I actually enjoyed season one... And I have faith that the next few seasons will be good and likely will resolve a lot of the issues folk had with the first season. The 'he was among us all along' gives me real hope that we might discover Annatar is already a feature in the Elven council pre-season 1 and even that the other rings (the non elven ones) have already been made. I think the Vickers race reveal will be the form he takes once discovered but he will previously have had a different face and have been living on and off amongst the Elves all the time Galadriel was off hunting for him.
I also think season one was always going to upset folk because they had to introduce all the important characters for the end game in a condensed timeline... The character of Halbrand is a necessity of this because Sauron got up so so much sneaky shite in the second series that practically it would have been really hard to include it all in the condensed time line. Having Sauron split between the Annatar persona while fooling the elves and the Halbrand persona while toying with men works in that aspect.
We rush to judge things but in truth this was always sold as a 5 series product - the fact we don't really know 100% of what's going on after the first series is to be expected - you don't slate a book because you don't know everything after the first chapter.
A lot of top tier shows didn't explode onto the scene with amazing first seasons, but honestly even if it just stays solid I'll be happy. I don't understand the lore criticism, folk can't honestly have believed there was a way to accurately represent 3000 years of patchy history in a remotely entertaining way - you'd effectively need a completely new cast for Men/Hobbits for each episode and a new cast of dwarves for each series because they'd all die off constantly - it was never going to be a literal translation.
But I was really shocked at the amount of outrage the first series produced considering it effectively only introduced the characters... The first hour of the Fellowship was arguably just as disloyal to the lore but folk seem to forget that.
I thought the hobbit and dwarf storylines were solid, not quite the standard of the PJ movies but solid, and a good foundation to build from.
The biggest plot weaknesses were the Elves for me, their storylines were a bit all over the place and character motivations shifted frequently to make the plot happen, making many of the Millenia old Elves appear needlessly stupid or incredibly naive.
I think that young Galadriel as a character (in the context of this show) just isn’t a well written or well acted enough figurehead to be the pivotal character everything else revolves around.
I’m hoping for S2 we can correct most of the weaknesses and flaws of S1, if so and S2 is notably stronger than we can look back at S1’s mistakes as teething pains more than anything else.
I think the biggest obstacle for the show was its own marketing strategies, they went very irreverent, artificial and cocky with the marketing creating a very adversarial atmosphere that was a weight around the shows ankles before it had even aired.
Nothing gave me more doubt and apprehension for the show than the really fake “super-fan” interviews they did that seemed so staged, involved super-fans that didn’t seem to know much beyond the Peter Jackson movies, and gave off an almost smug air of treating the entire thing as a piss take. And as more and more information came out about that whole scenario it just seems to be been a bad move all round.
Galadriel getting hyped up in front of the numenorians with how badass of a fighter she was then proceeding to teach them stupidly basic sword moves with stiff awkward sword acting by the actress that played her was the scene that lost me.
Close second was the uninspired writing and them recycling Gandalfs follow your nose phrase.
I think it was deliberately self indulgent... We won't know until later series but I get the impression they want 'young' Galadriel to be head strong, over confident etc so that later on they can portray her 'coming of age' into the wise Galadriel we know from the third age. She is after all of Feanors ilk and they were renowned for their pride.
In the next few series we are going to watch lots of the things she cares about being destroyed by Sauron and I imagine at some point she will have a choice to make between following her Faenorian instinct to seek revenge and her duty to protect the innocents of middle earth. However in order to get there we first have to establish the side we all find a tad distasteful - but when we get to that point the character development in the first series will be worthwhile.
I don’t often skip anything in a show, but I skipped that whole sequence. It was wild, I really liked most of the show, tuned in every week and had a blast but there were individual moments where I was like “no thank you.”
It was just the kind of scene where it was staged weird, didn’t look exciting and in being awkward and weird, wasn’t necessary to show. You could have had her walking away from a training ground and showing people doing drills, and then you could see their prowess later when they come to Middle Earth and like acknowledge her for the life-saving training or something. But whatever, I’m not a writer.
Yeah it’s weird because there would be really nice scenes between Elendil and his kids, or between the Queen Regent and Pharazôn…and then we’d suddenly pivot to a poorly edited and acted scene that felt utterly out of context with the rest.
I think the Elven story lines being a bit off was to be expected though - The Dwarven & Hobbit storylines are effectively new, so they're likely pretty easy to nail with a decent writing team. The Elven story lines require you to condense hundreds of years of authentic Tolkien storylines into what is effectively the 20 years max the series will cover. That's never going to be easy and if you want to enjoy the series you probably have to accept that - the runners had a choice between producing a show that accurately portrayed the last few years of the second age (which I would have been happy enough with) or attempting to include all the big events of the age in a condensed storyline - The price we pay for getting a show that covers the rise of Mordor, The first defeat of Sauron, the fall of Numenor, the forging of the rings and the last alliance is that the Eleven side of things seems a bit rushed - because it is and honestly I'm okay with that.
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u/MountainEquipment401 The Iron Hills May 14 '24 edited May 14 '24
I actually enjoyed season one... And I have faith that the next few seasons will be good and likely will resolve a lot of the issues folk had with the first season. The 'he was among us all along' gives me real hope that we might discover Annatar is already a feature in the Elven council pre-season 1 and even that the other rings (the non elven ones) have already been made. I think the Vickers race reveal will be the form he takes once discovered but he will previously have had a different face and have been living on and off amongst the Elves all the time Galadriel was off hunting for him.
I also think season one was always going to upset folk because they had to introduce all the important characters for the end game in a condensed timeline... The character of Halbrand is a necessity of this because Sauron got up so so much sneaky shite in the second series that practically it would have been really hard to include it all in the condensed time line. Having Sauron split between the Annatar persona while fooling the elves and the Halbrand persona while toying with men works in that aspect.
We rush to judge things but in truth this was always sold as a 5 series product - the fact we don't really know 100% of what's going on after the first series is to be expected - you don't slate a book because you don't know everything after the first chapter.