The fatal problem with The Rings of Power

Three episodes in I think I’ve worked out the thing that’s most annoying about The Rings of Power. It isn’t the gratuitously diverse casting. It isn’t the saccharine tweeness of the hobbity Harfoots. It isn’t the ‘You go girl!’ tediousness of the relentless female character heroics. It’s that the entire series appears to have been constructed with all the charm, flair, character, originality and artistry of an Ikea wardrobe.

Take the scene where Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and her fellow shipwreck victim Halbrand arrive – looking ludicrously healthy for a duo who till recently spent days clinging desperately to a raft of the Medusa – in the city state of Numenor. It is a spectacular place, shimmering with the kind of magnificence – massive statues, vaulting, fluting, towering, porticoed, white-stoned, etc – which only millions of dollars worth of computer wizardry can generate. But – inevitably – it’s not nearly as delightfully inviting as it first appears.

I say ‘inevitably’ because this now seems to be the standard formula in The Rings of Power. Wherever you go there must always be tension. Nothing, ever, can be anything other than hard won. Yes, of course, I appreciate that this is the key to all exciting adventure fiction. The Lord of the Rings, for example, would not nearly be the classic it has become if Frodo had simply found a straight road from the Shire to Mount Doom, galloped along it astride Shadowfax, and tossed the ring into the volcano with nary a mishap on the way.

But when Tolkien was doing it, he didn’t make the process seem so painfully obvious. All the various setbacks and disasters faced by the Fellowship appear to occur organically, unexpectedly, partly from circumstance and partly out of character. Never did you feel you were being tricked by authorial wiles into being scared or excited or tense when you didn’t need to be. With The Rings of Power, though, you do very much. You can almost see the scriptwriting team, cranking the gears, going through the motions and crying: ‘Time for some more jeopardy! It’s what the Rules of Screen Drama require.’

So, in Numenor, we are denied the respite of a natural and plausible scene where Galadriel and Halbrand are lent a boat and crew and swiftly escorted out of the city. No. There must be a confrontation in the royal court, where it is made clear to Galadriel that, as an elf, she is not welcome. And we must endure Galadriel, instead of allowing discretion to be the better part of valour (as she would, surely? Yes I know she’s an uppity warrior type but she’s also hundreds of years old so must have acquired a certain degree of understanding in how not to get yourself killed for no reason), acts so snotty and combative she runs a serious risk of being executed on the spot.

You sit there watching this pantomime – well I did, anyway – not on the edge of your seat at all this geopolitical and cultural tension, but rather going: ‘Oh just get on with it will you? I’m not buying this. This is totally unconvincing. And I do NOT need to waste half an hour having played out before my eyes two points that could have been made in about 30 seconds – viz, that in Numenor there is bad blood between humans and elves, and that Galadriel is jolly feisty. (As if we didn’t know).

There was a similar problem in Episode Two, when perfumed ponce Elf Elrond (Robert Aramayo, probably my favourite actor in the series so far) goes to visit an old dwarf friend in Khazad-dûm. Once again, with painful inevitability, we are refused a scene where the dwarf goes: ‘Mate. Great to see you. Been a while. Come and meet the missus.’ No. Instead, we have to endure several millennia’s worth of performative difficulty in which first Elrond has to engage in a tedious rock breaking contest, then endure a massive sulk from his dwarf chum Prince Durin IV, before eventually, grudgingly being allowed to meet Durin’s unaccountably dark-skinned wife and engage in some bonding. Again, all this could have achieved in a scene lasting a minute, without doing the drama any harm. Also, while we’re on the subject, why do the dwarves all now speak with Scottish accents when in Lord of the Rings they spoke with Welsh ones? This is especially odd, given that Prince Durin is played by a Welshman, not a Scotsman, Owain Arthur.

Still, just when you’re tempted to give up, the series pulls something out of the hat. The scene where Arondir, the non-canonical Silvan Elf (played by the handsome Ismael Cruz Cordova) tries to stage a prison break from Orcish captivity was almost Spartacus-like in its excitingness. Pity that it’s the exception rather than the rule.