The Rings of Power Post-watch Discussion (Spoilers)

I was catching up on the TolkienForum website, and a user had dubbed the midgets the "Fairweather Drifters".

Why are the critics still heaping praise on this pile of rot?

I almost posted this fool who at first I thought was bought off by Amazon, but then pasted his dumbassery on his sleeve by admitting he didn't think The Queen's Gambit would ever come to more than a difficult Jeopardy question. In other words critics aren't corrupt, just dumb as bricks. But the article made me gag (he mentioned "witty dialogue" ), didn't think I should drag others through that.

There is not much witty dialogue to be seen here.
Perhaps Adar's shot at Galadriel, about her looking in the mirror.
Most of the lines that are meant to be clever land like a school play.

Elementary school play, written by the kids. Teenagers have actual wit.

Well there was one scene, part of which I liked, this season finale. It was very brief, and mired by poor writing choices all around.

Anyway, concerning Halbrand not being Sauron as Halfy has been arguing. Ha!

My argument was based on reason, which doesn't hold for this series. I'll be watching the final episode in a few hours, but from what I've read the entire forging of all the rings happens like in a few hour's time, almost as a sudden whim. Uh...

The Sandman series is among the most refreshing things I've seen in a while and it doesn't even have a second season confirmed.

House of the Dragon, while inheriting some bad habits from its predecessor, is also a much better expression of its literary universe.

Shame Amazon seems to have decided to throw billions at amateurs who neither care for the subject matter nor can deliver a coherent story. Perhaps Jackson would actually have been better, which is a hard sell after the creative disaster of the Hobbit-movies.

Better nothing than another Jackson show or movie set in Middle-earth.

Well, if I had known that was an option.

No, it is definitely not.

{{ Well here we are, at the end of 8 hours worth of Tolkien based television that managed to not feature a single character, idea, setting, or event that actually comes from Tolkien. Remarkable really.

The utter failure here on a very basic writing level is astonishing.
Out of the main mystery boxes they set up the result was, exactly what you thought it would be - Halbrand was Sauron, Meteor man is Gandalf. This rather misses the point of the mystery box technique - its not supposed to be blindingly obvious from the very start. When Halbrand gives his speech to Galadriel pointing out how he was really doing Sauron stuff all along its one of those moments in a story where the viewer is meant to suddenly see a host of previous events I na new light, a light that reveals the truth of the character in a way that makes the viewer feel that they too have been tricked, yet all the information they needed was there all the time. Not as in this case where each of the events only has one light- the one you thought when it originally happened which was, yeah he's definitely Sauron.

Its such a mess of writing from start to finish, but this episode as a finale sort of crowns the whole thing off- its stupid beyond belief- Halbrand and Galadriel ride about 150 miles a day for 6 days whilst he is supposedly severely wounded, Galadriel gets the information she needs from a scroll in the catacombs- but why would a fairly new Elven city have catacombs at all? - and why would they full of the tombs of men of the Southlands? No explanation is given, but the plot needs Galadriel to find out Halbrand is lying and this is the cheap arsed way they do it.

And as to Galadriel- after an entire series of her being unbearably single minded in her pursuit of Sauron, once she finds out who is Sauron- she keeps it to herself and doesn't tell anyone. What?

Weird plot convenient shit is happening on Numenor too, here the old King is dying so students get to sit by his bed an hour each drawing him? This appears purely to be there so dying King can mistake Elendils made up daughter for his own when its her turn to draw his dying arse and he reveals the palantir to her and the the vision of the end of Numenor. Like the catcombs scroll everything about it is so clumsily contrived.

On the Harefoot one, Lenny Henry dies, Nori goes off with Gandalf who lets us know hes Gandalf by just wholoesale using lines like”when in doubt always follow your nose' so subtle stuff. He wants to go to Rhun, where the stars are different- a line from the books about Aragorn, except he was talking about Far Harad and beyond, south of the equator, Rhun is just a bit east, so again they use an actual line but it has no meaning in this context save as a 'look we used a real line' and its stupid as it doesn't make sense, why are the stars different in Rhun?

I feel this sort of writing sums up the entire series- callbacks to PJ's films, and occasional lines lifted from the books but completely out of context and ripped of all their original meaning interspersed with a poor man's attempt to mimick Tolkien's writing style that just produces awkward clumsy metaphors and clunky lines which the actors struggle to deliver with any meaning.

I don't have too much to say here- as a show taken on its own without any connection to Tolkien the plot is still stupid, events still contrived, the dialogue still clunky, the characters still unlikeable and the entire narrative rests almost completely on coincidence and convenience.

Taken as an actual adaptation of Tolkien's work, its simply not. There is not a thing in here that is Tolkiens, nothing. In fact in my view this does not even qualify for the name of adaption as that implies there is an original work somewhere being adapted, there is not, this is pure invention from start to finish, every character, every line, every event.

Avoid at all costs, its a waste of your time and there is much better out there to watch instead whether your a Tolkien fan or not, its awful either way. }}

The callbacks to Jackson are ridiculous. It really shows that either the showrunners almost entirely care about Tolkien because of the trilogy, or they know that a lot of fans will mindlessly gobble up these "tributes" and beg for more. It's banal.

And yeah what's the deal with the stars being different in the East? Do the stars not "travel" from east to west in Middle-earth as they do in our world? The stars in the east would only be "strange" to someone in the west if they only looked at the night-sky half of every year.

I feel that watching these just encourages Amazon. Need to send a strong message. I don't know if I'll be able to peel myself completely away from this trainwreck, but next season I will wait at least a month before watching new episodes. I want them to see low numbers.

I shall not be watching next season.

I was reading some more of The Two Towers, getting to the part where Theoden and Company ride to Isengard. The description of Isengard, though only three or four pages long, brought me more enjoyment than watching the entirety of this season.

(It was especially interesting because of how much worked stone there is in Isengard. The Jackson films and their crude orc-structures and flint roads paint an entirely different picture than--I crudely paraphrase-- "a wide, stone-paved road which allowed not so much as a blade of grass to grow in the gaps". Saruman's mimicry of his master's works is not well-represented in the movies!

{{ Halfy- this is why I didnt watch via Amazon, what they have done to Tolkiens legacy they deserve nothing, and I certainly wasnt rewarding them for it with money. In my view its morally better to steal for the sake of reviewing than it is to encourage them more to basterdize a man's (and arguably his sons) life works }}

How are you managing to watch this without being on Amazon?

I don't mind giving Amazon Prime money because I use it mainly for other things, I just don't want them to see an implied "thumbs up" when I watch RoP.

{{ A VPN and a torrent client. I dont even want to be registered as a viewer for them, as they use viewing numbers as justification that it must be good, and obviously its not }}

We need a pirate emote.

  This doesn't do it?  Not swinging a sword, but how much do you expect? A hat would help.

Just wanted to mention that I had hoped we'd get a good "Three Rings" song out of this mess at least; written by Bear McCreary and performed by Fiona Apple.

But I was worried about McCreary's ability to write a memorable melody, and my fears were justified. That song sank like a stone. The guy's great at writing atmospherics, but can't write an ear-worm to save his life. They let Howard Shore write the title music; should have let him take a crack at this one.

{{ Score reminds me a bit of the guy Chibnall got in for Who- its all ambient and atmosphere but not a single memorable refrain in any of it. }}

For a moment there given the timing I was alarmed that yet ANOTHER episode had come out.

Eh, call me easy to please, a normie, or whatever, but I quite enjoyed the season. Took a few episodes for me to get invested though.