The Lord Of the Rings: The Rings Of Power

anyone watching Season 2? I've only watched the first episode but it seems promising and felt better than season 1

I'm still watching. I do think this season has been better than season 1 so far. They kind of botched the canon story of the ring making in the season 1 finale, but given that, I really like what they've done with that and the Sauron storyline in season 2.

Rumours abound it's going to be cancelled, and it's easy to say why. Nothing has really changed from season 1. The story is plodding along, there are no stakes and none of the characters are likable.

I said earlier it's like the prequals, but it's also like The Last Jedi where you have a 4 "C" stories that are going nowhere interesting.

Is it possible for any of the humans that we see now to become of the Nazgul. Or do those people come much later. Seems like this Ar Pharazon bloke is a prime candidate for one of those slots if that is in play.

Everything I've read indicates that S3 is going ahead. The showrunners indicated from the start that Amazon had agreed to five seasons. Amazon proudly announced viewer numbers for S2. Morfydd Clark said she's expecting the official announcement soon.

Maybe lots of people are hate watching, but so what? Doesn't matter to execs why people watch as long as they do in sufficient numbers.

I doubt people hate watching is enough to see the show through 5 seasons. It looks like the writing team has been replaced for season 3, but I doubt that's enough to turn things around as the show has too many fundamental flaws at this point.

It doesn't really help matters that the guy playing Sauron is the only half decent actor among the protagonists. With such bad writing, he's the only one capable of polishing the turd well-enough to make his character interesting, so you're actually rooting for him.

I still think season 2 was an improvement over season 1 and the show isn't as bad as the haters want to make it sound, but it is frustrating how much better it could have been with better writing. It has all the ingredients it should need: a massive budget, amazing visual effects and score, the backdrop of the Tolkien universe, and the outline of a great story that connects to one of the greatest fantasy franchises of all time, but they keep shooting themselves in the foot with just awful writing.

Spoilers below.

40% of the way through the show, I still have no idea what the point of the whole Harfoot plotline is. So far, it's a completely standalone story that doesn't connect to anything else, but it's not nearly interesting enough to care about. It's like they just wanted an excuse to include hobbits and wizards and Tom Bombadil, even though none of them have any role in this story. But then no one had any good ideas how to do that, so we got 2 seasons of an amnesiac Gandalf wandering aimlessly trying to discover his name and find his staff, with the main narrative purpose being to hamhandedly build up to the big reveal of his identity. Grand Elf? Ugh. Literally, just cut this whole thing, and you instantly have a much better show.

The Celebrimbor/Annatar stuff this season was genuinely great though. Sauron's portrayal as a shape-shifting deceiver was really well done and fits perfectly with the source material. The way he uses the elves' & dwarves' own ego and greed to manipulate them into doing his will, rather than just destroying them with armies of orcs, is really the central theme of this whole story. It's fun seeing that aspect of the character rather than just the weakened, disembodied, generic bad guy version from LotR. Looking forward to more of Annatar next season.

There are writing issues in some places, but I still think the Galadriel/Gil-galad/Elrond/Durin stuff has generally been enjoyable enough. Arondir is a good original character, and I think the actor is doing a great job, but they seem lost about how to really use him in a coherent way. He's just kind of there, bouncing from place to place doing cool elf warrior ****. I liked the Adar plot as well, even though it's non-canon. The random Isildur adventures / love story was dumb and pointless.

The Numenor stuff has been kind of disappointing. The wide shots of the city look epic and amazing, as they should, but every time there's a scene of Numenoreans, it's just a couple dozen extras in a tiny space, so the scale of things just feels really small and unimpressive. This is supposed to be the pinnacle of the civilization of Men, so much so that their direct heirs are literally still treated as royalty thousands of years later, yet the Numenoreans in the show all just seem like idiots, really no different from any other men we've seen elsewhere. It also feels like very little happened with them this season other than some internal bickering, which really did a poor job of establishing the reasons behind the deep divide between the two factions there, which is a huge part of that story. I assume that plotline is going to be a much bigger part of season 3, so hopefully the new writing team can do a better job with it.

Sam Hazeldine as Adar deserves greater credit. He was very good, managing to make the orc side oddly sympathetic. Killing him off may be a mistake because that's one less compelling character in a show that doesn't have enough.

The Harfoots and Numenor could be entirely excised from the show, and it would make little difference to the overall plot so far. I know that Numenor is going to be more important (due to Isildur's presence if nothing else), but they've failed to connect it to anything else or do anything interesting with it as a standalone story.

I agree with the majority of your post, but I think this is the only bit I disagree with. Arondir is (another) pointless character - it's like they watched Picard season 1 and decided that the ninja *elf* whose only job was decapitating people was cool and decided to do that.

Also, Galadrial and Elrond might be the show's biggest problem. They are effectively the two leads, but both actors are poor and particularly in Galadriel's case, badly written - she's arrogant and unsympathetic, and this makes it really hard to care what happens to her. For example, when she got impaled by Sauron, this was the best expression Morfydd Clark could find. My partner and I were laughing through the whole scene she was that bad, which i don't think was the tone they were aiming for in the climactic battle of the series.

I guess it doesn't help that you can't help but compare them to Hugo Weaving and Cate Blanchet, which is a tough gig for any actor, but if you're going to spend a billion dollars on a show, get some decent known actors in the leads.