The Rings of Power

[vaznetti]

I spent much of my early life re-reading The Lord of the Rings, including the appendices, so this series was not entirely what I was expecting. But it was fantastic!

I love that they made it The Galadriel Show, pretty much from start to finish (with side appearences for some Numenoreans, some dwarves, some hobbits, and also Gandalf, but mostly the Galadriel show.) I also love that whoever wrote this thing decided to commit 110% to Galadriel/Sauron. Everyone should have that much money to put into their ship manifestos. I love that they had an idea and they stuck to it. And now their little ship of one is going to be famous!

I mean, the whole boat sequence was basically an extended meet-cute engineered by Sauron once he realised Galadriel wasn't actually going to the West, right? I love that the season arc for Sauron was his failed seduction of her -- and that it ended with her recognition of his true nature. I love that she was right all along, but also that she is going to have to become more subtle to face the kind of threat Sauron really is.

(I should also say that as soon as Halbrand and Galadriel got to Numenor, Spartacus identified him as Sauron, and although at first I didn't think it was likely I did think it was a good thing to do with his character -- and obviously as the season went on the clues piled up, and he became more and more the top contender I became more and more hopeful that they would go there. It's always nice to have your hopes met by a narrative.)

Once I heard that they were pushing the whole narrative into a few years, to keep the same human characters, I knew they were going to be jumbling events together, cutting them and shifting them around. Overall it felt more like a reaction to Tolkien's narrative than an adaptation of it -- so for example the people of the Southlands actually get names and faces and choices, and we get at least a hint of pushback against the orc problem via the Adar plotline. I think I enjoyed the sequences with the dwarves and the Harfoots more than those focused on the elves, in part because those were also felt more like an opening out of Tolkien's world than an adaptation of his Second Age narrative. Or I guess those focused on the "fading of the elves" plotline, because both Adar and Arondir provided very different takes on Tolkien's elves.

I love that they included proto-hobbits, and that they saved Gandalf in his first moments in Middle-Earth, as a wizard without his power and knowledge -- and so he will spend the rest of his time there saving them in return. I feel like he does have to be Gandalf, if he is a wizard at all, unless he's one of the three who disappeared into the East.

So overall that was entertaining and satisfying! I did not love everything about it, but I loved more about it than I didn't.

Comments

[loligo]

There were a lot of things I didn't like, but enough things that I did to keep me watching, and I ended up quite pleased with the finale! So much so that I've been contemplating actually posting about it. *g*

[vaznetti]

I think the show had a slow start -- it felt a bit awkward in the fiirst few episodes, outside the scenes with Elrond, Durin and Disa. But by the end I was really enganged, and overall I like how it turned out. I feel like the showrunners had an interesting take and made it work.

And as you can see, I actually gave in to the urge to post about it!