TV Episode Review for “Shadow of the Past,” Season 1 Episode 1 of Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Powers”

Clearly expensive, better than expected, and surprisingly weighed down—not by new diverse characters—but heavy-handed pacing and writing.

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Amazon’s expensive 2022 streaming platform headliner, THE RINGS OF POWER, has been widely discussed online previous to its recent premiere. With reportedly a budget of $1 billion dollars and an alleged request by Jeff Bezos’ son asking his father to make sure his company “[doesn’t] f*** it up,” many on the Internet do not have high hopes for the new show. A meagerly attractive female lead, diverse cast of hobbits and elves that includes non-white actors, and a roster of actors who — unlike Peter Jackson’s early 2000s trilogy — aren’t ridiculously good looking, may seem like a lot of faults to put on a show but the RINGS OF POWER’s episode one, “Shadow of the Past,” felt to me a much stronger first episode than the pilot of HBO’s newest series, HOUSE OF THE DRAGON. Although to be fair, House of the Dragon’s second episode was much better than the pilot. But like HBO’s prequel money-grab, Amazon’s prequel money-grab is permanently imprisoned by the fact most already know how the overall conflicts of its fictional universe ends.

RINGS OF POWER’s episode one opens with an almost 9/11-esque narrated intro from the perspective of a much younger version of a familiar Lord of the Ring’s Galadriel. Played by an ethereal Cate Blanchett in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Galadriel most remember is a haunting sorceress hidden in the woods while in RINGS OF POWER her younger version is more of an elegant swordswoman/warrior rather than a magic-focused character. She tells of a supreme evil called Morgoth who attacks of destroys two colossal trees of light in the elf homeland of Valanir, which sparks a war across the sea between elves and the evil Morgoth’s armies of orcs and men. This war takes the lives of many elves, including Galadriel’s older brother who sought to cripple Morgoth’s forces by defeating Morgoth’s right-hand man Sauron. Unfortunately, Sauron gets to him first, setting up Galadriel with the standard motivation for a quest for vengeance. Without spoiling any more, other developments arise in Middle Earth despite the long drawn-out incessant talking but this show may have some surprises in the episodes to come.

If you’re interested or just curious, here’s a YouTube link to a trailer for the show: