Rings of Power S1E1 Recap: "A Shadow of the Past"

Welcome to the podcast of Power. I'm your host, Mike White. Joining me is mister Chris Dashu. I'm still in shock that it's twenty twenty two and are watching a Lord of the Ring show, given that you and I have talked about Lord of the Rings so many times before, but so many times it's so many incarnations of Tolkien that we uh yeah, yeah, all the way back to the Hobbit, Yeah, multiple different shows. I mean, we've talked about it at least on my show, The Culture Cast a couple of times.

We've talked about it on Ranking and Bass, another show you and I do together about Ranking and Bachelors, but that was the Cartoons. But we've never talked about it on your show. No, No, for whatever reason, I've never covered any Tolkien on the show at all. So I probably have made little references to it, but that's not it. I think that's I think that's almost a given, given how given how much we love Lord of the Rings.

So that's true, and how culturally pervasive it is, well, yeah, anymore. And now, given who owns the rights and who's making the show and the show that we're going to be talking about, I feel like almost at this point. If you don't know what Lord of the Rings is, you're the weird one at this point. So, yeah, it is now to the point where Lord of the Rings is old enough that I've got little snot nosed kids that are like not even millennials, so like younger than that, and they're just like, the effects look terrible in these movies. I'm just like, fuck you kid, it's you know, it's funny.

The original movie came out, Fellowship of the Ring came out in what two thousand and one, twenty one years ago. Yeah, which is wild to think about given where we are now and why we decided to do this show because you know, again, we love Lord of the Rings so much. It was like we're we're you know, we're not gonna we're gonna balk at the opportunity to do a show together on Lord of the On the new Lord of the Rings show like arguably the biggest show of the year. I think like it and that Game of Thrones show are kind of like the two biggest shows of the year, but I would actually contend it's the Lord of the Rings show is like, is the biggest show of the year, And if it's not Amazon is trying to make it the biggest show of the year.

Well, they definitely spent the most money on this show. Yeah, holy shit, I mean, good God in Heaven that that much is certain. If you want, if you wanted to see what it looks like to try and compete with Disney in regards to the budget of your show, look no further than The Lord of the Rings Ring The Rings of Power, Because my god, it's a movie split up over eight parts, and on this episode we were talking about the first part, a Shadow of the Past, and we are being introduced to characters left, right and center through this a lot of jumping around. We are going all over the place, meeting our el friends. We're meeting some hobbits or what do they calling him half foot?

Yes, yes, and got some humans in here. But we definitely meet Lenny Henry. He's probably the only actor in this whole series that I know right off the bat. Oh I was about to say, I know the actor who plays l Run only because he played young Sean Bean in the later season, one of the later seasons of Game of Thrones, So that's like an immediate connection to Game of Thrones. Yeah, Robert Romeo.

It wasn't like a big part, but he has a very recognizable face and so when I saw him in this, I was like, Oh, it's the guy from Game of Thrones. So he's the only one that I knew of before coming into the show. It's it's nice for it's it's nice for the show that it's not a lot of well known people because it does honestly, it doesn't distract me right at all, which I really appreciate. Like, and I'm not saying like if it had been a lot of really well known actors, I wouldn't have been able to enjoy the show, but I mean, like, I'm focusing on essentially everything else because of it. So that's an immediate success.

And you know what, and I know that I'm sure we're not the only one saying this, but the amount of representation in the show, I applaud it genuinely because you know, there's there were there you know, again, there was no African American representation in the original three movies. Good lord, No, I mean there was very little female characters in the original movies. There's three Arwin, Galadrio and Iowen and that's it. And two of them are just love interests. I mean Arwin maybe a little less so.

But from the Ewen, I mean again, she kills you know, she kills the Witch King. But again, like it's the female characters in the Lord of the Rings, at least the original books, the way they're presented in the movies are not much of not really big representation of female characters. Well, that was my favorite part of the big battle in Return of the King, when it was um Aowen on the battlefield and then all of a sudden, Gladriel showed up. I swear to god, I knew you were going with this. I was like, is he doing is he riffing the Marvel thing?

I? Sure, am Yeah, we just lined up. And then even we had Sam's girlfriend from the Yeah, yeah, she showed up, Plea Saxvielle Baggins was there. Yeah, man with with her hat with the yeah, oh yeah, yeah, all the all the ladies right there. Yeah.

Before we dive too further into the episode, Mike, what what is what is your exposure to Lord of the Rings outside of the movies. You've read the books, the original books. I've read the books. I tried to read the Silmarillion what I was in high school and that didn't work out so well. It really reminded me of reading like Deuteronomy.

It just felt like, you know, el Ron begat bron Wyn, who begat Sellembroum, who begat Waldrake? And it was just like Jesus Christ, Man, enough of this stuff. There was no story to it. So right, if they're pulling from bits of the Silmarillian in here, hats off man, because I couldn't make heads or tails of it when I was eighteen years old. Yeah, so I read.

I finished The Return of the King last week. I read The Silmarillion earlier this year. It's okay, I mean again, you know, I don't think anybody's going to argue that it's stylistically interesting, but it sets it sets a very fine tuned groundwork for a universe in a world that's immensely well realized and fully realized. And so I mean, you know, like you said, it is a little you know, he who begat He? Who begat He?

It's like, I yeah, it is a little bit history book. It is a little bit bibly really, but at the same time, like that is what it is. Really, it's the you know, history of this world, I mean this universe even. I mean it opens with the creation by Aruiluvatar, so you know, it opens with that. I mean it opens with you know, and in the beginning, God created the universe.

So yeah, it is it's pretty dry, but at the same time, it offers up a lot of places to go with interesting stories. And we see that right out of the gate here because this story is said five thousand years before Lord of the Rings the events of the Lord of the Rings, mind you, because the events Lord of the Rings take place over like what essentially like a year. Yeah, maybe a long weekend something like that, Yeah, I think, yeah, but yeah, it's like a year. Yeah, No, you're right, it is like a year. It's like a year something to that effect.

I mean, maybe there might be a good amount of time at the very beginning between Bilbo's birthday and then when Gandolf comes back and has news about the Ring. It feels like it's like thirty years or something, because Froda doesn't age in the book in that time, and everybody else's like, because Froda has the Ring, everybody else is like, oh my god, Like Frodo's not aging, but like Mary and Pippin and Sam all Age, but that's not in the movies. No. No, I'm just saying as far as like I think they imply that there's some time being sprung there, just because you know, when we meet up with Bill Bowl again, he looks terrible and you're like, why the hell did he age so quickly, and it's like, oh, duh, there was a lot of time passed, and so he's now aging like a regular person without the ring.

I always just assumed he started aging really fast and it wasn't that long of a time pass. But realistically, if you're going into this series expecting to see certain characters, they're not here. There are going to be some characters here because of the way of the mechanics of the races, namely the elves, and they essentially are they're setting Like the thing I appreciate about this episode is they set the ground rules for the elves in the first episode. And it's not that they didn't do it in the movies, but the movies don't have enough time to explain all of this, And the fact that the movie's open with this exposition dump that's done so well is really a testament to Peter Jackson's and you know, Philip A.

Boyan and Fran Walsh's screenwriting ability, because this episode, it's really funny. It's explaining a lot of things that I take for granted having read the series now, like the whole thing about the elves and how elves never die but they go to the Gray Havens. But that's not death technically, you know, it's there's all this there's all these mechanics that are explained here that were never explained in the movies. I was always confused as far as elves and immortality, as far as because there's two types of immortality. One you live forever boom, end of story.

Two somebody stabs you, you're immortal, you live forever still, you know, So it's like, which kind of immortal are they? I imagine it's just the we live forever, but if you stab me, I'll die type of immortality. Right, they can still get killed, but they live forever. Yeah, right, it's not that they can't die, because I mean, we see at the beginning of Fellowship, we see here, you know, they talk about fighting more goth and going from valen Or to Middle Earth. They really echo that first movie heavily in this first episode with the way it opens with this kind of you know, there's a little bit of a cold open, which I think was kind of interesting.

But then they do that exposition dump just like they did in the movies, and it works really well here too, like surprising because again, like the I mean, you and I are such huge fans of Dune, and I was recently rewatching the Dune TV cut where they have essentially the same thing. They have these like massive amounts of exposition dump and those don't work very well, but they work better than they should, but they still don't work very well because again it's like I feel like they're explaining too much weird stuff here. It's it's like they can they can introduce the weird stuff very slowly. And again, I guess my question to you is, can you watch this show without having seen the movies or even having read the books?

I could, and you can watch this without reading the books, But could you watch this without having seen the movies? Possibly? I mean, I think they're doing an okay enough job introducing these races, and I mean they definitely they're doing one of my favorite things. They're showing a map a lot, but I mean, they make so many references to Son that it's just like, ah, maybe it'd be better if you knew who Saron was. And there's even times I want to say, there was a moment where there's a shadow and it's Soon's shadow over other things.

I'm just like, Okay, yeah, if you knew that silhouette, that would probably be a much more impactful shot. I don't know, that's a good question. We should have probably roped in somebody into the show that had never seen the movies. Yeah, but I feel like at this point, like who is that person? Because that I mean, I mean, I know people that don't like the movies, but even they've seen them.

So, you know, I was wondering the thing about Saron, and again I think, you know, again having read the sial Merillion, you know, and again like more Goth and Saron are such a big They're they're ever present, I mean throughout the story, so Saron has been around this long obviously. I think they do a good enough job in letting the audience, who may or may not the audience member who doesn't know who Saron is. I think they do a good enough job of letting you know, like the stakes of what he is and what that means, because again, you know it, you know the Lord of the Rings. That story it takes place over such a short amount of time that you think, like, Saron is this like minor threat, But it's like, no, he's been a threat for thousands of years and he's not even the original threat More goth Is and Saron is just a disciple of more Good and it's like, this is like thousands of years of stuff.

So it's yeah. I think what's really weird about this show is because it's so far removed, you don't have to worry about a lot of things, frankly anything. They didn't have to introduce Galadriel and Elron and another character who I think we both realize who the character is. I think anybody who's watching this show who knows Lord of the Rings knows who one of the characters. Doesn't.

We'll talk about it. But they didn't have to. I'm glad they did because it gives you that kind of anchoring point initially, but they didn't have to because of the time span that this is separated from that part of the narrative from well, I do like that Galadriel now has stakes and this whole thing of her brother being killed by Saron and more goth and it's just like, okay, I'm here to avenge my brother. I was like, Okay, it's kind of cool. I have to say.

There's a couple of times where Morphid Clark where she gets this like crazy look in her left eye and it's just like, oh, like she's gonna murder you right then and there, and I'm just like, man, she's got crazy. Yes. Well, I was glad that they found an actor who could bring a little edge to it, because that's the thing that Kate Blanchett brings in that role is she is tempted by the ring and that does bring an edge to her character. I mean you see it with those interactions with Frodo in Fellowship, and then you see in the interactions with Sauron in the third Hobbit movie she kind of goes green and black and kind of you know, tease off on I. I mean, I she's a really good pick.

Yeah, I'm already on board with her. And again, like as someone who appreciates representation and things like, I'm glad that one of the leads and ostensibly I would say, like the main lead of the show is Mail, Like, I appreciate I appreciate that given that, like there was so little of it in the original series. And again I'm not saying that was intentional on J. R. Tolkien's part, but like, I'm glad that we have found other stories to tell here exactly, and with her, I'm surprised that there aren't people just shitting themselves because of some of the close ups of her eyes where they're blue, but then the rest of the time they're brown, and I'm sure people are just like, oh my god, it's just terrible.

Why didn't they cast somebody with blue eyes? It's like, really, we're gonna go there? Do we have to do? I need to fight with people on the internet about theirs, I mean, because they're probably already losing their shit about Nori, who's like she's a made up character. Like all characters are made up, guys.

She's a made up character. She wasn't in the original books, and she's a woman. Again, woke bokes tourism is ruining my Lord of the Rings. Yeah, I don't and I don't understand. Like, again, there's how many thousands of years of history with this world and there were hundreds of thousands, of probably millions of inhabitants of this world throughout those times.

Like what what like, I don't what are the complaints here? I don't get it. This is the show that solves the Star Wars problem. It takes the narrative and says, you know what, what happened in those movies wasn't the most important thing to ever happen in this universe. And even if it is, other big things happened too, so far ago that it seems just as important as the things that happen in Lord of the Rings, because more Good getting defeated was as big of a deal to those people at that time.

And you know, we don't know what happened past Saron dying at the end of the Third Age, because Tolkien never wrote anything past that. He started on something which essentially alluded to Saron coming back anyways, So it's like again, like people want to get their panties in a bunch, It's like, you know what, go watch fucking Star Wars then, seriously, because Star Wars can't get out of the Skywalker loop. This like we're you know, even if this is Galadriel, who is an established character, and el Round who's an established character, it's so far removed that they don't even have to be the same people exactly. And the thing is that there's thousands of years separating these rather than just like ten or twenty.

We're just trying to cram everything in there, and there's nothing with el Rond and Galadriel where just like, oh, that's where she got the necklace from, and that's where she got the scar from, and that's where he got the whatever. You know, it's like all those little stupid things that we It's like, oh, well, we have to cram then in there. How how did Han Solo meet you Baca? After all? We should probably have a whole movie about that.

It's like, no, just let this. You know, you've got these characters who are around a couple thousand years ago. Just let this story play out. And talking about More Goth, it's like we didn't really see More Goth get defeated. They could still go back and do a whole More Goth movie if they wanted to.

They could do a whole series about that thousand years because again, like again we're seeing we're seeing in this show the times before we see what happened at the beginning of Fellowship, which takes place, however, many years before that, so it's like we're even further back than like five thousand years. Yeah, it's like it does it. None of the things that you normally assume matter in a prequel series matter here, and you know what, like, like, seriously, this show could fail from here on out, but doing this is the smartest thing the show has done. It's just saying, you know what, we're not gonna we know that the villains are are through line along with some characters based on the mechanisms of the universe, but everything else is like we're just going to stick to the narrative that was presented in the Sale Merillion in the Facts of the World and build around that.

Five thousand years. Yeah, you've got plenty of time. I mean, there is no shire, there is you know, we have yet to see any sort of stuff around the horseman, the tree, any of that kind of stuffisodes. It's like, please maybe stay away from that stuff. That'd be kind of nice if we just don't have to pay lip service to all of those things, right, because again, like a lot of that stuff took place hundreds of hundreds of years before even this, they show the Two Trees, but like, again, like that's old history even for these people, and these people are old history for the Fellowship people.

It's crazy, Like that's it's wild to me how successful that is alone. I don't need to finally find out where Gondor was when the Westfold fell fair. You know, the Game of Thrones show set its show two hundred years before the narrative and Game of Thrones that story is it's presented in that story, and Game of Thrones is like eight years worth of stuff, and in Lord of the Rings it's not. But even with that show, like giving yourself essentially three or four generations of time in between, I think we're going to start seeing this as a thing, their things, and I think it's really smart because again you can pay lip service, but like doing this feels like you're doing it so that you don't have to, so that you can just say, I'm telling whatever fucking story I want at this point, and you know what, Yeah, Saron is in this, and yeah we might get we might get more of goth I don't know, but there's nothing that we don't have to worry about so many of just like oh there, what am I?

You know? That was That's what those Hobbit movies did. They were like, oh, my son, Gimli, you have to go meet you have to go meet a Stride a ranger his name is Stride, or like oh those things that they're just crammed into that third movie. We're so grown worthy. Yeah, and there's none of that here, and it's it's I appreciate it so much and you get there is some of it if you know the narrative, like when he's like, oh, I want you know, He's like, ell, you know, Gil Gallant is like el Ron, I want you to work with Killa Brimbor on this really special project, which is the creation of the Ring exactly, you know, the titular rings of Power.

But again, I don't know how many people who just know the movies Lord of the Rings are going to know that, right right, which is pretty clever. It doesn't ruin it if you do know it, and it doesn't ruin it if you don't know it. I mean, we're going to get that eventually, and it's like, okay, great, well that's why the show is called this. So even as a casual fan, I'm like Okay, well, this is the guy. The only thing that I never realized about this character is that it is a hard see rather than a soft see because I used to all us call him Celli Brimbore when I was reading it.

Kella Brimbor is. So it's weird. There was a Lord of the Rings video game that came out a couple of years ago that was Cannon and had the Kella brimboor character in there, and I think, I don't think this clashes with it. But Kella Brimbo is an interesting character because he might be the one character who more casual fans of the show do know or casual watchers because of the video game connection. But but like in the you know, in the later parts of this episode, you have just again like you mentioned, like Gil Gallat, who is mentioned in the Silmarillion but just kind of in passing, but he is a character in this show.

It's like those kinds of things are nice because again it's someone you've heard of, but there's enough unknown factors that they can kind of do whatever they want with it, which we see with something like the har Foots, the Proto Hobbits, who I think are immensely interesting as characters in this show, I mean already right, yeah, yeah, and I yeah, I really can appreciate them. I thought that maybe they're hopping around a little too much in this first episode in the second episode, which we'll talk about on our next episode. But at the same time, I'm like, no, you kind of got to do it. You kind of have to do this cross cutting in order to keep up with these three stories that maybe one day they'll all cross probably they will, but this is a big place.

No, there are people, I mean, it's it's a thing like it's like how Legoless never spoke to frodo you know, yeah, like once or twice after the front. Yeah. Well, and again, like you have to also put into perspective, like you mentioned with this story similar to I mean that similar to Game of Thrones. I mean the story is like here in like little pockets all over the universe. So in Game of Thrones, yeah, there was the kind of big overall threat of the White Walkers, and like you mentioned, towards the end of that narrative, essentially everybody does converge.

And yeah, I would assume with this we're gonna get that because Saron is obviously clearly the big threat here or someone that he is in cahoots with or in line with. But I, yeah, no, I'm with you. It's it is a little bit and a lot a bit of jumping, but I feel like this is one of those things where either you do it now or do it later, but you're gonna have to do it. You're gonna have just exposition dump and jump around at some point. And like, it's not as jarring as I was expecting it to be.

I don't think. I don't think so either. If I were to have one other complaint about it, it would be that sometimes the language isn't as flowery as I associate with Lord of the Rings, you know, lines like not idly do the leaves of Lorian foul. It's like those kind of more poetic things. Yeah, it's you know, it's rather than the book, and there is no necessarily like book for some of this stuff, so it's like, Okay, maybe this is a little bit more common tongue type of stuff, but at the same time I might be laughing if they try to pretty it up a bit.

Yeah, and I'm kind of with you. I think my biggest concern with this show is going to be recapturing the tone of the movies. And again, this show is an added is a prequel show to the movies, not so much the books. I mean, it's inspired by the books, but this is in the universe of the movie bees. So I again like, if you're going to be in that universe, you need to hew close to what Peter Jackson did in those first three movies.

I think, you know, measured amounts of success in the second three, but they have to keep it in line with that, and I think they do more or less. I see what you mean about the language. I think visually it looks very similar to the Jackson films. I don't think that was going to be hard to do, but visually it looks the same. But yeah, I feel like I feel like there's a little bit of kind of this minor edge to the show that maybe needs to be sanded off a little bit or kind of refined a little bit more.

I don't know that. Yeah, it doesn't have there's something about it. It doesn't have that grandiose feel that the movies did. Maybe that's just, you know, again, that's just the way the movies were. Yeah, I'm intrigued I'm very intrigued by this.

I mean, I know, the big, baddest coming things are happening in here. The most fascinating storyline for me is about the elf and human, which is interesting because it's kind of the opposite of what we had in The Lord of the Rings, where it was well Strider as the Ranger, which is, you know, they live a little bit longer than that kind of stuff, but him being as obstensively human and his girlfriend being an elf, you know. But now we've got the male elf and the female human, and I was like, oh, that kind of works for me, and I like that he he's playing it almost more vulcan like at times. Yeah. Yeah, it's uh maybe it's it's very much like the Baron and Luthian story again, which I mean they yeah, like you mentioned, they did it in the original series, and they kind of did it again in The Hobbit with the boy tar Real and Keiley, so they've done this story a couple of times.

I yeah, it's Smile Cruise. Cordova's Elf is very different. It's it reminds me a lot of thrend Will from The Hobbit that kind of like the coldness to it because el Ron is not cold, right, Elron is very welcoming but calculating. This guy is kind of very calculating but cold. And so it's it's a it's a different kind of Elf.

It's again, it's more similar to the Hobbit, but I like that he's playing it in a way that is unlike even like the obvious big Elf character of Legolas. And I like the Bronwyn character. And there's snating those little kid you know, And I imagine he's in for a world of pain coming up pretty soon here. And yeah, it's okay, I'm all right with him suffering a little bit, but yeah, I hate to see his mother suffer. Yeah, it's it's interesting.

Yeah, you have a a artifact being found that has black speech markings on it. There's this marking that they keep showing that's the marking of Saron. And when when you see the marking, it does the whole It does the thing that you kind of see in the Lord of the Rings the movies where it kind of distorts the screen and you hear the black speech in the background. So I'll be curious to yeah, I'll be curious to see where where that goes. Again, I assume we're gonna see Saron at some point it or some representation of Yeah, hopefully it'll be a little bit better than the representation in the Hobbit.

Or it's just like that shum shum shum shum at the camera, the necromancer thing. Yeah, oh boy, Yeah, yeah, I'd rather have you as a giant eyeball than as that I'm zooming in on you a hundred times kind of thing. Yeah. I was not. I wasn't the biggest fan of the way he's presented in the Hobbit.

I mean again, you know, realistically, in the Return of the King. I don't know if you realize this, but they filmed a finale where Ergorn fought a Saaron in that scene. No, I didn't know that. Yeah, and there's I saw some of it on YouTube. There are some shots of kind of it's like a shot from behind Saron looking kind of over his shoulder and you can see Argorn backing up because Saron is like inching towards him.

They filmed it and everything. It blew my mind. Wow, because again, like I don't, we have never seen Saron as a moving fighting villain outside of the intro to the Fellowship where he dies the first time, where his corporeal form is destroyed the first time. So it'll be interesting to see if we get a full on Saron in this show in his suit, because again, we're so early on with all of this that that is still a possibility. So yeah, I don't know if it's just going to be Saron for five seasons, because that's the other thing they've said.

The creators of the show have said, like, we already know how many seasons of the show there's going to be, how like we've already charted it out, and of course they have. With the show as expensive as this one, the representation of the Saron character is kind of up in the air, really because there hasn't really been one in the series yet, at least the way the movies presented it, and they're in Hobbit. Yeah, less we say about that third Hobbit movie the better. It's the weakest of the three, but it is country mile. I mean, I like what they were doing as far as taking some of those things from the summ early and bringing them in and introducing characters that were in that book that weren't necessarily in the Hobbit and doing an okay job of let's tie these two movies together a little bit more and have you know, the meetings of Sarmon and Galadriel and el Rond and Gandolf in order to set that stage.

But at the same time, it did feel a little like, hey, get it, get it. This is setting up for the next movies. Get it and see how Sarmon's like, oh, I'll take care of so, don't you worry. And I'm like, it's a little much. Sometimes, Well it's the proximity to those movies, right, I mean that's sixty years so yeah, yeah, I'm with you.

I mean again, when I was reading The Hobbit, I didn't wonder where Gandolf went at one point during the book, but the movie was like, we need to answer where he went. So they see, you know, you see him going to Doelgodor and seeing Thrain and seeing rad Agast and all that like that. You know, great, like it's great that it's in the movie. But at the same time, movie didn't need to be three movies, so no, god sakes, no, Yeah, and just the pacing of that third movie was so stupid. Yeah, yeah, oh, we're gonna kill smagg in the first twenty minutes.

Yeah. Really, yeah, And it's interesting. You know, this show has already kind of adopted like you said, it's kind of already shown us who the big bad is going to be. It's kind of given us an idea of where this show might be going. And in the final moments of this episode, it introduced another character from the original series.

I'm not convinced yet, but it has to be. Yeah, oh god, yeah, I can't wait. Man, I've been waiting for Tom Bombadill all this time. Finally we've got him here. Wait, hey's here.

He's like, yeah, finally Tom Bombadill. Can't wait for them to just like turn his like wizard type speech into you know, Tom Bombadal rhyming and singing that kind of stuff. So it's not tombomba dial, is it? What I swear to God Mine? You're not saying that it's Gandolf, are you?

Yeah? Yes? Oh, for fox sakes here, I was already for Tom Bombadal. I mean, I don't know why I guess Pombombado would exist at this point, since he is essentially God. Yeah.

Well, yeah, he came from the sky, you know. Yeah, yeah, No, I as soon as they had that shot of him, I was just like, yeah, that's gotta be Gandolf, and especially with the beard and everything, and I'm just like, yeah's been around for a long damn time. And plus we've seen every type of race except for the Wizards. And I'm like, Okay, the Wizards are their own thing, right, Yeah, this is when they come in. They form Hogwarts so they can train all the other Wizards send them out into the world.

Yeah. I'm going to be really interested to see if the show brings in the Blue Wizards that are kind of just always mentioned in everything but never actually written. I mean Tolkien, I don't think ever even wrote about them, like other than saying there are two Blue Wizards out in the world. But I hope that the show brings in the Blue Wizards. The show has an opportunity to do a lot of interesting stuff, and I'm I don't know.

This first episode sets a pretty interesting stage. I think it gives some interesting stakes. I think the twist with Galadrio's character where she doesn't go to the Gray Havens, I think was saw that obviously coming from a mile away, but I think it's yeah, I think it's I think it's an interesting direction to send her character given that, again, we don't as she's presented in the movies, at least, we don't know a whole lot about her. So now, like you said, we get kind of an idea as to why she does what she does and and what that means for her character moving forward, because yeah, you know, this is the same character that we ostensibly see thousands of years later, So how does she become that character?

Here's part of that journey, right, And again, it's not like she gets the hat, she gets the whip, she gets the scars, the Ladriel's light there, Yeah, none of that, like there, maybe we will see that, but like they this is so far removed that they don't have to. Right, She's more than just trappings. It's kind of like, you know, oh god, if they if they take time to be like, hey, Gandel, if here's a big fucking floppy hat and a pipe, it's like, oh God, really please don't do that, you know. Oh yeah, see the staff. You can hold your pipe in the staff.

Isn't that kind of cool? Yeah? You want you want to try some of this pipe weed with us? Here? Bud?

Yeah, yeah, I don't. Again, I feel like, and I don't know how you feel about this, Like the show seems it seems in rather capable hands. Yeah. Yeah, and again people I've never really heard of before, and that's okay. I'm really okay with us not knowing these characters.

Like as we're talking, I'm looking up like the guy that played l Run that you brought up. It's like, Okay, I've seen them in The kingsman, I've seen them in this, I've seen them in that, but none of these characters have made such an impression other than Lenny Henry that I'm just like, oh, is that dude? You know? And like same thing with the writers and directors. It's like, yeah, I don't really know these people, but they seem to be doing a pretty good job.

Yeah, Jay Biona. He directed the second Jurassic Park movie, which isn't terrible compared to the third one, I mean, and compared to the second original Jurassic Park movie well, which was directed by some guy Steven Spielberg. Yeah right, and that was a piece of shit. But I think I think he stays out of I think he stays out of his own way, but pays an up lip service to Peter Jackson. You know again, you don't have I don't know, like you you don't have to do much in the way of creating your own style because Jackson really gives you a lot to work with.

Because Jackson is such a stylistically interesting director that I don't think anyone who comes to this show, I feel like it's going to be rather easy to ape his style. Whether or not they're going to do anything interesting with it is a different story. But I don't think they necessarily have to. I think somebody needs to come in and just have a good sense of how to put the camera where it needs to go and make it look nice and make it look like Lord of the Rings like we expect Lord of the Rings to look. I think maybe they could put a little bit, a little bit more of a haze or a glow on some of the stuff in in the show, you know what I mean.

There's this weird kind of hazy glowiness that I associate with at least the first three Lord of the Rings movies. Maybe not the Hobbit, but I would like a little bit more of that kind of like glowiness to some of the stuff, especially stuff with the elves, but other than that, I think they've really This first episode does a really good job of introducing us back into a world that I think for a lot of us never thought we'd see anything else. I never. I mean again, like you said at the opening, I said the opening show like, it's crazy to me that we're actually watching a Lord of the Rings TV show. Like we'd been hearing about it since the first movies came out.

They were talking. It's like the Star Wars TV shows. They were talking about them forever, and they never happened. And you know why they never happened because it would require a massive budget to do it right, and nobody other than the these big old companies that own these ips now could afford to do it. What studio is going to shell out the money needed to make this show properly other than someone like Amazon.

There was no way that when we were still on terrestrial television, even when we got originally into cable, there was no way that anything like this was going to happen. I mean, yeah, you're right, the budgets and everything for this kind of stuff. It does take these giants now in order to do that, The giants that own the IP and the giants that have all the money in order to be able to do this. Noah again, you know, we talked about the crazy budget for this show, and you know what, like I see it every time they show something crazy on screen. There's a scene early on in this episode where they're talking about crossing from Valanore to Middle Earth, and it shows one of the things that the Witch King is riding on one of those fell beasts, biting a hawk, one of the giant birds, and throwing it through the fire and that's all cgi.

Yeah, And I was watching it and I said out loud, audibly, very loud, Oh, holy shit, this is insane, because you know what, this is a fucking TV show, but it's a movie like this is just eight hours of Lord of the Rings the movie, because the production values are so high, and you know what, I think that maybe this will be I don't know if this is going to be something that can be done anymore because of the cost here, but I hope that this ushers in a new way of doing things with ips where you get time to work with them, actually give these narratives some time, because those Lord of the Rings stories work in those movies, because that's a contained narrative, but anything else like this does need time and room to breathe and establish the world and establish the character.

Is it going to take a while to tell this story. Yeah, but my hope is by the end of it, it's a rewarding story that they're telling, because I always feel as a viewer, I feel like by the end of those Lord of the Rings movies, even the Hobbit ones, they reward me for being a viewer and sitting through all nine hours of those movies, then rewarding me paying attention and seeing the themes and the reoccurring leap motifs and the music and stuff. I feel like those movies reward you as a viewer, and the show, I hope will do the same well. Speaking in the music, there are times when Baarn McCreary's music seems to get close to Howard Shores, but it never feels like it's just paying lip service to Howard Shores themes.

And I'm glad for that because these are different characters, this is a different age. We don't need the exact same themes that we had, And I thought that was another downfall of The Hobbit, which was the misuse of the music where you are using themes from one character or one group of people from the Lord of the Rings movies and just kind of shoving it in to the Hobbit in the wrong places where you're just like, well, wait a second, that's like an ORC theme, but we are nowhere near Orcs. You know, it didn't make sense, and it just felt so fucking lazy what they were doing with that music in that Hobbit series that I was just like, do you care at all about this stuff? Are you that mad at Gamma del Toro that you're just doing a slipshod job and saying like, ah, fuck it, I'll shoot this in sixty frames for a second.

Fuck with some people. I mean, he felt it felt like he was bored sometimes doing those movies. I agree. I mean, again, you know what's funny is the complaints in those movies are the CGI and how overused it is and not great it looks. I would contend this show has already done a better job than than those three Hobbit movies did with actually creating real sets but also utilizing CGI rather effectively.

And this is again, this is a TV show, and I feel like I'm caring about these characters a lot more like I didn't give a shit about Evangeline, Lily and Keely or feel or whichever one. I didn't care about the dwarves. I mean, there was only like one dwarf that I really cared about, and that was the old dude that would talk with Frodo or sorry Bilbo, and otherwise it was just like I don't care about this, and I really I don't need to see Lego lots. I'm sorry, but like, right well, it just doesn't need to be here, you know. And that felt like such a like, oh, hey, look at we have one of your favorite characters, and we're gonna make a reference to another one of your favorite characters, and actually two more of them, so it's like, no, just stop it.

Well, and you know that for me is kind I've always been the issue with those Hobbit movies. It's like they never feel like their own movies. The only one that feels like its own movie is the second one. The first one it feels like almost a straight rip off of Fellowship, and then the third one is just a mess, just an outright mess. And so the second one is kind of the only one that I really think is successful in being a Lord of the Rings movie, because those first three Lord of the Rings movies are damn near perfect.

Second Hobbit comes close. This show has come pretty close already, Like in its first episode, it's already come pretty close to being like someone watched those first three movies and understood the tone and was like, I want to do this in a long form narrative with the IP, not just ape that movie and do something else with it. They're like, I want to do this and do the thing that it is. I want to do Lord of the Ring. And that's a massive undertaking.

And yeah, the budget for this show was always going to be insane, but good on Amazon for doing it, because it looks like already they may they may have put their money in the right direction. Yeah, you mentioned the haze during the elf parts of the you know, like you might have wandered to have seen that in this and I kind of like that there isn't a haze. I kind of like that these elves are being treated very matter of factly. They're not as like misfay and fairy like. Yeah, And it's like, because you really get the feeling in the Load of the Rings and it's a good feeling.

But you really get the feeling of these folks have been around forever and they're all very magical and mystical, and they're just like kind of like an elevated race, just probably because they've had so much time to think about things and they're on their way out. I mean at the Fellowship. I mean, you have that scene with Sam and Froda where they're hiding out in the woods listening to the elves leaving for the Gray Haze, Right, So I mean, yeah, you know what, Honestly, I'll take back, take it back. I think you're right. I think it's better this way because they are just elves.

There are plenty of them. They're not in they're not a you know, a dwindling race at this point. This is five thousand years before that becomes the case. And I kind of like this idea too, of the elves not trusting humans because the humans are the ones that backed more goth right, and this whole thing of them being an occupying force for a long time, and the way that the humans dislike the elves because they are this occupying force because the elves don't trust them and them being always feeling judged by having these elves around. I kind of like that, and it feels very I mean, you know, I don't want to get too political, but it feels very maga esque sometimes as far as all these rednecks in this town and just like you know, whoa, well, we don't all like more goth and you know, how dare you be here?

And all this kind of stuff feels kind of racist as far as like, and it's a good idea that they have this you know, darker skinned elf there, because it feels like they're just like, yeah, get the fuck out of here, black person, we don't want you here. It is interesting to see the way the races are interacting at a much earlier stage when really they don't know what to make of one another. Because yeah, at the point of Lord of the Rings, the Elves are handing off Middle Earth to the humans right there. It's like they finally graduated, right They're They're like, we're done, We're out of here. The humans.

You like, it's the age of man. The fourth Age is the Age of Man. Well, and it makes sense that the elves don't trust us, you know, because I mean, look at il Sildor you know, hey, il Sildor, you finally have this opportunity to destroy this thing, throw this ring into the fire. No, he's all about selfishness and just yet another disappointment to el Rond and all the Elves, right right, And he will be a character in this show at some point, and I mean that makes sense because he's part of the Dunadine, so they live for a pretty long time, right, I don't know how far. I mean again, I have to assume that some point the show is going to jump forwards, right maybe.

I mean, I don't know how long. These first couple episodes are very you know, one thing happens after the other kind of thing. Second even opens with a shot from the first episode, right, so maybe though the third episode opens twenty years after that. I don't know, right, I imagine that they're going to keep going with the story. But yeah, maybe to your point, there is a time jump at some point or they just you know, it's like little ill soldier running around and they're just like a soldier.

Give me that no, you know, right, right? And again I mean again, like my hope is because we are so far in the future, like even the characters that we do have like Gladriol, like l Run, like possibly more than likely Gandolf. Even though they're there, they don't have to be treated the way they were in any thing else because it's so far removed from that. So yeah, I mean, I'll be curious to see how they treat a character like Isial Door, because yeah, he's he's a big part of the original series. He looms large over the original series because he's shown in the beginning.

He's the reason essentially a lot of the things happen is Silder's bane is aborn soord. You know, all of that is a large part of the mythology of that first series. So it'll be interesting to see how they handle it here because again, a lot of the stuff that we see in that original shop, you know, the original movie, is going to be shown here in a lot deeper of a context, like the creation of the rings, right, like I would assume the initial Maybe I mean again, if Isildor is here, there might be the initial downfall of Saron. I don't even know that that again, I don't I don't know where this show ends, how this show ends. Maybe this show ends with Saron's initial defeat and this show ends at that point, and it does jump that far forward, but that's I don't know how far apart that time when Saron dies is from now, because that takes place long before Fellowship.

But I just don't know how much further back this show takes place, right, Yeah, it could just be fifty sixty years until the rings are destroyed, but it's still five thousand years before anything else happens anyways, right, I mean I'm very curious obviously, going back to the title Rings of Power, I don't really know what that means. Once those humans, dwarves and owlves get those rings, what do they do with them? Right? I mean do they all have different powers that I don't imagine they all turn you invisible? That seems kind of lame, you know, right, well and well, and again the question is do you see them using the rings before the one ring is being used to subvert all of them as well?

Again, the show is good at that it has a long runway here to really play with, and we see it, I mean we were seeing it early on here that the show is taking its time. It's really taking its time already. So yeah, I don't I don't know where the show ends up going. But I'm really excited to see because I like high fantasy when it's done right, and you know, JD. Payne and Patrick McKay seem like they are pretty motivated to make a story that does not stray too far from what we've seen before.

And you know what, that was my biggest concern here was just like, if they're making this, is it going to feel like something that we you know, need is a funny word, but we can get excited about and want to be invested in because I don't think we need it any more Lord of the Rings any more than I think you would think that. But I'll take it if it's good, and I'll watch it if it's I and I'll get invested in and if it's good, and you know what, they've put the right foot forward at least with this episode, and it doesn't feel like I think, if this thing suddenly takes a left turn and starts to suck, I don't think that it's going to affect my enjoyment of those originally original three movies, Like The Hobbit hasn't ruined the three films for me.

It's not like those sequels to the Matrix where like I can't watch the original Matrix without thinking of those god awful sequels. I can put the Hobbit out of my mind, and I think I can put Rings of Power out of my mind if it suddenly starts to suck, and I still can enjoy those first three films no matter what. Well, I would agree, and again, the show starting off on the right foot, you know, makes me at least a little bit more forgiving should it start to not be good, because at least it was good at one point, or at least trying. So yeah, no, I'm in agreement. I'm I'm excited to see where it goes.

The second episode was released with the first one, and you know, we're in for one episode a week for the next couple of weeks. So I haven't watched a show live in a very long time. But that's exciting because it's Lord of the Rings, like it's it's it's you know, it's like the Untainted Ip at this point. I mean it kind of, it's like it's like the last big Untainted Ip. Yeah, well it's like the og as well.

I mean, obviously it's from the twentieth century, so it's not like we're going back to like the epic of Gilgamesh or something like that. But you're right, it's it's got this long shelf life. It plays with all these things that other people would play with as we go along, your Star Wars, etc. Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones, even some comic books, you know, kind of Truck and some of this stuff. And yeah, it does feel very pure right now.

And I like that. Yeah. Well, and I mean that's the other thing. It's it's kind of oddly hilarious that Game of Thrones comes back within two weeks of the Lord of the Rings TV show launching, which would not exist without that Game of Thrones show being made, and that show would not have existed without those O one Lord of the Rings movies being as wildly successful as they were. So they have fed off of one another.

And I mean Lord of the Rings doesn't get or Game of Thrones doesn't get written with the influences that it has from Lord of the Rings. And I mean it's it's Lord of the Rings and its scope, which I think was influenced by Tolkien Martin was at least, So it all feeds into each other. It's just funny that we're you know, we have a Game of Thrones show going on the same time Lord of the Rings, and they could not exist without one another. So we'll see. And you know what, they're both off to a good start, so whether or not they'll both hold that through the end of the first season of either show remains to be seen.

I think that this show has it easier than Game of Thrones because because the last Lord of the Rings thing that I watched, even as kind of middle of the road as Hobbit is, it's still better than how bad Game of Thrones, the bad taste in my mouth and the mouth of many that Game of Thrones left. I think this show has an easier overall task of appeasing me. But I think overall this show has as hard of a task as Game of Thrones, because there were plenty of died in the wool hardcore Tolkien fans who this show before they even saw any footage from it. It was an affront to them, and then they saw footage and it got worse. So I hope that even I hope that some of the died in the wool hardcore Tolkien fans are able to enjoy this show, but some of them may not even be able to enjoy the movies.

So if that's the case, then they're not gonna be able to enjoy this either. Unfortunately. It's funny. I was so busy today I didn't go to the LTR reddit because they were flipping the fuck out when well, when the character posters came out, oh my god, a black female dwarf, we can't handle this, Like so many of them are going nuts, and it's like, all right, where you know, where is it? Where's your reaction to this?

Because, like I said, I'm pretty darm pleased, and I hope a lot of other people are too. Yeah, and the senses, at least critically among TV critics, get and take their opinions with a grain of salt. Is that similar to ourselves. It's a good first step and a step in the right direction. So, you know, again, they have a long way to go to nailing a first season of a show.

I mean, this is the first episode, so they've got seven more episodes to falter and fall and disappoint, and one of the episodes is going to be disappointing. There's no way one of the episodes isn't worse than the others. That's just the way it goes. Maybe it'll be a perfect season of a show that's happened before. I've seen it, as have you.

True Detective Season one, damn near perfect season of a show. This is eight episodes, so maybe the small episode order will help it out. But you know, who knows. I'm like I said, I'm just excited to see because you know, people existed for fifty sixty years without a Lord of the Rings TV show, and now we're living in times with If nothing else, what they can do is, you know, sixth episode comes along, just bring back the Mandlaureate and just use him for two episodes and then you know, just kind of shoot the bed in the last episode again and you'll be okay, you know yeah, I mean, hey, that's the other franchise that's being ruined constantly. Yeah, for Folk's sake.

Well, you can always find me over at the Projection Booth, which is available at Projection Booth podcast dot com. If you want more of our foolishness with this new podcast, checkout Podcast of Power dot com. I can't believe that that url was available, But here we are, Chris. We are podcasting, and we are powerful. We are Mighty Yeah podcastipower dot Com somehow was not anyone else's, but now it's ours.

Check out every week. We're going to have new episodes as this goes along. Nice limited series and I hope that folks enjoy it.