The Rings of Power Season 3 Dutifully Builds Out Its Lore
The third season of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel is not quite the soft reboot it’s going for.
The best and worst thing you can say about The Rings of Power, Amazon’s polarizing Lord of the Rings prequel series, is that it’s “pretty good.” Which is either a death knell for the show or a ringing endorsement, based on what you measure it up against. There is, of course, the impossibly high standard set by Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy; then there’s the rock-bottom that is Jackson’s Hobbit movies. The Rings of Power has always sat comfortably in between those two, with its meticulous devotion to practical effects and the world’s rich lore aping the best of the Lord of the Rings films, while its sometimes sluggish pacing and unwieldy ensemble uncomfortably recalled the Hobbit films. But though its first season struggled to escape the shadow of the Lord of the Rings films, Season 2 managed to establish the show as a compelling interpretation of Tolkien’s works in its own right.
Which brings us to The Rings of Power Season 3, a season that showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne have teased as a soft reboot of the show, picking up five years after the events of Season 2. But despite promises of a “reset,” The Rings of Power Season 3 is very much the same — still chock-full of thrilling, epic highs…and plodding, cringey lows. But with the show jumping forward to the height of the Elves’ war against Sauron (Charlie Vickers) and Sauron’s dogged fixation on creating his master ring, The Rings of Power is starting to buckle under the weight of its lore obligations. However, the season gets enough fresh energy from new characters — original and canonical — and intriguing narrative innovations that the show still remains one of the most engrossing fantasy epics on TV right now.
Galadriel leads the Elven forces against Sauron’s armies.
Five years after the fall of Eregion, Sauron and his army of Orcs have laid waste to nearly all of Middle-earth, except for the Elven realms. Aided by the three Elven rings, the High King Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker) and his trusted commanders have managed to hold back Sauron’s influence, but at great cost. No one feels that cost more than Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), who has been fighting on the front lines alongside the Wood Elf Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) to keep Lindon and Rivendell free from Sauron’s grasp. But with Sauron recruiting more human kingdoms to his cause with the corrupting power of his nine rings of Men, the Elves are starting to become desperate.
Meanwhile, Sauron has been surreptitiously attempting to craft a new ring, one that would give him dominion over all the rings of power — a plot that the Elves are alerted to by a mysterious Orc named Marnûkh (Adam Young). Disturbed by this revelation and reports that Sauron is amassing an army aided by the Eastern kingdoms of Rhûn, Galadriel embarks on a quest to find the secret to the master ring before Sauron, while Elrond (Robert Aramayo) sails for the embattled island kingdom of Númenor to recruit an army that can rival Sauron’s. And in the neutral mountain kingdom of Khazad-dûm, Durin IV (Owain Arthur) faces pressure from his denizens over the Dwarven rings of power.
Sauron’s attempt to craft the one ring becomes the season’s main narrative.
Like past seasons, The Rings of Power Season 3 is a tangle of plotlines, some that are more interesting than others. The Númenor drama, now built up to a full-blown civil conflict between the former Queen Míriel’s (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) forces and the prideful Ar-Pharazôn (Trystan Gravelle), was always a slog, and Payne and McKay’s attempts to inject it with edge through subterfuge and assassination attempts fall flat. You spend most of their scenes waiting for Elendil (Lloyd Owen) to go and found Gondor already. Meanwhile, other storylines, like the Dwarven conflict between Durin IV and his newly arrived brother Thrain (Eddie Marsan) or Gandalf’s attempts to stop the dark forces in Rhûn, are padded with soapy twists or fleeing air-punch moments to give it equal footing to the Elven storylines.
The show is at its best when it focuses on a central conflict — Galadriel, Arondir, and Marnûkh’s quest to find the secrets of the master ring before Sauron — and uses the momentum around the buzzy Galadriel/Sauron dynamic to propel itself forward. It’s at its worst when it feels less like storytelling and more like chess pieces being put in place so that the story can move forward. The show has smartly been whittling down its gargantuan cast in the past few seasons (Harfoots who?), but Payne and McKay still often approach its story like a school project, going through events and storylines like they’re crossing off a checklist.
New cast member Jamie Campbell Bower as Galadriel’s husband Celeborn is a welcome addition.
Thankfully, the strengths of the charming cast and the show’s dedication to practical effects — the latter feeling like an oasis in a desert of AI slop and shoddy CGI — elevate The Rings of Power in its most laborious moments. Vickers already proved to be a standout performer in Season 2 with his transformation into the manipulative Annatar, but is clearly relishing playing the dark side of Sauron with an even more ruthless and capital “E” evil turn. Everyone else is on their A-game as well, varying qualities in storylines aside, with Aramayo stepping up to play double duty as Elrond and his twin brother Elros, who chooses to become human to found Númenor. Clark’s Galadriel remains a shining beacon of the show, and even more so with this season, which brings back her long-missing husband Celeborn, played by Jamie Campbell Bower with a sharp, enigmatic edge. Fans of the Sauron-Galadriel dynamic will enjoy how the show leans into this conflict, with Galadriel plagued by visions of Sauron, even when she’s reunited with the husband she long believed dead. The show wisely teases out this dynamic, which is still the strongest innovation that Rings of Power has done — no matter how it may irk classic Tolkien scholars.
For all its strengths and weaknesses, The Rings of Power Season 3 continues to be “pretty good.” Through the seven episodes screened by critics (the finale is still under wraps), the show demonstrates this through and through, with some truly excellent highlights — look to a pretty spectacular action sequence in Episode 4 — and some low points that just need to be powered through. But while the show continues to pay loving homage to Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films (sometimes in eye-rollingly silly ways), it does feel like The Rings of Power is settling into its own identity: full of potential, and almost grasping it. Maybe by the time we reach its planned fifth season, that identity will have graduated to “pretty great.”
