The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Prime Video, on demand
★★★★
Every time you sit down in front of the television screen, you are signing up for a transaction. A kind of pop-cultural handshake between yourself, on behalf of the audience, and the creators and craftspeople who concoct these masterpieces of small-screen, big-concept brilliance.
Preparing for war … Ismael Cruz Córdova as Arondir, Maxim Baldry as Isildur, Nia Towle as Estrid.Credit: Prime Video
In the field of motion pictures, the payoff is fast. You’re barely past the opening credits and the USS Enterprise is warping out of orbit, Obi-Wan Kenobi has the higher ground, or Frodo has flung the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Lights up, popcorn all over the carpet, and everyone can go home happy.
In television, such transactions are more complex. A 128-minute run time turns into episodes and seasons. Promised payoffs do not come quite when you want. The season finale leaves you hanging. And Galadriel isn’t the gracious, glacial elven monarch we met when we first journeyed to Lothlórien, many books, movies and radio serials ago.
Talk about getting off on the wrong foot. The first season of The Rings of Power was actually marvellous, though some of the noisier parts of the audience would tell you otherwise. The crucial thing that it is not The Lord of the Rings. It’s a wholly different (but still deeply connected) story set many years earlier. Like, thousands. (Almost 5000, actually.)
But like all first seasons, there is a dance that must be danced. The world must be established. The parameters of the journey must be set. And treats must be dropped on the path to tantalise the palate: meeting younger iterations of Galadriel and Elrond, meeting figures from the original story’s history, Isildur and Gil-Galad, and the is-he-or-isn’t-he Sauron or Gandalf of the mysterious stranger who fell from the sky in a streak of fire.
Morfydd Clark as Galadriel in The Rings of Power.Credit: Prime Video
Well, there’s a clue right there: chances are he’s Gandalf, who will go on to wield Narya, the “ring of fire”, one of the many rings about which the story is woven. Which means charming Halbrand, the Southerner who turned on the Aragorn-esque smiles for Galadriel was Sauron all along.
Cue the music. (With love to Marvel.) Who’s been messing up everything? It’s been Sauron all along. Who’s been pulling every evil string? It’s been Sauron all along. He’s insidious! So perfidious! It’s too late to fix anything, now that everything has gone wrong. Thanks to Sauron! Naughty Sauron! It’s been Sauron all along!