After a mediocre last few seasons, this season was a real return to form.
I was enjoying Rings of Power. If the season had ended after seven episodes I'd have been praising it as great. But then they fucked it with the last episode.
The first season was definitely slow paced, but I enjoyed that, gave plenty of time to establish characters, the state of the world and the plotlines. They peaked it really nicely with episode 7, with the short term threads coming to a conclusion while also setting up a lot of interesting stuff for future seasons...
Then episode 8 happened and basically burnt through a whole seasons worth of content, mostly with a subtlety hammer ("He's not Sauron" etc), with everything feeling rushed and unearned. Such a stark contrast to the rest of the season which was the opposite.
Really felt like they took everything planned for season 2 and crammed it into a finale. They literally rushed through Lord of Gifts with a single throwaway line.
Would not be shocked if the original intention was for the plot of the first seven episodes to be the entire season, then some focus group came in and told them they asked too many questions and gave too few answers.
Urgh, really disappointing, because I was so ready to be a Rings of Power defender after 7. I'll still watch season 2, but bad taste definitely left in the mouth. Took me down from an 8 to a 6.
It looked pretty for sure, and the Dwarf stuff in particular was well done. Mostly good performances pretty much all around, although sometimes a little let down by the script. Some nice callbacks to the trilogy, I'm a sucker for little things like the yelling of the name "Isildur!". Most of the elves felt a bit too much like pointy ear humans. I get that a lot of the elves focused on are the impulsive ones, but aside from crying at cutting down a tree and some interesting exploration of the concept of time as an immortal, they didnt stand out as different.
Oh and the show's love for the 'Im clearly on a bungee cord so when I get hit I go flying off in a straight line in that direction' is pretty bad. Not only do they do it a lot, they also do it particularly badly.
Gavia Baker-Whitelaw's daily dot review of the final episode does an excellent job illustrating the pacing issues.
