Now that the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has ended, I find it difficult to make up my mind. On the one hand, I cannot agree with the praise exemplified by, for example, the RottenTomatoes critics’ consensus of the last episode: “The Rings of Power‘s central mystery is finally answered in ‘Alloyed,’ a finale that is by turns sumptuous and staid while hinting at a more propulsive story to come.” On the other hand, I cannot go all the way to those other critics who now claim vindication in believing the whole enterprise was a waste of time from the start. The truth, I think, lies somewhere between these extremes.
Where the words of others fail me, I will recur to my own. Last week, I wrote that “a lot of characters are engaging in, at best, questionable behavior, with their emotions or other factors seeming to manipulate them to do things they otherwise ought not to. Each time this happens, it makes me wonder if their behavior is being endorsed, or if it is being set up as folly.” The main example of this, in my view, was Galadriel’s relentless drive to make war upon evil in the Southlands, which led to catastrophe. As that episode ended with Galadriel curiously electing to take an injured Halbrand with her over a several days’ horseback journey to elven lands, I could not help but wonder if she was engaging in yet more folly.
From Halbrand’s earliest moments as a character, I had wondered about the hints, some subtle and some not, about his true nature. In my review of the third episode, for example, I observed that it had fleshed out “the identity of Halbrand, who is more than we thought (with greater potential for good and for evil).” As the season progressed, the hints became less and less subtle, and even as his likely identity became more obvious, I became more stubbornly convinced that things would turn out otherwise, in the hope that the show would be more clever than that. But I was mistaken. Spoiler alert: Halbrand is Sauron. What tips Galadriel off is when he, mysteriously adept at aiding Celebrimbor in his elven forge, begins speaking of powers from the unseen world; consulting elven records (apparently Númenor’s own records, referred to earlier in the season, are less complete), she then finds that there is no king of the Southlands.
What confirmed it for me (before the show itself did) was when Halbrand speaks of giving Celebrimbor a “gift,” a not-so-subtle reference to Annatar the Lord of Gifts, Sauron’s fair form. The consequences of this revelation are at times interesting (Sauron’s self-understanding gives him a potentially interesting “villain who thinks he’s the hero” vibe); at other times a little video game–y (the whirlwind tour of some earlier incidents of this season reminded me of how certain games revisit past levels in the last battle before the final boss); and, on the whole, not fully fleshed out (if more rings are to be made, how will Sauron assist in their making without being outed?). But, by the end, we do finally get the first of our Rings of Power, though they would not exist without Sauron’s help.
The other of the show’s main mysteries was fulfilled in far less satisfying fashion. Perhaps in a (failed) attempt to throw people like me off the scent, this episode opens with the mysterious cultists tracking the Stranger finding him and pronouncing him Sauron. But with some timely harfoot intervention, we soon discover that this is not the case, as the Stranger dramatically dispatches these enemies to save the harfoots who have come to help him. In another revelation that was so predictable I was hoping things would prove otherwise, we learn that the Stranger is an Istari, one of the wizards with a long and familiar place in Tolkien’s work. But a very on-the-nose reference suggests that the Stranger is not just any Istari. Between it, and his growing familiarity with and affinity for proto-hobbits, the Stranger is almost certain to be the wizard Tolkien fans already know best, even as I fervently hope, for all sorts of reasons, he turns out to be someone else.
So, if the first season’s central enigmas have been resolved unsatisfactorily, what does that mean for the show’s overall success? A better way to judge this is to return to the criteria I outlined after watching the first two episodes:
It will have to prove itself reasonably faithful to its source material and, when it must deviate, to do so justifiably, or, at the very least, not profanely. It will have to depict a Middle-Earth that is at once familiar to viewers and novel. And it will have to make the re-emergence and defeat of an evil whose demise is only temporary meaningful nonetheless.
It is beyond the scope of this post for me to assess the lore fidelity of this series. But there were certainly many deviations and innovations. To some extent, I do stand by what I wrote earlier: that “some creativity and invention . . . is necessary, if the series is to exist at all.” But in many instances, such novelties were harder to justify. Weirdly, the showrunners seemed to acknowledge this by promising that season two will have a more canonical storyline, which feels like a real admission against interest.
As for the Middle-earth (and elsewhere) depicted in this show: It has much promise as a setting; Númenor and Khazad-dum were highlights of the first season. Yet it took a fairly long time for many of these places and their characters to be established. Thus, for long stretches of the season, the show was caught in a bind: Lore deviations prevented obsessive fans like me from fully attaching to what was happening, while “normie” fans saw little that was familiar until Mt. Doom erupted in episode six.
Finally, concerning the show’s moral universe: I think the most hyperbolic concerns about “woke” Lord of the Rings have proven mostly unfounded. Sure, Galadriel drove much of the story, but also many of the worst things that happened this season were basically her fault, with a path laid out for her to develop into her Third Age self. There were no serious, sustained attempts to map the show onto contemporary culture or politics (with maybe one exception). And timeless Tolkien themes of power, corruption, providence, intention, nature, friendship, etc., did come through. The nature of Sauron, the show’s ‘big bad,’ remains to be fully seen (what was he doing on that raft anyway?), although an interview Charlie Vickers did with the Hollywood Reporter has some promising intimations about his trajectory for season two.
But that’s a problem, isn’t it? Even if there is a five-season arc planned for the show, it seems like a serious strike against it that so much depends on what is to follow. Given this, it is hard for me to recommend wholeheartedly the first season as a self-contained work, even as I do not consider it a waste of my own time to have watched it. Though this finale left me dissatisfied, who am I kidding: I am probably in for the long haul now, if for nothing else than to see what happens next, and whether the show on the whole can ultimately judged as a success or failure. Whether others want to do the same is up to them.