Expectations VS Reality with Rings Of Power

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Prof. Devereaux weighs in again, to devastating effect:

And this bit made me actively angry with the show... The show did not ‘subvert expectations’ here, it did not ‘surprise’ you, it just lied to you. It showed you one thing and then told you later that another, entirely different thing happened just moments later. I cannot communicate how damaging this is for viewer investment because now nothing we see matters because at any moment the showrunners might just decide that the thing they just showed us didn’t actually happen and some other thing did. Infuriatingly bad.

As he points out in his preface, a movie battle does not have to be historically accurate, but it does have to be plausible. "because for the audience to care about the outcome of the battle, that outcome needs to feel like a product of the decisions characters made leading to it. The moment the audience feels like the battle’s decision depends entirely on the whim of the storyteller, disconnected from anyone’s actions, those actions stop mattering and the audience loses investment in the battle."

Read it all for a blow by blow fisking of the moronicity of Episode 6: https://acoup.blog/2023/01/27/collec...alling-towers/ The Rings of Power isn't simply bad Tolkien, it's bad television, period. It practically defines "hack work."