The Rings of Power season 2’s return to Middle Earth is middling

Season 2 of Amazon Prime Video’s ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ makes the cardinal mistake of assuming we care without doing any of the legwork to achieve that.

Just as ‘House of the Dragon’ returned to our screens after its first season two years ago this June, the other major 2022 fantasy show ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ is now back for its second offering.
While the wait for the second ‘House of the Dragon’ season was an agonising for fans, the watching experience itself of the first ‘Rings of Power’ season that was unfortunately equally painful.
Over eight episodes, the show lumbered through the history of Middle Earth in the Second Age, thousands of years before the events of the beloved original J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy.
For all the billions that Jeff Bezos was willing to throw at the project to bring the ‘Lord of the Rings’ intellectual property within Amazon’s coffers, little effort was made to craft an engaging dramatic story for viewers to care about.
From a first glance at the opening episode of season 2, the same issue with the first prevails. Once again, clear dramatic arcs, empathetic characters, and sharp dialogue have been placed second to glitzy visuals and deep lore dives.
Right from the off, we have a flashback on how Sauron ended up on that raft in the ocean at the beginning of the first season. It’s the sort of deep-dive question that only a fan would care to know about. The first season’s obsession with Sauron’s origin – a topic uninteresting to fans of the films and inconsistent to fans of the books – didn’t need these tiny details. Nor did it need to have a confusing cameo by Jack Lowden as Sauron to kick off the season with viewers questioning whether season one actor Charlie Vickers had been cancelled.
We quickly come back to the present tense (thousands of years before Frodo) and Galadriel is arguing with Elrond about whether the rings that they forged with Sauron – before they knew he was a wrong’un – should still be used for their intended purpose of rectifying the trend of diminishing magic in Middle Earth.
It’s in these exchanges where my problem with the first episode comes into greatest clarity. The elves speak with certainty about the importance of doing whatever is necessary to save Middle Earth. To them, deliberating over whether these rings are their saviours or contain their doom is of grave importance.
But all of this presupposes the importance to us, the viewers of ‘Rings of Power’. It’s been two years since the overly complex barely interweaving strands of the first season’s plots calcified into forming the supposedly serious stakes: Orcs are rising, Mordor has been created, and Sauron is back.
The average viewer can barely remember the details of the plodding first season, beleaguered by characters asserting the importance of topics without selling it through their actions or personalities. As these glossy elves debate the virtues of these rings, they’ve assumed we care about the fate of Middle Earth at all.
Peter Jackson’s original trilogy built a massive fanbase for Middle Earth on top of the legion of fantasy lovers familiar with Tolkien’s books. Most viewers will care about a Middle Earth, just not this one. Every character in this show speaks with ceremonial importance but there’s no levity, no grand heroics, and no personality for us to latch onto as we did with Jackson’s films.
The mistake ‘Rings of Power’ routinely makes is assuming that because viewers spent nine-plus hours in Jackson’s world, we should be as invested in Amazon’s one.
Beyond the elves, the first episode also reacquainted us with the Harefoots and Gandalf – except he’s not Gandalf, but he clearly is – on their journey… somewhere. Even with the extended reminder at the beginning of the episode, the sheer number of season one’s plotlines all without clear narrative trajectory makes this hard to keep up with.
On the bright side, now Gandalf-not-Gandalf is fully talking and Daniel Weyman is doing his best Ian McKellen impression while the Harefoots continue to be cutesy, if superfluous, Hobbit stand-ins.
It does all look excellent at least. The roughly $150 million (€135 million) that each season of this show costs doesn’t go to waste. Location shooting and top-notch CGI make this look as much the high-budget take on Middle Earth Bezos hoped for. From the idyllic wanderings of Gandalf (sorry, the Stranger) in the countryside to the Orc scenes providing a level of grime and grit, this is a fully realised vision of the fantasy world’s Second Age.
Additionally, from the preview of the rest of season two, it looks like the show may gain some momentum. Big battles are coming for the fate of Middle Earth as Sauron grows in strength, giving rings out to any willing passer-by. We also will get to catch up with whatever is happening in Númenor and to the loveable dwarf couple ostracised from their kingdom.
The first season also improved as it went on, as the interminable place-setting was replaced by bombastic set pieces. If the show can manage to make us care by the time the same shift occurs over the next seven episodes, we might just get the exciting ‘Lord of the Rings’ show Bezos always fantasised about.