The opening scene of the second season of Amazon Prime’s Lord of the Rings series The Rings of Power lingers long after I finish the first episode, through the second, and well after the credits roll on the third. It’s stunning, immediately making me feel like this season could put things back on track and redeem the whole enterprise after its underwhelming debut in 2022. Unfortunately, however, the rest of the first three episodes, which dropped simultaneously on August 29, fail to achieve anything even remotely similar to that scene during their lengthy runtimes, but if you told me the powerful visuals from those first few minutes were a deleted scene from one of Peter Jackson’s beloved films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, I’d believe you.
The first few episodes’ inability to reproduce that kind of quality more than once is frustrating, but the series is clearly trying to streamline what was, previously, too many disparate plots. And though Rings of Power stalls in moments, the sheer power of what it accomplishes straight out of the gate deserves its flowers, so I’m going to dole them out.
Sauron the single-minded
In case you forgot about everything that happened across the various subplots in The Rings of Power’s first season, we wrote up this handy refresher for you, but the core focus of the series is how Sauron, the primary antagonist of Tolkein’s trilogy and the movies it inspired, came to corrupt the people of Middle-earth. Under the guise of a human named Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), Sauron deceives Galdriel (Morfydd Clark) and the other elves, convincing them to craft three magical rings to help save their dying lands. By the end of season one, he has revealed his true form and escaped, and the first episode of season two tells us exactly how he came to be Halbrand in the first place.
“Always after a defeat, the shadow takes another shape and grows again. Morgoth is gone, leaving us alone and disgraced. But today, a new age begins, under me, your new master,” Sauron (clearly played by a different actor) tells the Orcs at Forodwaith. As he speaks, Adar (now played by Sam Hazeldine), looks on with growing concern—especially when Sauron explains his plan: “unconditional conquest” by way of a new kind of power “over flesh” that will require the death of a lot of orcs in order to enslave Middle-earth.
Just as it appears that Adar, despite his reservations, is about to crown Sauron as their new leader, he turns the pointed helm upside down and rams it into the base of Sauron’s skull. The other Orcs descend upon him, stabbing him over and over again until it’s clear that he’s died. A massive, blue-white explosion of light escapes from his every orifice, encasing Forodwaith in a sheet of ice, and the ink-black blood within Sauron eventually finds its way through the ground and drips from a dangling stalactite into a subterranean puddle. When a rat makes its way to the edge of the puddle to enjoy a drink, several sticky, Venom-like appendages lash out and kill it, swarming over its dead body like thousands of insects moving as one. It does the same thing to a centipede, before slowly, painfully, making its way out of the cave and into the snow-covered terrain of Forodwaith.
With an impressive (if terrifying) amount of will, this disgusting thing crawls bit-by-bit to civilization, where it collapses, exhausted, right in the center of a road. When it’s run over by a horse-drawn carriage, it crawls its way up the spoke of wheel, pours itself into the cart in the back, and ruthlessly kills the woman driving it. After several horrifying moments in which the cart shakes amid the sounds of bones cracking and shattering, Halbrand emerges, a sickening smile dancing across his face.
It’s an incredibly effective and disturbing scene that speaks to the single-mindedness of Sauron’s evil. Even when stabbed hundreds of times and losing his corporeal form, the disgusting, tar-like substance that is a physical manifestation of his evil soul manages to crawl back to civilization and find a new husk. It’s perfect, and I thought it was a sign of good things to come. Sadly, I was wrong.
It’s a mess in Middle-earth
We never get anything nearly as powerful as this opening scene in the rest of the newly released Rings of Power episodes. Thankfully, the series seems to be at least trying to stay more focused on the key plotlines (namely the rings and The Stranger’s quest to discover his true self), but there is still a plodding, feet-dragging feeling throughout what we’ve seen so far. I still don’t care about the humans in Númenor, even though one of them is Isildur (Maxim Baldry), who eventually cuts the One Ring off of Sauron’s hand before falling victim to its influence. They feel like character archetypes who were hastily promoted to speaking roles.
And though the dwarves are somewhat enjoyable to watch (a scene where the “stone singers” belt out a beautiful song to try and find the sun shafts that collapsed after an earthquake is especially moving), I’m mostly bored by their plight.
When the bizarre wizard people who were stalking The Stranger (Daniel Weyman) in season one before he (seemingly) banished them pop back up again amongst a whole new group of characters, I sigh. There’s just too much going on to care—even if one of them transforms into hundreds of white moths let loose from lanterns.
But when Sauron is centered, when Vickers is able to lean into the seductiveness of his evil influence, The Rings of Power soars. I imagine the showrunners want to establish just how dire the situation is in Middle-earth for all of its citizens, which is why it flits so frequently between them, but the series would be so much stronger if it kept Sauron at the center of its eye. Pun intended.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season two episodes 1-3 are available now on Amazon Prime. The fourth episode airs Thursday, September 5.
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