I have waited to write this to make sure I had given this show a good chance to prove itself. I am a very big Tolkien fan, the type who wore LOTR jewellery on a daily basis and dabbled in Elvish, who read everything she could find written by Tolkien. So it is needless to say I was excited by the prospect of the Rings of Power show. And I have rarely been this disappointed in my life.

I will make no spoilers -there are none to be made, the show has not progressed at all, anything that barely happened could be summed up in less than five minutes-, so don’t worry. The Rings of Power show is the perfect illustration to something one of my photography teacher once explained in class: it doesn’t matter what camera you have, a good photographer will always be able to use whatever they have at their disposal to capture the essence and the story on a photograph. What matters is your ability to see the moment and capture it. The camera is secondary. Someone with terrible eye and no photography talent can wield one of the best cameras and still will they only produce terrible images, ask my beloved husband who strives desperately to take any picture of me and still cannot despite using professional cameras.

So yes, the Rings of Power features great actors, I love the cast, love the talent, they are good, the film crew is doing a great job filming, images are beautiful, music is good, editing, everything technically is beautiful and everything you could expect from a show that has been invested with all the money you could only dream of. The problem resides in the fact that the story telling is bad. I get that they decided to muddle the timeline but still it is NOT GOING ANYWHERE that makes sense. The last episode was so full of self inflicted plot line contradictions it was infuriating. It is bad. It is beautiful but it is bad and it is not the fault of the actors or anyone who is technically involved it is the fault of whomever is trying to write some terrible Tolkien fan fiction.

I am thinking that if there is an after life there is not enough tobacco in heaven to calm Tolkien’s nerves right now and we might very well see 2022 ending with him coming back from the grave to go after Jeff Besos for desecrating his work like this. It is bad, really, really bad. I really wanted to love it, I really want something to happen because the actors are good but it is just all up in the air going nowhere trying to hold up suspense and it is just not funny anymore. Please stop… or hire someone who can at least write a script… and please just end this at season 1. I can’t bear the idea of this dragging any longer.