Warning: This article contains spoilers
Among Irish viewers, the big talking point about season one of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was the decision to saddle its proto-hobbit characters with appalling Irish accents. The problem wasn’t so much how the “harfoots” spoke but what their “Irishness” represented. The elves were posh, the humans, with their earthy northern English vowels, sounded like the front row of an Oasis concert ... and the primitive, feral proto-Hobbits were a muddled blend of Dublin, Dingle and Donegal.
Whether or not Irish people should feel insulted by bad Irish accents in the 21st century is a debate that raged across the internet. But what was unarguable was that these horrible harfoots took you out of the story – smashing the fourth wall with a six-foot shamrock. Was this a Middle-earth to this Irish Prime Video subscribers wished to return? Potentially not.
Two years later, series two of Rings of Power is en route (Prime Video, from August 29th), and the one bit of good news is that the Darby O’Gill hobbits have been cast, more or less, into the pit of Mount Doom. Just two harfoots remain – Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and Poppy (Megan Richards) and their accents are fine. They are certainly nothing anyone needs to get their shillelaghs in the twist over.
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The bad news is that Rings of Power otherwise remains epically underwhelming – full of noise and ambition yet lacking the magic of the original Tolkien novels and of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, movies that grow in status with each passing year.
Rings of Power is literally all over the map. Around and around Middle-earth, we go, never gaining a sense of an over-arching story in which to invest. Imagine if Game of Thrones was nothing but different versions of Daenerys wandering around the desert. That’s Rings of Power – all Daenerys in the dunes, no Ned Stark or Jon Snow.
The main action revolves around the creation of the all-powerful rings that will become central to The Lord of the Rings. The three elven rings were dashed off by pointy-eared smith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) in season one. Now he’s turning to the dwarves and men – egged on by a golden-haired stranger whose secret name is Sauron (Charlie Vickers). Nine rings for mortal men doomed to die – what could go wrong?
One issue is that none of these events feel nearly as momentous as they should. This is a crucial chapter in the history of Middle-earth – the forging of the rings, the dawn of the Nazgûl – yet it has all the heft of a lukewarm Marvel TV spin-off.
Meanwhile, the other plot lines feel like afterthoughts – there’s a quick visit to the island kingdom of Númenor where questions hang over the right to rule of queen Míriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson). In Mordor – created last time around in a naff CGI explosion – the orc lord Adar (not an OG Tolkien character but a creation of Rings of Power) weaves machinations of his own, even as the script goes out of its way to portray him as sympathetic.
Out east, Nori and the Gandalf-esque “The Stranger” (Daniel Weyman), for their part, have a run-in with a menacing and mysterious wizard portrayed by Ciarán Hinds, the Belfast actor doing his best to act his way past a ridiculous beard. Keeping the momentum going across these overlapping chapters are Morfydd Clark as Galadriel and Robert Aramayo as Elrond – the pointed-eared heroes of the tale. Both work hard to bring emotional depth yet are up against hokey dialogue and underwhelming battle sequences (that isn’t to deny that it occasionally has a so-bad-it’s-good quality).
The lack of awful Irish accents is, of course, a huge plus. However, The Rings of Power is still a wonky and hugely flawed attempt to turn Tolkien into Star Wars with staves. It’s shiny as anything – but, as a clever man once noted, “all that is gold does not glitter”. This laboured prequel certainly doesn’t.
The second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power streams on Prime Video from Thursday, August 29th
