The Rings of Power: season two is a vast improvement – and a meditation on the dangerous allure of AI

By Stuart Lee, Professor in English Literature, University of Oxford

At the beginning of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo Baggins attempts to describe how he feels about his unnatural lifespan, extended by his ownership of one of the magical rings. He likens it to too little butter being spread on too much bread.

That quote came back to me as I sat through Amazon Prime’s first series of The Rings of Power in 2022. For all the hype, and budget, it repeatedly felt like too little content was being drawn out across too many episodes.

The show’s writers faced the problem of only having the rights to the appendices of The Lord of…

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