El Sandifer's Rings of Power Review

My mother, Ilúvatar bless her, wrote up a review of Rings of Power to get people backing my Patreon. You can support hers here.

OK. Imagine the scene. Jeff Bezos has decided to commission his very own Lord of the Rings series. He turns to his algorithms, which proceed to spit out a strangely demanding brief, specifying individual talent and financing decisions, structuring episodes, production designs by neural network, as close to AI-produced television as it is possible to make. Now those individuals the computer has chosen are gathered at the first production meeting: the dollar store Benioff and Weiss, that lady who wrote Better Call Saul, the pretty good Doctor Who director, and that guy—yeah, the one who directed that film that that other guy who almost filmed The Hobbit, yeah, that guy, yeah, he produced it and this guy directed it and now he’s directing Lord of the Rings, all of them are in a room together for the first time, trying to figure out how to actually make this—how to go put actual people in front of cameras and make this television show that Jeff Bezos has spent almost as much on as he did in taking William Shatner to space. They stare for a while, in uncomprehending horror, unable to figure out how to get this pile of demands to look like an actual television show that might be watched by actual people. The silence is awful. And then finally one of these guys, probably the Game of Thrones veteran, finally pipes up. “I’ve got it. Elf Shit. We just give them elf shit.”

How else to understand this, after all? What other explanation is there for questions like “why this” and “why now?” I mean, sure, there is the obvious: that there are enough people who are simply invested enough in this specific set of signifiers—in this specific IP, as the terminology goes—that they are in fact clamoring for Extruded Tolkien Product. Certainly that’s the bet being made here. The belief appears to be that a series organized around nothing save for “these ones were in a movie, while these ones are kind of like hobbits, and that guy in the flaming hole is secretly Ian McKellen” has appeal to people.

And yet even given that, this is odd. Much of that is simply down to the source material’s stubborn persistence. Among corporate IPs, Tolkien is unique in its relative lack of exploitation—the fact that the estate has generally kept at least some hand on the rights, leaving a streak of crazed British isolationism on the exterior of the work to go with the one inside. This is not the hopelessly overexploited intellectual property of Marvel, or even one of the chronic sick men of SF/F intellectual property like Star Trek. This is something where the weird and crazed power of the original is still faintly detectable, not yet completely smoothed out into a grey miasma of content. The stubborn belief in the fact that doing a bunch of elf shit is inherently interesting is, ultimately, consistent with the original material, which really does expect you to believe that being an immortal elf old enough to remember Valinor is inherently interesting and relatable.

There’s a fleeting moment—when the two guys with the wooden bat wings wander by like exiles from a lost Robert Holmes script—when the first episode seems like it might deliberately lean into how fucking strange all of this is. But it quickly becomes evident that this was an accident—a lapse of judgment on the part of the people tasked with maintaining this mad, fantastically pointless venture’s human suit that would be avoided going forward. Everywhere else it is simply the usual insistence that IP is important: that Elrond is important like Batman is important, because your parents were into them as teenagers.

Alas. A show assembled out of the dream of an old British man who was a little too fond of linguistics and a neural network’s desperate attempt to please a billionaire’s whims instead of one desperately toned down by committee would be far more interesting than this.