‘Rings Of Power’ Season 2 Review: Dramatic Finale Offers Up A Mixed Triumph
Warning: This review contains spoilers.
(REVIEW) The second season of “Rings of Power” on Amazon Prime is far from perfect. But the finale pays off its themes in surprisingly satisfying ways, making it far more faithful to J.R.R Tolkien than its most ardent detractors will admit.
To say that “Rings of Power” is controversial would be an understatement. Since its premiere, the series has fallen afoul of the culture wars online, with many giving it high praise and just as many calling it a “woke” insult to everything Tolkien stood for. Reactions to the second season have been no less controversial. I gave a negative review in the article on the first season opener. However, I enjoyed the second season premiere far more.
“Rings of Power” follows the people of Middle Earth as the evil Sauron manipulates the elves, dwarves and orcs alike into helping him build his empire over the whole land. Galadriel and Elrond try to stop him, while throughout the land, Hobbits, wizards and men face the growing darkness falling over the land in their own ways.
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This show continues largely everything good and bad from the season opener. The visuals and the battles are grittier and cooler. Elrond is fast becoming a favorite character of mine, navigating his love for his moral principles and his loyalty to his friends. Watching noble characters — who seem far more sincerely noble than in the first season, though still not as much as in Tolkien and Peter Jackson’s version — clash over different views of what the right thing to do is. At the same time, they are suspicious of each other as being corrupted by Sauron, which is deeply satisfying.
Galadriel grows in both humility and wisdom after her failure. And watching Sauron play everyone like a violin makes me truly feel the terror of the rings that Gandalf spoke of in the original trilogy. “Don’t misunderstand, Frodo: I would use the ring out of a desire to do good” never felt more real.
Some critiques of the season by its detractors — and the series overall — I do agree with. Anytime the writers try to emulate Tolkein’s poetic style or noble speeches it is gratingly awkward and cheesy. Plot contrivances and head-scratcher plot holes show up with annoying frequency. For example, choosing to have Sauron revealed before Celebrimbor finishes the rings forces them to tie themselves in knots to keep him from finding out too soon.
Some fan service moments illicit more groans than cheers: Elrond kissing Galadriel comes to mind — particularly if you know the context of the books. And not every subplot is equally interesting: Isildur is such a cliche whiney male protagonist that it makes me angry he’s going to be the one to kill Sauron.
The series often feels like non-Tolkien fans are trying to make a show that is faithful to Tolkien, but clearly somewhat alienated from it. Like how deaf people feel when non-deaf actors try to imitate how deaf people sign. You can see this most clearly when they rip off moments or dialogue straight from “Lord of the Rings” to try to “recreate” that same feeling the original had, but missing the context. As Josh Shepherd points out in his review, “In the season’s least surprising sequence, Berek finds and saves his master –- exactly how human warrior Aragorn was saved from death by his beloved steed, Brego, in ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.’ Echoes of Jackson are frequent.” There’s an inauthenticity in its attempts to recreate these moments artificially to recapture the magic. But it’s a sincere authenticity, and you can see the show getting closer to what it’s trying to do each season, with practice.
And yet, many of the accusations against the show also feel like they’re missing the point. Criticizing the show for forcing Gandalf to grow into the Gandalf we know is odd when seeing that kind of growth is the whole point of a prequel series. “Repurposing” Tom Bombadill into a mentor figure for Gandalf is actually a brilliant way to give the character a purpose (something many Tolkien fans will admit the character never had originally) without undermining anything about his original character. The fact that they so often do it in ways that you can see “Yes, I can buy him becoming the person we know” and not feel like it’s violating the spirit of what we love about them is really impressive.
Likewise, I’m always surprised how the show never gets credit from its critics for how thoroughly the show deconstructs the “girlboss” feminist trope that has become so prominent in a post-“The Force Awakens” world. Galadriel was the feminist character fanboys hate, who are always right and all the silly men are wrong. Except in “Rings of Power” it's this very stubbornness that leads her to bring Sauron back to power. And of course, it’s her insistence on the rings that will bring about the rings in the end. The story is about her learning humility and wisdom, and how she can still be a hero despite not always being right.
One major criticism has been the humanizing of the orcs. Fans online were quick to cry foul at showing Orcs as having families and just wanting to be left alone, saying that was unfaithful to Tolkien’s original vision and is forcing a modern racial lens onto the story that didn’t have it in the original work.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it’s true that Tolkien didn’t give depth to his Orc characters. They are treated as simply evil in his work. On the other hand, he admitted to being uncomfortable with squaring that with his Catholicism. He couldn’t say they were created evil by Morgoth, because then he’s saying evil can create. But if he says they were good beings who were corrupted, it means that — in Christian parlance — they do still bear the image of God. Shouldn’t all such creatures be treated with some kind empathy? Yes, it’s a fantasy, but C.S. Lewis pointed out in “An Experiment in Criticism” that there is good fantasy and bad fantasy: Bad fantasy uses fantasy to tell lies about reality; good fantasy uses fantasy to tell truths about reality.
Astonishingly the show squares the circle of the Orcs by making their story a tragedy. Adar wanted children, and was deceived by Sauron into giving them to him. But like everything else that Sauron promises, they came with a price. They were a deformed form of life that Sauron forced Adar to use as Morgoth’s personal army. When Adar killed Sauron and tried to give his children a home of their own, he was so corrupt he could only do that through genocide. When given a chance to stay instead of fighting, Sauron declines, turning his children into cannon foder once again, and leaving themselves open to corruption. The Orcs themselves, misbegotten, had the opportunity to resist Sauron’s call and make a life for themselves. Instead, they chose Sauron. This means that the story of the Orcs — like all the people of Middle Earth who submit to Sauron’s will — is a story of self-dehumanization, rather than dehumanization based on race.
Sauron is a great example of how the show re-imagines an earlier version of an established character in a way that gives him more depth while enhancing, and undermining, what Tolkien wrote. As a die-hard Tolkien fan friend of mine pointed out to me, what’s amazing about Tolkien villains is that they’re ultimately pathetic. Saruman thinks he will gain more power by giving in to Sauron, but in the end, he’s defeated and dispatched over and over in the most humiliating ways possible. Sauron himself is just a lidless eye, the kind of character that no one would want to admire or dress up as for Halloween.
“Rings of Power” achieves this in young Sauron by having him a self-deceiver. He thinks that he’s a nobleman who is completely unlike the even Morgoth he once served. Morgoth used raw power. Sauron simply deceives and gives people exactly what they want at a price. Morgoth wanted to destroy and control. Sauron simply wants to rule to make the world better. But as Celebrimbor points out, he is the ultimate deceiver; he even deceives himself. He calls himself a god, but really he’s just an angry man screaming “I’m nothing like my dad” while being exactly like him. It doesn’t make him less evil, it makes him more pitiful, which is incredibly faithful to Tolkien.
The story of Numenor is also a refreshingly positive portrayal of deeply religious men and women who stand loyal to their religious beliefs in an increasingly secular society. We rarely get such stories today, even though they’ve been very common throughout modern history (see the French Revolution, the Soviet Union and Mao’s China), and it taps into the anxiety modern Christians (who are overwhelmingly Tolkien fans) feel in a rapidly de-Christianizing culture. The way that they show these people standing for their faith in a positive way — and even get divinely validated in a scene practically out of scripture, was very welcome.
The show’s primary theme becomes clear in the final episode, and it is well worth the wait. Throughout the season, Sauron has been playing everyone like a fiddle. Every person he comes across, he discovers exactly what they wanted to hear.
This reaches a head when Galadriel admits how Sauron deceives her as well. She weeps, “I wasn’t strong enough.”
Celebrimbor replies, “I don’t know if anyone is” and then says, “perhaps its not strength we need, but light.”
It’s a shockingly insightful — and even Christian — message. No one is truly strong enough to resist evil on their own. We need something and someone else to save us. Evil defeats us by giving us the things we most want. Everyone is equally susceptible to this seduction.
But this is also where the show shows its weaknesses. Celebrimbor waxes on about how awesome light is. But none of what he says gets made concrete so we know how it applies to the current situation. He could have made the parallel between “light” and “truth” so we could see that light defeats evil by exposing it. But his speech doesn’t make those parallels, so it ends up feeling like a nonsense word salad.
If you have a low tolerance for cheesy dialogue and plot holes, “Rings of Power” is probably still not the show for you. But for those who enjoy the deeper themes it’s wrestling with, then the show has a lot more to offer.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.