Below is a spoiler-free review of Season 1 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which is now streaming on Prime Video. See our spoiler-filled reviews of each episode below:
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Premiere Review — First 2 Episodes
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – Episode 3 Review
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – Episode 4 Review
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Episode 5 Review – “Partings”
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Episode 6 Review – “Udûn”
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Episode 7 Review – “The Eye”
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Episode 8 Review – Season 1 Finale
As the most expensive TV show ever made, Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power faced an enormous struggle in living up to the hype. It needed to satisfy both purists who have studied J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and were watching sharply for deviations from his canon while also drawing in those who have no familiarity with Middle-earth or just vague memories of seeing Peter Jackson’s films 20 years ago. It also had to grapple with the challenges of building mystery and tension within a prequel, all while directly competing for viewers with a new Game of Thrones spinoff.
Yet that massive investment in epic fantasy paid off. Season 1 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is far from flawless, but it delivered spectacle at the absolute peak of peak TV. Novice showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay may have leaned a bit too much on withholding information about character identities, but they still produced a show that richly developed both brand-new characters and the long-lived elves and wizards who appear in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
The Rings of Power is set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, though it considerably condenses events that spanned millennia in Tolkien’s mythology. The plotting is still leisurely — the titular rings don’t make their first appearance until the season finale. But the episodes leading up to that reveal rarely feel wasted, allowing the writers to show off the world through absolutely luscious shots of the homes of elves, men, and dwarves. Plenty of time is spent developing the people who live there and showing how they respond to the threat of a growing darkness.
The Second Age faces many of the same conflicts as the Third, with factions divided by historic mistrust and dealing with their own internal strife, all of which makes it difficult for them to acknowledge or respond to larger problems. The story feels both timeless and immediately relevant as it draws on the fantasy canon that Tolkien imagined while living through the seemingly apocalyptic conflict of World War I.
Plots intertwine and then come apart again, with characters and locations sometimes being abandoned for entire episodes. It’s a structure that works well at times — like in the action-packed Episode 6, where cutting to something besides the spectacular central battle might’ve felt jarring. Other times it feels like reading an epic fantasy novel with multiple narrating characters and wondering how many chapters you have to get through until your favorite pops back up again.
The sluggishness is most keenly felt in the time spent during Episodes 4 and 5 on the island kingdom of Númenor, which is necessary because it introduces several of the characters who will play key roles in the end of the Second Age and the lead up to The Lord of the Rings. It’s hard to make their stakes feel real given the degree to which they’re protected by the plot until they achieve their distant destinies, and it’s simultaneously difficult to care about the minor characters placed around them just to produce a sense of drama. The Rings of Power isn’t able to overcome those challenges, and episode 4 is the low point of the season as a result.
Morfydd Clark gives the best performance on the show as Galadriel.
Yet the show does still succeed with some of its most established characters: Galadriel and Elrond. Both are commanding legends by the time they are seen in The Lord of the Rings and The Rings of Power is able to use their endpoints as a guide as it provides rich development of their younger selves. It’s effectively a form of officially endorsed fan fiction, exploring the fury that could have turned Galadriel into a queen “beautiful and terrible as the dawn,” while showing deep contrasts in Elrond’s youth as an ambitious and charming half-elf diplomat desperate to prove his worth without sacrificing his honor.
Morfydd Clark gives the best performance on the show as Galadriel, a warrior so consumed in her quest to fight an elusive enemy that she become more like him than she would care to admit. Clark is captivating, embodying the otherworldly grace and power of the elves even as she struggles with the limits of her own power to command those around her. She’s particularly electrifying in her scenes with Halbrand, a man with a mysterious past she pushes to live up to his potential and at her most terrifying when demonstrating just how far she’s willing to go to fight the dark forces rallied by the warlord Adar. Both actors in turn open up around her like flowers drawn to light, with Charlie Vickers delivering a romantic chemistry held back by powerful secrets and Joseph Mawle transforming Adar from a generic villain to a far more nuanced character.
What We Said About the Series Premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
IGN’s Alex Stedman gave the two-episode premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power an 8/10, writing that it “may take it a little while to hit its stride, but once it does, it immerses us in a gorgeous fantasy world with a great ensemble and several intriguing subplots.” Read the full review here.
Robert Aramayo’s fresh-faced version of Elrond is mostly defined by his dealings with the dwarves of Khazad-dûm. His relationship with Durin, the kingdom’s ambitious heir held in check by his conservative father, has all the odd couple humor of the bond between Legolas and Gimli in The Lord of the Rings. There’s a genuine warmth to every scene involving him and Durin that shine through all the makeup Owain Arthur is wearing to play the dwarf lord, and it extends into a sweet found family that also includes Durin’s clever and charming wife Disa.
Original characters provide an opportunity to flesh out the world when the story shifts away from the big players. The sweet romance between the elven soldier Arondir and the human healer Bronwyn provides an excellent perspective on the lasting impacts of the war against Morgoth that brought the elves to Middle-earth, while also providing a counterpoint to the normal fantasy narrative where the best leaders are nobles. The nomadic harfoots serve the same purpose as their descendents the hobbits, delivering plenty of comic relief along with a portrait of innocence as they do their best to navigate an increasingly dangerous world. Daniel Weyman doesn’t get to do much besides act addled as The Stranger dropped into their midst, but Markella Kavenagh is charming as the oddly adventure seeking Nori who takes it upon herself to help him however she can.
The Rings of Power tries to get around the prequel problem by concealing characters’ identities, to mixed results. Much of the season’s conflict is devoted to trying to figure out where Sauron is and what he’s up to, and it’s a question clearly written to get viewers wondering the same thing. Is he the mysterious Stranger who falls out of the sky and is taken in by the harfoots, the dark lord rampaging through the Southlands with an army of orcs, the handsome scion of a lost dynasty looking to start anew, or someone else entirely? With so many fake outs and manipulative misdirection in play it’s not all that surprising that when the final shape of the puzzle is revealed, the pieces don’t quite fit together neatly.
But many of those missteps can be forgiven because of just how impressive the show is at its best. It marries moments of beautiful tenderness, focused on the power of friendship and community, with harrowing battles where darkness looms large. Good and evil are real forces in Tolkien’s world and the fight between them is constant, waged with fire, swords, and the hearts of every person when they face the choice between fear and courage, love and hate. The Rings of Power feels true to Tolkien in the best possible way even as it takes liberties when charting its own course.
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