[COLUMN] The Rings of Power Feels Like a Fetch Quest, not an Epic | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the second season of The Rings of Power and all the cool stuff that the characters pick up along the way. The full season is streaming on Prime Video.

It’s interesting how much the second season of The Rings of Power feels like an extended fetch quest, a show about watching characters scramble around the Second Age of Middle-earth collecting relics and artifacts that viewers recognize from stories published earlier but set later.

This isn’t an exaggeration. By the end of the second season, the audience has seen how Gandalf (David Weyman) got his iconic staff, how Sauron (Charlie Vickers) got his iconic pointy crown, and Elendil (Lloyd Owen) was gifted the less iconic sword Narsil – which will be reforged into the iconic sword Andúril and given to future King of Gondor, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen). This is to say nothing of how much of the season was an extended origin story for Sauron’s twenty rings.

The Rings of Power treats these objects with the same possessive reverence that Gollum (Andy Serkis) holds for the One Ring. These are mythic objects, and worthy of veneration within the narrative. Indeed, Sauron celebrates his claiming of the crown by employing it as a weapon in his duel with Galadriel (Morfydd Clark). There is a sense that the audience is expected to be as invested in the objects being employed as weapons as they are in the characters engaged in conflict.

More broadly, the season served largely as a repository for lore. At times, the season felt like just reading the footnotes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic Lord of the Rings saga, having the finer minutiae of the epic’s continuity explained in extended detail. The season dedicated itself to answering questions that only the most obsessive of devotees of The Lord of the Rings would have ever thought to ask about the world of the story.

For example, the season revealed why the Balrog that would confront Gandalf (Ian McKellen) at the climax of The Fellowship of the Rings was called Durin’s Bane – it was responsible for the death of Durin III (Peter Mullan) in front of Durin IV (Owain Arthur). Embracing the same narrative impulses as Solo: A Star Wars Story, the finale also revealed that the etymology of Gandalf’s name was derived from the fact that it sounded vaguely like the words “grand elf.”

The show is packed with winking references and knowing allusions. The Rings of Power is constantly reminding the audience of key moments from The Lord of the Rings, particularly Peter Jackson’s beloved adaptations. “We have been deceived,” Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) opines in the season’s penultimate episode. “All of us.” It’s a deliberate invocation of Galadriel’s (Cate Blanchett) observation that “they were, all of them, deceived” from the opening of Fellowship of the Ring.

Durin IV’s declaration that “the great tale of our Age is being written” recalls Gandalf’s observation that “the great battle of our time” has begun. There are also clumsy title drops. “But your Rings, the Rings of Power, they will be deemed the most… precious creations in all Middle-earth,” Sauron tells Celebrimbor, dropping a reference to Gollum’s iconic catchphrase. Celebrimbor uses his dying breath to sarcastically name “Sauron, Lord of the Rings.” Cut to the Leo pointing meme.

There is an easy joke to be made about the materialism of Amazon's adaptation of Lord of the Rings. After all, Amazon celebrated the launch of the streaming series Citadel by inviting audiences to “shop the look” of the characters in the show. Of course Rings of Power is obsessed with characters getting ahold of their individual swords, staffs, crowns and rings. Amazon’s entire business model is predicated in getting what people need into their hands. Forget debates about using the eagles to fly into Mount Doom, Frodo (Elijah Wood) could have just used the company’s overnight shipping.

More broadly, though, there is a strange emptiness to The Rings of Power. The series often feels like a televisual appendix to The Lord of the Rings rather than a compelling narrative in its own right. This makes a certain amount of sense, given that the show is “based on The Lord of the Rings and appendices by J.R.R. Tolkien.” Infamously, the show does not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s (admittedly rough) attempts to narrativize that background lore.

The Rings of Power often exists less as an object with its own identity or perspective and more as just a holding container for parts of the lore that Jackson pragmatically trimmed from his own adaptations. This is a season of television that made a huge deal announcing the casting of Rory Kinnear as Tom Bombadil, a character whose appearance Jackson cut from Fellowship of the Rings because “it's not really advancing our story. It's not really telling us things we need to know.”

In contrast, The Rings of Power reaches almost parodic levels of fan service introducing Bombadil. When Gandalf demands to know the stranger’s name, the show cuts to a low angle shot, pressing in on Kinnear, leaning casually and assuredly against a tree like he’s James Bond. “Been awhile since I’ve been called much of anythin’,” the suave stranger tells the wizard. “But back in the Withywindle, folk used to call me Bombadil.” Dramatic beat. “Tom Bombadil.” Hold for applause.

This is a very strange approach to telling a story. The scene is clearly structured around the assumption that the audience both doesn’t know who Rory Kinnear is playing and is intimately familiar enough with the backstory of The Lord of the Rings to immediately recognize the name Tom Bombadil. There is also a strong sense watching the season that what Tom Bombadil actually does within the narrative is much less important than the fact that he appears at all.

In this way, there is a sense in which The Rings of Power sits comfortably in the wider context of contemporary pop culture. So much of modern pop culture discourse is fixated on superficial references and fidelity. So much of the emotional arc of Deadpool and Wolverine isn’t rooted in the character of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) so much as the fact that he wears his comic book costume. Grown men were reportedly “sobbing” when Jackman first appeared in the outfit for camera tests.

There is a sense that all some fans want from Lauren LeFranc’s The Penguin is to see Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) wear a top hat and carry an umbrella in the season finale. (Somewhat ironically, umbrella-enthused Bat-fans are likely to get more from Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie á Deux, which quotes heavily from Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.) There is big “say the line” energy from so much contemporary pop culture, and the second season of Rings of Power is more than willing to comply.

The problem with this is that all of this lore and all these references leave little space to actually tell a story. What is The Rings of Power actually about, beyond serving as a clearing house for Lord of the Rings continuity? Sure, it is the story of the Second Age of Middle-earth, but why is that story important? Why does it need to be told, beyond the fact that it can serve as a convenient clothes horse on which these allusions to Lord of the Rings might rest?

Much has been made of The Rings of Power as an origin story for Sauron, the Dark Lord and antagonist of The Lord of the Rings. However, because so much of The Rings of Power is built around references, it feels like the meat of Sauron’s story takes place before the events of The Rings of Power. Sauron constantly references his service to Morgoth, and the show implies that his actions are rooted in the abuse that he experienced at the hands of Morgoth, so why not tell that story?

Some fans might argue that The Rings of Power doesn’t have to be about anything at all. They might even point to Tolkien’s quote about he “cordially [dislikes] allegory in all its manifestations.” That may well be the case, but the best stories – and this includes Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – resonate because they speak (consciously or not) to something in the moment. Tolkien was influenced by his experiences of the First World War, and his epic spoke to a world shaken by the Second World War. Jackson’s film’s resonated in the era of the War on Terror.

There are certainly elements of The Rings of Power that do speak to the current moment. For example, the first season’s focus on the elven occupation of the Southlands resonated with the end of the War on Terror. Even before the show was commissioned, Tolkien enthusiasts opined that Tolkien’s account of the corruption of Númenor would work very well as a metaphor for the decline of contemporary America. It is also a story of migration, a charged topic in contemporary culture.

However, when the second season addresses these threads, they feel like an obligation. The show is decidedly less interested in fleshing out the characters or the politics of Númenor than it is treating the island as a necessary evil that it has to work through to get to the story of Isildur (Maxim Baldry), who appeared (Harry Sinclair) in the prologue of Fellowship of the Ring as the King who refused to cast the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom.

The Rings of Power feels less like a compelling and exciting story than it does a walking tour through a museum built to The Lord of the Rings, an expensive live read of a collection of Wikipedia articles by a vastly over-qualified cast. It’s an entire television series built around the back matter of one of the greatest adventure stories ever written. It’s also haunted by a sense that none of this matters.