The Rings of Power: Alloyed Review (Patreon)

And there we have it: Alloyed is the most plodding season finale I’ve watched since The Timeless Children. The culmination of The Rings of Power’s malicious pointlessness. It contains every stupid, banal, ugly impulse this ultra-capitalist Mormon disaster has slung at its tormented viewers across eight intractable weeks. The world is a worse place for containing The Rings of Power. My brain is a more tortured organ for having witnessed it. I hated every minute of this beige nerd porn, and I’m starting to morally oppose any praise it secures from delusional so-called critics.

Where the fuck do you even go with this? It’s an anti-dramatic, pointless piece of schlock. There’s no plot structure to speak of: some extremely weak mystery box “subplots” are paid off and the show ends. No theming to speak of, nor even a statement of intent for the future. Just “check in next time.” It doesn’t even satisfy on a spectacle level: the action sequences are awful, Gandalf fighting off the pseudo-Nazgûl looks like shit, and every frame looks like a DALL-E image.

But let’s go into the ways this sucks rather than litigating how badly it does. The Gandalf reveal is, of course, not a reveal. Anybody looking at The Stranger knows he’s Gandalf. That Alloyed treats this like a reveal at all is a bigger mystery than anything in the show. And in the end, Gandalf doesn’t even get a name. There’s no pay-off to this non-mystery that the show fails to court while treating it like a mystery. Literally nothing happens in this subplot.

But the other pseudo-J. J. Abrams puzzle box is the real offender. Halbrand secretly being Sauron is complete crap. The show’s insistence that it telegraphed Halbrand's identity by having him suddenly be manipulative and conniving, is, of course, nonsense. This is a guy who brawls in the street and mopes around looking hot for a while. Nothing he does directly points to him being Sauron in a way where you can go “ah, yes, they were building up to this.”

Furthermore, it doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s a reveal simply for the sake of having a reveal. It doesn’t transform the show’s understanding of Sauron or Halbrand in any way. Nobody’s relationships are fundamentally altered by Halbrand being Sauron. If anything, its sole purpose is to betray the themes of Tolkien by having the “low man” in rags secretly be the evil mastermind behind everything. Jeff Bezos must have squirted watching this.

I’d like to have anything else to talk about, but this is all the episode really has. Celebrimbor is going to make the Three Elven Rings. Sauron is headed to Mount Doom. Númenór and Moria have… nothing going on at this stage, and the little Harfoots are just Harfooting around more confidently. There’s nothing more to say here.

The Rings of Power is the worst piece of Middle-earth media I’ve been consumed. It flatters Rankin-Bass’s The Return of the King, which at least delivered the classic banger “Where There’s A Whip There’s a Way.” It’s one of the worst TV shows I’ve ever seen — maybe even the worst. Everything about it has been miserable, and I’m immensely relieved to be done with this show for the next year. Let’s confine it to the Udûn it deserves: an ash pile for Gollum to spit on. The world is a worse place with Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings in it, and writers and artists and filmmakers should take this as a challenge to create something beautiful, radical, and mad that challenges utter banality like this.