Transcript
[0:00] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Now, my name is Julia Golding. I'm an author and I direct the activities at our centre. I thought I would do a short episode about the recently dropped teaser trailer for the second season of The Rings of Power, which was accompanied not long after by a behind the scenes of that particular series they've returned to making. Now, I think it's been a couple of years since we first had the first season of The Rings of Power, which was something of a hot mess, really, I think. There are some good parts of it, but my overall impression of it was that the storytelling went seriously astray with very strange directions chosen and opportunity to link all the story up missed. I know that they have a very long story arc that they're thinking of, and that might be part of the problem, but it did make for quite a chaotic season.
[1:13] And I'm just thinking back now, my recollection of it is not as coherent as it should be after having watched it quite attentively. And I think that's partly because of the storylines that seem to sprawl rather than knit together. So they're coming back with their big budget and they hopefully are spending on getting the story right this time. They'll have seen the fan reactions, which would have been, I think I'm expressing something which was fairly widespread. The feeling that the look was good, the CGI was great.
[1:51] Casting was on the whole really good but there was just something lacking about the series and the way it treated its material and with the news that Andy Serkis and Peter Jackson are gearing up to do what is basically a Lord of the Rings prequel in The Hunt for Gollum, They may feel that there is some competition out there to them now. That won't be out for a few years, I wouldn't have thought, but still, they've got that breathing down their neck. So let's see, what do we think? Are they going to bring it together? So looking at the teaser trailer, it strikes me that from this teaser trailer, it would seem that they are following basically three main storylines. They are following and the emphasis is on sauron getting to power and taking over mordor and turning that into the familiar wasteland that we know from lord of the rings we can see some orcs on the march the sense that he's gathering his forces and we also uh we can see because he He appears again in the teaser trailer in a sort of blonde wig.
[3:07] Yeah. But he's there in his sort of, what happens in The Silmarillion is that we know that he is taken to Numenor. He sort of is defeated, well, you know, seemingly briefly defeated by Al-Pharazon, who is the new ruler of Numenor. More about him in a second. and he persuades the Numenoreans that he's their friend. That blonde wig might not be from that bit though because there seems to be uh.
[3:43] Another part of the Sauron story which they're doing. The problem here is the sequencing. So let me explain.
[3:52] They've truncated the events of the Second Age to make it all happen concurrently. So if you look at it just in terms of the history of the lore, you've got in the century following 1600 in the Second Age, you've got Celebrimbor setting up his foundry and his colony and his elven kingdom in Eregion and making the rings. And at the end of that century, so in 1697, is the big showdown. So that's a whole 97 years later, which obviously in the life of a man is a long time and this is where they are attacked by sauron who has been uh again another of his disguises trying to persuade keller brimbor to show him how to make the rings that was sort of hinted at in the previous series this is where i get confused because they kind of did that in the the last series but yet they seem to be saying in teaser trailer that it's happening again because if you remember in season one you got halbrand who is the character that comes with galadriel from numenor and reveals that he is sauron to galadriel towards the end of that series.
[5:19] He's already been there, but it seems as though from something in the teaser trailer about him getting inside people's minds, that he's also there again. So this is where I'm not quite sure what they're doing with it. So is he coming back in the disguise of this elven chap with a blonde wig? Possibly. I think the important thing from storytelling, though, is that this whole Second Age is dominated by the activities of Sauron. It could be called the Age of Sauron, really, because he is sticking in his malign influence in a big way in Mordor, turning that into a wasteland and making it the place where he rules directly. He is perverting the making of rings in the elven kingdom of Eregion, and he also, towards the end of the age, is sort of taken into captivity and ends up causing the downfall of Numenor. In the actual timeline, if I remember, I was saying that in the Silmarillion, the TAL timeline, it's 1600.
[6:30] Celebrimbor is active in Eregion and the downfall of Numenor is 3319. So, you know, thousands of years later, but they're bringing this all together in one big crunch. This is why it's a bit confusing to follow, because they're trying to run all these things concurrently. So in some way, Sauron has got to go from messing up Eregion to shortly after messing up Numenor, because the people who are there during the downfall of Numenor, particularly the last king, Alpharazon, is already in place within a human lifespan. Lifespan, even if it is a Numenorean human lifespan, which is a bit longer. Yeah, it is a big, I can see why they get, they struggle with their storylines because it is a lot of things to get synced up. Anyway, looking at the teaser trailer, it seems to focus on Sauron setting up Mordor, getting in the head of Celebrimbor. And the rot is beginning to set in in Numenor as well because the Alpharazon character, who actually is the advisor to the queen from the first part.
[7:51] He's got a black and white beard, quite a good look. Yeah, I'm just looking up who he is. It's Tristan Gravel. Gravel? Gravel. Anyway, he's the one who's positioning himself to become ruler and the teaser trailer gives that away because he arrives on eagle if you arrive on an eagle you're clearly on the up and up and muriel you'll remember who is the queen figure or the princess figure with her father who is the previous rulers just on the point of death she was blinded in the last series so makes which makes her vulnerable of course yeah so they're running these storylines together i wonder if they're going to overcome.
[8:37] The problem that these storylines are separate my big gripe with the first season of the rings of power was it didn't ever start off in the same place storylines were set off in different parts of middle earth and didn't unite so the proto hobbits never really interacted with anybody else They didn't interact with the stranger who looked a bit like Gandalf or one of the other wizards. That's a character played by Daniel Wayman.
[9:10] But they didn't really interact with anyone else. And that was quite frustrating because it meant that there was no payoff at the end of the series where you thought, oh, yeah, that's what they were all doing.
[9:22] If you think of how the Fellowship of the Ring works, they come together, they break apart, they do their thing, and then they come together at the end for celebration and a sort of melancholy end. I would have taken my cues from Tolkien and gone that way, but hey, I'm not on the writing team.
[9:40] So the other big culture who seems to be getting quite a lot of time is the Dwarven Kingdom in Khazad-dûm or Moria. And this is important because if you look at a map of the Second Age, Eregion, where Celebrimbor is, is just outside the doors of Moria. It's the region which the Fellowship passed through in the Third Age to find the hidden doors of Moria. That's now because of what happens in this age, Regin is destroyed, Elrond tries to help Celebrimbor, who's like a kind of tragic figure in this age, but they don't beat Sauron and, Elrond retreats with a remnant of his people to Imladris, which is another name for Rivendell. So you can see those pieces moving. It's interesting to know, if you look into the appendices of Lord of the Rings, that the Dwarves survive as quite a strong nation, even though Eregion is destroyed, because the Dwarves are shut and they're able to carry on inside their big mountain kingdom. But there's one line in the Duwensfolk section of the appendices, if you want to look that. It says that they begin to dwindle, but it's not as a result of this battle with Sauron for Euregion.
[11:06] Looking at the teaser trailer and the making of video, it seems as though this, the female dwarf, who was a great character, she and three other female dwarves, two other, the three of them, seem to be getting more of a cultural showcase. Case they seem to be there's an element of them singing if you look at the making of video and.
[11:30] That's an interesting suggestion to see that there is some kind of chthonic power that the dwarf women have which obviously doesn't make it into the narrative that Tolkien told because he doesn't really think in those terms it's a kind of rebalancing of our time but it's also a father and son story between the two durins during the king and during his son and of course their big, beef is about what to do about digging for mithril and the danger of waking up a balrog so, while that would be a bit early to do that it's definitely all in there as possible material about greed and what the hunt for treasure can do to you because one of the reoccurring themes in tolkien is that like the dragon horde holding on to valuables has a very poisonous effect on a character that's the trajectory of thorin who gets that kind of dragon madness that his grandfather had and it's notable that of course the big story in lord of the rings is is getting rid of a treasure, not gaining one. So I think Tolkien has this distrust of gold and riches as having a hold on someone's heart.
[12:49] You can see where he gets that from his Catholic faith. Treasures in heaven, not treasures here on earth where thieves and moths and rust can get at them.
[13:00] So the other big collection of characters who are apparent from the teaser trailer are the elves the fighting elves if we should call them that it seems as though galadriel is going to be on some kind of quest not entirely sure what she's going to be doing yet the actress playing the part says that this this particular story brings her more in touch with middle earth which suggests that she isn't going to be hanging out on numenor in this season i wonder what that in touchness means she's clearly interacting more with Elrond and they're on some kind of quest, but it remains to be seen how that interacts with the other characters. I'm really interested to see if they can pull this character back into some sense of coherence, because she seems to have forgotten that she's married, which is one of those oddities.
[13:54] And I don't think they knew quite what to do with her in the first season. They used her as a way of travelling from Middle-earth to Numenor, following a character, but it doesn't make an awful lot of sense or coherence with the Galadriel that we get to know. Anyway, it's a challenge. I'll see if they rise to it. And then we've got a glimpse of one of the other elven characters, that is Arundir, played by Ismael Cruz Cordova. He was the woodland elf one with the wooden looking armor who ended up who was in a hinted of a relationship with bronwyn the feisty human who has the son theo that little nexus it seems as though he has now palled up with isildur who survived um there was a suggestion at the end of the last season that Isildur had perished but of course historically that can't be the case because we know he's a he's got a lot to do coming on um and they seem to have piled up together, I'm getting a bit worried it's going to be a bit incoherent again oh please pull all these story threads together rings of power writers so we've got dwarves we've got Celebrimbor we've got, things happening in Numenor, we've got Fighting Elves and we've got this other Isildur.
[15:24] Arondir and Theo as well. Looks like Bronwyn might not be around. Yeah, I'm getting a bit worried. And just to sort of add a final little bit to make me even more worried, we also get a glimpse of, daniel wayman playing the stranger in what looks like to be a far eastern context somewhere could be rune or that bit on the map that we never go to in lord of the rings and we know that, the two of the blue wizards are said to have gone to the east so it could be that he's actually one of them we don't know yet there is definitely going to be those proto hobbits knocking around because they're in the making of and at the end of the last series he does go off with his friend there one of the hobbits yeah so the one he goes away with is nori so it may be the rest of them aren't there she certainly appears in the making of teaser trailer oh dear i now beginning to think it might end up being a bit of a bit of a mess but i will hope i will hope i am pleasantly surprised that all these sprawling plot threads are neatly bound into a single.
[16:49] Sprung seal steel effective weapon of a story line but that will remain to be seen if you're looking for a frame by frame breakdown of what's going on in this teaser trailer i will recommend the one done by uh the great tolkien commentator nerd of the rings because it was uh his post that alerted me to this having come out and he gives in a lot more speculate he goes into much more detail and speculation about the various aspects he's spotted by freeze framing everything.
[17:26] So that's an almost exhaustive list of what might be happening. But I think my big takeaway point is it looks very ambitious. It still looks great, but they need to make sure they don't do the same thing, that they do too much that we don't care. We need to definitely have something to root for and a place where our sympathies can rest, as we do when we've got hobbits in the picture. We root for hobbits. We know who we care about throughout Lord of the the rings it's harder to find those points of contact within the rings of power and that is their challenge and i hope they are going to meet it.
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