Television Review

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Season Two (2024) • Prime Video — an apathetic bore undeserving of Tolkien’s material

Sauron resumes scheming under a new disguise, the Stranger meets a curious friend, and darkness falls on Khazad-dûm.

No discussion about Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is ever fully complete without some kind of evaluation of everything in the J.R.R Tolkien universe that surrounds it. So, for the time being, here’s some noteworthy context. For one, The Lord of the Rings media franchise has only ever been on a downslope since the insurmountable height that was The Return of the King (2003).

Following the release of Peter Jackson’s impossible landmark film trilogy, Jackson was enlisted into directing another epic film trilogy in the form of The Hobbit films (2012–14) after Pan’s Labyrinth (2003) director Guillermo del Toro was ousted from production. The fundamental problem with that endeavour was a matter of source material. In contrast, the nearly thousand-page, triple-volume Lord of the Rings lent itself naturally to the scope and scale of an epic trilogy, while the meager-in-comparison 300-page Hobbit was a single younger-age novel intended to be read to Tolkien’s children. The result of it was an over-bloated, tonally confused, direly rushed series of three films whose aimlessness was largely representative of the fact that Jackson and his team were winging nearly the entire series as they were progressing.

In the wake of the announcement of The Rings of Power’s first season, expectations were set to a very different point. Amazon’s colossal purchase of the rights to The Lord of the Rings from Tolkien’s estate brought with it plans for a very different kind of adaptation; one that would focus more on the external lore that took place thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Here, the team behind the show — led by showrunners J.D Payne and Patrick McKay — would instead redouble their efforts on…