The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power returns to Prime Video on Wednesday 11 November, and the reviews have arrived in Middle-earth in the traditional manner: two armies, one valley and nobody prepared to give an inch.
The first four episodes of season three drop together on Wednesday, with the rest of the eight-episode run following over the next three weeks. The story jumps five years on from season two, into the thick of the War of the Elves and Sauron. Going by the trailer, Charlie Vickers’s Sauron finally gets round to the job everyone has been waiting for since 2022: forging the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, with Barad-dûr and the Nazgûl in attendance. The Dwarves have sealed themselves inside Khazad-dûm and Sauron’s armies have taken a great deal of the map. Showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay are back, as are Owain Arthur, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Benjamin Walker, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Daniel Weyman and Jamie Campbell Bower.
The early reactions, posted after press screenings in late October, were warm enough to melt a Ringwraith. Total Film’s Fay Watson called the premiere “epic in every sense of the word”. Nerdist’s Rotem Rusak went with “Eps 1 & 2 are AMAZING”, capital letters and all. We covered the first wave of praise here, including the season’s surprise redemption arc for an orc.
Then the Forbes contributor Erik Kain, who says he has seen the first two episodes, posted his verdict on X: “Astonishingly derivative and painfully dull.” He added “overwrought dialogue, relentless melodrama, and a complete disregard for the source material”, in case anyone was wondering whether he liked it really. One fan replied that the early raves had come from a handpicked few at a studio screening. And so the internet’s longest-running Middle-earth war resumed hostilities, a good deal more bitterly than anything between Elves and Orcs.
The stakes for Amazon are real. According to Samba TV figures reported by Cosmic Book News, the season-two premiere reached about 902,000 US households, half the 1.8 million who tuned in for season one. Those are third-party estimates, not Amazon’s own numbers, but they are hardly a victory parade. McKay has talked about the new season as a fresh start, telling IGN: “In some ways, we’re starting a whole new story. This is turning the page on the show.” In television, “turning the page” is a soft reboot that would prefer not to be called one.
There is reason for cautious optimism. The time jump gets the show past its slowest business, and forging the One Ring is the moment the whole series was built to reach. It is, after all, what the title has been promising. Tolkien himself took twelve years to write The Lord of the Rings, so a television show taking three seasons to get the Ring made is practically brisk.
Full reviews should land around the premiere, and we’ll see which way the battle goes. Until then, as Bilbo very nearly said, it is a dangerous business going out of your door to read the comments.
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