the Foundation itself evolved from a bunch of nerdy archivists into a kind of Holy Church of Technology and beyond. The sole point of continuity is the holographic recordings of Hari Seldon, who are there to basically let all the air out of the tension tires in the first couple stories by saying that what looked like a mortal crisis for the Foundation was actually all accounted for, and that pattern being beautifully and panic-inducingly subverted with the introduction of the Mule.
The Apple show contrives to freeze its characters in cryogenic stasis so that it can have a continual cast. (Actually, they come up with a brilliant way to justify keeping the same actors, especially the amazing Lee Pace, with the whole "genetic dynasty" of Emperor clones - something utterly foreign to the original books, where the Emperor is barely a presence in the story.)
With the history of the Rings of Power, in Tolkien's lore, the rings exist over the course of many generations. The truth of their darkness and corruption isn't really understood until they've been fully incorporated into the various cultures of Middle Earth.
Galadriel is introduced as our primary protagonist, and the show's makers have a bit of an out - when you have Elves who never die of old age, you can portray ages passing by without having to introduce a whole new cast of characters.
It does mean, though, that you will need to do so with your human characters, and to a lesser extent, your dwarves and proto-Hobbits. Rings of Power decided that Elendil and Isildur and all the Numenorian characters had to be part of the plot from the start, and as such, the timeline has been compressed significantly.
While the Nine Rings of Men have not yet been distributed (and I've been thinking for a while that that one kid is going to be one of the Nazgul eventually,) the whole idea of them is that they basically prevented their wearers from aging. It's a whole thing in Tolkien that humans' shorter lives were actually a gift from God (Eru, but I think quite explicitly the same God that Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in). Sauron's power over humans is that he's gotten them to fear death, and by offering them a way to stave it off indefinitely, he's convinced them of the power of the rings.
Of course, by avoiding natural death, over time the human ring-bearers' souls become twisted into wraiths, and their bodies, while never technically "dying," are reduced to shadow-stuff that doesn't even properly exist on this plane of existence. Hence Ring-Wraiths.
In my mind, these people might have even started out as noble rulers who really thought they were doing the right thing - similarly to how Sauron believes that he's the only one who can fix the world after the chaos that his old master Morgoth inflicted upon it. Sauron's fatal flaw is that he isn't willing to let anyone else do the fixing, so convinced he is of his own unique capacity.
But the compressed timeline doesn't allow for this transformation. At this stage of the show, basically everyone knows that A: Sauron's back and B: the rings he's offering are bad news. And this is before he even forged the One Ring.
It's a shame, because I think the story of "hey, Celebrimbor, a genuinely good person who is the greatest craftsman of our age, made these miraculous magic rings, and they're making everything awesome!" and only later going "oh crap, there's some dark influence that is working its way through these rings that we've been using for centuries" makes Sauron feel more clever, cunning, and insidious.
It's also frustrating because I think there are a lot of people doing really good work on this show. I think a lot of the cast do a good job with what they're given - it's just that what they're given is... not great. (I also think some of the Elves don't really look right for elves - specifically Gil-Galad and Elrond. Tough when your predecessor is Hugo Weaving, who I think actually is an elf, or at least some other kind of supernatural being).
But beyond the larger-picture choices, I also think there are moments that feel... stagey? The climax of the season has Galadriel and Sauron cross swords while Eregion is being utterly destroyed by orcs... sorry, uruks. Sauron, of course, is a master of illusion. He begins in his elvish "Annatar" guise, and throws her when he takes on his previous human Halbrand look (er, spoilers for season one, I guess).
(Actually, I will give some credit to Charlie Vickers, because he changes his performance enough between Halbrand and Annatar that when he first appeared this season in this corrupted-Maia-pretending-to-be-a-good-Maia-pretending-to-be-an-elf form I wasn't sure if they had recast the part.)
And, look, yes, they've established that Galadriel has some super-weird feelings about all of this, because she clearly was developing a crush on Halbrand before she knew what he was. But this moment, where they pause in the fighting for her to feel really conflicted before crossing swords once more. And then it happens again, and again, and again. Sauron appears as Galadriel herself, and then as Celebrimbor, after going all Vlad the Impaler on the real one. I think we only needed, at absolute most, one moment of hesitation when he transforms into Halbrand, and then the rest should have been badass elf-warrior just fighting tooth and nail against, admittedly, a creature far more powerful than she is.
The show's decision to really spend time with Sauron, give him a recognizably human (or elf) face, is one that I actually think is pretty interesting. Tolkien, notably, never showed him at all - the burning eye being more of a metaphor for what was essentially a disembodied presence and voice. Peter Jackson made that burning eye literal, but it showed that whatever form Sauron had once taken, now he was utterly unrecognizable as anything remotely human-like.
Here, though, this doesn't contradict canon. Annatar was a form that Sauron took when giving out the Rings of Power, and it's specifically because Sauron was imprisoned in Numenor when the ocean swallowed it up (er... spoilers?) all Atlantis-style, that Sauron's body was destroyed so thoroughly that he could never take on "a fair form" again.
I mean, I suspect they're going to delay that as long as they can to let Charlie Vickers still show up on screen. But given what we've seen, I'm not even convinced they'll actually follow through with that (was his "time as a prisoner in Numenor" just that brief period in which he was essentially in the drunk tank?)
Still, I do find it interesting that Tolkien's world is one in which, usually, other-planar beings will just, like, hang out with the humanoid races. Gandalf is basically an angel (I'm not going to focus very much on The Stranger's plot this season) but gets high with Bilbo in his backyard (yes, I know "Pipe Weed" is meant to be tobacco, but honestly I think it's more wholesome this way).
Tolkien's view of good and evil is somewhat black and white - though the good are often plagued by the stain of evil, like how Boromir is tempted by the ring, despite being an altogether good guy. But he also wrote about how Sauron really believed himself to be the good guy in all of this (as most villains do).
I don't know that this show really gets that nuance. Sauron, much like Adar (who seems less fully committed to evil but never really goes far enough in the other direction to convince me that redemption was possible for him,) frequently gestures toward some complexity, some regret, some faint glimmer of the goodness that he once possessed, but then has mustache-twirling moments of brutal and short-sighted villainy, like instantly murdering the orc he'd gotten to betray and assassinate Adar simply for telling him that they'd need to retreat. Sauron is triumphant here - he got his army and destroyed one of the elves' great bastions. He just didn't get Galadriel on his side after thinking that perhaps he had.
And, I don't know. It's a bit high school.
Sauron, I'm sure, really wants all of Middle Earth to be on their knees with gratitude for the excellent work he's doing restoring order and all that. And I can even see that he might have invested a lot of hopes in making Galadriel his queen.
But this is mister long-term-scheming, isn't it? Just as his Ring ploy ought to be a long game, I could also imagine that his attempts to seduce Galdriel to his side would also be a long game. Sure, it's a foregone conclusion that she will resist the call (and diminish, and go into the west) but I almost feel like we could recontextualize that moment in which Frodo offers her the One Ring as Sauron's final, extreme long-con to try to take Galadriel for himself, making her into the Dark Lord. Like the extremely toxic ex you thought you'd never hear from again dropping you a line fifteen years after you last spoke with them.
The thing that's so frustrating is that there really is some good stuff in this show. In the season's prologue, in which we see Adar initially betray Sauron and set his uruk brethren to utterly pincushion his old Jack Lowden incarnation (funny story, the two shows I watched with my sister and brother in law while I was helping take care of my nephew were this and Slow Horses,) I love that while that body died, the seeping essence of Sauron dripped down into caverns below and gradually rebuilt a body by feeding on vermin.
The roiling mass of spiky ooze that Sauron is in that state is super-cool. It reminds you that, while the form he takes in most of the show checks all the boxes for being relatably human(oid), the actual truth is that he's something utterly inhuman and alien, like a Shoggoth from the Mountains of Madness more than some attractive young man (speaking of Charlie Vickers and Jack Lowden, I'm definitely starting to feel a little horrified that these actors at peak "attractive full-grown man" phase are both younger than I am. How dare they? Anyone born after the mid-1980s is just a little kid, and you can't convince me otherwise.)
So, while we're at it:
I wish I were more invested in the Stranger's story. I don't know that it would have made it any better to learn that this guy was actually not Gandalf, but it also didn't feel terribly exciting to have what felt like the most obvious answer confirmed after a whole two seasons (Ciaran Hinds better not be Saruman, though, because Saruman showed no signs of corruption until the beginning of Lord of the Rings. We're meant to believe that even through The Hobbit, Saruman was nothing but a wise, good, benevolent figure. My guess is he's one of the Blue Wizards, but if so, where's the other one?)
I wish the Numenor story was better. Ar Pharazon is obviously a villain, but he feels kind of lost amidst the various people supporting him. In the canon, Numenor tries to invade I want to say Valinor (the land of the Valar) and essentially, the Valar are at a loss for what to do because humanity are literally God's favorite creation, so they pray for Him to intervene, and He goes full Atlantis/Great Flood on them. Yes, Pharazon is now pushing this anti-religious agenda, which could lead to this blasphemous invasion attempt, but it's also kind of weird because Tolkien's world doesn't really have religion per se - the existence of God and the Valar and the Maiar doesn't really need interpretation by a clergy.
And finally, I wish we'd gotten a slightly clearer idea of just what Celebrimbor thought he was doing all season. "Annatar" appears to him in the fire of his forge, and it's clear that Celebrimbor ought to think this is a messenger from one of the Valar. But I don't feel like we ever get a sense of whether the other elves in his employ have any idea who this guy is, other than the fact that he's really working a lot with the master.
Anyway, like the first season, there's a big of joy just hanging out in a fantasy world. But I just feel like this show could be better than it is, and with only a few tweaks.
