Review of season 2 of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” – don’t forget that it’s a drama | Television

AAmazon's streaming service Prime Video has the burden of producing a fantasy series as popular as Game of Thrones once was. Can Prime Video prevail? Fearsome enemy HBO casts a long shadow over the series with House of the Dragon, which has the huge advantage of being a prequel to Game of Thrones, but Amazon has a big, iron-clad prequel of its own. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has a colossal production budget that you can see in every scene on screen. And the series is back for season two.

The goal here is usually to transcend the fantasy genre while catering to fantasy fans. Game of Thrones has been the most successful series on TV because it simultaneously delighted people attracted to epic prophecies, mythical beasts and sudden disemboweling in kingdoms with exotic made-up names (but that are basically medieval England), and viewers who would normally run away from such a thing. While Prime Video's other big fantasy gun, The Wheel of Time – yes, Amazon is so desperate to capture this market that it has an insanely elaborate fantasy backup series in case the main series fails – has struggled to fill that gap, The Rings of Power is a little different. It believes no crossover is possible because the Rings franchise is so big that its fans and a mainstream audience are the same thing.

And so there was a lot of foreshadowing and tongue-in-cheek allusions in the first season. It introduced younger versions of familiar characters, other characters we strongly suspected were younger versions of Ring veterans even though they currently have different names, and places and peoples also poised to morph into the familiar. Behind all of this was the question: Who is Sauron? The villain of the story was secretly taking other forms, so we spent the first season saying, “Is it him! Or is it him?” Then we found out who it was, but not everyone onscreen knew, so the question now is: Where is Sauron and who is he fooling?

The scenes depicting the machinations of a skilled manipulator help The Rings of Power to at least temporarily overcome the basic problem of this prequel, which is that it is mostly lore rather than drama. The characters often tell each other what has happened, what will happen, or what must not happen under any circumstances, otherwise Middle Earth will be doomed – and all of this in an amusingly portentous tone that can give casual viewers the impression that the fantasy realm is not for them. In this respect, The Rings of Power is not helped by the vocal affectation of the elves, who theatrically roll their r's, but only with proper names: every time “Mordor” is mentioned, the actors suddenly sound like Taggart announcing a murder.

There are other appeals, however, the most obvious of which is the show's production quality. When a giant spider attacks, it's convincing in its movements and the detail of its horrific, giant spider face; when a horde of festering orcs is required, there are hundreds of them, and they hum believably with rot and filth. Waterfalls, volcanoes, magical trees you don't want to stand too close to, and devastating, nuclear-like explosions are all rendered spectacularly, while the fight scenes – of which the three comeback episodes could do with a few more – whirl and slap along with bravura.

The proto-hobbit Harfoots, who sound dubiously Irish, are cute — if you don't mind the slightly cartoonish accents of British and Australian actors — and the dwarves, who sound more Scottish, are funny and have a nice way of phrasing: “stubborn as a root-bound parsnip” and all. They take some of the burden off the main gang, the elves, who are busy with the serious job of protecting the three titular rings, each of which contains the mystical power of mithril, a rare ore. While the men are more of a lumbering morass of moralizing blather and ridiculous side-hairs, Morfydd Clark leads them well as the intense Galadriel, whose growing presence as a warrior is balanced by the shame and insecurity of having been deceived by Sauron, who “appeared in fine form” — in other words, in the first season, he was hot and she wanted to sleep with him. When others ask her if she has overcome her desire for evil, she does not seem confident.

So drama worth watching isn't completely absent, but when Sauron – Saurrrrrrrron!! – boastfully says that the world “shall worship you, the Lord of the Rings!” to someone we know isn't the Lord of the Rings because Sauron himself is to become the Lord of the Rings, as he was in the Lord of the Rings books and movies, we're reminded of the weakness of The Rings of Power, which is that it's just a bit too… Lord of the Rings-y. As long as that's the case, it's going to struggle to conquer Earth.