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[SPOILERS] Rings of Power: "I am Sauron" "I'm Sauron" "I'm Sauron!"


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Well, in the first 5 minutes, the "mystery" was gone, so why they wanted to draw people into 6 wasted episodes of false character development for a villain while making the hero look like a fool, who knows.

This does feel like Lost... a complete waste of time. Why play the audience for fools, investing them in a story that means nothing. If they'd just introduced Sauron in the first place, it would have been much better.

Basically I put it on pause after that first 5 minutes and told myself to just forget about Halbrand, he died at Mordor, and this was a new character. So then onto the rest of the story... Do I give the rest of the story a chance?

Well, my favorite characters are the Stranger and Nori, and the way that played out with the mystics seemed a bit silly, too. I got the feeling this show is aimed at kids. So I thought, OK, I'll watch this as a kid. HE IS GOOD!

(Although Sadoc was the loss of another good character, for no real reason.)

Now to the ship returning to Numenor... they should have spent more time on Elendil, the transition from his state of mind in the last episode to this one. It was glossed over, when it really does matter.

So then we came to Galadriel finally wondering about Halbrand. And more really dumb stuff. False Finrod! Ugh, just get past it! Let me pretend the Halbrand fiasco never happened, so I can have fun revisiting middle earth.

And she doesn't tell Elrond about what happened? WHY!!! Is the identity of Sauron now going to be something GALADRIEL hides? This makes no sense whatsoever. Is this going to be another fiasco plot next season?

OK back to the Harfoots... The Stranger can speak! And he and Nori are off on an adventure! AND HE IS GANDALF! The kid in me may tune in next season for this part, but they really messed up what could have been something good.

What I would say to shows that mess up: don't pull the rug out from under the audience. Surprises are good, WTF's are not. There's a difference. Stories that tell it to you straight, and end up in a good place, are the best ones.

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3 minutes ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

By continuously pressing the skip x seconds key and stopping at points where it seems that something interesting is happening.

If the Amazon player had a option to play at 2x speed, I would have used that

Huh. It sounds like you have better internet but worse everthing else. 

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1 hour ago, Le Cygne said:

Well, in the first 5 minutes, the "mystery" was gone, so why they wanted to draw people into 6 wasted episodes of false character development for a villain while making the hero look like a fool, who knows.

This does feel like Lost... a complete waste of time. Why play the audience for fools, investing them in a story that means nothing. If they'd just introduced Sauron in the first place, it would have been much better.

Basically I put it on pause after that first 5 minutes and told myself to just forget about Halbrand, he died at Mordor, and this was a new character. So then onto the rest of the story... Do I give the rest of the story a chance?

Well, my favorite characters are the Stranger and Nori, and the way that played out with the mystics seemed a bit silly, too. I got the feeling this show is aimed at kids. So I thought, OK, I'll watch this as a kid. HE IS GOOD!

(Although Sadoc was the loss of another good character, for no real reason.)

Now to the ship returning to Numenor... they should have spent more time on Elendil, the transition from his state of mind in the last episode to this one. It was glossed over, when it really does matter.

So then we came to Galadriel finally wondering about Halbrand. And more really dumb stuff. False Finrod! Ugh, just get past it! Let me pretend the Halbrand fiasco never happened, so I can have fun revisiting middle earth.

And she doesn't tell Elrond about what happened? WHY!!! Is the identity of Sauron now going to be something GALADRIEL hides? This makes no sense whatsoever. Is this going to be another fiasco plot next season?

OK back to the Harfoots... The Stranger can speak! And he and Nori are off on an adventure! AND HE IS GANDALF! The kid in me may tune in next season for this part, but they really messed up what could have been something good.

What I would say to shows that mess up: don't pull the rug out from under the audience. Surprises are good, WTF's are not. There's a difference. Stories that tell it to you straight, and end up in a good place, are the best ones.

Maybe next Season’s WTF will be that Galadriel is pregnant by Sauron, and Celebrian is their daughter.

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Wow. I'm now fully sold on this being a shit adaptation. A few stray thoughts as my mind reels from the absurdities of this episode:

-Their attempts at unpeeling the powers of the Rings is just awful. To be expected given the mithril crap, but the rest of it this episode was bad even being prepared from the mithril reveal

-The Thee were not the first Rings made. The Elves did a lot of experimental lesser Rings, and the Three were made in secret in the very end, and represented the height of Celebrimbor's craft. This isn't a throwaway detail, this is why Sauron isn't able to use the Three to take control of the Elves. It is why he attacks Erigion. It is also why the Elves use them, once he's temporary defeated. This episode just wrecked all that completely. Yes, Galadriel makes them make three, for reasons, but by no twist of the imagination can Sauron be said to be uninvolved in their making. 

- Galadriel has just been tricked by Sauron, who shows he knows of some of her most cherished memories. She wakes, almost stabs Elrond, but is swayed because "Elrond" recounts their first shared memory? Did no one thing about the absurdity of this? I know it's meant to be actual Elrond, but once agains, this is atrocious writing 

- So the Elves don't know the Southern kings line ended a thousand years ago? Arondir and his crew must have sent really unreadable messages back to Gil Galad then.

-Also, really cheap shot to have Sauron not just tempt Galadriel, but tempt her with her own words from the movie. It completely reduces that scene and it's impact and is yet another undercut of Galadriel herself. In the world of this show, that moment isn't Galadriel finally giving up her own desire for power, but just her rejecting Sauron's power again, using his own words. Ugh.

-I guess I'm greatful that when "Gandalf" says his thing about following your nose, we didn't see the word "Stranger" become "Gandalf". Small mercies are appreciated. 

 

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Le Cygne said:

And she doesn't tell Elrond about what happened? WHY!!! Is the identity of Sauron now going to be something GALADRIEL hides? This makes no sense whatsoever. Is this going to be another fiasco plot next season?

Not only does she not tell Elrond, she makes a minor modification to Sauron's idea, and we are somehow to believe this is what keeps the Elves from total control at Sauron's hand. 

We're surely not going to see Annatar next season. It's an open question why the Elves would make any more rings, at all, though I think we're going to see yet another departure from the story and have Sauron make the Rings for the Dwarves and Men. 

The whole thing is shambolic, thoughtless, and utterly stupid. 

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34 minutes ago, fionwe1987 said:

Wow. I'm now fully sold on this being a shit adaptation. A few stray thoughts as my mind reels from the absurdities of this episode:

Bless you book-purist heart. :)

I've spent the past week mentally reviewing all the Halbrand/Galadriel scenes and thinking how well they work if he is Sauron - but the flip side of that is if he wasn't going to be revealed as Sauron then that would have all been a massive waste of effort and there isn't really an alternate role for Halbrand that would make sense in terms of why we have spent so mnuch time with this character. So really this was the only outcome that would work.

The scene where he meets Celebrimbor, 'oooh, can it really be you, The Real Celebrimbor?' is great because it shows how easy it is to seduce Feanoreans with flattery - as is appropriate for Hot Sauron. 

I need to watch again and put my thoughts in order, in a broader sense.

All of y'all that keep ragging on Lost and calling it a failed mystery box whatever are really telling on yourselves btw. Itw asn't about the mysteries it was about the characters.

 

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I stopped watching after episode 3. It has been fun reading the reactions in this thread and on reddit.

George RR Martin recently made a blog post about the supposed rivalry of this show and Hot D, claiming that he supports RoP because it is fantasy and he wants more fantasy. The most amusing part of his blog is when he mentioned he wants a good Earthsea adaptation. He couldn't help himself. Of course quality matters, even when it's in a genre you like. It's not fun when a show is treating the material it adapts and its own audience with contempt.

That's pretty much how I felt about this show, its marketing, and from the sound of it, that is something that continues to the very end of this season.

Hopefully there are more fantasy adaptations. But an audience only gets what it asks for, so hopefully audiences are drawn away from shoddy adaptations like this, and drawn towards adaptations like Hot D, where those behind the show actually seem to at least like the material they are adapting.

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37 minutes ago, IFR said:

I stopped watching after episode 3. It has been fun reading the reactions in this thread and on reddit.

George RR Martin recently made a blog post about the supposed rivalry of this show and Hot D, claiming that he supports RoP because it is fantasy and he wants more fantasy. The most amusing part of his blog is when he mentioned he wants a good Earthsea adaptation. He couldn't help himself. Of course quality matters, even when it's in a genre you like. It's not fun when a show is treating the material it adapts and its own audience with contempt.

That's pretty much how I felt about this show, its marketing, and from the sound of it, that is something that continues to the very end of this season.

Hopefully there are more fantasy adaptations. But an audience only gets what it asks for, so hopefully audiences are drawn away from shoddy adaptations like this, and drawn towards adaptations like Hot D, where those behind the show actually seem to at least like the material they are adapting.

I've not yet seen ROP.

I think that the problem with a lot of adaptations of fantasy is too many producers think "Fantasy = nothing has to make much sense."

Whereas the plotting and characterisation should be as good in fantasy as in any other series.  It's simply that fantasy involves imaginary worlds and/or the supernatural.

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That was a very schizophrenic episode. The direction, acting and pacing was probably the best it has been all season. Things happened and there was a good flow of events.

The plotting was confused though, and the pacing for the entire series seemed to be thrown off. Halbrand = Sauron is fair enough, but having Galadriel discover it, Sauron leaving for Mordor and the forging of the Three Rings in secret defiance of Sauron feels like it should have been the entire elven story arc for Season 2. Having it all happen in under 15 minutes was strange. How are they now going to stretch this out for five seasons?

The Stranger being Gandalf is somewhat tedious. I'd have much preferred him being one of the Blue Wizards and the final revelation is that he has to find his missing brother. That's not entirely off the table, but the "follow your nose," line strongly suggests he is Gandalf (unless it's a general Istari saying, but that was never established in the OG Jackson or Tolkien material).

The show overall feels like a puzzle of a golden chalice which you can also arrange to create a picture of a pewter cup: the pieces for something really great are all there, but they've not come together properly. A lot of unfulfilled potential on the table.

18 hours ago, The Bard of Banefort said:

Are there any instances of the mystery box working? Both Lost and Star Wars fell flat on their face. Westworld managed to surprise people, but it also lost most of its audience.

The ur-example is Babylon 5, which presented two mystery box questions in the pilot - "What happened at the Battle of the Line?" and "What do the Vorlons really look like?" - and successfully answered them by the end of Season 2, and used the answers to propel the next stage of the story. New mysteries arose and were then answered. Not only that, but this was done over five 22-episode seasons with a mastery of pacing and providing answers that I don't think any other show has matched since (and in terms of how well a long-form story arc is executed even without mysteries, only really The Wire has done as well or better).

David Lynch created so many mystery boxes in Twin Peaks that the entire show basically consisted of them, but for some reason Lynch gets a pass on this and the fact nothing was ever really explained and left very vague and up to the viewer's interpretation became a feature, not a bug. But 99% of writers and directors are not David Lynch.

13 hours ago, RumHam said:

I'd still like it if someone could define the term, or confirm that it's qctually just a newfangled longer way of saying "mystery."

There is a difference. A mystery is something that's brief and usually answered mundanely, but has plot ramifications. A stranger comes to town. Everyone wonders who he is. He turns out to be the brother of the murdered sheriff out for revenge/an undercover agent looking into a local crime ring/Actual Satan. The plot happens.

A mystery box is usually a mystery which becomes the central focus of the entire story and everyone constantly talks about it and it is not answered for ages and the Internet comes up with 60,000 possible explanations, and when the answer is finally revealed it's a disappointing letdown. A mystery box is basically a story singularity that sucks a lot of time and attention into it and people stop paying attention to the character arcs, the plot or subplot of any given episode etc in favour of endlessly litigating this one point. A good example is the identity of the Final Five on BSG, WTF is going on with the Rambaldi on Alias, what's up with the Reapers/Crucible/Catalyst in Mass Effect etc. Mystery boxes tend to be problematic because if there's a logical, reasonable explanation for them, most of the audience will have already come up with it so the final revelation is anti-climatic, but if the answer is unexpected, off-the-wall or crazy, it just feels like a random arse-pull done on the cheap by writers only interested in sensation, not having a well-crafted story that makes sense.

Ironically, Lost is sometimes cited as the primary example of the mystery box format but it actually resolved most of its mystery boxes on a reasonable timescale and used the answers to propel the storyline forward. The hatch in the jungle is the probably the trope-codifier on television, but that worked out well. The only question Lost arguably stumbled on is "What is the Island?" a question they really should have answered in Season 2 at the latest (and probably with just, "It's a unique but naturally-occurring phenomenon where time, space, energy and life interact in a way unmatched by anywhere else on Earth,").

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52 minutes ago, Werthead said:

That was a very schizophrenic episode. The direction, acting and pacing was probably the best it has been all season. Things happened and there was a good flow of events.

The plotting was confused though, and the pacing for the entire series seemed to be thrown off. Halbrand = Sauron is fair enough, but having Galadriel discover it, Sauron leaving for Mordor and the forging of the Three Rings in secret defiance of Sauron feels like it should have been the entire elven story arc for Season 2. Having it all happen in under 15 minutes was strange. How are they now going to stretch this out for five seasons?

The Stranger being Gandalf is somewhat tedious. I'd have much preferred him being one of the Blue Wizards and the final revelation is that he has to find his missing brother. That's not entirely off the table, but the "follow your nose," line strongly suggests he is Gandalf (unless it's a general Istari saying, but that was never established in the OG Jackson or Tolkien material).

The show overall feels like a puzzle of a golden chalice which you can also arrange to create a picture of a pewter cup: the pieces for something really great are all there, but they've not come together properly. A lot of unfulfilled potential on the table.

The ur-example is Babylon 5, which presented two mystery box questions in the pilot - "What happened at the Battle of the Line?" and "What do the Vorlons really look like?" - and successfully answered them by the end of Season 2, and used the answers to propel the next stage of the story. New mysteries arose and were then answered. Not only that, but this was done over five 22-episode seasons with a mastery of pacing and providing answers that I don't think any other show has matched since (and in terms of how well a long-form story arc is executed even without mysteries, only really The Wire has done as well or better).

David Lynch created so many mystery boxes in Twin Peaks that the entire show basically consisted of them, but for some reason Lynch gets a pass on this and the fact nothing was ever really explained and left very vague and up to the viewer's interpretation became a feature, not a bug. But 99% of writers and directors are not David Lynch.

There is a difference. A mystery is something that's brief and usually answered mundanely, but has plot ramifications. A stranger comes to town. Everyone wonders who he is. He turns out to be the brother of the murdered sheriff out for revenge/an undercover agent looking into a local crime ring/Actual Satan. The plot happens.

A mystery box is usually a mystery which becomes the central focus of the entire story and everyone constantly talks about it and it is not answered for ages and the Internet comes up with 60,000 possible explanations, and when the answer is finally revealed it's a disappointing letdown. A mystery box is basically a story singularity that sucks a lot of time and attention into it and people stop paying attention to the character arcs, the plot or subplot of any given episode etc in favour of endlessly litigating this one point. A good example is the identity of the Final Five on BSG, WTF is going on with the Rambaldi on Alias, what's up with the Reapers/Crucible/Catalyst in Mass Effect etc. Mystery boxes tend to be problematic because if there's a logical, reasonable explanation for them, most of the audience will have already come up with it so the final revelation is anti-climatic, but if the answer is unexpected, off-the-wall or crazy, it just feels like a random arse-pull done on the cheap by writers only interested in sensation, not having a well-crafted story that makes sense.

Ironically, Lost is sometimes cited as the primary example of the mystery box format but it actually resolved most of its mystery boxes on a reasonable timescale and used the answers to propel the storyline forward. The hatch in the jungle is the probably the trope-codifier on television, but that worked out well. The only question Lost arguably stumbled on is "What is the Island?" a question they really should have answered in Season 2 at the latest (and probably with just, "It's a unique but naturally-occurring phenomenon where time, space, energy and life interact in a way unmatched by anywhere else on Earth,").

Yea, that’s a flat out lie if you’re saying Lost answered most of its questions. It very much did the opposite, because “apparently they never mattered”. 

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10 minutes ago, sifth said:

Yea, that’s a flat out lie if you’re saying Lost answered most of its questions. It very much did the opposite, because “apparently they never mattered”. 

What other questions were left unanswered?

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Just now, Werthead said:

What other questions were left unanswered?

What is the Smoke Monster for a starter. Not who, or how it works, but what the dam thing is. Also don’t give me that half answer about liquid in a bottle, because that’s exactly what that is, a half answer.

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I was too tired last night to write a more complete review of the finale. 

Well, it takes 6 days on horseback to go from just the edges of Mordor to Eregion. Yup. And how did they cross the Anduin? The Numenorean ships had already left. 

I would be OK with Halbrand = Sauron because of the little clues from previous episodes, but again, WHAT THE HELL WAS HE DOING ON A SHIP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SEA? We are not told exactly what Adar did to "split him open" and Sauron's words about seeking redemption by healing Middle-earth are difficult to believe. Did he try to cross the ocean to ask forgiveness of the Valar? And the sea monster was basically their response? I posted an opinion a few weeks ago that maybe we could have had an interesting show if told from Sauron's perspective and this episode reinforces that opinion.

Did the actor who plays Halbrand/Sauron always have this accent? I could swear his accent was fluctuating from line to line.

So Sauron offers Celebrimbor pointers in metallurgy and somehow this leads to Celebrimbor talking about powers of the Unseen World. mkaay

I agree with others about Galadriel's reaction to learning the truth. I mostly liked their mind confrontation, though Halbrand using Galadriel's future words to her was really on the nose. However, the scene in the garden reminded me of GoT where Ned Stark confronts Cersei. While the previous episodes tried to shoehorn some sage wisdom into Galadriel, I guess we're back to obsessive Galadriel out for blood again. After all, what could be her reasoning to want to continue the work but with the minor alteration of adding another ring? She just accepted Sauron's gift and thinks this is enough to have her cake and eat it.

Why rush the creation of the objects after which you titled your series? smh Someone else said it already, but based on how this plot went about and Sauron going back to Mordor, it's likely that he will make most of the other rings in Mordor, though I could see the Elves still making Durin's ring.

Gil-Galad was really screwed over in this "adaptation". He didn't show wisdom in rejecting Sauron's gifts, he simply thought they were too pressed for time and had to pack up and leave. So disappointing. I suppose he gets skipped over wielding Vilya and the ring goes straight to Elrond since he was there and was eagerly looking at the rings? OTOH Celebrimbor wearing Narya for a time could make sense. 

The Numenor plot ended on a weird cliffhanger. We are now given the purpose of the existence of Elendil's daughter, but we don't get to see what she sees in the Palantir. Maybe in season 2. Right now, the writers probably have no clue either.

So the Stranger = Gandalf. No, it can't be another one of the wizards, not after that final line. But hold on a second! They only have the rights to the LOTR Appendices. So even if the writers know of Tolkien later in his life deciding that the Blue wizards maybe show up in the Second Age, the Appendices talk about all the Istari showing up in the TA. So why this massive change? Well, because Hobbits are not the only Tolkien creations that must exist in any and all adaptations, we gotta have a good old wizard, too.

The Harfoot goodbye scene was a bit too drawn out. Where they trying to evoke the Gray Havens scene in LOTR?

So the 3 Magi were in fact Wraiths. Ok, cool. I did like the fight for the most part, as there were some glimpses of the high art of the wizards. Though the Harfoots' plot armor was really thick, except for poor Sadoc. What happened to the Stranger's powers at the end? Did he run out of mana and couldn't heal a knife wound after bringing a whole orchard to life in the previous episode? I suppose the dagger could have been a "Morgul blade" since it was wielded by a wraith. So these Wraiths believe that Sauron needs to be in Rhun because that is where his servants are, but the ancient texts that Galadriel discovered said that Mordor was established as a secret fallback power base. I'm just so confused about all this.

The finale did have quite a few good visuals and the acting was solid. But the entire plot of the show has been a convoluted mess. I think curiosity, more than anything, is going to bring me back for season 2.

 

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9 minutes ago, sifth said:

What is the Smoke Monster for a starter. Not who, or how it works, but what the dam thing is. Also don’t give me that half answer about liquid in a bottle, because that’s exactly what that is, a half answer.

It's the security system for the Island, which was answered in Season 1 (and reiterated in Season 2 by the blast door map, which tells us it was codenamed Cerberus by DHARMA, a guardian of the underworld) and it pretty much fulfilled that role throughout. It also operates on the basis of assessing people's morality, terminating those who are "not good people" and it thinks are a potential threat to the Island (which was established in Season 2 and 3, with Eko). The Man in Black merged with the smoke cloud which both saved his life but also trapped him on the Island since, obviously, the security system cannot leave what it is guarding.

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2 hours ago, SeanF said:

I've not yet seen ROP.

I think that the problem with a lot of adaptations of fantasy is too many producers think "Fantasy = nothing has to make much sense."

Whereas the plotting and characterisation should be as good in fantasy as in any other series.  It's simply that fantasy involves imaginary worlds and/or the supernatural.

True enough. I mean, that's my preference. In defence of Bezos though, there are a lot of people who clearly enjoy this show. I'm curious ultimately what the ratio of those who liked it to those who didn't will be.

I'm pretty sure the ultimate moral to all this is that how you adapt something is largely irrelevant to a major demographic. All that matters is that you resurrect a familiar property and advertise that lots of money has been spent on it, because that's just about the only thing that RoP had going for it.

Character development? Logic? Anything making sense at all? Some relation to the author's writing? Irrelevant.

Familiar property name and budget. That's it.

But yeah, for me it doesn't cut it. I'm glad this is non-canonical. They really Anakin'ed Sauron in this version. The fearsome Dark Lord is some bumbling idiot who angers a crowd of a new country he visits, defuses things by buying everyone a drink, then immediately squanders that good will by clumsily trying to steal a guild token (as if no one would wonder what the well known foreigner was doing with such a token], then gets in some street fight and is imprisoned because he really is that dumb. (But it fortunately gives him the opportunity to provide millenia old Galadriel with sage advice on diplomacy, ie don't kick things off by insulting and threatening people who have rescued you and who have you in their power).

But I guess this kind of storytelling is good enough that the critics like it.

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