No, I Am Not Reviewing Season 2 of The Rings of Power
I do not make a habit of commenting on recent news, unless by synchronicity it makes a material difference to something I have written/am writing. I will make an exception in this case with the season 2 teaser of The Rings of Power, which was released to, at best, mild fanfare. It occurs to me that over half of my current subscribers joined after I completed my series of reviews on season 1 of The Rings of Power. Some of you more recent subscribers may still have read them, but if you have not, you can find the beginning of the series here. If you think some of my writing is absurdly long-winded, these reviews are among the most extreme examples, as the sum total word count of the series is in excess of 150k words, or roughly as long as I expect my next book to be. It was the result of a mistake of dedicating myself years ago when I first heard about the series to writing a review, no matter how it turned out, in the same fashion as I had previously reviewed the Peter Jackson films. I did not anticipate back then that there would be so much to talk about. Something I had looked forward to in documenting what diverse sources the writers would draw on to tell stories of the Second Age turned out to be irrelevant, as Amazon only had the rights to adapt The Lord of the Rings and the pertinent references therein. Even with that restriction, I do not think it worked well as an adaptation or as a show in itself.
I had a higher proportion of people read my last review compared to my first review than Amazon had of viewers watch their last episode compared to their first episode. But still, not everyone read that last review, so I want to reiterate what I said then: I do not plan to watch and review season 2. I fulfilled my obligation to my own word back in 2022, and I have no interest in continuing to invest time in this failure of a show. It did not take me as long as you might think—~four to five weeks worth of work spread out over seven weeks, not counting later proofreading—for me to write a series longer than my dissertation, but it was still too much time spent on a show in which I found no joy either as an adaptation or on its own merits. There are too many problems, most of which went unacknowledged by those in charge of the show, for me to think it will get significantly better so as to be good, if it gets better at all. I am simply not going to watch anymore, and for what it’s worth, I encourage others to do the same.