Latest / Mythmakers / The Rings of Power, Season 2: Our Hopes and Fears

Transcript

The Rings of Power, Season 2: Our Hopes and Fears · Mythmakers

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to MythBakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
• 0:11
  creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Now my name is Julia Golding,
• 0:17
  I'm an author and I direct the activities at our Centre. I thought I would do a short
• 0:23
  episode about the recently dropped teaser trailer for the second season of The Rings of Power,
• 0:32
  which was accompanied not long after by behind the scenes of that particular series they
• 0:40
  return to making. Now I think it's been a couple of years since we first had the first
• 0:45
  season of The Rings of Power, which was something of a hot mess really I think. There's some
• 0:53
  good parts of it, but my overall impression of it was that the storytelling went seriously
• 1:00
  astray with very strange directions chosen and opportunity to link all the story up missed.
• 1:09
  I know that they have a very long story arc that they're thinking of and that might be part
• 1:13
  of the problem, but it did make for quite a chaotic season and I'm just thinking back
• 1:19
  now my recollection of it is not as coherent as it should be after having watched it quite
• 1:26
  attentively and I think that's partly because of the storylines that seem to sprawl rather
• 1:32
  than knit together. So they're coming back with their big budget and they hopefully are
• 1:38
  spending on getting the story right this time. There have seen the fan reactions which
• 1:44
  would have been I think I'm expressing something which was fairly widespread, the feeling
• 1:50
  that the look was good and the CGI was great, casting was on the whole really good, but
• 1:59
  there was just something lacking about the series and the way it treated its material.
• 2:05
  And with the news that Andy Circus and Peter Jackson are gearing up to do what is basically
• 2:10
  a Lord of the Rings prequel in the hunt for golem, they may feel that there is some competition
• 2:17
  out there to them now, that won't be out for a few years I wouldn't have thought, but still
• 2:22
  they've got that breathing down their neck. So let's see what do we think, are they going to bring
• 2:27
  it together? So looking at the teaser trailer, it strikes me that from this teaser trailer,
• 2:35
  it would seem that they are following basically three main storylines. They are following
• 2:44
  and the emphasis is on Sauron getting to power and taking over Mordor and turning that into
• 2:52
  the familiar wasteland that we know from Lord of the Rings. We can see some orcs on the
• 2:59
  march, the sense that he's gathering his forces. And we also, we can see, because he appears again
• 3:08
  in the teaser trailer in a sort of blonde wig, but he's there in his sort of what happens in
• 3:18
  the Silmarillion is that we know that he is taken to Numenor, he sort of is defeated of, well,
• 3:27
  seemingly briefly defeated by Al Farazon, who is the new ruler of Numenor, more about him in a
• 3:35
  second. And he persuades the Numenorians that he's their friend. That blonde wig might not be
• 3:43
  from that bit though, because there seems to be another part of the Sauron story which they're
• 3:50
  doing. The problem here is the sequencing. So let me explain. They've truncated the events
• 3:59
  of the second age to make it all happen concurrently. So if you look at it just in terms of the history
• 4:08
  of the law, you've got in the in the century following 1600 in the second age, you've got
• 4:16
  Celebrimbaugh setting up his foundry and his colony and his elven kingdom in Aregion and making
• 4:25
  the rings. And at the end of that century, so in 1697 is the big showdown. So that's a whole 97
• 4:34
  years later, which obviously in a life of a man is a long time. And this is where they are
• 4:40
  attacked by Sauron, who has been again, another of his disguises,
• 4:48
  trying to persuade Celebrimbaugh to show him how to make the rings. That was sort of hinted at in
• 4:54
  the previous series. This is where I get confused because they kind of did that in the last series,
• 5:00
  but yet they seem to be saying entities of trailer that it's happening again. Because if you
• 5:06
  remember in season one, you got Halbrand, who is the character that comes with Galadriel from
• 5:16
  Numenor and reveals that he is Sauron to Galadriel, to what the end of that series.
• 5:23
  He's already been there, but it seems as though from something in the teaser trailer about he might
• 5:28
  get him getting inside people's minds, that he's also there again. So this is where I'm not
• 5:33
  quite sure what they're doing with it. So is he coming back in the disguise of this Elven
• 5:39
  chap with the blonde wig? Possibly. I think the important thing from storytelling, though,
• 5:44
  is that this whole second age is dominated by the activities of Sauron. It could be called
• 5:51
  the age of Sauron, really, because he is sticking in his malign influence in a big way in Mordor,
• 6:00
  turning that into a wasteland and making it the place where he rules directly. He is
• 6:07
  perverting the making of rings in the Elven Kingdom of Aregion, and he also towards the end of the
• 6:16
  age is sort of taken into captivity and ends up causing the downfall of Numenor. In the actual
• 6:27
  timeline, by you remember, I was saying that in the film, really, in the timeline, it's 1600,
• 6:34
  Kelebrimbor is active in Aregion, and the downfall of Numenor is 3319. So thousands of years later,
• 6:46
  but they're bringing this all together in one's big crunch. This is why it's a bit confusing
• 6:52
  to follow, because they're trying to run all these things concurrently. So in some way,
• 6:59
  Sauron has got to go from missing up Aregion to shortly after missing up Numenor, because the people
• 7:06
  who are there during the downfall of Numenor, particularly the last king, Alpharazon, is already
• 7:15
  in sort of in place within a human lifespan, even if it is a Numenorian human lifespan,
• 7:21
  which is a bit longer. Yeah, I can see why they struggle with their storylines, because it is
• 7:29
  a lot of things to get synced up. Anyway, looking at the teaser trailer, it seems to focus on Sauron
• 7:38
  setting up Mordor, getting in the head of Kelebrimbor, and the rot is beginning to set in
• 7:45
  Numenor as well, because the Alpharazon character, who actually is the advisor to the queen
• 7:52
  from the first heart, the guy, he's got like black and white beard, quite a good look. Yeah,
• 8:00
  just looking up who he is, it's Tristan Gravel. Gravel, anyway, he's the one who's positioning
• 8:09
  himself to become Ruler, and the teaser trailer gives that away because he arrives on Eagle.
• 8:18
  If you arrive on an eagle, you're clearly on the up and up. And Miriel, you remember who is the queen
• 8:23
  figure or the princess figure with her father, who is the previous Ruler just on the point of death,
• 8:29
  as she was blinded in the last series, which makes her vulnerable, of course.
• 8:36
  If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort.
• 8:41
  Because as your life changes and your body changes, sleep number mattresses adapt and shift to give
• 8:47
  you personalized comfort night after night. And now it's the final days of our everything's
• 8:52
  on sale event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses. Our Memorial Day event ends Monday.
• 8:57
  To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a sleep number store or go to sleepnumber.com.
• 9:02
  Sleep number to a good life sleep.
• 9:06
  Yeah. So they're running these storylines together. I wonder if they're going to overcome
• 9:12
  the problem that these storylines are separate. My big gripe with the first season of The Rings of
• 9:20
  Power was it didn't ever start off in the same place. Storylines were set off in different parts
• 9:26
  of Middle-Earth and didn't unite. So the proto-hobbits never really interacted with anybody else.
• 9:34
  They did interact with the stranger who looked a bit like Gandalf on one of the other wizards.
• 9:40
  That's a character played by Daniel Wayman. But they didn't really interact with anyone else.
• 9:47
  And that was quite frustrating because it meant that there was no payoff at the end of the
• 9:52
  series where you said, oh yeah, that's what they were all doing. They didn't. Yeah, like,
• 9:57
  if you think of how the fellowship with the ring works, they come together, they break apart,
• 10:02
  they do their thing, and then they come together at the end for celebration and a sort of melancholy
• 10:08
  end. I would have taken my cues from Tolkien and gone that way, but hey, I'm not on the writing
• 10:14
  team. So the other big culture who seems to be getting quite a lot of time is the dwarven kingdom
• 10:20
  in Caves of Doom or Moria. And this is important because if you look at a map of the second age,
• 10:28
  a region where Kela Brimbaugh is is just outside the doors of Moria. It's the region which the
• 10:36
  fellowship passed through in the third age to find the hidden doors of Moria. That's now because
• 10:45
  of what happens in this age, the region is destroyed. Aron tries to help Kela Brimbaugh,
• 10:52
  he was like a kind of tragic figure in this age, but they don't beat Aron and Aron retreats with
• 11:01
  a remnant of his people to Imladress, which is another name for Rivendell. So you can see those
• 11:08
  pieces moving. It's interesting to know if you look into the appendices of Lord of the Rings that
• 11:13
  the doors survive as quite a strong nation, even though a region is destroyed, because the doors
• 11:21
  are shut and they're able to carry on inside their big mountain kingdom. But there's a one line in
• 11:27
  the, it's in the duins folk section of the appendices if you want to look at that. It says that they
• 11:34
  begin to dwindle, but it's not as a result of this battle with Sarron for a region.
• 11:40
  Looking at the teaser trailer and the making of video, it seems as though this, the female dwarf,
• 11:46
  who was a great character, she and three other female dwarves, two other, the three of them,
• 11:53
  seem to be getting more of a cultural showcase. They seem to be, there's an element of them singing.
• 12:00
  If you look at the making of video, and that's an interesting suggestion to see that there is
• 12:08
  some kind of catholic power that the dwarf women have, which obviously doesn't make it into
• 12:15
  the narrative that Tolkien told, because he doesn't really think in those terms. It's a kind of
• 12:20
  rebalancing of our time, but it's also a father and son story between the two durins during the
• 12:27
  king and during his son. And of course, their big beef is about what to do about digging for
• 12:33
  material and the danger of waking up a bowrog. So while that would be a bit early to do that,
• 12:38
  it's definitely all in there as possible material about greed and what the hunt for treasure can
• 12:46
  do to you, because one of the reoccurring themes in Tolkien is that, like the dragonhold,
• 12:52
  holding on to valuables has a very poisonous effect on a character, that's a trajectory of Thorin,
• 13:01
  who gets a kind of dragon madness that his grandfather had. And it's notable that, of course,
• 13:09
  the big story in Lord of the Rings is getting rid of a treasure, not gaining one.
• 13:15
  So I think Tolkien has this distrust of gold and riches as having a hold on someone's heart.
• 13:23
  That's a very, you can see where he gets that from his Catholic faith. You know, treasures in heaven,
• 13:27
  not treasures here on earth where thieves and moths and russ can get at them. So the other big
• 13:36
  collection of characters who are apparent from the teaser trailer are the elves. The fighting
• 13:43
  elves, if we should call them that, it seems as though Galadriel is going to be on some kind of quest.
• 13:49
  I'm entirely sure what she's going to be doing yet. The actress playing the part says that this
• 13:54
  this particular story brings her more in touch with Middle Earth, which suggests that she isn't
• 14:00
  going to be hanging out on Numenor in this season. I wonder what that in touchness
• 14:07
  means. She's clearly interacting more with Elrond and they're on some kind of quest,
• 14:14
  but it remains to be seen how that interacts with the other characters. I'm really
• 14:20
  interested to see if they can pull this character back into some sense of coherence because she
• 14:24
  seems to have forgotten that she's married, which is one of those oddities. And I don't think they
• 14:30
  knew quite what to do with her in the first season. They used her as a way of traveling from Middle
• 14:36
  Earth to Numenor following a character, but it doesn't make an awful lot of sense or coherence with
• 14:44
  the Galadriel that we get to know. Anyway, it's a challenge. I'll see if they rise to it.
• 14:50
  And then we've got a glimpse of one of the other
• 14:55
  Elven characters that is Arondia, played by Ismail Cruz-Codova. He was the Woodland Alpha one
• 15:04
  with the Woodland-looking armour who ended up, who was in a hinted of a relationship with
• 15:12
  Bronwyn the Fisty human who has the Sun Theo, that little Nexus. It seems as though he is now
• 15:20
  paled up with Isildur who survived. There was a suggestion at the end of the last season that
• 15:27
  Isildur had perished, but of course, historically that can't be the case because we know he's got a lot
• 15:34
  to do coming on. And they seem to have paled up together. I'm getting a bit worried. It's going to be
• 15:41
  a bit incoherent again. Oh, please pull all these story threads together, rings of power writers.
• 15:48
  So we've got tools, we've got Killer Brimble, we've got things happening in Numenor, we've got
• 15:54
  fighting elves and we've got this other Isildur, Arondia and Theo as well. Looks like Bronwyn might not
• 16:01
  be around. Yeah, I'm getting a bit worried. And just to sort of add a final little bit to make
• 16:11
  me even more right, we also get a glimpse of Daniel Wayman playing the stranger in what looks like
• 16:19
  to be a far Eastern context somewhere could be rune or that bit on the map that we never go to in
• 16:25
  Nord of the Rings. And we know that the two of the blue wizards are set of gone to the east. So it
• 16:35
  could be that he's actually one of them. We don't know yet. There is definitely going to be those
• 16:41
  proto hobbits knocking around because they're in the making of. And at the end of the last series,
• 16:49
  he does go off with his friend there, one of the hobbits. Yeah, so the one he goes away with is nori.
• 17:00
  So it may be the rest of them aren't there. She certainly appears in the making of teaser trailer.
• 17:06
  Arondia, I now begin to think it might end up a bit of a bit of a mess, but I will hope,
• 17:13
  I will hope I am pleasantly surprised that all these sprawling lot threads are neatly bound
• 17:21
  into a single sprung seal steel effective weapon of a story line. But that will remain to be seen.
• 17:32
  If you're looking for a frame by frame breakdown of what's going on in this teaser trailer,
• 17:39
  I will recommend the one done by the great cocaine commentator, Nerd of the Rings,
• 17:46
  because it was his post that alerted me to this having come out. And he gives in a lot more
• 17:53
  speculative. He goes into much more detail and speculation about the various aspects he's spotted
• 17:59
  by freeze framing everything. So that's a very almost exhaustive list of what might be happening.
• 18:04
  But I think my big takeaway point is it looks very ambitious. It still looks great, but they need to
• 18:11
  make sure they don't do the same thing that they do too much that we don't care. We need to
• 18:16
  definitely have something to root for and a place where our sympathies can rest as we do when we've
• 18:23
  got hobbits in the picture. We root for hobbits. We know who we care about throughout Lord of the Rings.
• 18:29
  It's hard to define those points of contact within the rings of power.
• 18:34
  If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort.
• 18:39
  Because as your life changes and your body changes, sleep number mattresses adapt and shift
• 18:45
  to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now it's the final days of our
• 18:49
  everythings on sale event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses. Our Memorial Day event ends Monday.
• 18:55
  To experience a whole new world of comfort visit a sleep number store or go to sleepnumber.com.
• 19:00
  Sleep number to a good life sleep.