The Rings of Power’s Heel Turn

Done correctly, the terrible moment in which a villain sees himself as he truly is—his anagnorisis—can be one of the most powerful type-scenes in all of literature. The accumulated sins of weeks or years funnel to a single instant of dread recognition. With repentance unthinkable, the villain embraces his role, firmly and finally casting aside the tattered rags of pretended altruism, self-deception, and social respectability he had cloaked himself with previously.

While Shakespeare’s Macbeth (“For mine own good, / All causes shall give way”) and Milton’s Satan (“all Good to me is lost; / Evil, be thou my good”) provide the classic examples of the type in English literature, they have countless descendants in modern drama. In fact, once you recognize the pattern, you can find it just about anywhere: in prestige television dramas (Breaking Bad’s Walter White), superhero shows (Daredevil’s Wilson Fisk), and even, surprisingly, in Disney princess movies. “You want me to be the bad guy?” Mother Gothel snarls in Tangled, “Fine. Now I’m the bad guy.”

What does any of this have to do with season three of Amazon’s The Rings of Power? It is not that I expect the upcoming season to give one of the show’s unconvincing villains his own muddled anagnorisis—we’ve already witnessed several of these—but that the show itself has finally realized what it is. To understand what I mean by this, it may be useful to recall the fanfare surrounding the first season of the show.

Jeff Bezos’ billion-dollar investment was hailed as a true passion project; showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay were repeatedly touted as true Tolkien enthusiasts; droves of sycophantic Tolkien scholars and influencers were treated to an inside look at the show and dutifully fawned over it in return. Even the show’s marked deviations from Tolkien’s work—in aesthetics, lore, and theme—were largely justified as acts of affection, lovingly updating the professor’s works for a new audience and century. The show advanced in triumphant confidence; lonely dissenters were, by and large, dismissed as wild-eyed reactionary cranks.

Four years later, all that has changed. The Rings of Power has proved to be a spectacular and very costly failure, widely panned by respectable critics while bleeding audiences from premiere to finale and from season to season. The triumphant fanfare is gone. What is left? It seems that Amazon now recognizes The Rings of Power for what it is: a cynical, destructive, exploitative act of sheer creative envy. What’s more, they have chosen to embrace it.

To suggest that The Rings of Power showrunners have consciously adopted the role of anti-Tolkien villain may, I grant, seem absurd. But, if nothing else, it fits the pattern discussed above. Consider: the villain’s recognition ordinarily coincides with a realization of failure. Macbeth’s desperation is heightened when he admits that all the consolations of old age—“honor, love, obedience, troops of friends”—are forever out of his reach; Milton’s Satan only embraces Evil fully when he admits that all Good has been lost.

And for Rings of Power? Suffice it to say that Amazon’s ambitious hopes to create a cultural phenomenon comparable to the original Peter Jackson trilogy or HBO’s Game of Thrones (to say nothing of Tolkien’s books) have vanished beyond all recovery: “they have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow.” And the showrunners know it. How else to explain the five-year time jump between seasons two and three—and the promise that new viewers need not trouble watching the earlier seasons (“even if you’ve maybe never seen the first two seasons, season 3 is a great place to jump in because the stories are starting in a brand new spot”)? How else to explain season three’s bizarrely truncated release schedule, which seems specifically designed (as the trenchant Erik Kain has noted) to soften the impact of negative reviews?

Recognition of failure is not the defining feature of the villain’s anagnorisis, however: a hardening in malice is. Here, again, the current trajectory of The Rings of Power does not disappoint us. From all appearances, in fact, it seems as though Amazon is hell-bent on redoubling the sins of previous seasons.

Where the first two seasons gave us a motley crew of conflicted orcs, morally grey orcs, and even sympathetic orcs, this season threatens us with a positively good orc, allied with the Elves. The first seasons gave us a cringey and almost blasphemous romantic relationship between Galadriel and Sauron. Now, the showrunners emphatically insist (“yes, absolutely”) that they will give us a full-blown love triangle between Galadriel, Sauron, and Galadriel’s long-lost husband Celeborn.

The earlier seasons subverted Tolkien at every opportunity, offering a soulless postmodern absurdity, simultaneously muddy and plastic, in place of Tolkien’s noble, humane, and thoroughly Catholic vision. And season three—well, season three gives us this monstrosity. I suppose I should confess that human beings are complicated and that I don’t know that the showrunners are acting out of pure spite at this point. But would they be behaving any differently if they were?

At least the maniacally wicked proto-Hobbits are gone. Amazon has announced that the so-called “Harfoots” will not appear in the current season. But even this may turn out to be a mixed blessing. For Tolkien, Hobbits were essential to the Magnificat-inspired themes of The Lord of the Rings: the casting down of the proud, the exaltation of the lowly.

As he wrote in 1955, “I myself saw the value of Hobbits, in putting earth under the feet of ‘romance,’ and in providing subjects for ‘ennoblement’ and heroes more praiseworthy than the professionals” (Letter 163). Even in their mangled Amazonian form, one might argue the Harfoots gave the show some kind of anchor in the virtues of simplicity and humility. With this tether removed, there’s no telling where Amazon’s Icarus may soar.

There may be a silver lining in all of this, however. In most stories, the villain’s anagnorisis naturally occurs during the falling action and acts as a clear signal of the approaching end: the character arc is complete and only the final confrontation remains. Will it be any different here? As Amazon’s travesty of Tolkien continues to alienate viewers by undermining and mocking the beloved source material that attracted them to the show in the first place, and as the broader world continues its accelerating Gadarene stampede into the abyss, we have some reason to hope that the story of Amazon’s Rings may be drawing, at last, to its conclusion.