Review: Rings of Power Season 3, Episode 1…

Rings of Power Season 3 just came out and even before the entire season dropped, the reviews from critics were abysmal, with the Telegraph writing the glowing headline of, “The Rings of Power is great fun, unless you’re a Tolkien fan.” The Telegraph then continued, writing, “If you manage to completely ignore its relationship with The Lord of the Rings, Amazon’s third series is a bingeable treat.”

I wouldn’t describe it as a bingeable treat, even after trying to scrub from my mind that this show is supposed to be connected to Lord of the Rings. I would put it down as a Temu-quality fantasy show. In fact, that’s what Forbes said about it, with what seems to be their original headline calling it “Temu Lord of the Rings.”

When the same media companies that were originally your side begin to side with Tolkien fans and those with common sense to say that Rings of Power is terrible, that’s a bad sign.

But besides the terrible reviews of the season, we need to actually talk about Season 3, Episode 1. The episode kicks off with an explanation of what’s been going on between Seasons 2 and 3. Apparently, in the five years that have passed since the end of Season 2, Sauron has been trying to give rings to everybody while conquering almost the entirety of Middle Earth. The only areas that are still standing against him are Lindon and Rivendell thanks to the power of the elven rings, and Khazad-Dum…which I can only imagine is protected by plot armor at this point.

While this opening to the season could have been good, Amazon manages to completely fumble the ball with it. For one thing, they don’t even try to hide the fact that the opening is based directly off of the opening in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring. This not only makes the opening feel cheap, but with how the map appears be completely ignored for the rest of the episode, combined with how poorly the opening was done compared to Jackson’s opening (what with Morfydd Clark’s bad narration and how the opening just stayed as a map instead of showing anything really interesting), it just doesn’t work.

Moving on from the poorly executed opening, however, we then go to Sauron trying to forge the One Ring. Now, this scene makes no sense for a multitude of reasons. For one thing, why is he wearing guantlets constantly? He’s at home. He can take the guantlets off; he’ll be fine.

A more relevant critique with this scene, though, is how, according to the showrunners, they really want Sauron’s plotline to run with Tolkien’s quote that evil cannot create but can only corrupt what good has made. This could have been an interesting concept to explore within the show, but Amazon botched this as well. In the scene where Sauron is making the One Ring, it’s made clear that he doesn’t know how to make the One Ring…even though he was the guy who, two seasons ago, was instructing the elves on how to make rings. That’s also not even mentioning how an orc has to remind Sauron that he was the one who ordered all of Celebrimbor’s records on how to make various things be destroyed back in Season 2 after Sauron asks where they are. I guess Sauron has dementia.

Don’t worry, though. According to Amazon, you don’t have to watch the other two seasons to know what’s going on in Season 3, so this really isn’t a problem.

After this, we quickly jump back in time a thousand years or so to what I can only assume is the mid-late First Age or very early Second Age. Here we see Celeborn for the first time after spending two seasons wondering where he was, and learn about how he met Galadriel, and even get a sweet scene where they loosely plan building Lothlorien. This whole sequence takes up about 15 minutes of the first episode, and after that, we jump to Galadriel in battle.

At this point, if you’re wondering why I’m constantly saying, “After this/that,” or “Then,” that’s because this is exactly how the episode is written. Really, this has been a problem for the entire series, but it feels particularly jarring in Episode 1 because it bounces around from one plot point to the next with very little to connect them. Anyways…

The scene with Galadriel in battle is quite possibly the dumbest scene in the entire show. To sum up, Galadriel is fighting in the woods with a handful of elves against some random people who all look homeless and some orcs. After the elves kill a couple of people, the enemy flees, and the elves think that they have won. However, Galadriel – who back in Season 2 got a ring of power that allows her to see into the future – sees that the enemy will come back and tells her group of elves to form a line.

Remember, she is leading a handful of elves, and they are in the woods. The shield wall they put up is a line that’s one person thick and about ten people long. They are surrounded by woods, with plenty of trees and underbrush where the enemy could launch a stealth attack and the elves would be screwed, especially since the elves are outnumbered. How the showrunners looked at this and said, “Yeah, this is smart leading on Galadriel’s part,” I have no idea. It just makes Galadriel look like a complete and utter moron who should never lead a group of elves, much less an army.

But as though that wasn’t a dumb enough set up, the enemy, instead of surrounding the elves and shooting at them, decide to simply shoot from in front of the elves, then charge the sheild wall, successfully killing or injuring a few elves, while a good chunk of their guys get killed. These guys are the Middle Earth equivalents of Robert E. Lee and Napolean Bonaparte, I tell you what.

Thankfully, this crap-show of a fight scene ends with the coming of one of the Naznagul, Amazon’s Temu-quality Totally-not-Nazgul-Though-They-Have-the-Same-Names-and-do-the-Same-Thing^TM. This guy scares everyone away and immediately targets Galadriel since she has one of the elven rings, which Sauron really wants since they haven’t yet been tainted by his influence…even though he kinda helped make them.

This show doesn’t know what’s going on.

Even worse with this scene is the fact that the Temu Nazgul directly targets Galadriel. In the books, Galadriel was absolutely terrifying to the Nazgul because she was the Lady of Light. Her power was so great that, had she taken the One Ring for herself, she likely would have been able to overthrow Sauron, making her a rival to him. Having the Temu Nazgul go after Galadriel removes all of that.

Then there’s the Khazad-Dum plot line, which is where the map at the beginning showing which places are under Sauron’s control is most blatantly ignored. Basically, Durin has been exchanging weapons with Elrond between Khazad-Dum and Rivendell in secret, which requires the elves to ride back and forth between the two places, crossing through land that Sauron controls…because that’s safe.

As though that wasn’t bad enough, even more people are traveling to Khazad-Dum – Durin’s brother, Thrain, and the dwarf lords from the Blue Mountains. If you have a map of Middle Earth, that’s quite a ways away, and according to the map at the beginning of the episode, they had to cross through lands completely under Sauron’s control. I guess orcs don’t attack travelers or something.

There are a bunch of other issues that I could talk about regarding the other side plots that this episode deals with, but seeing as this post is already long enough, I want to focus on how the show looks overall and some of the really bad overarching storylines.

I think the quality got worse.

From the start, while the cinematography was fine, and the music was good, with several of the sets, character outfits and makeup, the quality sucked. For a show with one of the biggest budgets on record, everything looks very plasticy, cheap, and uninspired when compared not just to the Peter Jackson movies, but even to other fantasy shows. In this season the elven sets (Rivendell in particular), don’t look amazing and the outfits not only look generic and poor quality, but they also feel like costumes. Nothing feels lived in. That’s also to say nothing of Galadriel’s armor that, for no other reason than aesthetics, has holes in it.

As for the overarching storylines, already the love triangle between Galadriel, Sauron, and Celeborn is being set up with all the subtlety of a brick. That means that Galadriel is having to choose between this universe’s version of Satan 2.0, or a dude that she’s still married to. It’s all sorts of stupid, but not as stupid as the orc with a redemption arc, which is being introduced.

Until next time,

M.J.