Yesterday was all overview. Today we get into things that most people would consider spoilers. So if you’re of the cohort that can’t abide spoilers, leave now.
Here and there during the 9+ hours of the first season of The Rings of Power, I rolled my eyes. Every so often, I giggled. I doubt that this is what Amazon intended. I’m a hard man to please on the fiction side. I considered The Silmarillion a waste of time and money. I’d already been to college, and had read quite enough Cliff Notes, thank you very much. I wanted another story.
The Rings of Power is certainly a story. Several stories, in fact, and I enjoyed most of them. I was very interested to see what Amazon could do, given how little they had to work with about the Second Age. We got Ar-Pharazon the Golden; will we get the sinking of Atalante? (Yes. That’s what Tolkien called the Lost Continent underneath Numenor. Really.) Well, they made a lot of it up. What would you do, with a sparse outline of events and a billion bux to blow? You’d make most of it up too.
They did. Some of what they made up was better than expected. And some…I giggled.
First up: The Three Witches Or Something Very Like Them. Here and there in the saga there were these three women dressed in spotless cream-white capes, wandering around the wild country asking every third person they met if they were Sauron. This is silly enough on the surface. But really: Where were the grass stains? Where were their backpacks? Did they camp somewhere, somehow, or just get a room at the Southlands Best Western?
One was a soldier, with a helmet. She threw knives, and nailed one of my favorite characters. Another was a preacher, with her hair under cover, who carried a saucer sled and said a lot of pompous things that didn’t amount to much. But the third…Eru help us…she was another damn deranged albino. I was already tired of deranged albinos in 2008. (There is a whole Wikipedia entry about deranged albinos.) I guessed that she was the boss, carrying around a very Egyptian-looking magical staff and levitating rocks with it. Alas, she eventually picked a fight with the wrong man (also not Sauron) who grabbed her staff and roasted the three of them real good.
The Harfoots (proto-hobbits) were sweet and sane, and only occasionally silly. I liked Sadoc the Harfoot tribal chieftan, who was well-cast and acted the part brilliantly. He defied The Three Witches Or Something Very Like Them and got a knife in the heart for his trouble. So what was silly? Just this: As best I could tell, their primary source of protein was…snails. Raw. Sometimes shells and all. Ye valar, everybody knows that snails carry a veritable arsenal of parasites, many of which can send you off to that far green country beneath a swift sunrise with barely a burp. The Harfoots haul their whole village around in tumbrel carts. A few dozen chickens in cages wouldn’t weigh that much and could work wonders for their diets.
Ok. Here we get to the more significant stuff. Elrond, one of the Elf-lords who eventually got to wear one of the Three Elf Rings of Power, is a cuddly, huggy, back-slapping round-faced good ‘ol boy who looked like he could do standup and keep the audience in stitches. Ok, this was the Second Age. He still had a few thousand years to develop Hugo Weaving’s gravitas–but probably wouldn’t. The actor did his best with what they gave him. But the casting and the scripting were all wrong.
And now, the biggie: Early in the series, a human teen kid named Theo discovers a weird artifact in his unpleasant neighbor’s barn. It looks like the hilt of a sword minus the blade. It gives him the serious galloping creeps, so being a teen, the only thing he could think of doing is to wrap it up in rags and take it home. It comes out of hiding here and there, with Theo’s blacksmith friend finding that hammers can’t do a thing to it. Shifty-eyed people want it, and eventually get it, without having to kill Theo in the process, whew. I was thinking it was some kind of immaterial magic sword, which would have been way cool, like an Iron Age lightsaber. But no–here there be belly-laugh spoilers–the damned thing is the ignition key for Mount Doom.
Really. And literally. I am not making this up. The shifty-eyed neighbor takes the gizmo, shoves it down into some kind of keyhole, and gives it a twist, just like a car key, if any of you remember what car keys were. Alluva sudden, in an undisclosed location that clearly wasn’t anywhere nearby, hidden machinery opened up a very big dam and sent a megacrapgallon torrent of water roaring toward the dormant volcano. The water goes down into the cracks, meets some lava, and (presumably) boils. Then, boom! Old Orodruin (AKA Mount Doom) suddenly erupts like Krakatoa cubed, and turns the Southlands into…wait for it…naw, you already figured it out…Mordor.
I did not know that you could make a dormant volcano erupt (rather than merely explode) by giving it a good thorough soaking. I was really into volcanoes when I was a kid, and that never came up in any of the books I read about them.
I didn’t giggle. I laughed out loud.
Here and there I also groaned, but those groans were few and far between. (I hope you figured out by now that I’m not being entirely serious about all this.)
To avoid leaving you with the wrong impression, tomorrow let’s talk instead about what works and how well.
