Greater love for his fellows hath no man than the Dark Herald, who is suffering through the second season of The Rings of Power on our behalf:
It’s been two years since the first season of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was unleashed on a helpless and unsuspecting world. Seven hundred and thirty days has not been enough to dull the pain of the horrors it inflicted on the genre of high fantasy.
J.R.R. Tolkien was without question the greatest and most influential fantasy writer of the 20th century. Every writer that followed him had to consciously either embrace or reject Middle Earth. The Lord of the Rings was the story of a struggle of good against absolute evil. A story where the protagonist succeeds in his quest to take the One Ring to Mount Doom but ultimately fails in his mission to destroy it. He is saved by Providence and the self-destructive nature of evil.
In the 21st century, there has been a race on to turn as much of the fantasy genre as possible into a pastiche and palimpsest of Professor Tolkien’s life’s work, or perhaps a better term would be a mockery. This production is certainly the pinnacle of that school of thought. There is no ultimate good or absolute evil there are simply shades of grey and at the end of the day everyone is the same and we are all equal. No one has the right to judge anyone for anything unless they are a white male, in which case they bear the sins of all the world and must constantly perform acts of contrition from morning to sunset.
Nowhere is this school of fiction more pervasive than in Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
throws back a quick shot of Four Roses
Let’s get after it.
The show starts with a recap of the first season. This is probably a sad necessity for its audience. I know that I personally had to (pauses to shudder) rewatch the entire first season because the brain cells that had been assigned to remember it had died of embarrassment. I’m not the only one, everyone who has to review this has been groaning about having to wallow through the acre of rotting of pig dump that is 2022’s Rings of Power.
Within minutes of starting this new season, you know that Amazon has outdone the last one in terms of sheer incompetence.
It’s impressive that Amazon actually managed to lower the bar. But, as we know, the real purpose of these abominations is to destroy the affection for the source material. Fortunately, the joke’s on them, because we can read old books!
Which is vastly more entertaining than thinly-disguised lectures on girl power and how orcs are people too and they just want a better life for their children, and anyone who doesn’t open the gates of Gondor to them are racists for whom there is no place in Gondorian society.
