High Fantasy Archives - Page 18 Of 25

November 23, 2021January 29, 2025

“The Wheel Of Time” Episode 1 Is Decent, But Deceptively Simple

**MINOR SPOILERS FOR THE WHEEL OF TIME EPISODE ONE AHEAD!**

For the past decade or so, the fantasy genre has been dominated to such an extent by HBO’s Game Of Thrones that it appears as though many professional critics no longer remember what came before. So they dissect every new fantasy series looking for similarities to Game Of Thrones, and inventing said similarities even when there are none. The Witcher? A Game Of Thrones rip-off, clearly. Shadow And Bone? A young-adult Game Of Thrones. The Wheel Of Time? Uh, Game Of Thrones but…uh, more wholesome, I guess?

The reference-point they’re looking for (in the latter case) is The Lord Of The Rings. To be honest, it’s downright annoying that critics feel the need to endlessly compare vastly different works in the same genre at all, especially as fantasy is rapidly expanding to be more diverse than ever and the writings of cisgender heterosexual white men are no longer automatically the gold-standard by which we judge everything else. But even leaving that aside, comparing The Wheel Of Time to Game Of Thrones is absurd. The first installment in Robert Jordan’s sprawling fourteen-book series is intentionally modeled after The Lord Of The Rings.

Later on in the series, perhaps, one could argue that Jordan’s increasingly complex spiderweb of crisscrossing subplots was more reminiscent of Game Of Thrones‘ intricate storytelling than The Lord Of The Rings‘ relatively straightforward quest narrative, but Amazon’s The Wheel Of Time is only on season one – which means we haven’t gotten anywhere close to the point where a Thrones comparison is even relevant, much less accurate. The Wheel Of Time‘s first episode is actually so simplified that my biggest criticism is that it feels deceptively generic, stripped bare of almost any unique embellishment to distinguish it from The Lord Of The Rings.

Perhaps recognizing that the monumental scope of Jordan’s series could alienate casual viewers or audiences new to the fantasy genre, Wheel Of Time starts off with a bare-bones plot and as little lore-heavy exposition as possible – basically all we learn from episode one is that “the Dark One is waking”, which is a vague yet familiar concept, and that one of the four main characters is prophesied to be “the Dragon” who can stop the aforementioned Dark One. There’s no way of narrowing down which character is the Dragon (although book readers will know the answer), because they’re all roughly the right age to fit the prophecy, and the Dragon could be any gender.

What Jordan did with these well-worn tropes was deconstruct them in various ways, but unless you know that going into the show I worry that some new viewers might be turned off by what sounds like a basic plot. There are plenty of worldbuilding details and story elements unique to The Wheel Of Time that could have been sprinkled in throughout this episode, not distracting from the narrative but enriching it and giving viewers a reason to keep watching for something they haven’t seen before onscreen, rather than the promise of deconstructing tropes they already have.

The one area where Wheel Of Time stood out from the crowd when the first book was published was in the series’ exploration of gender roles, and one would think that Amazon’s series would lean into that more, given the focus it received in the marketing, and the top billing given to Rosamund Pike as Moiraine Damodred, an Aes Sedai on a mission to find the Dragon. To be fair, episodes two and three (released simultaneously with the premiere) do a much better job of explaining the rift between women and men in this world, but episode one only gives a handwavy explanation of who the Aes Sedai are, why women alone can use magic in this world, and what happened so that men can’t.

Yet even so, Amazon’s depictions of women in The Wheel Of Time are effortlessly superior to Jordan’s, at least insofar as it feels like the women of Amazon’s series are real people with some thought and care put into their individual characterizations. Reading Jordan’s books, it sometimes feels like he pulled at random from a grab-bag of sexist stereotypes to flesh out his female characters, which in turn dilutes whatever message he was trying to send (I said his books explored the subject of gender roles, but you could build a strong argument for why they also reinforce them).

Fantasy and sci-fi in particular are two genres that have always had a problem with sexism, and that doesn’t magically go away during the transition from literature to film and television without writers behind the scenes advocating for updates to the source material. Based on showrunner Rafe Judkins’ previous work on Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., I do trust him to make those decisions on his own, but I’m very glad that his writers room for season one also included three women; one of whom, Celine Song, is credited as having written four episodes – the most of any writer on the series. The result is that Wheel Of Time‘s dynamic female characters are its highlight.

That being said, this is something that only becomes gradually clear throughout the first three episodes. Episode one, in and of itself, skimps a little on characterizations…which is weird, seeing as there’s not enough actual plot packed into these fifty-four minutes to warrant doing anything else with all that screentime. The women do still manage to steal the spotlight, however, particularly Moiraine, who keeps the people of the Two Rivers on edge with her disarming personality, and Egwene al’Vere (Madeleine Madden), whose journey of self-discovery is followed so closely by director Uta Briesewitz’s camera that whether intentionally or not she comes across as the lead.

We’re introduced to Egwene and expected to focus on her before we even hear of Rand al’Thor (Josha Stradowski), or Mat Cauthon (Barney Harris, whose performance you’ll want to enjoy while it lasts – he’s been recast for season two), or Perrin Aybara (Marcus Rutherford), while Nynaeve al’Meara (Zoë Robins) doesn’t get enough attention in this episode to foreshadow her significance down the line. Throughout the battle with the beastly Trollocs, we remain centered on Egwene as her reality crashes down in flames around her, and it’s through her wide eyes that we witness Moiraine’s first staggering display of power.

When we cut back to Rand and his father Tam (Michael McElhatton), their fight with a Trolloc – through which Jordan narrowed the scope of the entire battle to just two people fighting to survive one harrowing night in the mountains – is an interlude between scenes of Egwene’s experiences. We briefly follow Mat and Perrin as they weave in and out of the battle, but I never felt like the show knew exactly to do with Mat, and Perrin’s storyline in this first episode features an overused trope which, unless subverted soon, will continue to grate on me every time it’s brought up again.

Egwene obviously benefits immensely from this change. But if there’s an unfortunate side-effect, it’s that Rand and Tam’s entire relationship is cut down to just three scenes in which we barely get to know anything about them. I loathed Rand in the books, but here I think he could be a more interesting and likable character (episode three, in particular, proves that) if we got a little more time to connect with him.

Amusingly, Wheel Of Time doesn’t have enough time to tell its story. I’m not saying that the episodes need to each be over an hour long (although with only eight episodes in this first season, they might want to consider it), but the premiere certainly should have been. We bounce from scene to scene before having a chance to process anything, and as a result the characters’ personal lives feel underdeveloped. Egwene’s romantic relationship with Rand, which we enter just as both characters are starting down diverging paths, is a clear example of this; reduced to a scattering of interactions that give us no indication of why they loved each other in the first place and why we should care that they no longer do.

Between that, Mat’s standard-issue broken family, and Perrin’s listless relationship with his wife (a character invented for the show), the first episode drags quite a bit as it rotates between these subplots, at least until the Battle of Bel Tine begins. That’s also when Moiraine and her Warder Lan (Daniel Henney) finally stop hovering on the sidelines and get involved. Moiraine’s battle with the Trollocs, accompanied by Lorne Balfe’s eerie and powerful score, is a thing of beauty – we’ve seen magic onscreen countless times before, but Wheel Of Time‘s complex system of “channeling” is completely new.

Amazon’s fight choreographers and VFX team interpret channeling very literally – Moiraine bends into the One Power as gently as a tree in the wind, and performs a kind of slow-motion dance as she wields it, leaning in whichever direction she wants the power to go and letting it flow through her body, forming a channel with her outstretched arms and hands. It’s mesmerizing to watch. The magic itself, comprised mostly of glowing white threads, wouldn’t be all that interesting without Rosamund Pike’s incredible physical performance – although I liked that when Moiraine summons the One Power to her, it spills in luminous rivulets from everything in the area, even the ancient stones used to build the village inn.

The production values are incredible, of course. Amazon may have devoted more money and resources to their adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings, but The Wheel Of Time didn’t come cheap either, and it only occasionally looks less than cinematic when its expansive sets and locations are bathed in that unnaturally bright TV lighting that gives everything an artificial sheen. If the costumes don’t look as lived-in as one would expect, only Nynaeve’s vivid gray-green coat is actually distracting in the moment. But that’s not to say the other costumes look good. Moiraine’s traveling gear is the only fashion so far that I could see making an appearance at Halloween parties next year.

As I close this review, I realize that it might sound harsh, but please keep in mind that I’m reviewing episode one separately from two and three (and if I have time, I’ll review both those episodes in the coming days). Wheel Of Time doesn’t take long to improve significantly, and by the end of episode two I was heavily invested in the story and most of its characters. Episode one on its own, however, isn’t great – it’s fine, but it’s diluted to the point where it sometimes feels more like a bland rip-off of The Lord Of The Rings than the book, which is…impressive.

And amusing, seeing as Amazon has its own Lord Of The Rings adaptation coming up, and it will be completely different from the story most people are familiar with – in fact, possibly more like what Wheel Of Time will become. Me, I’m just happy that in the wake of Game Of Thrones, the fantasy genre on TV continues to expand and diversify, giving us fans plenty of content from which to choose our new obsessions.

Episode Rating: 6.5/10

October 25, 2021

Is Isildur The Star Of “The Lord Of The Rings” Season One?

Amazon Prime’s The Lord Of The Rings is now slightly less than a year away from release, and we still know shockingly little about the most epic (or at the very least expensive) streaming series ever made. Every tidbit of new information we learn seems to point in a different direction, leading fans on wild goose chases as we try to piece together when the series is set in the sprawling chronology of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, how much time and space it will cover over a reported span of five seasons, and whom exactly it will follow.

If you’ve been following my coverage of The Lord Of The Rings for a while, you might know the basics, but here’s a refresher before we get to the latest round of rumors. First of all, despite the fact that it’s still being referred to as The Lord Of The Rings, Amazon’s series is a prequel, not an adaptation of Tolkien’s novel or a remake of Jackson’s trilogy. Up until two days ago, our only certainty was that the series would take place sometime in the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth – which doesn’t exactly narrow it down much, seeing as the Second Age is a period of three-thousand, four-hundred and forty-one years.

Only adding to the confusion, Amazon’s first officially released image from The Lord Of The Rings – purportedly a stunning screenshot from the first episode – depicts a scene from long before the Second Age began, during the Years of the Trees; exponentially widening the scope of the tale.

But perhaps we may finally be able to zero in on a specific character, and a tangible timeframe. New reporting from Fellowship Of Fans suggests that one of The Lord Of The Rings‘ central protagonists, from episode three onwards (presumably to the end of the show), will be Isildur, a Númenórean prince who became the first king of Gondor and played a major role in setting up the events of The Lord Of The Rings proper, when he cut the One Ring from the dark lord Sauron’s hand. Additionally, Redanian Intelligence reports that Maxim Baldry – who was among the first actors rumored to be cast – will portray Isildur.

This won’t be Isildur’s first time appearing onscreen. Both Peter Jackson and Ralph Bakshi’s adaptations of The Lord Of The Rings open with memorable depictions of Isildur defeating Sauron at the end of the Second Age and of Isildur’s own death at the dawn of the Third Age when the One Ring slipped from his finger and betrayed him to the orcs. As far as Second Age characters go, he’s one of the few that casual fans of the franchise might recognize, so it’s not entirely surprising that Amazon would want to establish him early on in the show. But his inclusion in the very first season of Amazon’s series comes as a bit of a surprise.

Isildur was born in Second Age (S.A.) 3209, only two-hundred and thirty-two years before he defeated Sauron in the War of the Last Alliance which concluded the Second Age. Because of his Númenórean heritage, Isildur was extremely long-lived by human standards (he was killed at the age of two-hundred and thirty-four), but his entire lifespan is only a small fraction of the Second Age. By the time he was born, the heyday of the Elves in Middle-earth had ended, the Rings of Power had been forged, the kingdom of Eregion had been sacked and Khazad-dûm had closed its doors to the outside, while Sauron was already wielding the One Ring.

In both Jackson and Bakshi’s adaptations, this nuance is largely lost because the entire Second Age is reduced to just two pivotal events in the history of the One Ring – the forging of the Rings of Power between S.A. 1500 and S.A. 1600, and the War of the Last Alliance in S.A. 3441. Canonically there’s a gap of almost two-thousand years in between these events, but in the films it’s implied that they happen pretty much back-to-back. And now that we have two reliable outlets reporting that Isildur is a protagonist of Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings, I think we can expect to see the timeline of the Second Age similarly tailored to fit the story Amazon is telling.

Some people have come to the conclusion that Amazon is skipping over the forging of the Rings entirely, jumping straight to the end of the Second Age. But I feel very strongly that that’s not the case, and there’s evidence to support my argument. Think back to the very first map of Middle-earth that Amazon released to promote the series – the map that unmistakably showed the kingdom of Eregion and its capital of Ost-in-Edhil still standing. By Isildur’s time, Eregion had been in ruins for over a thousand years. That same map doesn’t depict Barad-dûr at all, though the fortress was completed in S.A. 1600.

Take a look at Amazon’s official synopsis for The Lord Of The Rings, too. Though it’s fairly vague, there’s one significant line that doesn’t support the theory that Amazon’s series takes place after the forging of the Rings. “Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth.” If the series were truly set after the forging at the end of the Second Age, Sauron would already have been at war with the Elves and with the Númenórean empire for centuries.

So no, I don’t think that Amazon is skipping over the forging of the Rings, arguably the single-most significant event in the Second Age. My personal belief is that Amazon will simply move the forging backwards to nearer the end of the Second Age, to around the same point at which Isildur first enters the histories of Middle-earth as a young prince of Númenor navigating an increasingly complex political crisis in the royal court. It would require a lot of reshuffling, but that way a lot of events that canonically took place thousands of years apart will now occur almost simultaneously.

There are several benefits to this approach. It would remove the need for potentially jarring time-jumps between seasons to cover all of the events of the Second Age. We’d have more time to get to know our core group of human protagonists and develop a connection with them, without constantly having to worry that by the next season they’ll be dead and we’ll have moved on to their great-grandchildren. And it makes sense to focus exclusively on what Tolkien wrote about the Second Age, so that the writers don’t have to fall back on entirely original plotlines to fill that three-thousand year period.

On the flip-side, I think there’s something to be said for why the use of time-jumps and a constantly rotating cast could have helped reinforce the primary themes of the Second Age – mainly the growing restlessness amongst humans as they become more and more fearful of their own mortality and begin searching for ways to cheat death. If the showrunners could have made us feel some of the same envy and resentment of the immortal Elves that emboldened the Númenóreans to try and wrest the secret of deathlessness from the land of the gods, that would have been an extraordinary feat.

And I can understand why many fans might feel upset that the timeline is again being tampered with dramatically – not to the same extent of Bakshi and Jackson basically taking the two events they needed and ignoring the rest of the Second Age entirely, but still seemingly prioritizing those same two events. This isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker for me, because I think it was always clear that there were going to be adjustments to the timeline one way or another simply because Tolkien himself left behind so many versions of the timeline in which there are countless slight variations, but I get where it might be for some.

As for the news that Maxim Baldry is potentially our Isildur – that definitely makes sense. I was rather hoping he’d be revealed to be playing one of the “fair forms” that Sauron took during the Second Age, but he has the build and beautiful flowing hair of a Númenórean prince, and though my only experience with his acting was through a small role in the last season of Doctor Who, I think he could certainly convey Isildur’s best qualities, his valor and selflessness, which the One Ring swiftly manipulated.

Isildur’s appearance strongly suggests that several other members of his family will also show up in the first season – including his father Elendil and younger brother Anárion, who both died during the War of the Last Alliance; his grandfather Amandil, who died at sea on an ill-fated mission to beseech the gods on Númenor’s behalf; and of course his more distant relatives, Ar-Pharazôn and Tar-Míriel, who became the last king and queen of Númenor and perished in the kingdom’s tumultuous downfall. Isildur’s family weren’t the luckiest folks in Middle-earth.

By the end of the Second Age, Isildur, his sons, and his nephew, were the last remnants of the Númenórean royal family in Middle-earth. Three of Isildur’s sons were killed alongside him during the Battle of the Gladden Fields at the start of the Third Age, leaving only the youngest, Valandil, alive. Valandil inherited the kingdom of Arnor from his grandfather Elendil, while Isildur’s nephew Meneldil became king of Gondor. But while Arnor would fall during the Third Age, Valandil’s descendants would include Aragorn – who re-established both kingdoms and reunited them under his rule.

All of this makes Isildur a crucial figure in Middle-earth’s history, and a worthy protagonist for Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings to follow across several seasons. However Amazon chooses to solve the timeline problems that they’ll be creating for themselves, I hope that they’re handled carefully. Basically, what I’m saying is that if there’s anything in this series that’s even remotely evocative of Thranduil telling Legolas in The Battle Of The Five Armies to seek out the ranger Aragorn when he was canonically only ten years old, Amazon will not hear the end of it from me.

But what are your feelings on this decision? Share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!

October 10, 2021

Should Amazon’s “The Lord Of The Rings” Have Hobbits?

Amazon Prime Studios has gone to great lengths to prevent any and all secrets from the set of The Lord Of The Rings from slipping out, and the little marketing they’ve done for the epic fantasy series thus far has been vague and at times misleading. So I have a hard time believing that Sir Lenny Henry, one of the series’ most prestigious stars, was supposed to disclose any information about his role in a recent interview with BBC Radio 4, much less the fact that he’s playing a hobbit.

As you can imagine, the news spread rapidly throughout Tolkien fan-circles. This is the first official confirmation of TheOneRing.net’s exclusive reporting from July that hobbits would be featured in Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings, and that Henry would be playing one. If Amazon’s series were a straightforward adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings, it would go without saying that hobbits should be present…but it’s not, and that’s why this reveal is causing something of a stir on social media.

Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings takes place between six-thousand to three-thousand years before The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, during the legendary Second Age of Middle-earth. I’ve written extensively about the Second Age in a series of posts detailing the ancient history of the Elven kingdoms of Lindon and Eregion, the Dwarven mansions of Khazad-dûm, and the Mannish empire of Númenor – but as you’ll find if you look back through those posts, I make no mention of hobbits. And that’s because the diminutive heroes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books only make their first appearance in the canonical timeline a thousand years after the end of the Second Age.

In the prologue to The Fellowship Of The Ring, Tolkien is intentionally but tantalizingly vague about hobbit prehistory, giving us armchair anthropologists – and the writers for Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings – extremely little to go on:

“Their earliest tales seem to glimpse a time when they dwelt in the upper vales of Anduin, between the eaves of Greenwood the Great and the Misty Mountains. Why they later undertook the hard and perilous crossing of the mountains into Eriador is no longer certain. Their own accounts speak of the multiplying of Men in the land, and of a shadow that fell on the forest, so that it became darkened and its new name was Mirkwood.”

Thanks to The Tale Of Years in the appendices to The Return Of The King, we can be certain that this “shadow” was in fact the malicious spirit of Sauron, which first settled in Greenwood around Third Age (T.A.) 1050. At this point, hobbits began to migrate steadily westward, and it wasn’t until T.A. 1601 that they crossed the Brandywine River and settled down in what later became known as the Shire. That’s when the hobbits finally began keeping written records of their history, much too late to be very helpful for those of us trying to look back into their distant past.

Even so, it seems clear that hobbits did exist in some form or another during the Second Age. They must have lived in the Anduin river-valley for some time, long enough at least to have become divided into three distinctly separate groups, Harfoots, Stoors, and Fallohides, who crossed the Misty Mountains at intervals between roughly T.A. 1050 and T.A. 1150. Sir Lenny Henry very specifically pointed out that he would be playing a Harfoot hobbit – which is quite interesting, given that Harfoots were the first hobbits to migrate westward. Still nowhere near as early as Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings is set, but earlier than the Stoors and Fallohides.

Little else is known about these prehistoric Harfoots, except that like all hobbits they originally lived in holes in the ground (a custom which predated the tradition of building large and elaborate hobbit-holes in the Shire), and that they “had much to do with Dwarves in ancient times”. In contrast, the Stoors were “less shy of Men” than other hobbits, and the Fallohides “were more friendly with Elves”. Details such as these could be played up in the series: a Harfoot hobbit being invited into the Dwarven kingdom of Khazad-dûm at the height of its glory would be a moving parallel to Samwise Gamgee’s awe and wonder at that same kingdom’s ruins in The Lord Of The Rings.

But the presence of hobbits in Amazon’s series introduces a couple of complications that definitely can’t be ignored (although there are workarounds). For one thing, there’s a very good narrative and thematic reason for why hobbits don’t start popping up in the legends of Middle-earth until nearer the end of the Third Age. With the exception of people like Gandalf, almost nobody is supposed to know about them.

In The Hobbit, Thorin’s plan to reclaim Erebor only succeeds because the dragon Smaug is unfamiliar with the scent of hobbits. And the entire plot of The Lord Of The Rings hinges on the fact that the dark lord Sauron does not, must not, be aware of hobbits. For they’ve given him no reason to notice them: they’re a small and seemingly harmless people tucked away in a quiet corner of the world, minding their own business and generally not being a bother to anybody. Sauron, seeing only the mighty kingdoms of Men and Elves as his true threats, overlooks the hobbits – allowing them to slip through the cracks in his defenses, undermine his strategies, and eventually defeat him.

So the glaring problem with hobbits in Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings is that they really can’t do anything of note, certainly nothing that would put them on Sauron’s radar, unless it’s handled very delicately – in the same way that The Clone Wars had to find increasingly complex ways to avoid having Anakin Skywalker and General Grievous ever meet so as to maintain continuity with a single line of dialogue in Revenge Of The Sith.

Thematically, it would also be hard to justify a whole bunch of hobbits going on epic quests to save Middle-earth thousands of years before Bilbo and Frodo’s time. In the prologue to Fellowship, Tolkien does mention that “In olden days they had, of course, been often obliged to fight to maintain themselves in a hard world”, which could provide Amazon’s writing team with an excuse to write about hobbit wars, but the reason hobbits are the heroes of Tolkien’s works is because they’re a peace-loving people put to the test by extraordinary circumstances, not that they were all secretly warriors once upon a time.

If hobbits are a major part of Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings, then I hope their storyline is more of a survival-genre adventure detailing their trek across the Misty Mountains and Eriador, with their arrival in the Shire moved forward a thousand years or so into the Second Age to give their subplot a clear and satisfying endpoint – preferably marked by the long-expected return of Howard Shore’s Shire theme. Canonically, it’s King Argeleb II of Arnor who grants the hobbits permission to settle there, but it could just as easily be Elendil or Isildur, Aragorn’s distant ancestors.

Would it be fanservice? A little. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, and it’s nothing compared to the idea that came to me as I was writing my notes for this post that involves the hobbits helping another enigmatic nature-loving race of people, the Entwives, escape the destruction of their gardens by Sauron and finding a new home for them in the Shire – where Samwise Gamgee’s cousin would one day see a giant elm tree walking across the north moors. Now that’s fanservice, and to be honest I’m not totally opposed to it, either.

Anyway, Amazon obviously has their reasons for including hobbits in The Lord Of The Rings, and I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that hobbits are arguably J.R.R. Tolkien’s most iconic characters, and their absence in his tales of the First and Second Ages is often cited as the main reason why those tales are less widely-known and universally-beloved. But there is some sense in that reasoning. Amidst all the wizards and warriors of Middle-earth, it’s the firmly grounded hobbits whose humility, empathy, and love of nature keeps Tolkien’s epic tales from ever straying into the glorification of war and violence that so much fantasy espouses.

That’s why I don’t necessarily have a problem with hobbits in Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings. If they have a purpose in the story beyond being instantly recognizable to general audiences, one that doesn’t introduce too many plot-holes but instead uses the hobbits to counterbalance the stories of heroes like Galadriel, Elrond, and Gil-galad, then their inclusion could be quite effective. Ending the series with them finally reaching the Shire after several seasons of hardship, providing a hopeful and optimistic end to Amazon’s story that would offset the tragedies of the Second Age while segueing beautifully into the stories we know, would be very much in the spirit of Tolkien.

And before I end this, I have to address one other thing about Henry’s remarks that isn’t and shouldn’t be a problem – though of course it’s being made into one by bigots. According to Henry, Amazon’s Harfoot hobbits will be a multicultural group including Black actors like Henry himself and Maori actors from New Zealand (making it all the more confusing why Amazon would shift production to the United Kingdom for season two). I’d have supported this casting decision regardless of whether or not Harfoot hobbits were canonically described as being “browner of skin” than other hobbits (which they are, by the way).

So what hobbit-centric storylines would you like to see in The Lord Of The Rings, and how big a role do you think they’ll play in the series? Share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!

October 5, 2021October 5, 2021

“House Of The Dragon” 1st Look Features No Dragons, Oddly

You know what they say about Game Of Thrones spin-offs, don’t you? Every time a new one gets announced, the gods toss a coin in the air, and the world holds its breath to see how it will land. Some have filmed entire pilot episodes before being abruptly canceled, some haven’t made it nearly that far, but so far prequel series House Of The Dragon is the only one that we can be (relatively) certain will actually hit HBO sometime next year.

As for whether it will be any good, the other big question that must necessarily be asked of any Game Of Thrones property following the long-running original series’ disastrous final season, that’s much more unclear. The first photos from House Of The Dragon weren’t particularly revealing, but failed to inspire much confidence in the series’ costume, hair, and makeup departments. Today, HBO unveiled a brief teaser trailer that still features its fair share of awkward wigs and lackluster outfits, but at least promises more of the political intrigue and intricate royal court drama that made Game Of Thrones such a phenomenon in the first place…before the writers ran out of George R.R. Martin books to adapt, and abandoned realism for bland high fantasy.

Fortunately for everyone involved, the source material for House Of The Dragon is a finished work, one that doesn’t require the writers to clumsily invent their own ending for the series from scratch. Based on Martin’s book Fire & Blood, House Of The Dragon tells the story of the war that tore the Targaryen family apart from the inside roughly two-hundred years before the events of Game Of Thrones. But while a lot changes in that time, even more stays the same: because just like Game Of Thrones, House Of The Dragon features deeply flawed and morally-conflicted characters fighting for power – only this time, basically everybody has a dragon.

Now, I’ve never read Fire & Blood, but I am a history buff, so it didn’t take me long before I started really vibing with the source material as I researched the history of the Targaryen family, the lead-up to the Dance of the Dragons, and the central power-struggle between Rhaenyra Targaryen, Daemon Targaryen, Alicent Hightower, and Aegon Targaryen II. It’s all really good stuff, and House Of The Dragon is going to have multiple seasons to give this story and these characters the justice they deserve. Based on this trailer, season one is very much going to be a “prelude to war”, fleshing out all of the characters and their relationships before pitting them against each other.

The teaser trailer provides very quick glimpses of important characters and events, accompanied by some (in my opinion, rather poorly-edited) narration from Matt Smith’s Daemon Targaryen, the younger brother of Westeros’ current Targaryen king, Viserys I. With Viserys nearing the end of his life, the question of who will succeed him weighs heavily on the minds of everyone at court, particularly Viserys’ adult daughter Princess Rhaenyra, and Rhaenyra’s stepmother Queen Alicent Hightower. Two political factions emerge, one recognizing the legitimacy of Rhaenyra’s claim to the throne and the other seeing Alicent’s young son with Viserys, Aegon II, as the better (i.e. male) option.

My hope is that these characters will all have clear and well-defined motivations for wanting the Iron Throne, but I do worry that House Of The Dragon will try too hard to justify Daenerys Targaryen’s “mad queen” turn in the final season of Game Of Thrones by retroactively doubling down on the idea that latent sociopathy runs in the Targaryen bloodline and can pop up whenever the writers need to cut a character’s arc abruptly short – a lazy excuse for a horribly-executed plot twist that I’d rather see retconned entirely than expanded upon; especially since House Of The Dragon is focused on another ambitious woman soon to be vilified for her actions.

House Of The Dragon is very clearly trying to establish visual and thematic parallels between the stories of Daenerys and Rhaenyra – the latter’s slow yet confident march toward the Iron Throne echoes Daenerys’ climb to that accursed chair in dream sequences and at the very end of her life in Game Of Thrones, and even their appearances are strikingly similar. I can only hope for Rhaenyra’s sake that her writers don’t fail her the same way that Benioff and Weiss failed Daenerys and her legions of fans, and in so doing tainted the Iron Throne to the point where even seeing it onscreen again brings back feelings of disappointment and regret.

House Of The Dragon will at least feature a relatively more diverse main cast than Game Of Thrones, which relegated most of its characters of color to the outskirts of the story. Most of the characters from House Valeryon, including Corlys Valeryon and his children Laenor and Laena, will be portrayed by Black actors, and the fascinating Mysaria, Rhaenyra and Daemon’s Mistress of Whisperers, will be played by Japanese actress Sonoya Mizuno. All of these characters have integral roles in the Targaryen civil war, and I can’t wait to see more of them.

And, of course, there will be plenty of dragons for everyone wondering…although they’re absent from this teaser trailer, which I think is a mistake. I understand that House Of The Dragon is still in post-production, so HBO probably doesn’t have any good dragon footage ready to go just yet, but in that case they should have just waited until they did. The show has dragons in the title, Matt Smith’s narration and HBO’s new tagline for the show both use the quote “Dreams didn’t make us kings…dragons did”, and the trailer itself has no dragons. It’s very disappointing in that regard, particularly seeing as dragons are a really big part of the Dance of the Dragons storyline…as you’d expect from, you know, the name.

But now we wait…for a specific release date to be announced, for HBO to show us some dragons already, for the coin to finally land and decide whether House Of The Dragon can reclaim the throne that Game Of Thrones itself willfully abdicated in its final season, or whether it will all come tumbling down, like the easily-avoidable pile of bricks that ultimately killed Cersei and Jaime Lannister because dying ignominiously in the penultimate episode was better than surviving into that dumpster-fire of a series finale.

Trailer Rating: 8/10