Rings of Power dials up the energy as war comes to Middle-earth

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Prime Video, on demand
★★★★

Every time you sit down in front of the television screen, you are signing up for a transaction. A kind of pop-cultural handshake between yourself, on behalf of the audience, and the creators and craftspeople who concoct these masterpieces of small-screen, big-concept brilliance.

Preparing for war: Ismael Cruz Córdova as Arondir, Maxim Baldry as Isildur and Nia Towle as Estrid.Credit: Prime Video

In the field of motion pictures, the pay-off is fast. You’re barely past the opening credits and the USS Enterprise is warping out of orbit, Obi-Wan Kenobi has the higher ground, or Frodo has flung the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Lights up, popcorn all over the carpet, and everyone can go home happy.

In television, such transactions are more complex. A 128-minute run time turns into episodes and seasons. Promised pay-offs do not come quite when you want. The season finale leaves you hanging. And Galadriel isn’t the gracious, glacial elven monarch we met when we first journeyed to Lothlórien, many books, movies and radio serials ago.

Talk about getting off on the wrong foot. The first season of The Rings of Power was actually marvellous, though some of the noisier parts of the audience would tell you otherwise. The crucial thing that it is not The Lord of the Rings. It’s a wholly different (but still deeply connected) story set many years earlier. Like, thousands. (Almost 5000, actually.)

But like all first seasons, there is a dance that must be danced. The world must be established. The parameters of the journey must be set. And treats must be dropped on the path to tantalise the palate: meeting younger iterations of Galadriel and Elrond, meeting figures from the original story’s history, Isildur and Gil-Galad, and the is-he-or-isn’t-he Sauron or Gandalf of the mysterious stranger who fell from the sky in a streak of fire.

Morfydd Clark as Galadriel in The Rings of Power.Credit: Prime Video

Well, there’s a clue right there: chances are he’s Gandalf, who will go on to wield Narya, the “ring of fire”, one of the many rings about which the story is woven. Which means charming Halbrand, the Southerner who turned on the Aragorn-esque smiles for Galadriel was Sauron all along.

Cue the music. (With love to Marvel.) Who’s been messing up everything? It’s been Sauron all along. Who’s been pulling every evil string? It’s been Sauron all along. He’s insidious! So perfidious! It’s too late to fix anything, now that everything has gone wrong. Thanks to Sauron! Naughty Sauron! It’s been Sauron all along!

In season two, Middle-earth plunges into war. And in a sense, the show begins to deliver on the pay-off due to the audience. Not the whole loan plus interest – that’s going to take five seasons to slowly unfurl itself – but enough that the initially intriguing story lunges into something more compelling.

It also begins to answer the mystery promised in the show’s title: the revelation of the rings themselves. The three elven rings – Narya, the red Ring of Fire; Nenya, the Ring of Water, also known as the Ring of Adamant; and Vilya, the sapphire Ring of Air – were revealed in the first season finale.

The second season will draw out the seven rings given to the Dwarves, and then the nine rings given to the race of Men, the generic frame of reference for humans in J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth. Will this season see the rise of the Nazgûl, the sinister wraiths made when the nine consume their bearers? Time will tell.

While not everyone benefits from war in Middle-earth, the audience certainly does. The genesis of Mount Doom, one of the spectacular pay-offs of the first season finale, casts a long shadow over the story. And the urgency of war turns show runners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay’s story beats from a steady rhythm to a frenetic pulse.

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