One of my consistent complaints about the second season of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is not simply that the show’s creators are deviating from the J. R. R. Tolkien source material they are supposedly adapting. It’s that, after having deviated, they have revealed that they are not as good at storytelling as Tolkien himself is. This has shown up in all sorts of ways, from pacing to characterization to world-building. But the most noticeable has been their stretching of insufficient plot material over the time allotted.
That’s not the case in “Doomed to Die,” the penultimate episode of this season. Bringing some of the most interesting storylines together and shedding everything else enables The Rings of Power to bring pretty much all it has to the table. Paradoxically, however, this maximum effort brings into sharper relief how the show falls short of its aspirations.
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