Review: Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, "The Great Wave" | Season 1, Episode 4
Good character development and a stronger sense of purpose keeps the season moving forward
The greatest challenge facing any attempt at adapting the work of Tolkien for modern audiences is finding a way to make the material, for want of a better word, “accessible.” Which isn’t to say the books themselves are unreadable: Fellowship of the Rings does have a hundred-page-plus speedbump to get over if you aren’t utterly enchanted by hobbits, but past that, the rest of The Lord of the Rings is pretty smooth sailing, and The Hobbit remains, as they say, a complete bop. But, with LotR—and, even more obviously, The Silmarillion)—Tolkien was working in a specific milieu, one which appealed to both the scholar and the absolute nerd in the great man–myth-making on a grand scale, an effort to create an epic that could fit alongside the likes of The Illiad or Gilgamesh or Beowulf. Such epics tend to have heroes and villains who don’t really operate under the rules of ordinary people, motivated by a kind of primal nobility that makes them beautiful but dista…