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The fifth episode of Amazon’s The Rings of Power only manages to fuel the question of how much lower the show can go. Far from getting better with each episode, The Rings of Power delves into meaningless dialogue, increasingly ridiculous scenes, and charisma-less characters.
While The House of the Dragon is growing in audience and once past the halfway point of its season, so much has already happened -some of it memorable-, The Rings of Power enters its second half and it seems that not only has nothing remarkable happened, but it’s going nowhere.
Well, yes, it’s going down. It has reached such depths that it’s surprising that a Balrog hasn’t appeared yet. Or maybe they’ve passed it by, because episode 5 accentuates all the problems that were already evident in the previous ones, making it increasingly clear that it’s a lousy adaptation in free fall.
Some of the problems of The Rings of Power
Galadriel is still the same or more haughty, insufferable and unfriendly than before, something that the character did not need for its development, and that can only be explained by being the new model of femininity that progressivism tries to impose.
The powerful, fascinating and admirable female character Tolkien gave us has been reduced to a “tough guy” in an elf’s body. In episode 3 she had a moment when she was riding a horse that was so cringe, it seemed insurmountable, but no, in the last episode she stars in a sword fight that looks like a slapstick sequence out of a Jackie Chan movie, with the difference that the ones of him try and manage to be funny.
Actress Morfyd Clark plays Galadriel in The Rings of Power (EFE by Mario Guzmán).
The constant attempt to shoehorn feminist ideology into The Rings of Power is a drag on the series, and has done incalculable damage. It has become increasingly evident that there is not a single decision made by a male character in these episodes that was not the result of a direct order from a woman, or covert persuasion.
Not that this has anything to do with the plot, or wants to show them as victims of manipulation -which would give the characters much more complexity, by the way-, but it is clear that the intention is to show that the only characters with agency are the women, relegating the men to mere followers. Time will tell if we are right, but it seems clear that the only male characters who maintain some judgment of their own will eventually be revealed as the show’s villains.
In the section of nonsense dialogues, in this episode they have managed to reach new heights of stupidity. It turns out that the elf Elrond had promised the dwarf Durin that he would not reveal the secret he had entrusted to him that they had found a new mineral with incredible properties, mithril.
Later, the High Elf King Gil-Galad tells Elrond of the legend of how the mithril was formed in the depths, after a fight between an elf and a balrog, and asks him if the dwarves have found it. Elrond replies that he has sworn an oath not to reveal the secret entrusted to him by the dwarf prince, and that he will not tell him.
Who wrote this, and isn’t answering that precisely confirming that they have found it? The most ridiculous part of all this is that his answer makes Gil-Galad not know if they have found it or not. Are the elves idiots? Are the scriptwriters idiots? Do they take us, the viewers, for idiots?
So far, the only positive highlights of the series are the beautiful landscapes of New Zealand, but for that you’d better watch a documentary about the oceanic country. I don’t think Amazon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars just for that, nor should we spend our time watching The Rings of Power.
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