It’s an exciting show now, is what I’m saying. It’s a show to get excited about, too. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is a surprise and a success.

I reviewed the fine season finale of The Rings of Power for Decider.

Rings is a truly massive production, and your character is right in the middle of the biggest battle it’s ever shown. But for much of that battle, he and Celebrimbor are off in this little world of their own. You mentioned how much that helped your performance — what was it like stepping from that quiet environment into all-out war?
Even though it was just us on the set, and it was essentially a two-man drama, you feel the resources the show has, even inside, because you’re in a completely interactive forge. You’re standing there and you still get the scale of the production, because they’ve built the forge.

But then you go outside and it really hits home, because things are exploding. When I’m walking along the parapet, I’m trying not to flinch, because things are exploding around me, and Sauron wouldn’t be flinching at explosions. And those explosions are real. The courtyard in the city — that’s all real. It’s just the horizon that’s CGI. It fulfills every dream you’ve ever had as an actor to be able to play in a world like that. It’s easy to get caught up in the budget, or the expectation, or the narrative that comes with being part of a project like this. Particularly this project. You see the number of people who are there to help tell Sauron’s story. But ultimately, we’re children going to play on this set every day. Anytime you get weighed down, whether it’s the pressure or the expectation, all it took was for Charlie and I to look at each other and be like, “Look at your ears! That’s amazing!”

I interviewed Sauron for Vulture. That is to say, I interviewed actor Charlie Vickers from The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power for Vulture.

“What a great shot!” “Brilliant!” “Hahahahahaha!” “What a line!!!” “Looking cool, actually!” “Incredible banger line!” “Fuck yeah!” “Holy shit!” “Fuck yeah!” “Unreal, dawg!” These are all actual notes I took on this week’s episode of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. I think my overall feelings about it are pretty clear.

I reviewed this week’s Rings of Power for Decider.

What a wunderkammer of an episode. From its opening moments, in which grumbling orcs desert Adar’s army rather than fight, to its closing image, of catapults hurling flaming rocks that arc through the night sky on their way to rain death and destruction on the sprawling Elf city of Eregion, this week’s Rings of Power delivered something special seemingly with each scene. 

I quite enjoyed this week’s Rings of Power, which I reviewed for Decider.

The Elf-lord in question is Celebrimbor, who’s powered here by a sad and anxiety-inducing performance by Charles Edwards. Edwards had been an odd choice for Celebrimbor for me until now; he simply seems too approachable to play one of the most towering figures in Tolkien’s entire legendarium. 

But now I see the vision. Edwards’s job this is to take his genial approach to the character and draw the notes of self-doubt his placid disposition normally papers over. When you watch Celebrimbor look at his own shaking hands, wondering where the creation of the Seven Rings for the Dwarf-lords went wrong — he’s received word from Prince Durin that his father Durin III has undergone a complete personality change since receiving his very powerful piece of jewelry — you see the grandson of the godlike Elf craftsman Fëanor. Can he ever live up to his grandsire? And given the death and misery that resulted from Grandpa’s creations, would he even want to?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Rings of Power for Decider.

Ents. Orcs. Elves. Barrow-wights. Wizards, good and evil. Two different kinds of proto-hobbit. A Galadriel battle sequence. A Watcher in the Water. Tom freaking Bombadil. “Pulling out all the stops” is a perfectly valid, even noble, approach for any series belonging to a genre that shows us the spectacular — fantasy, horror, and science fiction foremost among them. About the only problem I have with the cornucopia of Tolkienian pleasures that is this week’s Rings of Power episode is that co-creators and co-writers J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay didn’t try this approach sooner.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power for Decider.

Call this one “The Episode Starring All the Characters Whose Names You Forgot.” With no Elrond or (especially) Galadriel to anchor it, no Stranger/Harfoot antics to provide comforting Hobbit-y vibes, and a pair of very shaky storylines in their place, the third and final of the three episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 released as a giant-sized premiere faces by far the heaviest lift. If it doesn’t get as far as its two predecessors, it manages quite a bit more than I both expected and feared.

I reviewed the third and final episode of last week’s three-ep season 2 premiere of The Rings of Power for Decider.

Is this really happening? Is The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power…good, now? Without possession of an Elven ring myself, I cannot see things that have not yet come to pass. Who knows, maybe the show falls right back off a cliff in the third and final of the three episodes Amazon released for its giant-sized Season 2 premiere. But so far, so good. Quite good, even.

I reviewed the fine second episode of The Rings of Power‘s second season for Decider.

Well. Well, well, well. Now that’s more like it!

The last thing I wrote about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was this: “a crushing disappointment.” I stand by that. But I also speculated that the inexperience of creators and showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne, coupled with the sheer amount of money poured into the misfire, meant there was little chance the show would improve. 

Boy, am I happy to be wrong. It’s early yet, obviously, and the show could revert to the mean. But the first episode of Rings’ second season, is, quite frankly, crackerjack live-action fantasy television. No one’s going to mistake it for the first-in-class Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon franchise anytime soon — for one thing, my 13 year old cracks wise about the special effects looking goofy when they watch this one — but can it stand with Amazon’s similarly improved sophomore season of The Wheel of Time? If it keeps it up, I don’t see why not.

I liked the season premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, believe it or not, and I reviewed it for Decider.

Stefan Sasse and I continue our breakneck pace of reviewing big genre shows with our latest podcasts on Andor, which we love, and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which we do not love. The latter is the first time I’ve done a podcast where I got so emotionally exhausted that I literally had to ask Stefan to stop the episode. How’s that for a selling point? These are both Patreon exclusive, so go subscribe and listen!

Change is value neutral. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. The process of adaptation from source material to new material, from one medium to another, is tricky and complex and prone to being misunderstood by just about everyone. Books are not film, books are not television, and hell, film is not television; these are distinct media with distinct strengths and weaknesses and demands. In adapting one to another, change to the origin is necessary to suit the strengths and weaknesses and demands of the destination. The passage of time and the emergence of new social norms is another factor that deserves consideration. And of course there are the tastes and talents of the artists involved to consider. 

Any one of these points, much less all of them in tandem, serves to explain why alterations are, in the end, simply alterations, neither good nor bad in and of themselves. The question is not “Did this adaptation change anything?”, but rather “Were the changes the adaptation made to the source material beneficial, given the new medium involved? Did they enhance the source material’s strengths? Did they improve upon the source material generally? Were they true to the source material’s tone and themes? Did they make the adaptation stronger than a more direct and literal transposition from one medium to the other would have been?”

We have finally reached the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’s first season, helmed by J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, And we have our answers. Were the changes The Rings of Power made to J.R.R. Tolkien’s source material beneficial, given the new medium involved? No, they were not. Did they enhance the source material’s strengths? No, they did not. Did they improve upon the source material generally? No, they did not. Were they true to the source material’s tone and themes? No, they were not. Did they make the adaptation stronger than a more direct and literal transposition from one medium to the other would have been? No, they did not.

I reviewed the season finale of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power for Decider. As I say in the review, this show was a crushing disappointment.

Stefan Sasse and I return with our regularly scheduled weekly series, focusing on this week’s episodes Andor and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, both Patreon exclusives! Subscribe and listen!

I’m fond of saying that when it comes to adapting a work of art from one medium to another, “change” is value neutral. The mere fact that something is different in the TV or movie version than it was in the book is not an artistically or aesthetically meaningful thing in and of itself; what matters is whether the change improves the adaptation or weakens it. In all the cases outlined above, I cannot for the life of me figure out how altering these basic facts of the agreed-upon timeline of Tolkien’s Middle-earth improves anything. They make the story less coherent, they substitute bait-and-switch character disappearances and deaths for actual meaningful developments, they flummox hardcore Tolkien nerds like me while, I suspect, adding nothing of particular interest to newbies and casuals. 

Disa’s fire, Durin and Elrond’s friendship, the Stranger’s isolation, Elendil’s quiet dignity: This is where The Rings of Power’s power lies, not in turning Galadriel into a badass or pretending Isildur is dead or acting like we in the audience have no idea what and where Mordor is. (And btw, if you must treat the Mordor reveal as a reveal, why not have Adar proclaim the new name and then end the episode, instead of using that goofy “THE SOUTHLANDS/MORDOR” text to do it?) None of this is a dealbreaker of course; plenty of shows have rebounded from weak first seasons to achieve goodness, even greatness. It’s just hard to imagine a show with this kind of money behind it, these resources, the attention of the Eye of Bezos Himself, being granted the room to grow and breathe and change. I fear that what you see is what you get, no matter which eye you’re looking through.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power for Decider.

My Illustrious Co-Host Stefan Sasse and I continue our breakneck podcasting pace with new Patreon-exclusive episodes on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Episode 6 (disappointing!) and Andor Episode 4 (invigorating!). Go subscribe and check ’em out!

As it turns out, Adar’s whole deal is absolutely fascinating: He is a first-generation orc, one of the original Elves whom Morgoth tortured and warped to create his race of minions. (He also claims that he killed Sauron, which, okay buddy, but that’s neither here nor there.) If you’re deep into Tolkien lore — as, presumably, a decent chunk of the audience for a show set in Tolkien’s Second Age would be — this is a glimpse of something we’ve never seen before but have been wondering about since…well, in my case, since I first read The Hobbit at age four. Wouldn’t it have been so much more interesting for the show to make his origin clear immediately, thus getting the audience invested in who he is rather than who he might be, instead of erroneously presuming that mYsTeRiEs are the be-all and end-all of fantasy narratives?

Please recall that there are approximately zero “mysteries” in Tolkien’s work: Aside from the origin of Gollum and the Necromancer, which are irrelevant when they first show up in the text, everything you need to know is spelled out almost immediately, with Tolkien counting on his inventive skill to engross you all by itself. Which it does!

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Rings of Power for Decider.

My illustrious cohost Stefan Sasse and I have posted not one but two Patreon-exclusive new podcasts, one on the most recent episode of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and one focused on the three-part series premiere of Andor! We’ve got a very ambitious schedule going on right now so there’s no guarantee of future Andor episodes, although at the rate TRoP is going we might decide to switch, who knows. Subscribe and listen! And hey, they’re at two different tiers, so you can select one that’s right for your budget!

Anyway, I could not help be brought up short by the idea that mithril, of all things, is required to preserve the lives of the Elves? Because of the failure of a magic tree with no basis in Tolkien’s mythology? This seems like an awful lot to add to the mythos, and for what? An added sense of urgency? A connective tissue between the disparate narrative threads? A way to move the story along during these early episodes in order to kill time between now and the end of the season? All of these seem like ways of saying “the writers didn’t really know what to do, so they said to hell with it, Elves need mithril to live, so let it be written, so let it be done.” Granted, I’m bringing a certain bias to this analysis. But even if I weren’t, it seems both too neat and too busy, an overcomplication of a pretty straightforward story about the resurgence of evil and the need for disconnected races to unite to fight it. Adding “or else one of them will go extinct” undercuts the human (for lack of a better word) drama inherent in the need to persuade different peoples to fight for a common cause.

I reviewed the fifth episode of The Rings of Power for Decider.

Stefan Sasse continue our Patreon-exclusive, subscriber-only series of full-length weekly podcasts on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power with a look at episode 4, aka the first one we actually liked! Subscribe and listen!

Now that’s more like it!

Look, I’ll admit there are any number of reasons why I might have warmed to this episode of The Rings of Power more than its predecessors. Maybe, as a guy with the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my arm, I just want a big-budget J.R.R. Tolkien TV series to succeed. Maybe I’m simply getting used to the show’s depictions of its characters and their world and learning to live with them rather than chafe at them. Maybe I’m feeling peer pressure!

Or — and I think this is the more likely case — maybe the show is finally doing what I’ve wanted it to do from the start: tightening the focus, abandoning the cheap “cliffhanger” mysteries that artificially forced the plot along, and allowing the story to emerge organically from interactions between characters with different personalities, goals, fears, plans, desires. Maybe it’s acting like a drama, instead of an expensive sandbox in which to play with a bunch of Tolkien and Tolkienesque toys.

In other words, maybe it got good!

I reviewed this week’s Rings of Power for Decider. It’s a vast improvement over its predecessors, though still far from perfect.

Not content with our weekly podcasts on House of the Dragon, my illustrious co-host Stefan Sasse and I are also doing a weekly series of Patreon-exclusive podcasts on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power! Here we are on episodes one and two and on episode three. These are full-length podcasts — subscribe and give them a listen!