Lore modifications to Tolkien’s world are nothing new for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. However its modifications to the palantíri, the spherical seeing gadgets which have appeared most notably in Númenor up to now within the present, are beginning to get a little bit complicated.
Whereas followers of the Peter Jackson motion pictures will definitely acknowledge the particular risk that the palantíri poses within the present, that’s not how the books say the gadgets ought to work at the moment within the story. Positive, by the point of the Fellowship’s quest to destroy the One Ring, the gadgets have been principally instruments of deception employed by Sauron. However in the course of the time of The Rings of Power, they shouldn’t be evil in any respect. In reality, they’re principally simply walkie-talkies.
The palantíri, like all the very best and worst issues in Center-earth, have been initially created by the elves and later given to the Númenóreans, with seven of them surviving the island’s destruction and facilitating communication between the realms of Gondor (the place Boromir’s from) and its sister nation Arnor. They’re primarily one thing alongside the traces of Facetime walkie-talkies. They might be used to speak over lengthy distances, normally solely two immediately with one another, and so they might present visions of their environment throughout these communication periods. This is why once we see them within the present and flicks, characters would contact the palantíri and see visions of numerous locations with little to no context about what they have been. In different phrases, there’s nothing inherently evil about them or the pictures they present in any respect.
The issues with the spherical creations didn’t come up till the Third Age (when the primary trilogy is set) when, one after the other, the seven palantíri have been misplaced, falling into rivers or disappearing when cities have been sacked. The remaining palantíri have been locked away (one in Orthanc, the stronghold of the nice and noble Saruman, chief of the sensible wizards) for the identical reason that you just wouldn’t spill delicate data in a Zoom assembly the place the visitors have been hidden. There was no method to show that someone who shouldn’t be listening in (particularly Sauron) was listening in — and in The Lord of the Rings, we noticed precisely that occur. Whereas Gandalf says that Sauron couldn’t use his palantír to utterly fabricate the pictures that Denethor and Saruman noticed in their very own, he might manipulate the visions to fragment them and ensure they solely noticed those he needed them to. It’s these Sauron-influenced visions that drive Denethor almost to his state of desperation and denial in the primary trilogy, and that frighten Pippin (and reveal his location).
The issue is, this is additionally a reasonably precise description of how The Rings of Power treats the palantíri as effectively. They appear, primarily based on what we’ve seen of them within the present and their complete lack of description, to already be a destructive affect on characters.
As with all adaptation, a change isn’t inherently good or unhealthy. Nevertheless it’s laborious to not really feel like this one takes away from The Rings of Power’s effectiveness as a prequel. It’s presupposed to be a narrative about the best way a golden age of Center-earth was destroyed by the delicate influences of Sauron and the corruption that his evils impressed. However the present hasn’t finished a lot to show this age was golden in any respect, and the palantíri might have performed an integral function in that by displaying one thing we acknowledge as a device for evil getting used innocently and with out concern.
Half of the enjoyable of a prequel is that the viewers is aware of issues the characters don’t. So, for occasion, attending to see good characters freely utilizing the palantíri to speak might have been a wonderful avenue for the present to show to us how far Center-earth has fallen by the point Frodo and Sam set out from the Shire. They may change into yet one more lovely factor that was ruined by Sauron and his minions. As an alternative, the one palantír we’ve seen is handled as evil immediately by the individuals of Númenor, and as a essential object of prophecy by Míriel, suggesting they weren’t used for communication and have a totally completely different canonical place within the present. The Rings of Power appears so determined to offer us one thing we would acknowledge from the unique motion pictures that it skips straight to the fallen model of the world, quite than letting us witness that collapse organically.
And the palantíri aren’t the one place the present takes this identical shortcut. In episode 5, Durin IV solely spends a couple of minutes of display screen time in awe of his father’s use of the Ring of Power earlier than he realizes it’s a token of evil. It appears simple to think about the model of this plotline that will get area to play out over a pair of episodes, the place the rings may initially carry great good fortune to the dwarves, however solely Durin can see the ways in which a hoop is slowly turning his father egocentric, grasping, and merciless. With that model, we as an viewers may need an opportunity to see how Sauron’s rings got here to trick a lot of Center-earth into falling beneath his spell. As an alternative, the characters catch as much as our understanding virtually immediately.
At their perfect, prequels do greater than inform us what occurred earlier than the tales we love. They inform us how the world bought to the place it was — and within the case of The Lord of the Rings, that ought to imply telling the story of how the world fell up to now. How Sauron was allowed to rise once more and why the realms of males, elves, and dwarves have been so ill-prepared to cease him. It ought to present us all of the glory and grandeur that Center-earth needed to provide within the Second Age, and present us how nice the price of letting Sauron rise at the moment was. As an alternative of deepening our understanding of Center-earth, nonetheless, The Rings of Power appears rather more concerned with speeding us again to one thing acquainted: a warped model of a imaginative and prescient in a corrupted palantír.
