The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, episode 2: "Adrift" (Amazon Studios, HarperCollins Publishers, New Line Cinema, Tolkien Entertainment, Warner Bros. Television, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved ≤br>
Last night my husband Charles and I watched the second of seven episodes in the first season of Amazon Prime’s new streaming serial The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. This was called “Adrift” and the title pretty much summed up the way I felt about it. I remember when Charles and I first watched Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung together he complained that in the first three episodes there seemed to be only 12 people in the entire universe, and when we watched The Lord of the Rings movies together and he served as my “Tolkien whisperer” the way I had served as his “Wagner whisperer,” I had the opposite problem: I had a hard time keeping track of the various populations – the elves,the dwarves, the humans, the Hobbits – and though there aren’t any Hobbits in this prequel (actually a pre-prequel since the cycle originally started with The Hobbit) I’m still having trouble keeping track of the multiple plot lines and resent the fact tha just when one set of characters and one plot line starts getting interesting, director J. A. Bayona and writers John D. Payne, Gennifer Hutchinson and Patrick McKay wrench us away from it. The main character appears to be Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), whom we first encounter swimming alone in the ocean after she jumped ship in the previous episode. She runs into a life raft but most of the people (or eives, or whatever) don’t want her there and eventually a hostile ship rams them and everyone appears to die except for one young man who takes her on board the remnant of the raft they have left.

Meanwhile, Elf-King Elrond (Robert Aramayo, easily the sexiest guy in this cast) goes to visit dwarf Prince Dunn IV (Owain Arthur) for help constructing a giant tower (which I’m presuming is one of the titular Two Towers in the second book of The Lord of the Rings, or is it the third if you count The Hobbit?). He’s hoping to get Dunn’s assistance because the two are – or at least were – friends, but Dunn has a major case of hurt feelings because Elrond hasn’t seen him for over 20 years during which time Dunn has got married and had two kids. Elrond challenges Dunn to a contest which has the sort of gibberish name that abounds in fantasies in general and Tolkien in particular, which turns out to be a rock-breaking contest in which, if Elrond loses, he will be permanently banished from the dwarves’ realm. He loses, but Dunn’s wife intercedes for him, insists on inviting Elrond for dinner, and eventually they renew their friendship. (The wife is played by a Black actress in the sort of cross-racial casting that attracted a lot of ire among Tolkien fans on Twitter, but I actually liked it.) And while all that is going on, there’s yet another subplot involving two young girls, Non Brandyfoot (Markella Kavanaugh) and Poppy Proudfellow (Megan Richards), who rescue a giant known only as “The Stranger” (Daniel Wayman) from the woods and take him home, even though they have no way of communicating with him. All these plot lines do not converge or bounce back and forth reinforcing each other: they just clash with each other and don’t do anything to reinforce each other. I’m really not feeling this series or identifying with it, and it’s just pretty much flowing over me (much like the three episodes of The Hobbit did) without actually moving me or reaching me emotionally.