Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power was a series that was heavily panned during its first season, and ultimately got saddled with some pretty negative baggage z which persists to this day. However, with some distance from the show’s original release, I feel like I can fairly evaluate the show free of the overall Discourse.

(From Right) Elrond, Galadriel, and Gil-Galad.

Where Rings of Power ran into some problems from the jump is that this story is a prequel, telling the story leading up to the creation of the Rings of Power, and the eventual defeat of Sauron by the Last Alliance. These two seasons in particular focus on the creation of the Three in the first season, and the Seven and the Nine in the second. This led to the inevitable criticism that most prequels face of “What’s the point? We know the destination already.” On the other hand, while being in the dark about the destination is nice, I feel the journey is just as good.

Related to this is the issue that the show-runners only had access to The Hobbit, and all of The Lord of the Rings (including the Appendices), but not the Silmarillion. This means that some pieces of world-building have to be tap danced around, because they’re only hinted at in the book. Or, that’s what conventional wisdom would say. What the show-runners do instead is they basically go in other directions when they think it would make a good story. For a lot of people, this would likely be sacrilege, but in some instances, I think it works.

Part of the way this makes it work is that, frankly, Tolkien’s biggest weakness is writing women. There’s exactly one woman with a real character arc in the Lord of the Rings, and that’s Eowyn. Rings of Power, on the other hand puts a lot of women at the fore, starting with Galadriel, who at this point is basically in her “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous To Know” period. We also get one of the best romantic married couples in fiction with During IV and Disa. These two are a fantastic married couple with amazing chemistry together and fantastic dialogue to match. On top of that Durin also has a fantastic friendship with Elrond – enough that I kinda wish that “Dwarf-friend” was also a term in the Legendarium.

Then there’s Tar-Miriel, the Queen-Regent of Numenor, who also has an interesting arc over these seasons, as she tries to come into her own as a ruler, only to be brought down by the machinations of Numenorian internal politics – and all of them also get hit directly or through splash damage by the plans of Sauron.

Speaking of which, Sauron in these seasons is really interesting. Sauron in the Lord of the Rings novels is effectively just an off-screen force of nature, who we only know of through his agents. Here he’s an active participant and is physically present in the plot. In particular, in this part of the story, he’s a seductive force – getting Celebrimbor to make the Rings, and to do that in the film he uses Galadriel to get there. It’s great as it shows Sauron as still being a sociopathic figure, but also how he can be a corrupting and manipulating force.

And then there’s the plot-line around the character of The Stranger who… look, it’s Gandalf – and his involvement with Hobbits. This whole story is charming. The books made it clear that Gandalf had repeatedly drifted in and out of Hobbit society across generations, so having Gandalf here works for me, and I like the idea of his interest in Hobbits starting early in their society. I do think the mystery of The Stranger’s identity gets stretched out a little too long, but wrapping it up in the second season works fine.

I don’t know how many more seasons we’ll get, but I look forward to seeing them.

Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power is available for streaming on Amazon Prime.

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