Shouldn’t We Be Having More Fun in Middle Earth?

Two seasons into Amazon’s splashy multi-hundred-million dollar investment in The Rings of Power, it’s hard to find a scene that subverts expectation. That too-good-to-be-true, Aragorn-esque Halbrand who was helping Galadriel in season one? Yeah, that was Sauron in disguise. Those settlements in the Southlands you’d have trouble placing on a map of later Middle Earth? Yeah, those get turned into Mordor. The “Stranger” who fell to the ground with no sense...