This was the one storyline I was really looking forward to, and nothing exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of Rings of Power Season 1 more completely.

Setting: I really love the visuals and maybe 90% percent of the world-building. I don’t care about the timeline compression issues(1), and the most obvious pieces of stupidity (ship size and “elves coming to take our jobs”) are fairly fleeting. The cavalry rope-a-doping infantry with chains was apparently an actual thing in Spain at some point, but I can’t find enough English language info about it to judge whether Rings of Power was doing it badly. As for complaining about crowd scenes in a production shot during Covid, in a country (New Zealand) which was particularly hardcore about all things Covid, that’s just dumb. Plenty of more legitimate things to complain about with ROP.

Plot: most of what we’ve got is fairly entertaining political machinations between the Elf-friends and the King’s Men, but unfortunately we have skeevy boring Halbrand and Angry Elf Galadriel stinking up the joint. If the object of the exercise was to get me to declare Elendil a saint for putting up with Galadriel, or sympathize with Pharazon’s anti-elf policies…congratulations, writers, you succeeded. But at what cost?

Elendil: To be honest, I’d always imagined Elendil the Tall as Sir Christopher Lee circa 1958 with silvery gray contact lenses on, or possibly same-vintage Charlton Heston with suitable wig and contacts, so this gnarly sea captain on the tallish side of average took some getting used to. The ROP actor is really good though, with a warmth and gravitas largely missing from the human characters in the LOTR movies. His tendency to treat Galadriel as a teenager is a logical reaction to her behavior. The drama between him and his children feels boring and manufactured, as does his sudden hatred of Galadriel after Isildur is MIA.

Pharazon: I’d always imagined him more like Yul Brynner’s Ramses in Ten Commandments, but this guy works well with the storyline as written. He fears death profoundly, holds the elves in quiet distaste, and knows how to work any situation to his advantage. He’s the smooth, deceitful operator that Sauron-alias-Halbrand mostly fails to be.

Miriel and Tar-Palantir: Miriel is something unusual for this show, a reasonably well-written character in a difficult situation, brought down by a competent but unexciting actor. The gentleman playing Tar-Palantir is fairly bad, with not much of an excuse on the writing front. Next time he gets a role like this, he needs to go back and watch all the Dr. Manette scenes in all the Tale of Two Cities adaptations, and possibly check out Krull’s Blind Seer of the Emerald Cave while he’s at it.

The young people: Earien is an interesting idea for an invented character – a child of Elendil who isn’t particularly an elf-friend – but the actress only really comes into her own in the final episode, maybe because she’s finally separated from the stupid dad-son drama. Kemen is amusing but unmemorable, really just a foil for her and his father Pharazon.

Isildur: I always saw him as this kind of swashbuckling adventurer type (mostly due to the White Tree incident). The ROP version of the character is a young twerp driven by confusion about what he wants to be when he grows up. This wouldn’t be interesting even if it were well-written and well-acted, which it is not. The sequence of events that lands him on the military expedition would be embarrassing in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. There’s a touching moment between Isildur, his horse and his father that succeeds solely because of the two latter performers. That’s how lame this Isildur is. His friends are less lame but still uninteresting.

(…On a completely unrelated note, my headcanon for Sir Thomas Bertram is that he turned abolitionist when he got to Antibes and saw slavery for himself and that’s why reader-of-abolitionists Edmund Bertram thinks fellow reader-of-abolitionists Fanny Price can have positive conversations with Sir Thomas about the slave trade. It makes bad parent Sir Thomas much more interesting than if he’s the straightforward ogre of the 1999 film. If anyone is willing to adapt Mansfield Park with this angle, please cast Lloyd Owen as Sir Thomas. Thank you in advance.)

(1)In the source material, Elendil and his children lived at the end of the Second Age, well after the initial forging of the Rings of Power.