I hope Charlie Vickers has a great chiropractor with the way he’s carrying this billion-dollar laundering scheme on his back.

Image Credit: Y.H. Zhou from Unsplash

A dude is playing a dude disguised as another dude.

I make that reference all the time, but hey, why fix something that ain’t broken?

Which is exactly the philosophy Amazon Studios should have stuck to. Unfortunately, they didn’t, and now, as a reviewer, I have an obligation not to mind my own business and suffer in silence, but rather to bring you an unnecessarily thought-out meditation on evil that has taken up more time and work than it ought to have, given how banal and simplistic Amazon’s take on Tolkien’s world is.

Let’s just get it over with before I change my mind and toss this piece into the fire from whence it came.

No Lens

Marvel has introduced numerous forms of cancers into visual storytelling, but none more asinine than that of a “sympathetic villain.”

After nearly a hundred-year run of colorful villains—deliciously evil, selfish, and destructive monsters—Marvel decided to write a villain whose motivations you might not agree with but still understand. You sympathize with his reasons, and his philosophy. And, in turn, with him.

Poor Thanos; his planet was destroyed, and so he became a radicalized nationalist.

A couple of takeaways from this example directly relate to the Rings of Power’s failure to write evil:

Firstly, I think that a sympathetic villain/antihero can be a huge draw. Who among us did not want to burn down their office building or stab our ex with a hot poker after they broke our hearts?

The allure of evil is in us and all around us, constantly calling us to succumb, to give in to our worst impulses. And so, when we see evil represented in the media—without CNN condemning it to [censored] instantly but instead analyzed with a degree of compassion and humility, even pity, perhaps—it evokes the same feelings in us.

Poor Thanos. His planet was destroyed. He wanted to help.

Instead, he became a twisted monster. He could have been a leader. He could have been a father. A good one.

Secondly, we knew right from the beginning that Thanos was the villain of the story. He was not presented as something he was not; there was no degree of deception or poorly written dark horse switcheroo nonsense designed to trick the audience. The impact of his decisions was not diminished by his sob background story. If anything, the sob story amplified the evil deeds.

The only person who thought he was not the villain was Thanos himself. His delusion contributed to the psychotic factor, justifying the Avengers putting an abrupt stop to him without negotiating. There is no rational conversation to be had with a psychotic person who thinks they are doing God’s work by genociding half the universe.

Thirdly, Hollywood, as always, has taken the wrong lesson from this one example of writing a philosophy of a sympathetic villain: People want more villains who are not inherently evil, only tragically converted to it by a sad event in their lives outside of their control. (Of course, Batman: The Killing Joke did it first, but comics are a niche medium, and so the popularity of a sympathetic villain skyrocketed only after Marvel put its twist on it.)

Fourthly and most importantly: Thanos worked because we saw the world through his lens without prejudice. Without the writers adding their worldviews to his. The script represented a staggering display of empathy and objectivity.

Without looking too closely at his evil—which may have had the opposite effect and conveyed condoning of it—with just the right amount of evil POV for our frontal cortices to clock, analyze, and process his psyche, Thanos was a perfectly balanced meal for the depravity lurking in our souls.

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Is He Evil or Nah?

Firstly, Sauron is introduced to us as Halbrand. Just a mortal Middle-earth dude with a waxed chest, Aragorn-approved grease in his hair, and dreamy, dreamy eyes. I'm not sure when you guys realized Halbrand was Sauron; I knew from “Hi, I’m Halbrand.”

This character was written explicitly to manipulate the audience into liking him from the first minute he appears on screen. And because the dude is conventionally attractive, boastful, a smirky little [censored] waxing poetics about the tides flowing out of me or something, the script thinks these surface-level qualities are enough to lift his character.

After all, Thanos was a purple giant with a scrotum for a chin. The dude had no chance of endearing himself to women or men with his charm, wit, warmth, humor, or looks, for he had none.

The script was therefore forced to develop his character into a three-dimensional archetype with depth and layers.

In The Rings of Power, showrunners Patrick McKay and JD Payne rely solely on Charlie Vickers’ charisma to carry their script.

And let me tell you, Tolkien’s world is not a 50 Shades of Grey kind of literature. We cannot hope that vibes and [censored] will pull us through the Andy Dufresne tunnel of doody, hoping the rain at the end will magically purify us.

It won’t. We will still end up sticky and gross.

Despite Vickers’ herculean effort and talent, The Lord of the Rings franchise is an ensemble story. Sauron is but one cog in a large machine, and no matter how well-oiled he is (not objectifying the man, this is just a turn of phrase), and he is well-oiled, the script falls apart without substantive commentary on Sauron’s inner evil.

Secondly, because Patrick McKay and JD Payne graduated from Mr. J.J. Abrams’ School of Mystery Boxes Emporium, they dedicate the entire first season to a non-existent mystery of Sauron’s identity for the big reveal that is not a reveal, which happens in the last thirty minutes of the last episode and falls completely flat.

In the first year of film school, directors are taught about Hitchcock’s ticking bomb under the table. When two people are sitting at a table in your scene, and suddenly a bomb goes off, you will give audiences ten seconds of utter shock.

When your camera pans to the underside of the table at the beginning of the scene and shows the bomb ticking there, you will give audiences a nerve-wracking ten minutes of nail-biting anxiety waiting for the bomb to go off, enriching their emotional experience.

Besides the fact that our emotional experience has been lessened by the bomb being disguised as Aragorn, the script tried to trick us in an incredibly amateurish way just for the lols.

It sacrifices valuable time we could have spent in Sauron’s head, learning about him and his motivations.

Why are you so evil, dude? I can’t pity you if you don’t tell me. I don’t care how beautifully shampooed your beautiful brown curls are, you beautiful man. Call me.

Image Credit: Madalyn Cox from Unsplash

Sauron the Moron

The series presents us with the concept of a sympathetic villain/antihero without doing any of the lifting to make him one. We do not see the world from his POV because he is playing peekaboo with us for eight episodes.

The POV character is Galadriel, because she represents incorruptible good in Tolkien's world, except in this iteration, she is plagued by her brother’s death and struggling with darkness herself pretty hard, so that does not work either.

We do not know his motivations, we do not know his strength—which fluctuates from omnipotent god to clownish impotence based on what the plot requires of him—we do not know if his Halbrand show was genuine repentance or just manipulative theater to get him closer to forging his ‘power over the flesh.’

Your Honor, we do not know Jack. How are we supposed to feel anything? We are not. This show was not created to make us feel things; it was created so we could stare in awe at the CGI locations from the Second Age and subscribe to Amazon Prime for more.

If that was Amazon’s metric for success, then congratulations. The locations were beautiful and occasionally looked real. I do subscribe to Amazon Prime regardless of your billion-dollar advertisement called The Rings of Power, because gas is like ten dollars a gallon, I do not wish to catch typhus riding public transportation, and I do need to get my food and dry shampoo into my house somehow.

Naturally, then, the fans of The Lord of the Rings, as well as first-time viewers, turn to lore, Peter Jackson’s trilogy, Tolkien, and his mythology described in The Silmarillion, to make heads and tails of The Rings of Power’s version of Sauron.

And the conclusion: Coca-Cola Zero.

Saur-brand does not subscribe to any of the philosophies introduced in Tolkien’s lore, neither in text nor in subtext. I do not think he subscribes to a philosophy of evil, period.

He is just sort of cruising for the bruising, more of an opportunist than a manipulator, and were it not for him being a lucky moron and everyone around him being a complete moron, he would fail instantly.

Here’s the biggest insult: He is still the most likable and one of the more competent characters in the show.

Image Credit: Y.H. Zhou from Unsplash

Manichaeism of the One Ring

Because Sauron has no philosophy in this iteration, and we do not see inside his head to understand where he is coming from—or why he possibly does things that are not inherently evil—we have no choice but to write off his successes as pure luck.

In Season 2, Episode 8, when Galadriel incorrectly accuses him of orchestrating this entire outcome from the beginning, he all but laughs in her face and says, “You think I planned this?” I’m paraphrasing, but … yeah.

And … yeah. The series strips him of his agency and makes him an opportunist rather than a manipulator, and isn’t that just sad?

Thank God Lady Luck decided to go to Hawaii in the Third Age and abandon her favorite son; otherwise, Frodo would never get to stare into the middle distance with a single tear streaming down his face like Denzel in Glory for twelve hours straight. The quest would be over as soon as it began.

But that’s not how we know Sauron to be, right?

The One Ring is Sauron. Sauron is the One Ring, as he poured much of himself into it during its forging. The shenanigans we see the various Ring-bearers endure are caused by the addictive nature of Sauron’s spirit, which clings to the soul of anyone unfortunate enough to cross its path.

Credit where credit is due: #HotSauron is a legitimate attribute borrowed from Tolkien’s pen that the showrunners somewhat got right. Sauron indeed disguised himself multiple times during his time in Middle-earth, taking on fair forms to seduce, manipulate, and prey upon others—but most importantly, to coax the evil he believed lay dormant in everyone to the surface.

“The devil is endlessly ingenious, and [censored] is his favorite subject,” Tolkien wrote to his son Michael in 1941.

This “constant presence of evil against which good must endlessly fight” aligns with the philosophy of Manichaeism and is one of the key aspects of the inner workings of the One Ring.

The Ring has a mind of its own—Sauron’s mind, an evil mind—and it relies on the existence of evil as a tangible, physical force in the world. It grabs you by the hair, pushes and pulls all your buttons, and demands you let that evil out—not in, but out.

After the defeat of his master, Sauron assumes the role of a metaphorical devil, bringing with him the belief that humans (elves, dwarves, or whatever) are a bunch of miserable, evil douchebags who need to be put down for their own good.

In that aspect, The Rings of Power utterly fails to connect its audience with Sauron. He is definitely not depicted as purely evil. In fact, he has moments of light—but these are shown merely as callbacks to the Peter Jackson trilogy and fail to reflect what we know about this very real aspect of Sauron.

He is an active force of evil, not a passive opportunist.

Image Credit: Archee Lal from Unsplash

Boethius’ Take on the One Ring

Anicius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boethius was a Roman senator—and a man who didn’t know when to shut up. For that, he paid the ultimate price.

Even the bleakness of his fate, waiting in prison for execution, couldn’t deter him from an incredibly optimistic view of the world, which he recorded in his Consolation of Philosophy. His core argument is this:

Everything is inherently good. Evil does not exist as a perpetual force but as a void that good has yet to reach.

“We agreed before that everything that exists is unitary, and that oneness itself is good. It then follows that everything, because it exists, is good. And it also follows that whatever falls from goodness ceases to exist, and that evil men cease to be what they were, having by their wickedness lost their human nature, although they still survive in the form of the human body.”

— Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

One reason the One Ring is so fascinating is because it embodies both of these philosophies about evil, seamlessly intertwined. The Master Ring has a will of its own—a very evil will—yet simultaneously functions as a mere vessel for that will. A void where good is absent, if you will.

Knowing what we do about Tolkien’s legendarium, the Rings of Power’s Saurbrand seems closer to the repentant version of Sauron we see in The Silmarillion following Morgoth’s defeat.

That Sauron is left open to interpretation: Was his repentance genuine, stemming from a desire to atone, or was it a calculated move to avoid the void where his master had been cast? Tolkien’s brilliance lies in this ambiguity.

This writing choice encapsulates why Tolkien is hailed as the founding father of modern fantasy:

1. Nothing is wholly evil.
2. Fantasy is rooted in the act of “fantasizing.” Tolkien doesn’t hand you all the answers because he doesn’t claim to know them himself. He presents a scenario and lets your mind wander, inviting you to ponder where the truth lies.

So, Halbrand—or whatever your name is—why did you save Elendil during the Battle of Tirharad? Was it because the absence of good momentarily gave way, and the moral conflict inside you shifted toward good on the spectrum of good and evil?

Or was it to parallel that opening scene in The Fellowship of the Ring where your alter ego smacked the holiness out of Elendil? Now, in The Rings of Power, the scene is reversed: You save Elendil, lying in the mud, as Isildur runs toward his father.

Somebody, please, tell me something!

Please, sir, can I have a movie?

The Catholicism Is Not Catholicising in This One

Unfortunately, we need to talk about religion—a sore, taboo subject and, frankly, not my favorite. I’m not a religious person. But I am a writer, and Tolkien, inextricably intertwining his faith with The Lord of the Rings, leaves me no choice but to address it as both a writer and a reader.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Catholicism breathes life into The Lord of the Rings, shaping its themes of hope, redemption, and the eternal battle between incorruptible good and redeemable evil. His vision of a benevolent Creator—a God who crafts a world where even the most fallen souls can find their way back to grace—imbues his work with profound spiritual resonance.

This message of divine goodness is conspicuously absent in The Rings of Power. Without it, the series feels hollow, as if it’s missing the moral clarity that gives Middle-earth its enduring power.

In their attempt to modernize the narrative, the writers fail to distinguish between the sins of institutional religion and Tolkien’s deeply personal, redemptive faith. Evil in Tolkien’s world is not a fixed state but a choice—one that can be undone. Goodness, though fragile, is incorruptible.

By neglecting this balance, The Rings of Power forfeits the spiritual depth that reminds us we are children of a higher purpose—flawed but not irredeemable. Tolkien’s God is a God of love and second chances, and his presence imbues The Lord of the Rings with hope. It’s a tragedy when that universal truth is overshadowed by a reluctance to embrace the light of Tolkien’s faith.

I’m sorry to be this blunt, but the sins of priests and institutions have little to do with one’s inner faith. They don’t reflect it. And so, I sorely miss a character like Frodo in The Rings of Power: a soul so pure and incorruptibly good that even the devil must work overtime to see him fall.

Not every story needs to be murky, complex, and morally grey. Some can be simply good. Some can be simply evil.

Didn’t we collectively agree back in 2018 that Blurred Lines was not a vibe?