“I wish it need not have been screened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such series. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that we would have spent watching it.”
Well, that’s three hours of my life I can’t get back. I’ll avoid spoilers, but frankly, I don’t think there’s much you can do to detract from the experience of watching this series.
On the positive side, I went in with very low expectations, and it wasn’t quite as bad as I feared. There has obviously been a rethink since the last series, and the changes made have been in the right direction. We’re now getting longer segments of each story thread. The writing has improved, and in places, the dialogue was actually quite good. Nobody can write like Tolkien, but there were bits that weren’t too far off. There weren’t any cringe-worthy moments like ‘the sea is always right’ that were bad enough to make you regret the invention of talking.
However, the plot disaster inherited from the first season is still constraining what they can do. Tolkien did tell us that evil cannot be undone as if it had never been, and the same is true of story threads and characters. A few have been killed off, and most have become a bit better. I still found it slow and hard to get interested in, but I wasn’t positively repelled.
The most extraordinary thing, though, was a very basic error. Many of the scenes that were supposed to take place in darkness were so poorly lit it was hard to see what was going on. I had to turn up the contrast on my telly.
Overall, it isn’t really worth watching. I’ll probably plod on with it, not as compelling drama, but to see how they dig themselves out.
