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Episode 6 of The Rings of Power does nothing but confirm the very serious scripting problems the series has. At this point, the series has become an unintentional comedy that is only worth watching for the sheer curiosity of what the next silly thing will be.
One wonders where all the money Amazon has spent on The Rings of Power has gone. It doesn’t seem to have been on the screenwriters, although whatever they’ve been paid, it’s too much. Nor on the actors, because there are none known and none of them having any glamour whatsoever. It doesn’t look like they spent a lot of money on the interior design either, let alone on the armor, which looks like it was made from the leftover foam from Amazon order wrapping.
Jeff Bezos should definitely audit where the hundreds of millions invested in The Rings of Power have gone.
The Problems of The Rings of Power episode 6 (Spoiler Alert)
Although The Rings of Power is not based on any fully developed material already in existence, it is as predictable as if it were following to the letter of a book already written, because it follows point by point the manual of wokeism and incurs every cliché there is.
Evidently, this imaginary woke style manual is nowhere near anything written by Tolkien, who would never have used such absurd and inadequate metaphors as the one heard in this chapter that “one cannot satisfy their thirst by drinking seawater.” To make matters worse, this is not even uttered by a Númenórean, who are, after all, sailors.
It also makes us raise an eyebrow that Amazon has left Tolkien reduced to a cheap copy of Game of Thrones, with slogans like “the sea is always right” —which they repeat as much as they did in Westeros with “winter is coming” or “what is dead may never die”— and they have even dared to copy the phrase of the “king that was promised.”
The writing of The Rings of Power has the level of any fan fiction, but with the aggravating factor that it is not written by Tolkien fans, but by superfans of wokeism.
The only narrative technique that the screenwriters of The Rings of Power seem to know how to handle is that of their alma mater, Bad Robot, J.J. Abrams‘ macguffin and mystery box factory. Each episode is a mere succession of small mysteries that are solved in the most predictable and stereotypical way imaginable.
The screenwriters must think that when at the end of The Rings of Power it is revealed that Halbrand is Sauron, we will all react as we did when we found out that Bruce Willis was a ghost in The Sixth Sense. But no, we will be just as surprised —that is, not at all— as we were when at the end of this episode we discovered that what was wrapped in cloth was not Sauron’s sword.
The dialogues of the female protagonists seem to be taken from Sex and the City, and whenever two empowered women coincide —and the screenwriters make sure that it is so repeated—, they always interact with each other to tell each other how splendid they are and demonstrate large doses of the feminist sorority. It’s a pity they’re not shown later on, but they’re not shown giving each other a hard time behind each other’s backs.
The Rings of Power‘s woke feminism is one of the series’ most crippling straitjackets. In this episode, Bronwyn, who for some strange reason suddenly became the de facto leader of the group of humans, once again takes down an orc with consummate ease. She’s already killed more orcs than John Wick Russian mobsters.
In this episode, Bronwyn confronts a huge orc who was beating up an elf, and when he was about to finish off Arondir, she kills him without batting an eyelid. In fact, throughout the series, Bronwyn is always gorgeous and spotless, even within hours of almost bleeding to death. She is the female equivalent of James Bond, whose bow tie never came undone no matter what happened to her.
Although it seemed impossible to make Galadriel even more inconsistent with the character created by Tolkien, the screenwriters of The Rings of Power have outdone themselves, and have added to her arrogance, stubbornness, belligerence, and constant bad temper, the fact that she is now also a potential genocidal and orc torturer. If this is the model of a woman that feminism wants to sell, it’s no wonder they are scaring more and more people away.
Galadriel wants to wipe out all the orcs, but also the uruk, because the character of Adar, the dark elf, is in charge of reminding her at all times that he is not an orc, but an uruk, showing the same or greater insistence than the wokes claiming to be called by their preferred pronouns.
In this episode of The Rings of Power, finally, there is some action, but not much, lest we wake up startled from the drowsiness caused by the series. It’s more like a few minutes of battle, where the orcs return to fight as if they were trained by the fight choreographer of the Power Rangers, with jerky movements that are ridiculous.
In the short-lived attack of the orcs on the small fortress that is full of improvised traps as if it were an episode of The A-Team or Home Alone, we can see that the military incompetence in planning and executing the defense by elves and men, is only surpassed by the incompetence of the orcs in carrying out a coherent attack… which makes us think that the incompetent in military matters are the scriptwriters.
The editing and montage are not very coherent either, since we are shown the troops of Númenor riding in broad daylight to the aid of the besieged, while in the besieged fortress it is still night. Either the budget of almost $500 million did not allow them to hire someone to notice these flaws or the person in charge of doing so was so overwhelmed by the errors that plague the series that he preferred to say that everything was fine, otherwise they would have to remake the whole thing.
To finish reducing Tolkien’s legacy to ashes, it only remains that in the next chapters we have a sex scene between Galadriel and Halbrand. Seeing the spiral of ridiculousness in which The Rings of Power has plunged, not even this would surprise us.
Ignacio Manuel García Medina, Business Management teacher. Artist and lecturer specialized in Popular Culture for various platforms. Presenter of the program "Pop Libertario" for the Juan de Mariana Institute. Lives in the Canary Islands, Spain // Ignacio M. García Medina es profesor de Gestión de Empresas. Es miembro del Instituto Juan de Mariana y conferenciante especializado en Cultura Popular e ideas de la Libertad.
Social Networks: @ignaciomgm