Written by Luke Barnes
In this cinema issues article we are talking about The Rings Of Power and what I believe it needs to do in order to be a better second season and in order to set the series up for long term success.
Now as a Tolkien fan I have a very complicated relationship with this show, there is a part of me that thinks it shouldn’t exist, and when I watched the first few episodes of the first season I was convinced it was little more than current year trash. However, as I advanced beyond that I did think there were some good ideas there, deeply buried but there, and I began to warm to it more by the end of the first season. As such I want to suggest ways that the second season could improve on the first and turn the show around, because lets face it by Amazon’s own admission, in the end, the majority of people didn’t finish the first season.
Before we get into it I want to say this is all just my opinion, nothing to cry about, some of it will be changes they can make this season and some will be possible changes they can make before a maybe possibly season 3. The idea of if this show can even be saved will also be discussed.
I think the fundamental issue with ROP that was there in the first season and will be there in season 2 is the fact that those who make the show do not understand or like the IP. As such they inject other things into in order to try and get more people in whilst driving away people who might actually like the show, take for example the fact in the new season they are teasing a romance between Galadriel, Morfydd Clarke, and Sauron, Charlie Vickers which just shows that the creators do not know these characters. They are doing this in an effort to try and get social media shippers to care, and to appear like it is A YA show, they are doing this when they could just use Celeborn instead. Doing things like the YA shipping makes me think that the show can’t be saved.
Moving on I think the show needs to focus on less characters, the Harfoots need to go away as do the Numenorian’s, I would also cut out the Dwarf’s and just have it be about Sauron trying to corrupt different groups of people with Galadriel and Elron in toe to stop him. All the stuff with the Stranger too I would cut out, we just don’t need it, the show is trying to tell too many stories at once.
I would also hype up events rather than going look guys the first black elf, this is tokenistic and irritating virtue signalling. You should have natural diversity and not make a big deal of it just be like yes this is the world, you don’t need to show them off its weird. Look at how House Of The Dragon does it for example, much better.
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