Durgan vs Elfe: The Rings Of Power

Hot on the heels of Sad Dragon Family And Friends, here’s my review of the first episode of The Lord of The Power: The Rings of Ring.

In contrast to Game of Thrones, my level of fandom for Tolkien is pretty much non-existent: I saw the three LOTR movies once when they came out, liked them but didn’t love them, and have never read a single word of the man’s writing. I have zero familiarity with the material this series is drawing on, nor do I care at all about how faithful it is to said material.

So as a non-fan just looking for a high budget shiny fantasy series to watch, how was the opening episode?

The Rings Of Power takes place in Middle-Earth’s second age, a time that came before the third age but after the first age. I assume that means something else to Tolkienheads, but for normal people all you need to know is that this is long before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord Of the Rings. It’s prequel time, baby! Those always turn out well and are universally embraced by fans.

Anyway, the elves have finished up a long war against Morgoth, the first Dark Lord who attacked their homeland centuries ago, and everyone is convinced that the threat is gone and an era of peace is at hand. Everyone, that is, except for returning protagonist Galadriel, who is convinced that Morgoth’s lieutenant Sauron is still out there and getting ready to finish what Morgoth started. She is, of course, correct about this, and when the threat becomes apparent to the wider world the different races of Middle Earth have to start putting their differences aside to face it. Presumably this eventually involves forging the titular rings of power that cause so much trouble in the Third Age.

As I’ve said before when it comes to fantasy on the teevee, the opening episode needs to do a lot of work very quickly in terms of introducing the setting and characters. Arguably Rings Of Power is in a worse position in this regard than House Of The Dragon, as the latter is sufficiently similar to its original installment that the show only needs to get viewers caught up on the small number of changes, whereas Rings Of Power is like a thousand years before the books and movies and pretty much everything is different apart from the major races of Middle Earth. How does the show balance conveying all of this information while getting the actual plot moving?

Well, it…doesn’t.

Despite looking absurdly gorgeous, the first episode really left me cold due to its heavy-handed, expository writing. Characters come on screen and bluntly explain who they are and what their deal is, or engage in clumsy as-you-know conversations with other people. All the poetic faux-Tolkien dialogue in the world can’t disguise how hacky this is. I constantly felt that the storylines spinning up seemed like they should theoretically be very engaging, but the clunky writing kept me on the outside.

The episode’s editing is also rough, with a lot of scenes ending slightly too quickly so that the pacing feels off. Elsewhere, the episode continues with one character’s story when it seems like it should, for the sake of pacing, be cutting to someone else, and vice versa.

This was all off-putting enough that I didn’t end up watching the second episode, despite intending to. I’m going to go back and give it another shot at some point—the end of this first episode, when the actual plot kicked in, was already getting more interesting—but for the moment, House Of The Dragon wins this round.

The Purge Season 1

The Purge is an IP that seems to be in a perpetual state of wasted potential. The first movie infamously squandered its fascinating premise on a rote home invasion plot, but even the sequels always felt like they were failing to really make good on the promise of the franchise’s central idea.

Enter the Amazon Prime series of the same name. With nine to ten episodes a season, can this extended Purge finally succeed where the movies didn’t?

The premise, for those not familiar: it’s some vague number of years after an authoritarian group called the New Founding Fathers have taken control of America, and one of their big innovations is the Purge, an annual “holiday” where for one night all crime is legal. This is supposedly aimed at reducing crime by letting people get all of their crime urges out in a semi-controlled manner, but its actual purpose is to reduce the population of homeless, poor, minorities and other people the NFFA considers a drain on society.

So just like in the movies, it’s Purge night and a diverse cast of characters find themselves, for one reason or another, out on the streets and in danger. This time around we’ve got a teenage girl looking to sacrifice herself at the behest of the Purge cult she’s joined, her estranged Marine brother who would rather that didn’t happen, a finance executive who hires an assassin to kill someone and then gets cold feet, and an upwardly mobile young couple who attend an NFFA party in hopes of securing funding for their business ventures.

Right away we’ve got a more interesting selection of protagonists here than “person whose car breaks down ten miniutes before the Purge siren goes off.” A big reason for this is that the expanded scope of a series lets the show take its time getting the characters out of the safety of their secure enclaves rather than rushing to the action as soon as possible. In fact, one of the multiple plotlines takes place almost entirely behind fortified doors, the show making the point that holing up somewhere isn’t necessarily any safer than being out on the streets if you can’t trust the people you’re holed up with.

Having four different viewpoint characters whose storylines don’t intersect until the end of the season (in quite an elegant twist, I might add) lets the show take a more expansive look at what kinds of trouble a hapless citizen can get into on Purge night beyond just being chased by machete-wielding killers in masks. One of the constant criticisms of the movie franchise is that it focused on murder to the exclusion of all other kinds of crimes, and the series remedies this to an extent. 

Yes, we still mostly have people in zany costumes killing each other for funsies, but there’s other illegal activity highlighted like human trafficking, contract killing and—in probably the darkest and most disturbing scene the franchise has ever featured—sexual harassment. The show uses an admirable level of restraint when it comes to that last topic rather than going as over the top as it does with the violence, which if anything just makes the sequence more horrific than it might have been otherwise.

In a show with four main characters who mostly operate on completely separate story arcs, some are inevitably less interesting than others. My personal choice for the most disappointing protagonist is Jane Barber, the finance exec who sets out to stop the assassination she put into motion. For most of the series she was actually my favourite character, but in the last episode she delivers a speech about how the Purge is bad actually–a conclusion she had already reached by episode three–tries and fails to stop the bad guy, and then gets unceremoniously killed. I kind of get the feeling the writers ran out of things to do with her before the end.

In the past I’ve advanced the idea that the Purge movies are aimed primarily at angry American liberals. Given that this is a franchise featuring—in an entry released in 2016–supporters of a far-right US regime rioting after their candidate loses an election, maybe that’s fair enough. I still wish they were a bit more subtle about it. Like, I know rich dipshits in real life don’t pay taxes, but having the rich dipshit just blithely announce that he doesn’t pay taxes is a bit on the nose.

Despite these issues, this first season is for my money easily the best Purge-related piece of media that’s been released. Unfortunately the franchise seems to have reached its apotheosis just as its appeal started to wane, as the series was canceled after the second season. So, let’s see if the inevitable reboot in ten or so years can keep the momentum going.