Is The Rings of Power Still Worth Watching?

4 min readWhen I was a kid, I was obsessed with something called Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog. If you weren’t a first-grader in 1998, it was a Fox Kids Saturday morning series about four heroes in medieval Ireland who morphed into armored knights to battle dragons and evil witches. It was Power Rangers by way of Celtic mythology, and it kicked ass. I was a wee bit too young for Hercules and Xena then, and Mystic Knights made sword-and-sorcery stories accessible to my Saturday morning-addled brain. Two years after it went off the air, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring stormed into theaters.However unfair, it’s through that spectrum of two extreme ends that I see fantasy television like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. I have a standard through which I see this genre in this particular medium. On the big screen, fantasy can feel endless, its scope stretching beyond the horizon. On the small screen, you can feel the ceiling over everyone’s heads. Even Game of Thrones had a coffee cup slip through the veil. Which is why, despite the distant relation to Peter Jackson’s immaculate movies, The Rings of Power is quintessential fantasy TV on par with Mystic Knights. That’s not a bad thing—it’s just perspective.We’re four years and three seasons (lol) into The Rings of Power’s planned five seasons on Prime Video. After all this time, it still hasn’t won over skeptics. There are long and boring reasons why Tolkien faithful have been averse to the prequel show. They have complaints about pacing, plotting, creative liberties from Tolkien’s textbooks of lore, and general execution. Regrettably, they more often than not get mixed up with old-fashioned racism and misogyny. (Valar forbid a dwarf be a Black woman.) But sometimes the worst people you know have a point: The Rings of Power has been an underwhelming experience. Despite its strong start in season 1, the show simply hasn’t escaped the long, long shadow of Jackson’s cinematic trilogy. (Even Jackson never lived up to his own standards. See: The Hobbit.)Amid the show’s large ensemble, the series bet many of its chips on Charlie Vickers as Sauron. Though handsome, Vickers’ lack of charisma, middling scriptwriting for his role, and a severe lack of sexual tension with co-star Morfydd Clark (as Galadriel) have sadly made Rings of Power somnambulant. Now in season 3, the chance to course-correct is long past, and the rigor mortis of its missteps have now settled in.Season 1 had a strong start. Sauron is a hottie, and his early relationship to Galadriel carried with it an air of intrigue and yearning until his mask came off. Maybe there could have been a whole show about their forbidden attraction. (Some fans have already coined “Saurondriel.”) The good girl/bad boy pairing is a tried and true tradition, with a subset of the Star Wars fandom possessing a bizarre obsession with Daisy Ridley’s Rey getting it on with Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren. Who are any of us to deny ourselves this pleasure?But season 2 didn’t seize on nor improve what was its grace. Their characters were kept separate until the finale, where they reunited on the battlefield. It’s a good scene, to be fair, it’s just maddening that what could have been the whole show was just five minutes, including a bloodless sword fight.Now here we are in season 3, and it’s more of the same. All of the characters are on a journey across Middle-earth, the story is moving along at a steady, if at times meandering pace, Sauron is quite literally plotting everything from his high tower, and there is a clear endpoint at the end of it all: the forging of the One Ring. As of this writing, the season’s four episodes (available to stream now) suggest we’ll get there in due time. There have been some big-name casualties already, and some impressive set pieces that actually feel like things are intensifying at the right temperatures.Still, this is Lord of the Rings we’re talking about here. For all the lore and imagination Tolkien spilled onto his pages, his was a story still mired in the age-old tradition of good versus evil. That is Rings of Power too, where even morality comes in shades of stark black and white (mostly) and just enough polished VFX and production design to sell the immersion. One could ask, “What more do you want?” Somehow, it’s still not really enough. Even now, there is still too little energy, too little thrust, too little verve—and yes, still too little sex appeal—to warrant undivided attention. The Rings of Power is mighty pretty to look at on a big 50-inch LED screen. (I’m particularly engrossed anytime we follow Daniel Weyman’s Gandalf, who is always strolling through the most picturesque backdrops.) But it’s also far too easy to get distracted by more exciting things, like your laundry machine timer going off. In other words: The Rings of Power is a television show.For all the money Jeff Bezos spent on making Rings of Power a reality, it’s still just TV. It’s maybe a cruel, cosmic, and frankly righteous joke that the billionaire’s very clear marching orders to his team—“I want my Game of Thrones,” is how he was quoted—have resulted in precisely that. A fantasy television series. Blame the streaming era for pigeonholing everything of this caliber into a blockbuster with lofty expectations. Not all TV should be appointment viewing. Sometimes a TV show can and should just be what it is: Mystic Knights, with a few extra zeroes.