The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (S1 Ep1) “A Shadow of the Past”

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power cost over a billion dollars to make and it isn’t going to be easy to recoup that money. Don’t ask me how that works with streaming services because I have no damned clue. I do know that a massive majority of people who have Amazon Prime do not use it for their streaming service. I can only assume that the good folks there decided to make this wildly expensive series to convince some of those people to quit ordering useless shit all the time and to just sit down and watch some Elves wander around Middle Earth.

So that’s the gist of it. Episode 1, titled “A Shadow of the Past” is a big introduction into this world that is many years before we saw it in The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring. In this time period, the Elves are super chill, just hanging out and watching the beauty of nature with their long flowing robes and pale-ass skin. They don’t even have a word for death! What a sheltered life. Then, a real big asshole named Morgoth starts getting into all sorts of chaotic trouble with his orcs and causes the Elves to leave their totally awesome lands West of Middle Earth to fight it out with the bad guys.

One Elf, in particular, whom we’ve actually met before, carries most of the runtime of this first episode. It’s Galadriel, the blonde and super powerful Elf we met in the original LoTR trilogy way back when. Played by Cate Blanchett in those films, this Galadriel is a little different because she’s kind of an outlaw and doesn’t have much interest in doing anything other than hunting down the evil baddie Sauron (yes, that guy again). She wasn’t always so angry, though, and it was only after her brother had been killed by Sauron that she decided to take up his quest and will not stop at nothing to kill his ugly ass.

We also get to meet a few other people. One is an Elf warrior named Arondir who has been living and working as a watchman near villages of humans who fought with Sauron’s buddy Morgoth. It’s been many years since Morgoth was running around but the Elves are still looking out for the people who did his bidding decades earlier. Arondir isn’t like all of the other Elves there and he’s got the hots for one of the human chicks. It’s bound to get interesting.

Let’s not forget the Harfoots. Are they the precursor to the Hobbits? I guess so. They sure seem like Hobbits and their innocence is something desperately needed in an episode already full of people just waiting for Sauron to pop back up.

This may seem like a lot of characters and things happening in the episode and it kind of is. I didn’t even mention Elrond but that’s mostly because he didn’t do much except for blab on to Galadriel about what she shouldn’t be doing even though we all know she don’t play those games. She’s an outlaw and she’s got bad boy Sauron’s number.