The best thing about Rings of Power season 3 is what Amazon cut
Season 3 arrived with Sauron forging the One Ring, Gandalf in play, and a Stranger Things star as Celeborn. The loudest fan celebration is for two characters who aren't there.
The Rings of Power season 3 premiered on November 11 with four episodes, the rest arriving November 18 and 25. On paper it's the season the show has been promising for four years: a five-year time jump, Sauron openly the Dark Lord and forging the One Ring, the future Nazgûl introduced, Jamie Campbell Bower — Vecna himself — as Celeborn.
And yet the change fans actually celebrated is an absence. Nori and Poppy are out, and co-showrunner J.D. Payne confirmed the Harfoots' demotion to Empire:
"It was time for them to take a little bit more of a backseat."
The r/television thread took the news like a gift with a bow on it:
"Sidelined the Harfoots? Christmas is early this year!"
That is a damning kind of applause. When a show's most welcomed creative decision is deleting a storyline, the audience is telling you the seasons so far were an endurance exercise — and that Amazon knows it, because no one benches characters who are working. Subtraction can fix an episode count; it can't supply the thing the show has been missing, which is a story people are impatient to get back to.
Four years and hundreds of millions of dollars in, the season 3 change fans cheered loudest cost nothing and removed two characters.
The comparison that stings more than any review
The same thread produced the sentence Amazon should pin above the writers' room door:
"Living in a world where a LOTR adaptation is abysmal while a One Piece adaptation is kicking along just fine is so bizarre"
Strip the hyperbole and the comparison holds. Netflix took a thousand-episode pirate cartoon — on paper, unadaptable — and made a live-action show confident enough to be renewed for season 3 before season 2 aired. Amazon took the most beloved fantasy text in the language, with a reported quarter-billion just for the rights, and four years later its fans' highest praise is "less of it."
Don't miss: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power cast — who plays Adar, and why he looks different in season 2
The actual season may play better than its reputation; One Ring forging and a talking balrog voiced by Simon Pegg are real draws, and Payne left the door open with "never count a Halfling out." But viewers who walked away during season 2 were asking one question this week — is it worth coming back — and the strongest argument Amazon has offered them is a removal. For a franchise this size, that should be nowhere near good enough.
Previously we wrote: The man who made Gollum count as acting is putting AI in Hunt for Gollum