THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER Dropped Hints About Sauron's Identity Way Sooner Than We Realized

This show… the more they talk about their thought process, the less credible their “we’re Tolkien fans” claims seem. It’s almost mind boggling to me why they’d tell the story of the titular rings of power in this way.

Almost, because it’s apparent that this isn’t that story, but rather a poor attempt to out-prequel The Hobbit Trilogy while hitting some necessary contemporary Hollywood tropes, including the “antagonistic strong female” protagonist and the mystery-boxes-as-a-substitute-for-compelling-characterization form of storytelling.

This is such a misguided series, especially given the creative boundaries in which they were allowed to write. Telling the story of the rings of power, even with limited rights to Tolkien’s works, only required them to figure out how to adapt the stories of Eregion, Celebrimbor, and Annatar’s plan into an engaging eight hour-long episode season. From there they could tell the rest of the story of the Second Age.

But instead of doing that, they took a cheap “market-tested” approach to getting high viewership, all the while claiming that their show was actually based on Tolkien’s work. And even then, it would have been better for them to gender-bend Celebrimbor rather than take the approach they did.

Their comments about Season 2 don’t bode well either. The solution is not to focus on Sauron as some sort of Walter White character, or to shove in canonical characters to check the boxes. The solution is to tell the story already told, because there’s a reason it works well. But that’s likely expecting too much from two failed scriptwriters making a show for the most soulless company on the planet.

"It's time to cringe"

Does anyone even care? Show was uninspiring and disappointing for me.