This is my initial reaction to the first season finale of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. I am going to speak plainly and there will be spoilers so if you don’t want to know, leave now and come back after you have watched it yourself.
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Please note these are my initial opinions. If you disagree with me that is fine, but just like visiting a person’s home, this is my platform. I have been doing this since 1998 and started GenreOnline in 1999. I would not disrespect your home on or offline. Do not disrespect mine.
I can’t believe how played I feel. Between the haters and the lovers, I think they both did exactly what the show producers wanted by keeping The Rings of Power on people’s minds as though they were politicians playing both sides against each other just to do what they were going to do regardless if one voted or not.
If you expect anything faithful to Tolkien’s books, you will be disappointed and if you don’t care about that then fine. I don’t expect this to be a literal interpretation word for word of what is in the books because even Thr Lord of the Rings motion picture trilogy is not faithful, but the changes made therein were understandable and did not undermine the books the way this show has basically taken Tolkien’s imaginings and twisted it to promote whatever agenda they have.
So there are no surprises. Only disappointments. Here are the revelations. Halibrand is Sauron. The guy who crashed to Middle Earth in a meteor is Gandalf. Numenor is blighted. The three women are revealed to be, (and I might be wrong) three Nazgûl while tte Harfoots discover what appears to be The Shire at the end. That is it.
It totally goes against any expectations by being predictable where it shouldn’t be and the surprises that do exist only serve to be mistakes that should have never been allowed to happen. This could have been special, but now I think it is one of the biggest disappointments of 2022. It is like loose fan fiction made by amateurs who have less understanding of Middle Earth than a bad Wikipedia article and know less about pacing and developing characters beyond the most rudimentary good versus evil tale filtered through a prism that makes comparison to what has come before look about as relevant as comparing Picard to Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is not at all what was promised and ultimately it is just a terrible example of how classics that are best left alone are reworked until the story is barely anything that could be considered faithful in spirit to what was written and produced previously. In short, this is not Middle Earth. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power caters to the lowest common denominator and ultimately shows how not to make a TV series inspired by a beloved book series and masterpiece of filmmaking the original trilogy had before it.
(C) Copyright 2022 By Mark A. Rivera
All Rights Reserved.