Well here is my Rings of Power review for the Season 2 finale, and since it was awful, this is also my final review of this series. I was determined to see out the end of Season 2, but I have to tell you folks, this was actually a struggle to get through. There was one point where I just switched it off and if not for this review I wouldn’t have bothered finishing it.
As always for this show it’s FULL SPOILERS and I’m a huge fan of the Tolkien books.
With that out the way, I’m keeping this as simple as possible.
The Good
This is the quick part. Still liked Celebrimbor and even in his death scene Charles Edwards is the best actor on this show and actually felt like he was in a real story. Second best actor on the show is Peter Mullan, who plays Durin III. His end was idiotic whereas Brimby’s was quite nicely handled, but that’s not Mullan’s fault.
The Rest
The rest is not good, or not good enough to mention. Durin III smashes through the rocks and finds so much mithril, and the Balrog. The Balrog will please movie only fans, but us books fans were never happy with the design in the movies. Far too large, and as every debate on this subject across my life has proven, it’s that the only people who read Lord of the Rings and think Balrog’s have wings aren’t that well read. At least not in English.
Durin and Durin face the Balrog…. For some reason in an epiphany Durin III takes of the Ring, then decides to kill himself to save his son. He charges at the Balrog, he has no hope, we see him jump. Big, dramatic Hollywood shot and the Balrog connects with his sword… Main titles.
Now that’s the last we hear about the Balrog in this episode, and the only mention of Durin III we get is in a cringey final montage of all the main characters of the show. Meanwhile the Dwarves do eventually appear and turn the tide of the battle of Eregion. The worst battle I’ve ever seen. We’ll get to that. So is no one else gonna talk about the now awakened Balrog that’s only one thin wall from the main hub of Khazad-dum? Nope, that’s fine, this show doesn’t care about continuity, just cool money shots that the showrunners dreamed up in their head after watching Peter Jackson movies.
Oh and about 12-20 Dwarves appeared to help Eregion, when it was too late. They really turned the tide with those swollen numbers. Pathetic
Eregion
My goodness, where to start. So last week we end with Gil-galad, Elrond and some red shirt Elves in a final stand surrounded by Orcs. This week we pick up the battle with hand to hand fighting inside Eregion and there’s still solders shooting arrows from the wall. Where were they during the final stand, which happens off-screen by the way? Stop asking questions, consume Bezo’s product and assimilate.
Those red shirt Elves, got red shirted off screen. The Elven leaders have been captured, and Arondir is put with them because he’s a main character despite no other reason to be captured. Oh and that stab wound, which everyone was thinking he may have died from last week, not important. It was barely an inconvenience. He’s good.
And that’s about that, the battle is kinda over, the Orcs won, and then in the end they didn’t due to a score of Dwarves.
Galadriel/Sauron/Adar/LOL
Celebrimbor gave Galadriel the Nine so Sauron would not get them. So, Galadriel hangs about the City she was supposed to leave and is trying to get some Elf maidens to safety, who look like scared damsels from the 60’s. An Elven maiden is more than a match for a few Orcs unless they were never trained in any warfare during the First Age when their entire existence was warfare against Morgoth.
Galadriel leads them through a path, right into an ambush and offers to give herself up to save them. Putting the Rings back in the hands of the bad guys. Why is Galadriel such a stupid idiot in this show, who knows? A clown she is though.
They take her back to Adar, whom she just escaped, and now she has the Nine, oops. Anyway, it’s all good because Adar wore her Ring and magically looked like a normal Elf again. He gives her it back, because he just wants peace. Then his Orcs all stab him like they did Sauron because they’ve now decided to go back to Sauron. I mean maybe Sauron won’t get them killed? First order Sauron gives them, go kill yourselves by wiping out Eregion. Well, nobody said Orcs were smart.
Adar is stabbed I think around 30-40 times in the chest. But this is cheap Hollywood schlock, so you know for a fact….Yup, he’s not completely dead. He in fact is still alive enough to say some raspy words whilst Sauron looks over him. Then an Orcs stabs him again, and you know this was was somehow the killing blow because they set up the shot that way. The wound is just where all the others are when we see it from topside. Brilliant.
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Then Sauron and Galadriel get into a fight, he wants her Ring and the Nine which he somehow knows she’s got. I’m not going to get into the fact that this version of Sauron so far just wants to have all the Rings and not give then to others. Why I have no idea? There’s literally no point to forging the One as everyone knows the whole game is up before he’s even considered it. In this battle Sauron can shapeshift at will. But he was trapped on a wrecked boat sailing West for no reason in Season 1…Sure. Never be scared to change the rules you’ve established for a cool fight folks, Hollywood 101.
Sauron stabs her with Morgoth’s crown and takes the Nine, but she jumps off a cliff so he can’t get her own Ring. Earlier we saw both the Dark Wizard and Gandalf levitating massive rocks, but Sauron who’s stronger than both together can’t stop Galadriel from falling. Yup, the power levels in this show vary based on how cool the directors think a shot will be.
Numenor/Elendil
The worst plot, yet the one that should be the best. Earien is now seeing that she doesn’t really like being a bad guy. So she’s had an evil turn to a redemption arc in around 40 minutes of screen time all season. Emma Horvath still can’t carry any of her scenes and looks like she’d rather be anywhere else.
The show rips off the Peter Jackson movies all the time. Copied lines in the wrong places and even designs and shots. This is after some legal issues around how much they copied in Season 1. Well Elendil finally gets Narsil and it’s almost shot for shot exactly the same as the scene in Return of the King when Aragorn gets Anduril, Flame of the West. Only difference is it’s Miriel giving it to Elendil and calling it the White Flame.
Don’t get. me wrong, Narsil even at this point is a legendary sword. It was forged way back in the First Age by Telchar and it’s knife mate was the blade which Beren used to cut the Silmaril from Morgoth’s crown. However, to make the scene seem so similar to the movie was just a cop out. I feel sorry for Lloyd Owen. The man is literally ideally suited to playing Elendil (could be taller mind) and they give him nothing but scraps.
Numenor/Pharazon
Almost everything else in Numenor is done in montage format and no one speaks much at all. Pharazon has gone full evil, arrested the Faithful etc. However, the question is, why? He’s already in charge, he has absolutley no benefits to get from alienating a portion of his people. Not once have we really explored what Pharazon thinks or what his motivations are.
Pharazon just does things because it says he takes over in the books. In the books he had genuine theological differences and his side was the more numerous. However, he never went full tilt evil until Sauron got his mits on him. Well, I guess there is one or two things a keen Tolkienist may disagree with me on that statement. However, they’d agree with me this show doesn’t present Pharazon’s goals, or his politics well at all.
Isildur
He falls for Astrid and it’s as twee and pathetic as the cheap romance films my wife watches on Hallmark to fall asleep to. He’ll take her to Numnor because she’s had her bit of rough and now fancies the high life. In comes Kemen, the worst character ever, acting all smarmy. His boat didn’t take long to get to Pelargir from Numenor where he was some mere moments ago in terms of the timeline of everyone else.
Anyway, Kemen is like, ‘whoa bro you’re alive (damn), Earien gonna be stoked’. Then Isildur says he wants take to take his new squeeze to Numenor. Kemen suddenly decides to be pretty racist against non-Numenoreans and fill Isildur in on the fact he’s a big deal now and Isildur’s family are pond life. Isildur can’t take Astrid, so we assume he won’t be going.
The terrible closing montage though, shows us he got on the boat and left her. Not sure why, but I guess it’ll be all dramatic when they meet up against in Season 3. Truly the most pointless story of them all in Season 2. Escapes from spiders, fall in love in two seconds with a baddy, get depressed when her boy shows up. Then, get her back and get told he has to go home and leave her. That’s Isildur’s entire season right there.
As for Theo, I genuinely think the writers forgot he was in this show, could have cut him out and nothing would change at all for anyone.
Gandalf
Yeah they finally revealed it’s Gandalf. ‘Oh, this is so cool, we get a Gandalf backstory, woop, woop, woop’. That’s what Bezo’s Amazon thought was gonna happen. However, even the fans who like this show admit they ballsed up this mystery box. They made it so obvious it was Gandalf and most will admit the Blue Wizard was the superior choice.
What’s even worse is that Gandalf doesn’t get that name until much later in the Third Age as it’s a direct translation of Elf-Stick in Gondorian. Gondor doesn’t even exist yet. When Olorin (his actual name in the West) arrived the Elves called him Mithrandrir. This was the name he was known by across most of Middle-earth outside of the North West. Anyway, I knew this was coming, so be it.
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Gandalf faces the Dark Wizard, and though he’s probably not Saruman he might as well be. Many fans think he still can be, but this show is desperate to be viewed as an unofficial prequel to Jackon’s movies. Therefore, they won’t drop a plot hole that big by making him Saruman. Half his lines feel like Saruman trying to sweet talk Gandalf in LOTR. The way he calls him old friend and looks so Saruman like. I mean this guy looks evil.
My main criticism is that the dialogue between the pair and then later with Old Tom is poor. I’m also critical that he seems to have left Nori, or her him again, but I don’t think they properly explain why? Don’t worry, S3 probably has both Poppy and Nori show back up. I mean Poppy walked across ME last time off-screen. Finally, the Rhun plot just feels like it is going nowhere fast. Even the eejits who love this show hate the Rhun plot. Nothing has actually happened apart from the Gandalf mystery box and he’s got a staff and walked with some Hobbits.
The Closing Montage
Laughably bad, poorly shot, cringey acting and direction. The show is trying to be epic like the end of Return of the King and it fails because there is no emotion attached to any of these characters. Gil-galad might as well be a cardboard cut out. Elrond can be the guy who moves the cut out of Gil-galad about. Durin III is dead and Durin IV now has a succession problem to deal with, really emotional content. Almost no grieving and no mention again of the Balrog.
Galadriel can’t be saved from her wound by one Ring, but two can save her. Let’s all shout and cry out defiantly after we just got our asses kicked by about 200 Orcs who ransacked the biggest Elven City in Middle-earth.
GRADE: D
Overall Season 2 Thoughts?
Utter dross, I actually hoped they could salvage the bad aspects of Season 1. Instead they doubled down and produced one of the worst seasons (and most expensive) of TV I’ve ever seen.
The writing team for Season 2 were all let go and an entirely new writing team is coming in for Season 3. News broke today. That’s a start but until Amazon fires the showrunners this won’t help. In fact, it’s already too late. McKay and Payne decide the big beats and the characters that we spend time with and they’ve absolutley wrecked this series. It’s unsalvageable at this point. Even if Season 3 was amazing, it’s too late to ignore all the terrible decisions made in Season 1 and Season 2. Therefore, I’m out.
Overall Season Grade: D
“I am going. I am leaving NOW. GOOD-Bye!”; and with that Cam put on the Ring and was never seen writing about Rings of Power ever, ever again.
Let me know what you thought below, as always, of the Season 2 finale for Rings of Power?
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