The misunderstanding of subtlety in storytelling

Adaptations are difficult. Whenever you're translating something from its original medium to another one, you're going to lose something of it. That's why the achievement of Game of Thrones' first five seasons isn't to be overlooked, as they largely nailed the books that were intended to be "unfilmable" by their author. Sure, there were some technical issues, but the story usually came across just as it had been depicted on the page. That's a rare thing. It's even more difficult when you're trying to adapt something huge, like J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, and all of the little details that come with it. It's even more difficult when you're legally forbidden from telling the whole story that you'd like to present, as with Rings of Power, given the apparent greed of the estate that holds the rights. The other problem with adaptations is the vision of the producers/showrunners. Again, GoT comes out ahead here because Benioff and Weiss wanted to tell that story and so they did until the last couple seasons when they obviously just wanted to stop telling that story or were incapable of doing so without the guiding hand of George R. R. Martin. But it's often because people think they have a better take on said story that drives things off the rails. They're not beholden to the desires of lifelong fans of the material. They're not beholden to the history of the material. In many ways, they seem to lack respect for the material itself. They think they know better and can do it better than anyone has before. Kevin Smith has a brilliant story about this in regards to doing a Superman film. (It's perhaps the only brilliant thing Smith has done in the past 25 years...) And this may be part of the problem with the way that RoP's season ended.

Part of the marketing of the series was the Keyser Söze hook. All through the season, we were presented with little drops on various media outlets asking: "Who is Sauron?" That way, we were supposed to keep watching to see the big reveal of the Ultimate Bad Guy of the Second and Third ages. It wasn't sufficient for him to be the background malevolent force that Tolkien had created. The showrunners knew that he had come in disguise to the elves as Annatar and, just as the title states, taught them the craft of ring-making, so one of the conceits of the first season was figuring out who was going to be Annatar and how Sauron had managed to insinuate himself among our heroes. Except that there's a way to make a reveal that really works and then there's a way to just cheaply slip it in there so that some people can smack themselves on the forehead in awe while most people will just shrug their shoulders at the innocuous nature of it all. Turning a key story element into a publicity stunt is generally not the best way to approach these things if, again, respect for the material is actually part of your approach. So, yeah, spoilers to follow immediately.

Halbrand, nominal "king of the Southlands" showed up quite early in the series and actually was the most interesting of the lead characters for a while. In fact, the earliest clue to his true identity was shown on Númenor, when he demonstrated skill as a smith and a desire to join a guild. It was also an indication of his later desire to be present on the island to lead its already wayward people astray. This is where the writers think they're being subtle. "See? He's king of the Southlands aka Mordor... because he really does become king of Mordor later! See? See?" And, sure, that's all well and good if your story was written with the idea of pulling off the "big reveal." But if it was written to actually tell the tale of the Second Age, you've basically warped everyone's perception of both characters and key events in order to pull off your "big reveal." Tolkien doesn't go into extensive details (for once), but the impression he gives about the rings' creation is that Annatar remained with Celebrimbor and the elves for some time. He became familiar to them and taught the former how to craft the most important items since the Silmarils (which Amazon is contractually forbidden from using in their story.) In this case, all he does is inform an accomplished smith about the concept of alloys, as if somehow all of the metalwork in Lindon, from delicate chains to massive structures, has been done with nothing but raw iron and gold. You see how absurd this is becoming in order to pile everything about their relationship and still do the "big reveal" into a single episode?

But this is just part and parcel of how they've handled the character from the beginning. Halbrand was introduced to us floating on a raft in the middle of the Sundering Sea so that he could link up with Galadriel to do... what? Play a mind game? Learn something he somehow didn't know about her dogged pursuit of him for how many decades? Sauron is a Maia, which is the equivalent of an archangel or thereabouts in Tolkien's mythology. The Valar are one step below the creator god and the Maia are one step below the Valar. They're enormously powerful beings but this one, the greatest servant of the Valar, Morgoth, decided to float on a raft in the middle of the ocean so that his sworn opponent could have a moment of shock a couple months later? Eh? The grand scheme of Sauron to forge the rings was so that he could assume control of the mortal races and be the master of Middle-Earth. In the original works, he began that scheme by going right to Lindon and working with the foremost smith of his greatest enemies, the elves, not by traipsing around with one of them whom had never held a hammer and a bunch of humans with no connection to what he was doing. (Yet...) But, somehow, warping the story and the main villain in it to create the "big reveal" was more important than presenting the original material as it had been told.

Now, granted, adaptations are hard, right? How thrilling would it have been to keep checking back in on Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards as one of the more wooden players of a real forest of them, by the end) and his new pal, Annatar, as they figured out how to make some real bling? But that's part of the challenge of adaptation of the actual story. We went wandering off with the Harfoot so we could have hobbits and bring in one of the Istari a couple thousand years too early ("It's Radagast the Brown because he's always wearing a brown cloak? See? See?"), so we've already ventured pretty far afield from what the appendices talk about as the important events of the age. On the one hand, that could be an argument for the pseudo-character that was Halbrand. But it's also a counter-argument in favor of having some of the story stick to the original, while you get to wander around and do other cool things off the beaten path, as it were. Now one of the key elements of the entire premise of the series is reduced to a detail that takes place in a couple hours where some guy tells an immortal elf smith about the tenets of metallurgy. Thus are the master plans of an equally immortal demigod put into motion...

The key to Tolkien is the majesty and the lore. That's always been the essential hook of the story. Taken at face value, the One Ring is an invisibility trinket and that's probably what it was when Tolkien first wrote about it in The Hobbit.  But as he expanded upon what he'd created, he realized that it could be so much more than just a minor MacGuffin to get Bilbo out of a tricky spot. It was a thing of power because people believed that it was a thing of power, just like Tolkien's dear Catholicism. If Sauron is just some guy twirling a mustache in disguise, then he and the story lose a lot of the majesty that was built around them by the author and which has only been enhanced by decades of readers and fervent fans. If you want to get really nerdy about it, it's ridiculous that even Sauron's servants, from regular humans to the white-robed devotees of Morgoth, refer to him as "Sauron", which was a name given to him by the elves as an insult; a play on his actual name Mairon, "the admired", whereas Sauron means "the abhorred." But I can understand when you want to keep the casual viewers or casual fans of Middle-Earth hooked without having to explain to them that "the Great Enemy" or some other euphemism is "Sauron, the flaming eye dude" every other episode. But the commonplace use of a name that was only spoken in hushed tones in Peter Jackson's films and in the books demeans it to some degree and reduces the character to... a cheap disguise that was only used to pull off a marketing stunt. So, maybe that was the plan all along by the people who really didn't respect the material?

I don't know. One thing I do know is that, like GoT, Rings has diminished as it has gone along. When it began, it was visually resplendent and at least interesting to follow in a dramatic sense, as we got to see Middle-Earth in a very different state. But it ended with a cheap marketing trick and the polar opposite of what Tolkien's work has always been presented as: majestic. Does season 2 even have a draw at this point? Not from where I'm sitting.