The first two-three episodes at least had me even a little pumped.

The dark wizard in the east very much signals to me that the stranger could be a blue wizard, along with the dark wizard, which is honestly very cool and a nice way to split the difference around Tolkien’s “speculation” on what happened to them.

Getting more complex Sauron manipulation and moving the plot along too seemed nice.

But after episode 4, I don’t know. I came away from it thinking it might have been the worst tv episode I’ve watched since Picard S2, which was very strange given how much interesting shit they did. Ents, Bombadil, Wizards, Hobbit origins (actually I don’t care for the amount of hobbit stuff in the show at all).

But there was something just boring about it all for me.

The only way I can explain what I think I’m seeing, and why it’s fundamentally flawed, is that the writers/directors want to take Tolkien seriously and even feel rather pressured to do so … and so in many ways they’re actually writing/filming that sense of seriousness rather than a well thought out adaptation style.

The clue for me is how the whole show is at once strangely grounded and somehow “elevated” at the same time. The elves, such as Galadriel and Elrond, are kinda normal people doing normal things a lot of the time (compare LoTR trilogy Galadriel basically being mind-crushing and haunting most of the time) … but talk as though they’re reading directly from the bible or Silmarillion. Same for Halbrand/Annatar/Sauron. The construction of the rings is a clue into this I think, where they’ve attempted to portray it as powerful and important, but there’s absolutely no sense of how in the world they’re magical, no indication that there’s some special elven craft behind them. Just “add mithril and get powerful rings”.

Bombadil’s dialogue seemed the same to me. Talking about being the eldest as though he’s talking about what happened last week. Now in that character this sort of approach makes the most sense. But even so, there didn’t seem to be any joy, jolly or aloofness about the character to signal how old he must be to be casual about witnessing the beginning of time. And there’s always the concern the show should have for making us the viewer feel what’s happening on screen … and I don’t think we felt Bombadil’s mysteriousness much at all. Compare with, in the LoTR books, Tolkien using a wonderful way of showing that … the one ring had no affect no him whatsoever to the point that he could see Frodo while he was wearing it.

The only breath of fresh air so far has been the dark wizard, which clearly takes cues from Saruman. It’s probably been the only sense stylistically I’ve gotten that we’re in a lost age of a fantasy world.

One take I had from season 1 was that RoP’s biggest problem might be that it’s being made after Game of Thrones not before it. That GoTs is absolutely the wrong influence for a show like this and yet is likely to have one due to its pervasive success. And I feel like I may have been right about that. The Tolkien world and GoT “politics and intrigue” are not compatible. Moreover, I suspect the GoT style may have run its course somewhat. A show like RoP was a chance to try something interestingly mystical and I don’t think the creators were up to the challenge, perhaps not at all.