A Truly Dreadful Season Finale

I’m not sure where to begin when it comes to breaking down everything wrong with the Season 2 finale of The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power. It wasn’t all bad, but it sure was a far cry from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, and pales in comparison to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien himself. Cheap, lazy Hollywood writing is to blame. Pretty visuals and a sweeping score cannot cover up all the holes and blemishes. All that glitters is not gold.

See, I can knockoff Tolkien quotes, too.

Since the bulk of this review will be an exercise in skewering all the rubbish showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay foisted upon us in the Season 2 finale, I’ll open with what I liked. First and foremost, Charlie Vickers as Annatar / Sauron basically held this season together through sheer force of will. He was genuinely great in every scene, though sometimes this highlighted how bad the rest of the show could be—and the other actors.

For instance, the long duel he and Galadriel have toward the end of the episode really underscored for me what a great casting choice Vickers was for Halbrand/Sauron/Annatar and what a phenomenally poor choice Morfydd Clark was as Galadriel. I’m sure she’s great in other roles, but as Galadriel I could not think of a worse actor in just about every sense.

She is too mousy. Her voice is too small. Her face constantly pinches into awkward, almost goofy expressions. The more anguished she tries to look, the more I want to laugh. Every time she goes for gravitas it comes off as petulance. She’s written poorly, sure, but the actor is wrong. I cannot—I refuse—to accept her as Galadriel. Even as Robert Aramayo has grown on me as Elrond, Clark’s Galadriel has become more and more intolerable with every episode. Even though she has taken on a smaller role in Season 2, every scene she’s in is cringe-inducing and painful to watch, and so this big duel between Galadriel and Sauron is almost laughably bad, no matter how good Vickers is throughout. When he shape-shifted into another version of Galadriel, I groaned.

Ultimately, he gets the Nine from her, but she hurls herself off a cliff rather than hand over her Ring. I’m not sure about you, but if I was a powerful magical being like Sauron, I might use my powers to float down there and snag it from her corpse, or maybe send my orcs to retrieve it, rather than just go “Oh well, she’s 50 meters down that cliffside, I guess I’ll just go back to Mordor now.”

Also, I was really hoping they’d keep breaking lore and kill off Galadriel. Or say, “Hey that wasn’t really Galadriel, that was some imposter!” and recast her for Season 3. A boy can dream.

Alright, I know I said I’d start with what I like, but every time I like something in Rings of Power, this show does its level best to ruin it for me. I like Sauron! But if I have to spend time with Galadriel chirping at him, squelching her face up into the weirdest looks of constipated distress, I’m going to still not enjoy my time. Sorry, folks, them’s the breaks.

However, I did like one scene quite a bit despite its lore-breaking nonsense. That, of course, was with . . . .

The Dwarves

I actually really liked the scene with Durin and Durin this episode. For one thing, Owain Arthur and Peter Mullan are both great. For another, the costume and makeup people have done a solid job with the dwarves on the whole, and the dwarven storyline has always felt a little more “true” than the others, even though it’s not true to the lore and even though I think they badly rushed the ring-corruption plotline this season. The look, the feel, the sound, the speech of the dwarves in general feels a bit closer to what I want from a Tolkien adaptation.

The episode pretty much opens with the dwarves. Durin IV shows up and pleads with is father to take off the ring. He tells him, “Do you remember when I was just a wee lad and we used to arm wrestle? You would let me lift my arm just enough to think I might win.” (I’m paraphrasing). The words seem to have no effect on Durin III. He breaks through the wall and there before them, glistening veins of mithril stretched out into the caverns. “To see our mountain the way I do, you have to wear a Ring,” he says.

“It isn’t our mountain,” his son replies. “You taught me that.”

“It could be,” his father says, and then the Balrog comes. Durin the Elder, faced with this dread nightmare, realizes he’s been deceived and takes off the Ring. He tells his son to run, calls him King Durin, and before he turns to face the monster he says, “I never let you raise your arm. It was always you, getting stronger.” Then he turns and charges. The cavern caves in between them as the old king leaps to his doom.

This is a good scene! The story about the arm-wrestling and the father’s revelation to his son were nice and well-written. It’s a shame that nothing else in this entire episode could match this moment. I do wonder, however, if Durin III should have left the ring on his finger for the Balrog fight. Anything to gain an edge. The symbolism of taking it off, and his son seeing that, was effective, but from a purely utilitarian perspective he might have fared better with it on. That’s neither here nor there.

The dwarves ultimately show up at Eregion in the nick of time—because fast travel!—and save Elrond and the others. Later in the episode we learn that Durin is being challenged for the throne by his brother who we didn’t even know existed until now, and that other dwarven lords have his brother’s backing, so I guess we’ll get a stupid, totally unnecessary power struggle between the dwarves next season, because this show’s creators want it to be more like Game of Thrones.

Of course, they could have saved a much more interesting power struggle for Season 3 instead of compressing the timelines so egregiously. We could have gotten . . . .

Númenor

This storyline should have been saved for later, quite frankly. It also should have been written with far more care. As it stands, the Númenorean plotline is painful in every way. Númenor itself feels like a sad little backwater filled with small-minded idiots who change political leadership based on the goofiest reasons: Petals falling from a tree, a random eagle landing at a window, some scroll about Sauron that we didn’t get to read. One week, Miriel is in charge. The next Al-Pharazon is in charge. Then the next week, Miriel has a cool swim with a squid and she’s back in charge. Now, there’s a scroll about Sauron and everyone is loyal to Al-Pharazon again. Elendil is given Narsil by Miriel in a scene lifted directly from Lord of the Rings between Aragorn and Elrond and flees the city on his lonesome. Why? Next week, Miriel will be back in charge because a crow poops on her crown or something.

On second thought, let’s not go to Númenor. It’s a silly place.

We’ll hop over to Pelargir where Isildur is chilling with Theo and Estrid. At first, Estrid was someone they were helping and then it turned out she was a wildman and so they took her prisoner but then it turned out she wasn’t so bad, so Isildur started to fall for her but then it turned out she had a man already so he backed off but then it turned out she wasn’t actually in love with her betrothed and is totally down to shag Isildur so he invites her to Numenor. This show is like playing ping-pong with plots. Back and forth and back and forth and no progression or actual development at all. And then and then and then. It’s the worst way to write a script.

Kemen shows up (because fast travel!) and puts a kink in Isildur’s plans to return to Númenor. I thought Kemen was going to try to trick him into getting on the ship, but he plays his cards immediately and reveals that Elendil is a wanted traitor and Al-Pharazon is king, so Isildur is now wise to his games. Though who knows, right? After that crow crapped on Miriel and she became Queen of the Air, Al-Pharazon might have seen a flower bloom in a pile of cow dung on the highest peak and gotten his crown back. The half-witted residents of Númenor are so superstitious and racist and small-minded that they’ll pretty much follow anyone who puts a MNGA baseball cap on or promises to cut taxes and forgive student debt.

What is the point of any of these characters? Why do we care about Isildur smashing lips with Estrid? Isildur is the future king of men. He will someday cut the Ring off of Sauron’s finger and take it for himself instead of destroying it, setting in motion everything that follows in the Third Age. Why are we spending time in this pointless, stupid story in which his horse—his friggin horse—Berek the Brave, is the real hero?

Of course, as bad as this lousy, aimless, ping-pong story is—and as much as we ought to have saved the Fall of Númenor for Season 3 or later after a major time-jump—the very worst storyline remains . . . .

The Grandelf and the Not-Hobbits

Well, folks, we know Gandalf’s name now and how he got it and I want to punch a Harfoot in the face. Or maybe a Stoor. They say “Grand-elf” three times this episode. Twice as the Stoors leave their home and once when Gandalf repeats it. “Grandelf,” he says. “Hmmmm.” “They’ve never seen an elf before,” Nori replies. Oh really? Then why are they referring to him as a “Grand-elf”, eh? Why? How does this make any sense except as a very stupid, clumsy, hairbrained no good way to give us a homophonic bridge to Gandalf. Later, Tom Bombadil Yodas at our bumbling wizard, “A wizard doesn’t find his staff, a staff finds the wizard. Same with his name.” (This is one of those let’s sound very wise and deep moments that makes literally no sense when you think about it). “Gandalf,” Gandalf says, because I guess Grandelf sounded too weird. “That’s what they’ll call me.” Gameshelf. Glamdolf. Gannendorf. Grimpelt. So many to choose from!

(In Rings of Power Season 3 Gandalf shows up as Mrs. Claus and the Fallohides, the not-Hobbits of the snowy north, call him (or her, rather) Miss Reindeer and this is how he came by the name Mithrandir).

And now he has a staff, I guess, which is just a big stick he found. Like a child finding a stick and pretending its a sword or a gun. I thought wizards made their staffs, sanding them down, wrapping them with a grip, maybe plopping in a gem or carving some runes, imbuing them with power, etc. etc. But hey, now he’s Gandalf and he has a stick and he can finally go to Hogwarts like a real boy.

Before all this, Gandalf has a run-in with totally not Saruman who calls him “old friend” and talks about taking down Sauron and grabbing his power, because he’s very bad at reading people. Gandalf and Nori don’t trust him, even when he kills one of the nomadic warriors, so he tries to destroy them but it doesn’t work very well because Gandalf remembers how to do magic and buys the not-Hobbits time to escape.

Alas, the Stoor village now has a bunch of rocks everywhere. You can see that a lot of the structures look okay, but there are rocks that have to be cleared and that is too much work. Poppi tells everyone that old Sadoc Burrows told her that sometimes when something is broken it’s better just to give up and not try to fix it—it’s rather a long speech that serves as voice-over for a montage of various scenes across Middle-earth—and so the Stoors, who have known young Poppi for all of a week, pack their bags and head off into the desert to die.

Just kidding, they’re heading to the Shire of course! That’s the whole point of the not-Hobbit storyline. A long, arduous, super dangerous journey into the unknown totally makes more sense than cleaning up some rubble. And Nori tells Grandelf, er, sorry, Gandalf (that’s gonna be hard to shake now!) that their paths now must diverge, for reasons that we are apparently not getting, I guess because she’s going with the Stoors? And he has to take his staff to the fires of Orodruin! “One does not simply walk into Mordor,” the Dark Wizard will tell him in Season 3.

I did like the moment when Tom Bombadil and Gandalf sing the Bombadil song and the camera floats up and out of his hut and for a moment you think, “Ah, at last we come to the end of the episode and the season!” because it would have been a nice, peaceful, sort of happy way to end the episode, but no. Not even close. C’est la vie. This episode was like Return of the King, just ending after ending after ending.

Onward, to . . . .

Eregion

Remember in The Lord Of The Rings how Legolas inspires actual fear in the orcs he encounters because elves are so powerful and so old and so filled with light that darkness and its denizens literally fall back in terror when confronted with them? Well, here in Rings Of Power, an elf soldier does some cool parkour stuff getting down from the battlements and the moment he lands he gets shot with one single orc arrow and falls down and dies. I guess some elves just suck. Rian, the super archer, was Boromired with like a dozen arrows last week and still managed to get her shot off. But mostly, the elves—even the powerful Gil-Galad of legend and Elrond—are chumps, easily captured by Adar’s orcs.

Adar is also a chump, easily hoodwinked by Sauron who turns the Uruk commander offscreen so that the show’s writers can “surprise” us. It’s not a surprise. This betrayal has been telegraphed far and wide. The only surprise is that Adar was so easily fooled and then stabbed to death. Or that Galadriel, the warrior, stood by and watched her new ally—who had just promised her a forever peace—get stabbed to death and did nothing to intervene, despite being fully capable of slicing up a dozen orcs. She’s armed, has a ring of power on her finger, and stands there drooling until Sauron arrives. How does this make sense?

Then again, Arondir was stabbed through the torso in last week’s episode, and fifteen minutes later he’s just fine. You’d think being stabbed through the torso would be a tough wound to recover from. But it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience.

This section is just filled to the brim with nonsense and convenient twists. The orcs burn the scrolls of Eregion and all seems lost, but at least Sauron told them to not hurt the leaders, which I guess includes Arondir just because and then the dwarves teleport from Khazad-dum and save the day and the elves get away. I did think it was funny when the Uruk commander goes to Sauron and says, “We’ve been overwhelmed. The elves are escaping and we follow them many Uruk—” he’s about to say “will die” but Sauron stabs him before the words can be uttered. Should have stuck with Adar, buddy.

Galadriel is stabbed with Morgoth’s crown, the same crown that Adar “killed” Sauron with and then she falls from the cliff to the ground where she’s . . . mostly fine. It’s the kind of fall that would kill a lesser elf, surely, but she’s Galadriel and the show wants us to believe that she’s just so badass, even while it constantly reminds us what a pale shadow of a character she is compared to the books and films (and our imagination). Elrond has his little arc at this moment, realizing that hey, guys, it’s okay to wear these rings after all. So he and Gil-Galad pull a Captain Planet and, with their powers combined, heal Galadriel, who wakes up the spitting image of Frodo in Rivendell, all in white, alive so that she and Arondir and Gil-Galad and Elrond can walk over to the cliff edge and all the elves below can cheer and shout while their king raises his sword on high, because this is the sort of “epic fantasy movie” moment that they wanted to end the season on. Oy vey.

Hey, at least Galadriel—when asked if they should attack or defend—decided to quote Celebrimbor instead. “It’s not strength that defeats darkness, but light,” she babbles, as though this is an answer to the question posed. Does that mean go fight, Galadriel? Does it mean retreat and lick our wounds and rebuild our strength? This is a politician’s answer. How does anyone put up with her?

Verdict

In many ways, I think season 2 managed to be even worse than Season 1. I did enjoy some of the stuff with Annatar and Celebrimbor, including in tonight’s finale. But the forging of the rings and the relationship between those two ought to have been the focus of the first season, while their schism and ultimate war could have occupied the second. So much focus has been taken from this story and put on side-characters and side-plots that the end result is a messy, poorly-paced and wildly amateurish attempt at epic fantasy that feels like it has all the superficial trappings in place but none of the heart or sensibilities of the genre. And that’s just generic epic fantasy. As far as adaptations of Tolkien goes, this could not be much worse or more disrespectful. This is why the Tolkien estate closely guarded its intellectual property for so long, and Rings of Power serves now as glaring evidence of the kind of creative malpractice its former stewards were so rightfully concerned about. That it has come to this is a true travesty, and both the Tolkien estate and Amazon should be ashamed.

I give this season a 2/10. It gets 1 point for the few good scenes it managed to provide, mostly with dwarves or with Sauron, though I think Elrond was a pretty good character as well, and Adar—even recast—whose death is the biggest “shock” of this episode, and who will be missed. It gets another point for some pretty visuals and Bear McCreary’s score. It loses points for the abysmal writing, the feckless, faithless adaptation of Tolkien’s legendarium and for the many pointless storylines, poor casting choices and other crimes against all that is good and holy in this world and in Middle-earth. This grotesque monstrosity is not Tolkien. It’s barely even a coherent story.

Here’s my video review:

Read My Past Season 2 Reviews:

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