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…