The Lord of the Rings - Rings of Power Season 2 [airs August 29th]

[Infernally Clay]

Well there it is. Did you like the first season? Does this new trailer get you excited for the next one? Got any cool theories or topics you want to talk about?

[warty goblin]

I vaguely enjoyed the first season while watching it. Then it ended and the whole thing was revealed to be six episodes of nothing happening, followed by one moderately ok episode and a finale where everything happened at such a rush it meant nothing and somehow felt underdeveloped in spite of seven hours of TV before that.

I could have watched the Jackson movies all the way from Hobbiton to Helm's Deep in that time. Or most of S1 of Game of Thrones. Think about how much narrative and character and sense of place those managed to convey in that time, and how little Rings of Power achieved.

It's a terrible Middle Earth story (I can't really consider it an adaptation, it's going on like 1 page in the appendix) and the plot is such a mess and the characters so badly drawn I think it fails taken entirely as generic fantasy unconnected to anything. Which of course you can't do, because it's only reason for existing, the sweaty essence that drips from every pore, is "the opening of Fellowship of the Ring was so cool, it needs hours of backstory!"


Rings of Power is high on my list of reasons for hoping my favorite things remain obscure, niche, and out of fashion enough they don't get TV adaptations.

[Sapphire Guard]

Genuinely can't wait to see what they do with Celeborn.

[TheSummoner]

I plan to thoroughly enjoy watching people roast it. From what I've heard, their takeaway from how season 1 was received is that they need more battles... Despite the big battle in season 1 being laughably bad.

[CheesePirate]

I enjoyed the first season, I look forward to season 2, and I plan to ignore all the usual outrage merchants on YouTube and elsewhere who never have anything positive to say about anything.

[Ionathus]

I watched the first episode and liked it, though I never built momentum and fell off watching any more. It had a fun ethereal quality to it that made me feel like it was a dream or recollection of the distant past. Not sure if that was what they were going for.

Reception to season 2 will probably determine whether or not I try to get back into it.

[Tyndmyr]

Well there it is. Did you like the first season?

No.

Does this new trailer get you excited for the next one?

No.

Got any cool theories or topics you want to talk about?

At this point, I'm willing to entertain a conspiracy theory that Hollywood is controlled by some manner of dark creatures sustained solely by the tears of fans.

The first season was miserable. I didn't quite manage to finish it. It probably holds the strange distinction of being the tv show on which the most money was flushed down the toilet. The plot didn't make sense. The characters were miserable. Nearly everyone was unlikeable, and also sort of an idiot. Things mostly happen because if they didn't, the plot wouldn't work.

The 38% audience score on RT was overly generous, and the decision to make another season of this is proof that Hollywood is bankrupt on ideas and instead must loot the moldering corpses of every IP that once made a dollar.

[Infernally Clay]

The 38% audience score on RT was overly generous, and the decision to make another season of this is proof that Hollywood is bankrupt on ideas and instead must loot the moldering corpses of every IP that once made a dollar.

For what it's worth I believe Amazon is obligated to go the whole nine yards with it. Something to do with having to deliver a certain number of hours worth of content as part of the deal they made to get the rights from the Tolkien estate to begin with.

[Errorname]

Rings of Power has always felt kind of sad, a project adapting a book they don't have the rights to based on the scant mentions from a book they do have the rights to and being adapted badly.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Infernally Clay
Does this new trailer get you excited for the next one?

Hard no.

“I think he’s been here among us all along!” has to be right up there with “Somehow, Palpatine returned.”

Originally Posted by warty goblin
…the plot is such a mess and the characters so badly drawn I think it fails taken entirely as generic fantasy unconnected to anything.

This new trailer reminded me of one of those achingly bad early-90s fantasy movies, except with unaccountably high production values. And they borrowed Armus from TNG Season One.

Oh, and I like how Galadriel has her own super-team now, with an Avengers-style preparing-for-battle moment.

Originally Posted by Tyndmyr
The first season was miserable. I didn't quite manage to finish it.

Didn’t the first season have a 37% completion rate? Meaning two out of three households who started watching never made it all the way through?

Originally Posted by Tyndmyr
…some manner of dark creatures sustained solely by the tears of fans.

And now I’m trying to come up with stats for something like this.

[Tyndmyr]

Didn’t the first season have a 37% completion rate? Meaning two out of three households who started watching never made it all the way through?

Don't recall the specific numbers, but yeah, it was definitely low. I think I struggled all the way until just before the last episode before calling it quits. I *really* like the original film trilogy, and consider them among the best fantasy films made, so I should be exactly the target market for them, but this is something altogether different. Even the Hobbit wasn't so bad. Oh, a bit padded out, yes, but some individual scenes in the Hobbit were still good. Smaug remains amazing, after all.

This is lacking in redeeming qualities.

[Infernally Clay]

Hard no.

“I think he’s been here among us all along!” has to be right up there with “Somehow, Palpatine returned.”

It's not quite as bad as that but it does require a substantial suspension of disbelief to reconcile that Sauron appears before the elves with the same face as Halbrand had and yet they somehow didn't pick up on that.

Although, to be fair, Celebrimbor may very well be willingly working with Sauron and fully aware he is doing so. If he were to hide this fact from just about everyone that might go some way to explaining it.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Tyndmyr
I *really* like the original film trilogy, and consider them among the best fantasy films made….

Wholeheartedly agreed. One of my life goals is to make it to New Zealand and visit as many of the filming locations as I possibly can. Edoras is at the top of that list.

Originally Posted by Tyndmyr
Even the Hobbit wasn't so bad.

I am…much less fond of the Hobbit movies. There were some nice individual scenes. Here and there.

[Errorname]

Kind of a shame this isn't going back to back with HOTD's second season like the first one did. Really helped me get over my grievances with HOTD to have a truly abysmal fantasy show to compare it to.

[warty goblin]

Hard no.

“I think he’s been here among us all along!” has to be right up there with “Somehow, Palpatine returned.”

Particularly because they already did that plot in the first season. "Find the Sauron" was a bad plot once, there's really no reason to repeat it.

This new trailer reminded me of one of those achingly bad early-90s fantasy movies, except with unaccountably high production values. And they borrowed Armus from TNG Season One.

If it had been achingly bad in a cheesy fun way I'd have enjoyed it. I like Xena, a show that is frequently awful, has plots that defy human reason, and a production budget of nearly $45 per episode, and it's a blast because it's fun and energetic and knows precisely how to execute what it is. RoP is dour and self-serious, not in that absolutely zero self awareness of how cheesy this actually is way that makes for a blissfully unaware and therefore fascinatingly entertaining bad movie, just in normal ways about normal things to a very boring effect.

That said, to be fair the production values on the first season were excellent. There's some definite misfires here and there, but overall the show looks great, the props and effects folks should be proud. I only wish the actual story was worth the effort.



Didn’t the first season have a 37% completion rate? Meaning two out of three households who started watching never made it all the way through?



And now I’m trying to come up with stats for something like this.[/QUOTE]

[Sapphire Guard]

Didn’t the first season have a 37% completion rate? Meaning two out of three households who started watching never made it all the way through?

Sort of, but in a super clickbaity way. Streaming services are super opaque, so it's an anonymous source form the Hollywood reporter referring only to American households. Worldwide it was 45%, but no one likes to mention that because it's not as snappy a headline. And no one seems to know what normal completion rate is anyway., or how many people came back to finish it later or anything.

[Ionathus]

And no one seems to know what normal completion rate is anyway., or how many people came back to finish it later or anything.

I wouldn't be surprised if average completion rate was quite low for most shows. I've bounced off plenty after 2 or 3 episodes, myself. The abundance of other choices doesn't exactly help their case.

Steam games are a different media format entirely, but their completion rates are pretty significant thanks to Steam achievement percentages: it's not uncommon to see 80% of players beat the first section but only 20-30% finish the game.

[Tyndmyr]

Searching on completion rate brought up varying levels. Movies are higher, which I guess makes sense, but it doesn't feel fair to judge shows and movies exactly the same.

Best example I could find was that Netflix cancels shows if they have under 50% completion on the first season. On the flip side, Netflix has cancelled some good shows that way, so I don't know that this is a smart metric to use, but it does indicate that Rings of Power performed poorly either way.

A lot of stuff gets cancelled even with way higher completion rates. Inside Job had a 90% completion rate for the first half of the season, and the dip to 58% with the release of the second half was bad enough that it was blamed for the show getting axed.

Streaming doesn't seem to be very good at standardizing numbers, though. Batch episode releases vs weekly releases vs split season releases seem like the kind of thing that would push numbers this way or that, but there isn't a universal metric. This appears to be the best available data, but it could be better, yeah.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by warty goblin
That said, to be fair the production values on the first season were excellent.

One sequence really stood out—an approach by ship through a river (or fjord?) to a hidden city, past river-cliffs lined with immense sculpted heads. I may be misremembering a bit, but it was visually astonishing and clearly had the GDP of New Jersey for an effects budget. It was an echo (or rather prefiguration) of the Argonath, but it also worked superbly on its own, and offered a hint of genuine wonder.

If more scenes had been up to that standard, especially scenes with actors, it might have had a very different reception. But then there’s Galadriel.

Originally Posted by Sapphire Guard
Worldwide it was 45%, but no one likes to mention that because it's not as snappy a headline.

“Less than half the people who started watching ever finished it” is a tempting take, and not great in itself.

Originally Posted by Sapphire Guard
…or how many people came back to finish it later….

This is an interesting caveat, and raises the question of whether there’s a set timeframe to consider a viewing “complete.” I would guess there is no specific window, and a hiatus in viewing for weeks or months wouldn’t factor into the statistic, but that’s a question only Amazon can answer.

[KorvinStarmast]

I have amazon prime.
I will watch it.
We'll see what works and what doesn't.

Fan enthusiasm level is about 4 out of 100.

[runeghost]

So, what famous meme/line for Jackson's trilogy will they spend a billion dollars making a joke out of this season?

Spoiler: Spoilers for RoP Season 1

Show

[Rynjin]

I vaguely enjoyed the first season while watching it. Then it ended and the whole thing was revealed to be six episodes of nothing happening, followed by one moderately ok episode and a finale where everything happened at such a rush it meant nothing and somehow felt underdeveloped in spite of seven hours of TV before that.

This seems to be the standard Amazon fantasy show format, sadly, as they did the exact same thing with Wheel of Time. Out of 8 episodes, 5 are essentially filler. On a per-episode basis this filler is actually really entertaining, but when you're trying to cram ~800 pages of novel into ~8 hours of television it really doesn't help you to try to instead cram those 800 pages into 3 hours fo television disconnected across 5 hours of filler.

After how bad episodes 8 and to a lesser extent 7 were for WoT I went from being a huge defender of the series' charm to apathetic at best, and never watched season 2.

If it had been achingly bad in a cheesy fun way I'd have enjoyed it. I like Xena, a show that is frequently awful, has plots that defy human reason, and a production budget of nearly $45 per episode, and it's a blast because it's fun and energetic and knows precisely how to execute what it is. RoP is dour and self-serious, not in that absolutely zero self awareness of how cheesy this actually is way that makes for a blissfully unaware and therefore fascinatingly entertaining bad movie, just in normal ways about normal things to a very boring effect.

That said, to be fair the production values on the first season were excellent. There's some definite misfires here and there, but overall the show looks great, the props and effects folks should be proud. I only wish the actual story was worth the effort.

I got dogged on pretty hard here a couple of years ago for saying I was tired of "prestige television" as the dominant format so I'm glad other people are starting to come around to the idea that a 5/10 fun show is a lot better than a 6/10 snoozefest.

[KorvinStarmast]

After how bad episodes 8 and to a lesser extent 7 were for WoT I went from being a huge defender of the series' charm to apathetic at best, and never watched season 2.

Season 2 is worth a look. yes, they have to mix together stuff from multiple books, but if you roll with it season 2 had some good stuff in it. And some "uh, what?" stuff.
I want to see season 3.

[Metastachydium]

Okay, so in their DEFENSE, they are apparently actually at least not glossing over the Annatar thing as they seemed to be doing earlier (even though they'll certainly find some way to make it bad); and are at least following Not-Orc Guy, the closest thing to "kinda interesting" they made for this whole trainwreck (stupid as the whole "1. raise a big Orc army; 2. dig out a stupidly big ditch; 3. ????; 4. PROFIT" plan might have been) on. Other than that… Well, we have superfluous weapon twirling, even more superfluous lightspeed aerial barrel rolls, hollow lines meant ot be so very deep and at least two explosions per frame. This kinda fells like they are trying to redo The Hobbit TRILOGY, but with Michael Bay as the director. I'm sure that's going to turn out alright.

[Rynjin]

Season 2 is worth a look. yes, they have to mix together stuff from multiple books, but if you roll with it season 2 had some good stuff in it. And some "uh, what?" stuff.
I want to see season 3.

The "uh, what?" stuff in episode 8 is what really threw me off my game. I was fine with extrapolating on things that were just hinted at in the books; Moiraine and Siuan's relationship becoming an ongoing thing instead of them just being "pillow friends" as children for instance.

But a lot of random stuff from the finale like characters just manifesting abilities they had not been trained for was just...ugh.

I'll consider giving season 2 a shot, if only because mixing together The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn seems like an objectively good move.

[ecarden]

Okay, so in their DEFENSE, they are apparently actually at least not glossing over the Annatar thing as they seemed to be doing earlier (even though they'll certainly find some way to make it bad); and are at least following Not-Orc Guy, the closest thing to "kinda interesting" they made for this whole trainwreck (stupid as the whole "1. raise a big Orc army; 2. dig out a stupidly big ditch; 3. ????; 4. PROFIT" plan might have been) on.

I think that was actually Adar's plan, and, unless I'm misremembering, it was intended to do exactly what it did, act as a path for the sun-averse orcs to reach their destination, then funnel the water back to the volcano, once they'd released it and cause the eruption which would blot out the sun and allow the Orcs to have a homeland of their own, where they can actually walk about.

But I may be misremembering, as Adar was basically the only part of the first season that worked for me and I may be backfilling to make it work for me.

[pita]

Season 2 is worth a look. yes, they have to mix together stuff from multiple books, but if you roll with it season 2 had some good stuff in it. And some "uh, what?" stuff.
I want to see season 3.

For me, season 2 of Wheel of Time just had a moment early-mid season 2 where it clicked and just got good. I'm not sure how it happened but it was like the lead actor remembered he's the lead actor of a show that also has Rosamund Pike so he better up his level acting, and then the writers were like "**** we've got someone good here we need to give him lines and storylines that are worth that", and the special effects people suddenly got extra hours each day to make sure things looked good. It was just that sometime during season 2 every part of the show got better, leading up to a genuinely enjoyable finale.

With RoP, I was faced with how much I just enjoy high budget fantasy, no matter how bad the rest of it is. Morfydd Clark was incredible and the Elrond bit was fun and everything else was terrible but I enjoyed all of it anyway. Season 2 looks even worse, so I'm kind of excited to see it.

[Sapphire Guard]

Amazon have beat the system, creating something so polarising that the only way to judge it fairly is to watch the damn thing.

[warty goblin]

With RoP, I was faced with how much I just enjoy high budget fantasy, no matter how bad the rest of it is. Morfydd Clark was incredible and the Elrond bit was fun and everything else was terrible but I enjoyed all of it anyway. Season 2 looks even worse, so I'm kind of excited to see it.

If it had been either a bit better - less mystery box, less LoTR coat tail riding, less filler - or a lot cheesier and just gone whole hog on high fantasy nonsense I think I'd have quite enjoyed it as, well, high fantasy nonsense.

But it spent too much time aping the style and tone of the Jackson films without the directorial and screenwriting talent to pull off, and the script ended up twisted into a weird pretzel by the secret Sauron thing. And the sheer amount of nothing that happened is kinda mind boggling, it's like the sort of badly edited fantasy epics you used to see a lot of, where an entire 30 page chapter would be 90% retread of the last interminable 30 page chapter, but with one actual event buried in the morass of flaccid repetition. Which is one thing when it just leads to Book IV of The Lost Dragon Star Trilogy Cycle* being more boring than it should be, and quite another when you're a prestige project of one of the biggest corporations on the planet, in the most important fantasy setting ever, and are incinerating millions of dollars an episode.


*so far as I'm aware this series does not exist.