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.

The hand of the GM

I'm going to delve back into my Dungeons and Dragons metaphor because it works for this latest episode of Rings of Power in more ways than simply the subject matter. Yes, D&D and Tolkien are almost the standard-bearers of nerdism, hand-in-hand. The former is the outward expression of the genre that the latter almost introduced into modern storytelling. Fantasy was an aspect of storytelling from the time humans began sitting around campfires and entertaining and/or educating each other. But in the 20th century, it became a literary genre of note when Tolkien did his thing, even if it was long-preceded by things like Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories. That story (The Lord of the Rings) spawned the role-playing game culture as we currently know it. That, in turn, kept Tolkien alive and in the minds of kids who became adults and that's why we had Peter Jackson's films 20 years ago and why we now have this Amazon series. You can't really escape it and so it's often easiest to use the techniques that the game has both taught and presented to demonstrate how good and bad storytelling is conducted. I've referred to this before when I mentioned the difference between the good DM and the bad DM (dungeon master, traditionally, although "GM" (game master) is probably more appropriate these days.)

You have your group of characters and they're given a set of circumstances to react to and engage with. These are player characters, meaning that they're people involved in the story that, you, the GM is creating, but they're also other humans that you have to entice to play along. In the case of Galadriel and the people around her, the enticing circumstances are the eruption of Orodruín and the creation of what would be known as Mordor. We already know what this is and we know where it is. Outside of the fact that, in any normal situation where a volcano would release a pyroclastic flow, all of those people that it swept over would be instantly dead, we can at least follow along with this set of circumstances and see massive changes to one key figure, Miriel, and more subtle changes to others, like Galadriel. Miriel being blinded and the devastation wrought by the orcs and the mountain compels her to bring her people back from their island kingdom to make a stand on behalf of the other humans that have also been devastated by this. While this is kind of a stretch for any regular player characters, this is at least a premise that's been put in front of them that they can react to in a relatively reasonable manner. They've been wounded and those around them have also been, so it's easy to see how simple vengeance and/or a sense of justice would compel the characters to act in this way. Fair enough. It's a little on the obvious side, but a good GM could make this work, given that there's already been a character with a driving motivation (Galadriel) dropped into the midst of this scenario. The problem with that character is that she's been so monochromatic that it's more likely she's an NPC (non-player character) than someone who would naturally be inclined to act that way. She's a storytelling device, rather than someone who acts normally, like you'd hope a player would in response to what's happening around her. Miriel, Elendil, Theo, and the rest in this scenario are more like players and are the people you'd hope that the audience could relate to, given what's happening, and much of this storyline is made to work by them, rather than the obsessed elf. But it's still kind of a mixed bag and the producers do themselves no favors by not only providing the very obvious cues, but then providing the very obvious labels to everyone (e.g This was The Southlands and it is now Mordor, just in case you somehow didn't get it.)

Similarly, we were kind of hit over the head with the mithril story. Anyone could see what was coming, when NPC King Durin denied the desires of nominally PC Elrond and Prince Durin and Disa. They're given a bit more to work with, in that Prince Durin has to overcome the distrust of the elves that his father and culture have taught him and Disa gets to express her personal desire for power and how she and her husband will step into it when the old man is dead. Likewise, Elrond gets to express not only his exceptional character but his rueful understanding of the violence to come when Gil-galad is informed that the dwarves have essentially told him and his people to piss off and die. All of this is decent reaction to a very obvious situation that, again, we all could see coming from leagues (traditionally, the distance one could walk in an hour; roughly three miles; fantasy term) away. We also get to see non-traditional emotion from hardened dwarven warrior Prince Durin, so we understand how difficult this situation is for him on a governmental, cultural, honorable, and personal level. Similarly, we see the legendary wisdom of Elrond in his understanding of both King Durin and Prince Durin's choices, despite his dismay that they're making said choices. All of these are good storytelling choices by the GM and actions by the PCs. It all gets almost completely ruined by the "teaser" scene at the end showing the balrog incinerating the leaf at the bottom of the mithril vein. For some reason, the incredibly powerful servant of Morgoth isn't sleeping entombed in the ground with the departure of his master (what actually happened in the books) but is instead laying in wait for a dramatic moment next season...? It's right there and it knows they're right there because they just dropped a leaf apparently 50 yards down an open hole. As soon as they crack that hole a little wider and start grabbing the shiny stuff, it's ready to grab them with that famous whip. The importance of the whole story concept was that the dwarves were so greedy for the stuff that they dug too deep after centuries, not that they could drop a piece of paper down a hole after first discovering it and realize that an immortal fire demon is present. They basically just trivialized one of the eeriest legends of the whole Tolkien mythos and one of the trademark scenes of the standard-bearing novel to make a ham-handed teaser.

But the best GMing example is the storyline with the (sigh) Harfoots. Here we have multiple PCs that are allowed to make what seem to be mistakes but which actually just continue the story in the direction that the GM probably wants it to go. They brought the big man along, but then they sent him away because he seemed to be doing destructive stuff. Both of those choices moved the story along. Now several of them are setting out to retrieve him in the name of charity and understanding, which are also very human choices that may not make much practical sense, but are perfectly understandable and relatable motivations. On the practical side, it is kind of odd for them to give rousing speeches about sticking together being the most important thing to the Harfoots as a people, only for four of them to split off from the rest to pursue an adventure but, yeah, most people aren't always consistent even when trying to be noble. In fact, they're pursuing the big man because they don't know who or what he is, but they also told him to leave because of the actions of the trio of white-robed people whom they also don't know. And the best part about all of that is that we, the audience, the largest group of player characters, also don't know who he is or who they are, even as Tolkien fans. (I'm still kinda thinking that he's Beorn, especially since they sent him north to Greenwood (later Mirkwood), but I still wouldn't put money on that.) That's the least amount of recitation of history and the most amount of new story in the whole series so far. My only gripe is that it has to come via the hobbits. Again.

The way to keep your readers/viewers/players interested is to present them with stuff that they have to sink their proverbial teeth into. They have to explore. They have to discover. They have to question their own actions and they can't just have everything served up to them on a plate. That's boring. That's obvious. That's not the way to keep their/our interest. Riugs has run into a similar problem to House of the Dragon, in that we know all this stuff already and there has to at least be an interesting presentation of it to keep people coming back. I don't think I will be with House, but I can be convinced as long as Rings does away with idiotic moves like the balrog teaser and tries to make its leads a bit more like people and a bit less like devices.

Overwhelming meh

There's a strange form of cosmic equilibrium happening between the two most noted fantasy shows of the moment; House of the Dragon and Rings of Power. The former has taken a significant leap forward in storytelling quality with its most recent episode (I'll get to it. It hasn't been that good.), while the latter has taken a bit of a dive. Neither of them were or are spectacular, so it's not like the drop off in quality between GoT's first five seasons and the last three, but it's still noticeable. The last episode of Rings was mildly annoying at its insistence on setting up what was to come in this episode and this one was not enough of a payoff for that setup. To continue the baseball analogy, the closer couldn't do his job because what came before him wasn't good enough. Of course, if you had a really good closer, the setup wouldn't matter as much. But, again, none of this has been spectacular, so here we are.

This was the Helm's Deep battle scene from The Two Towers, complete with cavalry charge to save the day. The fact that it wasn't a suicidal cavalry charge down a 45 degree angle is a mild step forward, but it was still utterly obvious and borderline meme-worthy. Fantasy of any kind requires a suspension of disbelief. Most of the time, watching material that contains orcs, elves, magic swords, and kingly prophecies (as well as people of color with agency, if you're a bigot) requires you to accept that you're in a world that treats those things as normal. But there still has to be some degree of belief in the basic physical properties of the world. I was hard-pressed to stay with this very average screenplay when being forced to believe that not only did the forces of Numenór arrive from across the ocean at just the right moment, but they would be heading for that specific spot in the enormous area around the gigantic Orodruín in full armor and at a full charge. This is putting aside that they were earlier traveling at that same full gallop in full daylight while it was still dark where the rest of our characters were fighting Adar and his orcs. This was just short of Gendry running forty leagues in a couple hours and still somehow a) getting to where he needed to be and b) surviving. Dramatic timing is what it is because it's at least partially believable and somewhat surprising. This was neither of those things.

This is all after watching a series of action sequences that were neither particularly exciting nor suspenseful in any real fashion, since we've been in enough last-minute escapes/successes/moments of "tension" with Arondir to make him think he's the luckiest damn elf alive. (But, no, there's someone even luckier...) We also won't get into how the collection of average townsfolk were able to successfully sabotage a 100-foot tower to the point of collapse in just a few hours. There was so much of this episode that screamed the other kind of setup; not preparation, but putting the last domino in place so it all falls over in exactly the right fashion, that it seemed both trite and obvious from the opening moments. Nothing saps a story of energy faster than a scenario that makes you want to skip ahead to the (hopefully) genuinely exciting or interesting parts. Other than Adar detailing that the earliest of corrupted elves by Morgoth were called uruks (thus creating the baseline for the uruk-hai of Saruman in LotR and somehow different from the massive orks with that label who destroyed Osgiliath later in the Second Age) there was nothing compelling about this story whatsoever. In the end, we're saved from the evil sword being some kind of weapon of doom by being shown that it's actually the key to a set of locks to free the river Anduin to flow into the caverns below Orodruín and trigger its explosion. Locks built by whom, exactly? And why a sword? I mean, sure it's a setup(!) for creating the forgeworks that Sauron would later use to create the rings, but that seems like a rather elaborate story surrounding this dark weapon for it to end up being a mechanical tool for a hardly believable (even in elf and dark spirit world!) hydroengineering facility.

Nathan texted me earlier today, saying that this episode was largely a bunch of fantasy tropes and he's exactly right. The battle scenes, the forced emotion between Arondir and Bronwyn (complete with orchestra!), the cavalry saving the day, and even the soldier who's decided that one fight is enough for his lifetime when he's traveled halfway around the world to get here and was formerly trying to take a place in the Sea Guard. 'Obvious' and 'typical' don't begin to carry enough meaning to describe this script that apparently took no less than four people to complete. Part of that script is the continuing story of the invulnerability of Galadriel. We've already seen her trying to swim from Valinor without ill impact and now she's apparently unaffected by a pyroclastic flow, too. (I loved the call to "Get behind the wall!" Newsflash: That will not save you.) To draw another analogy, I've said for years that the reason Marvel's comics and films are so much more successful than DC's is because the former's characters are humans first, superheroes second, while the latter's are simply demigods. Since this is a story of a time long before LotR, we know that Galadriel won't die. But you also have to put your character in some degree of jeopardy for people to pay attention to her at all and we're now being shown that she is the most typical of superheroes, set up to be here week after week and issue after issue with the surrounding story having no impact whatsoever. You almost couldn't write something more uninteresting if you tried. This series' grip on me has gone from decent to very faint in the space of two weeks. I hope the last two can rescue it and, uh, not with cavalry.

Setup pitchers still have to play the game

In modern baseball, it's pretty rare that one pitcher will be on the mound for the entirety of a game. That's why the "complete games" stat is heralded by many as both an accomplishment and an example of what the game used to be and still should be. But the relief pitcher has actually been a regular thing since the 19th century. They've simply become more common in recent decades because of the wear-and-tear that modern pitching takes on human bodies. The arm can only take so much. But that's also why setup men have become even more common, such that what used to be commonplace (one pitcher doing the whole game) has now been largely replaced by three or four pitchers working a single game. Setup guys are the ones you use to bridge the gap between your opener and your closer. They're often overshadowed because they don't carry the glory of being the opener who's supposed to set the tone and get your team ahead or being the closer who's the one who snuffs out any chance of the opposition making a comeback or contesting a close game in the late innings. Episode 5 of Rings of Power was a setup man. It was the bridge between all of the information we've had poured on us in the opening half of the season and what's to come in the rest of it. Similarly to baseball, it means that it really wasn't much of an episode. We knew the orcs were going to attack the watchtower. We're just waiting for them to do so. We knew the Dúnedain were going to sail to Middle-Earth. We're just waiting for them to do so. When you have really monumental events in a story, you want to highlight them so you try to build them up before unleashing their monumentalness in the same way that the setup man tries to reach the last couple innings where the closer can do his work. But there's a limit to all things and when your episode is just build-up to the events that the audience already knows are going to happen, a lot of it feels like time wasted that would otherwise have gone toward building an actual story.

Certainly, there were moments of interest, such as the mysterious white-robed people that early press photos seemed to indicate was Sauron and some of his minions. But the Horfoots traveling while learning of the Big Man (Wiz-War players will know what I'm talkin' about) and his abilities and the Numenóreans preparing for their big voyage and Elrond finally giving up the ghost on mithril and the humans trapped in the tower remaining trapped in the tower while Adar and his orcs plot outside are all just delaying the moments of crisis that are already right there in front of us. Dragging them out won't make them better and, if anything, will often reduce their impact because people like me start doing the "Yeah, let's hurry up" motion with their hands while watching which is a sure way to lose your audience while trying to be grandiloquent about what's not happening. This is one instance where the series' visual resplendence kind of worked against it, as the visuals are still great, but there are only so many times we can see ships in the harbor of Armenelos and be impressed, especially with the orchestral crashes telling us that we should be really impressed.

As has been the case more than once, the most interesting part of the episode once again involved Elrond and Durin, as we learned about the light of the Eldar fading (In the grim darkness of the far future...) and perhaps signaling the end of the elves in Middle-Earth (Spoiler: It doesn't.) It's also a distinct departure from Tolkien's work in that mithril never really held any significance for the elves other than them being fascinated by its beauty, just like the dwarves were, albeit to a less fanatical extent, and realizing that it could make great armor. So, while there have been other deviations in terms of detail, this is the only the second major segue into something genuinely new and different, outside of Adar (and pending the identity of the Big Man (He's not Beorn.) (I think.)) With Gil-galad insisting that the elves need the stuff to keep from fading away, that sets up a genuine socio-political crisis that hadn't been seen to that point in M-E since the First Age and Thingol asking the dwarves to make a necklace for one of the Silmarils and the dwarves becoming enchanted by it and not wanting to give it up. (It's always the jewelry in this world...) That presents an opportunity for more strain on the friendship between Elrond and Durin which isn't exactly mind-blowing in story complexity but does present a lot of opportunity for texture.

That said, the most fascinating character of the moment remains Adar, since he keeps spouting little homilies about how his obvious drive for vengeance is rooted in things far greater than the personal injury that he's suffered. Devout Catholic that he was, all of Tolkien's tales are suffused with themes of faith, divinity, and ancient grudges because of both of those. Adar is going to actually act out that morality play which is a bit more complex and lore-heavy of a motivation than most of what everyone else is carrying. Next week is clearly "the battle episode" so we'll see how it pans out. At the very least, we'll be past the setup and on to the (mid-season) closer.

From the high end to the legendarily mundane

Most fiction is either character-driven or plot-driven. The novels that make up A Song of Ice and Fire and the subsequent TV series, Game of Thrones, are notably character-driven. There is no high concept that drives the story. It's pretty much straightforward epic fantasy. But it's a story that is steered by several amazing characters, such as Tyrion Lannister and Arya Stark. It's the lack of these that currently hinders its prequel, House of the Dragon. The Rings of Power has the mild advantage of being plot-driven- everything centers around massive events like the creation of the rings and the fall of Numenór -but also having multiple characters that are interesting in and of themselves, like Galadriel and Halbrand. Granted, Galadriel is being written and played by Morfydd Clark so intensely as to be borderline annoying at times. Yes, we get it. You're obsessed with Sauron, greatest surviving servant of Morgoth, whom you hold responsible for the death of your brother and whom you will never, ever stop pursuing. We're right there with you but, at some point, we're all hoping that you learn one of Sauron's essential talents (e.g. more flies with honey, etc.) And, yet, somehow your vinegar roped in the queen-regent of the Dúnedain, Míriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson.) It's that kind of irritating leap that made this the first episode of Rings that felt more rote than splendid. It was still interesting, but it was also the kind of routine adventure story that you'd expect from material much lower on the scale of such things and more like you'd get out of a Terry Brooks novel (to speak of only one of the most notable of Tolkien ripoffs, complete with a Gandalf who sends some halflings on a mission.)

Just like that Brooks novel, this episode of Rings also involves a sword that the dark forces want to possess. Said weapon is in the hands of young Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin) who is determined to be more active in the defense of his fellow villagers that have taken shelter in the very watchtower that Arondir and company abandoned a couple weeks back. Everything old is new again and all that. The fact that this is much like Théoden leading his people to Helm's Deep should be in the forefront of most LotR fans' minds, if they're paying attention. And, again, this is what makes this episode somewhat rote in its telling. This is the adventure story, as the common people do their common things and the heroes among them stand out, to one degree of success or another. The fact that Theo waits until dark, when the orcs can move around at will, to try to escape from the otherwise empty village is another example of how one person's hero is another person's fool. But stumbling into things is also one of the easier ways of getting a story out of them, so here we are. There's a Tolkien nerd moment when the old man warns Theo of the return of Sauron, since said name was given to him by the elves as something of a mockery of his original name (Mairon, "the admirable"; Sauron means "the abominable") Would Sauron's servants use the elf name? Obviously, that's way too much detail for the casual viewer but it occurred to the Tolkien nerd.

The events on Numenór are a little more awkward in terms of delivering a story. Isildur "failing" at the Sea Guard tests is pretty standard for Campbell's hero's journey and, as noted, Míriel is somehow convinced by Galadriel discovering the secret of her ailing father. I guess they did well enough in showing just how disturbed the queen regent was by the vision she kept seeing in the palantir that she has, but it still felt unconvincing and simply like a plot element (e.g. this is how Elendil and a bunch of Dúnedain first end up in Middle-Earth!) that had to be fulfilled. Speaking of the seeing stones, it was odd to hear Míriel say that "the rest" had been lost or hidden, considering that when the Numenóreans finally moved to M-E for good, they brought seven of them along with them and Tolkien lore suggests that there may have never been more than eight in the first place. One other detail is that, in the books, the stones were only used for communication and it was mentioned that they could be used to view the past. The presence of visions of the future was never a thing, but artistic license by the show writers has already been employed, so this is probably just another one of those things. Still, I question why the others had to be "lost or hidden", rather than simply explaining that the one in the palace was simply one of them. Galadriel would have known what they were and why they were there, as they had been given to the kingdom by the elves. It was nice to see them displaying Pharazôn's political acumen, by setting up a rabble-rouser to inflame a crowd, only for the chancellor to calm them and display his leadership qualities. Thus are coups set in motion...

We were also brought back into the realm of the dwarves, as we finally returned to the amusing interplay between Elrond (Robert Aramayo), Durin (Owain Arthur), and Disa (Sophia Nomvete.) Obviously, all of this was leading up to the discovery of mithril at Khazad-Dûm, which is fine. It's a good way to show off the mistrust of the elves that the dwarves share with the humans, as well as the grasping possessiveness that the former have when the possibility of crafting something comes around. Disa is by far the most entertaining of the trio (That's right, racists. The Black dwarf is the cool one.) Alongside the typical blustery Durin and the aloof but still earnest Elrond, Disa is entirely practical yet eminently sociable and clearly the one most capable of navigating the disruptions created by the instincts (or agendae) of others. Nomvete is kind of a delight and I really hope her role expands in the future. In contrast, the appearance of the Morgoth-serving elf, Adar, was kind of restrained. I had expected a bit more of a Romulan experience, with the cold intellect surrounded by some degree of actual fury. For his couple of minutes on screen, he's essentially still the figure in the shadows that didn't need to be seen or named at all. That may be what is still the Diablo-esque nature of the M-E scenes shining (shadowing?) through, though, which is still part of what makes the show enjoyable. So, we've lost a bit of the shine of wonder and are through to the "story simply progressing" phase; much like the difference between Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. It's still absolutely worth the time.

The political crux emerges

With the introduction of Númenor, we are now fully into the story of the latter part of the Second Age. Most of the key moments of the story of the rings, the return of Sauron, and the creation of what would be the Middle-Earth of the Third Age (where Lord of the Rings is set) is based in, affected by, or fully revolves around the island kingdom of Men that was granted to the Dúnedain by the Valar (aka the gods themselves.) This is where most of the political struggle and upheaval that should be central elements of The Rings of Power will take place. With that in mind, it's not surprising that, with a couple excursions to the captive Arondir and (sigh) the half-halfling nature people, all of the action took place in Armenelos, the capital of Númenor, where we were introduced to the key figures of not only Elendil, but his son, Isildur, who ends up having a bit of history with the most important ring of them all.

The amount of money poured into the series was once again on full display, as Armenelos and the port all looked spectacular, as did all of the ships and pretty much every bit of kiwi scenery, CGI-enhanced or not. The series is a visual treat without question. The issue at hand is whether they'll be able to present a story to match. (Just as a side note: I have absolutely zero concern about the impact of racists "review-bombing" the series. With the positive opinions coming from critics and the non-ignorant, the general audience will soon vastly outweigh the closed-minded keyboard warriors who have spent the last few days accusing Neil Gaiman of having ruined Tolkien.) So far, they seem to be doing well with both "canon" material and the new stuff designed to bridge the gaps and bring Tolkien's myths down to earth to some degree. The presence of characters like Halbrand (Charles Vickers) as the smooth-talking, regular guy with the dark past and occasionally criminal habits does help to break the ice that the presence of people like Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) would otherwise create to keep the entire thing at a distance from viewers; kinda like a legend, one would think. One funny side effect of their interaction on screen is that her Welsh accent makes his name "Halbrand" sound like "Hellbrand", which only serves the current fan theory that he's actually Sauron come to Númenor in disguise to scope out the scene. If you want a long-running series with characters that people can identify with, that's typically the best approach.

The other one is to engage a fan sop about the source material and continue to subject us to stories about the little people that hide from every danger. I'm still not particularly thrilled with the Horfoot material because it's still kind of routine and that makes it kind of tedious. The odd contrast is that those scenes also contain the greatest number of characters that the audience can identify with, as Nori (Markella Kavenagh), Sadoc (Lenny Henry), Largo (Dylan Smith), and Poppy (Megan Richards) are at least somewhat funny and quite believable in a charming, Underhill kind of way. But just like with the first two episodes, I continue to not see the necessity of the Horfoots (Horfeet!) other than to add the LotR shine to a story that could've been told without the clown act constantly running. It's not actively repulsive and tiresome like the court scenes in House of the Dragon, but it's such a step down from what else is happening in the story that it stands out as something of a flaw, overall. In something of a contrast, I can't help but arch an eyebrow at some of Clark's moments. One assumes she's been instructed to be such an absurd hothead to present the starkest possible contrast with the ethereal thousands-of-years-older version of Galadriel in LotR. The confrontation with Elendil (Lloyd Owen) over whether she could kill him, fight her away aboard a tiny skiff, and then pilot said skiff singlehandedly out of the port was just a bit OTT on the acting side. Since we've been given the impression that Elvish immortality extends to limitless endurance, given her willingness to swim from Valinor back to Middle-Earth, I suppose it's not completely unreasonable to the point of stupidity, but it's awfully close.

On a couple other production notes, the revelation of the glyph being a map of Mordor and the (for some reason) written plan to create a place where "evil could thrive" was a bit heavy on the melodrama and orchestral crashes, but that may be my "I know all this stuff already" bias speaking. Along those lines, the Númenorean distaste for elves in general and Galadriel in particular strikes me as a bit overdone. What might have softened it somewhat is a bit more elaboration upon why not just the rulers of the island but the people, in general, hold that opinion with such intensity. Even the real racists in our world complaining about non-White actors try to come up with excuses as to why they're so opposed to the presence of people who don't look like them. On that topic of looks, while almost everything is quite stunning on the visual side, I'm not sure we needed 90 seconds of Elendil and Galadriel riding, along with every shot possible of Galadriel, her perfectly white horse, and her flowing blue robes to drive that home. It's also kind of funny to note that, despite the elaborate use of chains as weapons and the savagery of the orcs driving their prisoners, the direct death scene of one of Arondir's (Ismael Cruz Cordóva) compatriots involved as little visible blood as possible and certainly not the kind of arterial spray you'd normally get from a mortal wound on the neck. I'm not objecting to the lack of blood. It just seems like kind of an odd way to pull your punches a few minutes removed from a warg chewing through people. Also, Arondir's commander pointing out that the rudimentary cover to protect the orcs from the sun being "how they hid from our sight" in the middle of a path of devastation through forested land stretching for miles is, uh, a head-scratcher of a script point.

Regardless, it's still entertaining and has me looking forward to subsequent episodes, although I'm willing to question if that's not more because of my latter-day Tolkien nerdism than whether the story is simply that interesting. Bringing in Isildur (Maxim Baldry) this early is an interesting choice, since it allows plenty of time for him to build into the alternately heroic and tragic character that he becomes. OTOH, creating someone new like Adar- apparently an elf serving the forces of Morgoth, which doesn't seem at all irrational given the Kinslayings and the shame of the Noldor that Galadriel avers to -shows a willingness to strike out in new directions, which is certainly of interest. Is it compelling? Not quite yet. Could it be? Positive signs.

Re-forging the rings of storytelling

Amazon's long-anticipated series about the Second Age of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, The Rings of Power, was released in the last couple days and brought with it my usual personal complications around Tolkien's work. I'm a long-time fan, having read pretty much everything he's ever written about his world (yes, including the collections of notes and letters; a lifetime ago, I worked for Borders and got'em on the cheap. I used to read a lot more then, too.) However, Middle-Earth became the bog standard for fantasy literature, TV, and films so long ago that there's some degree of disdain that now accompanies it. While I was fascinated by Peter Jackson's films bringing the world I'd known for so long to visual life, those felt like isolated instances and not something I was really interested in reengaging with on a creative level. If you'd asked me if I ever wanted to write a bog-standard, Western fantasy story at any point over the past thirty years, my answer would've been a resounding: "No." It's been done. I see no point in my doing it again. In that respect, it wouldn't be illogical to extend that to more productions about Middle-Earth. I thought The Hobbit was an overproduced and overlong video game with a half-assed script and didn't see either of the sequels. Consequently, I went into Rings with a certain degree of weary trepidation because I didn't expect to see anything more than the usual routine of orcs, elves, and dwarves. Having watched House of the Dragon tread heavily over the same ground that Games of Thrones did in the past two weeks certainly didn't help my attitude. But now that I've seen the first two episodes of Rings, I have to say that I'm not entirely convinced, but I'm at least more interested in watching episode three of that series than I am House. (Of course, I'm far more interested in the season opener of Rick and Morty on Sunday than anything else, but that's a (very) different story.)

One significant upside of Rings is the tonal shift that they've taken in terms of storytelling. In LotR, everyone but the hobbits seemed to know everything that was going down. The hobbits were the new players at the RPG table, while everyone else had read the Monster Manual years ago and knew just what to do and when to do it at almost all times. All the bad guys and good guys were clearly marked. The approach to Rings is somewhat different. Rather than being straightforward D&D, the atmosphere felt far more Diablo-esque, in that things were dark and murky and uncertain and everyone was attempting to figure out just what was happening during much of it. The hunt for Sauron in the far north; the skull-wearing goblin bursting from the ground; the sword that feeds on blood; the secret that Durin is hiding from Elrond; all of these things are not hugely innovative fantasy elements (far from it) but they were presented in such a way that even those of us intimately familiar with Tolkien's world were dropped into a bit of uncertainty, just like the characters were. That's a distinct advantage of the story being set in the Second Age, which has only just emerged from an almost-literal war of the gods (The War of Wrath between Morgoth and the Valar.) What that means is that everything is somewhat new, as Middle-Earth has lost about a third of its land mass and a lot of it has to be genuinely explored by the people in front of us. But since it had still been partially inhabited for thousands of years prior, one still gets the mystery of the "people who came before us" that has always been one of the enchanting parts of Tolkien's work (and subsequent epic fantasies by other authors.)

Certainly, one can't fault the notorious budget that was put into this series, as everything looked like it had just come out of a nine-figure film production. Also, unlike House, there was the occasional moment of interesting dialogue ("Why should we enter where sunlight fears to tread?") and the majority of the characters felt like something other than people slotted into roles to move the plot. I can't say I'm thrilled with the large presence of the Harfoot; both as a Tolkien fan (Hobbits don't appear until the Third Age, whereas the Harfoot were an offhand comment of his) and as someone who feels like this series should stand on its own (relatively) without pandering to the people who think that "Middle-Earth" means "goofy characters with big feet" by default. There are enough "regular Joe" humans present that I'm not sure we really needed more of the "people who have no idea what's going on" since, as noted, that's largely everyone in the first place. We don't need little roly-poly people for the audience to identify with. We have the real humans to do that with already, plus elves and dwarves who are a lot more emotional and approachable than Orlando Bloom will ever be.

On the topic of storytelling in the big picture, my friend, Nathan, did point out that in their condensed telling of the First Age at the beginning of episode one, they missed a rather grand opportunity to build upon the fact that the Noldor elves had pursued Morgoth to Middle-Earth against the wishes of the Valar and had slaughtered other elves in order to do so (the Kinslaying; one of several.) It was pride that created that war and that's a great dramatic building block that could have been carried by Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and Elrond (Robert Aramayo) and everyone else who remembers what things were like before Morgoth was defeated and Beleriand sank into the ocean. I'm not sure how many people would have caught the note about Elrond not being allowed into the council because it was for "elf lords only" and Elrond, of course, is only half-elven; a topic that was ignored in Jackson's films. It's not beyond the realm of reason that those things might be included and/or elaborated upon later in the series (five seasons are planned) but it was an opportunity to inject it right away. Certainly, loading down newcomers with that much lore might be a bit much to ask. It's easier, for example, to present the ingrained dwarven distrust of elves as something personal between Durin and Elrond than it is to point out how the dwarves were actually created first by the Valar, Aulë, who was forbidden from awakening them because Eru, the big god, wanted his chosen folk, the elves, to come first. There's a fair amount of subtext built in there that's more complex than just "You missed my wedding!" and that's the same for a lot of Tolkien's world that didn't really become obvious to readers who may have only confined themselves to The Lord of the Rings. Is all of that necessary to tell a good story? No. But I think it helps tell one that can be a straight adventure story, like this one was for the first two episdoes, as well as a more involved political tale, like GoT was and House is attempting to be. Of course, much of that kind of story will likely emerge as we introduce the men of Númenór starting next episode (speaking of pride leading to disaster...)

So, if you haven't figured it out by now, I'm feeling a lot more positive about Rings than I am House. It wasn't earth-shaking. It wasn't mindblowing. It didn't even stray that far from the dread "bog standard." But it was solid and somewhat interesting and has me looking forward to the next episode to see where the showrunners take us both within the boundaries of Tolkien's tales of the Second Age and beyond. And whether the guy who fell in the meteor is Beorn (which was another very Diablo-esque moment, for anyone who played Diablo III, for example.)