‘The Rings of Power’ improves in its second season. But not enough.Prime Video’s lavish fantasy epic seems as morally confused as its characters.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/2024/08/29/lord-rings-power-review-season-two/
In its sophomore season, Prime Video’s “The Rings of Power” will finally address the “rings” portion of the story it’s ostensibly been telling.
Slowly.
Very, very slowly.
The fantasy epic will also, on a less fictional plane, try to correct the jagged course it has charted as one of the more singular (and expensive) case studies of the post-prestige TV era. Widely believed to be the costliest TV series ever made, the first season’s budget reportedly ballooned to more than $700 million. At first, the experiment seemed to pay off; despite some rough plotting, the pilot boasted the biggest debut on record for Prime Video, with some 25 million viewers. But the audience the streamer expected the show to attract dwindled: Only 37 percent of viewers who started it actually completed the series. (Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon, which owns Prime Video.)
There are good reasons for this. The first season of “The Rings of Power,” set in what J.R.R. Tolkien dubbed the “Second Age,” with Middle-earth recovering after the big bad guy Morgoth’s defeat, was certainly beautiful. It looked expensive, and it was relatively well-acted. But the final product was spectacularly uneven. The story meandered. The dialogue was stilted and the pacing strange, lingering over points of minor interest and rushing through major events, such as the creation of the Elven rings. More than a few plots aimed at moving the viewer seemed less tragic than painfully contrived. Most important, perhaps, the show’s moral vision was mushy: Peppered with bids for theoretical nuance it seemed (in practice) to disown, the series felt less ethically complex than confused. And confusing.
Take the orcs. Or Uruks, as the fallen elf and villain Adar sensitively suggests they be called in Season 1. When the show’s Elven hero Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) articulates an explicitly genocidal desire to murder every last one of them in the first season, Adar suggests she might be infected by the very darkness she proposes to defeat. It’s a potentially interesting (and aggressive) intervention. Galadriel’s ugly phrasing is provocative. The moment seems calibrated to position her as the kind of morally gray protagonist we know from other prestigious prequels. Is Galadriel, in fact, an antihero? Or is this just conventional fantasy? (No one mourns the Stormtroopers, after all.)
If “Rings of Power” has a fatal flaw, it’s that it isn’t actually invested in the substance of the question. The series repeatedly and deliberately raises the issue of orcish “humanity” only to revert, almost reflexively, to a position functionally indistinguishable from Galadriel’s. Sure, individual Uruks are occasionally shown being loyal or vulnerable, as if disappointed by their superiors’ apparent indifference to their suffering and death. But most of the time they’re just snarling, congested goblins whose main affect is sadistic glee. As shown, they actually are irredeemable.
It’s dramatically awkward that Galadriel seems to usefully reflect on her own spiritual ugliness shortly after her genocidal comment to Adar. In a conversation with Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin), a young villager who survived an orc attack, she chides him for voicing anti-orc sentiments that mirror her own. Is this growth? It feels like a well-meaning character whose vengeful impulsivity has caused tremendous damage is finally taking stock and considering the larger picture.
Then she resumes badass orc-killing without any discernible ambivalence, and the camera cheers her on.
The second season handles these sorts of stepwise moral ascents and descents with a little more grace. This is Sauron’s season, now that the villain has finally shed his disguise. Charlie Vickers effects so remarkable a transformation from Halbrand to Sauron that I found myself briefly thinking that he (like Adar, who is now played by Sam Hazeldine instead of Joseph Mawle) had been recast. The season also belongs to the famous Elven smith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards). And Sophia Nomvete as Disa, Durin IV’s wife.
The action picks up in the immediate aftermath of the Season 1 finale, with Elrond (Robert Aramayo) racing to tell Elven High King Gil-Galad (Benjamin Walker) what he has deduced about Halbrand’s true identity and Galadriel chasing him in an effort to retrieve the Elven rings. Their disagreement over whether the rings are safe to use, given their provenance, drives much of the season. Galadriel values the visions they offer. Elrond finds their guidance suspect; that Sauron wanted them made means they’re part of his plan.
Scenes featuring the long lanky “Stranger” (or Istar, played by Daniel Weyman) and the Harfoots are improved now that he is able to speak (though a detour into a second Harfoot village feels a little like homework). The Khazad-dum plot, in which King Durin III is slowly corrupted by his ring, is genuinely affecting thanks to a number of textured, moving and humorous performances, even if it reprises beats we know from earlier installments (and depends on Durin III and Durin IV switching sides, with Durin IV — who last season was the one pushing for riskier mining — now counseling prudence and caution).
But the show’s use of the orcs baffles me even more in the second season, where the orcish question becomes not just urgent but pivotal. The new season contextualizes their place in this story by offering an extended flashback to Adar and Sauron’s last on-screen encounter (with “Slow Horses” actor Jack Lowden playing Sauron). Adar leads the orcs in an uprising against the dark lord that appears to be motivated by the latter’s indifference to orcish life. Unfortunately, the show fails to flesh out their core disagreement! It is clear that the orcs believe Adar will be less brutal. But whatever Adar sees in them or says to them — or to Sauron — happens off-camera.
This series abounds in radically underexplained mutinies. (Having spent an entire season on Numenor’s succession crisis, I still couldn’t tell you why Numenoreans support the usurper over the queen regent.) But this conflict is the one we most needed to understand to make sense of the principles (rather than personalities) at stake in the “hate triangle” among Sauron, Adar and Galadriel.
In practice, Adar treats the orcs as expendable, much as Sauron did. That’s a crushingly disappointing nondevelopment, one that fails to distinguish between these two important and similar adversaries. It proves, too, that the function of the “orcish rights” question was to show that Adar, the fallen elf waging war on Middle-earth, is also — gasp — a hypocrite. The show never intended to draw real focus to this population’s wretched position in a world that sees them as evil and unlovable (a move that could have riffed and expanded on themes Tolkien explored with Gollum, even if his redemption arc was short-lived). Instead, it doubles down on Galadriel’s moral error, using the orcs as pawns in its philosophical thought experiment, just as their leaders do on the physical battleground. There’s no consideration for (or interest in) their true nature or whatever experiences may have corrupted them. They remain NPCs, not genuine players, in this moral cosmos.
I worry I’m coming across as a raving orc apologist. I don’t intend that. “The Rings of Power” makes them remarkably unappealing, and the brutal, extended, well-crafted battle scenes from the new season kill any possible sympathy one could feel for this terrifying demographic. But the show also keeps centering them — with vague Marxist appeals and lazy populist Kabuki — in a way that turns them, almost accidentally, into Middle-earth’s most essential political constituency. That inadvertently makes a compelling case that the real key to world domination in “The Rings of Power” isn’t the rings. It’s the orcs.
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