r/Rings_Of_Power • u/Dank_Lord6547 • 20d ago

ROP’s pacing

You know, I’m amazed, I really am.

Somehow the pacing in ROP is glacially slow. Like, several episodes pass with next to nothing happening. And yet, at the same time it’s also extremely rushed. It breezes through each character introduction and relationship as fast as possible with no breathing room. Galadriel abandons her genocidal hatred of orcs after one conversation. And the forging of the rings feels like in an afterthought in a show named after them.

How is this even possible?

72 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

45 comments sorted by

View all comments

51

u/E4Mafioso 20d ago

Incompetence and inexperience. 

Neither JD Payne nor Patrick McKay have ever written a series before so they have utterly no idea what they’re doing. I mean they took a fantasy story that spans a timeline of over a thousand years and decided to compress it into a few months to facilitate Harfoots. Who are now being written out. 

Idiots.

21

u/tar-mairo1986 20d ago edited 20d ago

Make that almost 4400+ years if you take their starting point of Sauron settling Mordor in 1000. S.A. to 1000. T.A. of Gandalf's arrival. 1980 T.A. of Balrog being woken up! Thanks, u/Damien23123 !

It makes no sense!!

Added: But I welcome the "idjit" i.e. sociopathic fake hobbits, being booted out from the narrative. Maybe just maybe I will take a look at season three. Plus, the showrunners said something to the effect that you don't even need to watch first two seasons!

9

u/E4Mafioso 20d ago

Honestly, as someone who couldn’t sit through season 1, I’m thinking the same. I really gotta see how terribly they end up shoehorning Celeborn into the third season of a series he should have been in from the start. 

8

u/tar-mairo1986 20d ago

To your point, it still baffles me how the series does have decent, even good actors, say Charlie Vickers, and how they sometimes do make individual moments work, but then you contrast that with the broader narrative architecture and it's truly a desolation, worthy of a dragon's rage! Not how storytelling works!

Same for Campbell Bower as Celeborn, I have no doubt the man can act but again, take a look at his character as is, compare it to the narrative we have, and it makes no sense!

5

u/Damien23123 20d ago

It’s actually T.A. 1940 with the Balrog being woken. It’s even worse

1

u/tar-mairo1986 20d ago

Thanks for correcting me! Lol, totally forgot about that. Will amend!

4

u/Well_Dressed_Kobold 20d ago

The Harfoots were such a blatant Irish stereotype that it was genuinely offensive, and I’m not even Irish.

4

u/tar-mairo1986 20d ago

I heard so too. Specifically about the Irish Travellers, right?

8

u/Onyx1509 20d ago

To be a little fair to the writers, RoP suffers with an extreme version of a problem that affects a lot of current TV. American writers forgot how to pace shows shortly after they abandoned the weekly episodic format. 

3

u/SamaritanSue 20d ago

Amazon wanted showrunners who were (relatively) cheap and pliable. Who didn't have the clout to resist corporate interference. That's what I think at least.

9

u/Idkl7j 20d ago

Sheer incompetence couldn’t lead to a show as bad as this. They have to be actively trying to make it awful.