The Complexity of Simple Stories (Rings of Power Season One)

Saturday afternoon, I found myself sitting down at a post-concert reception with one of the orchestrators for the score to the Rings of Power Amazon Prime series. (I love my job.) He is a  lovely human, an excellent young composer who gets to work with some of the biggest names in the business. So we got to talking about the new LOTR series, and he asked me if I had watched it and what I thought of it, and…it was a little embarrassing, but I had to admit to him that as gorgeous as the music was, my family just hadn’t been able to lock into the series enough to stay engaged. So we talked more about the music, and the challenges of telling a story that could sustain over eight episodes, with so many characters, and so on…

(I went home that day and put the score on my Spotify—it is fantastic, and as iconic as the score for the original trilogy is, I think I may like this one better; it’s, I don’t know, warmer somehow; it surrounds you with setting and characters without specifically telling you what to look at at any given moment, and  breathes so beautifully. Anyone who enjoys film scores and/or LOTR, or orchestral music period, I highly recommend giving it a listen.)

What story are they trying to tell?

Then I came home to talk with my kid about the whole conversation—my younger offspring is my favorite nerd-partner about film music and story structure. We remembered how we got to the end of the first episode of Rings of Power, and they said to me seriously, “You know, it’s  gorgeous to look at, wonderful music, good acting, but…it’s been an hour and I have no idea what the actual story is they are trying to tell. And I don’t know whose story is more important, and who we are supposed to care about. So…I don’t really care that much about anyone.”

I think they kind of nail it there.

To be fair—it’s incredibly difficult to manage the multiple arcs you need to tell a story like this—beginning to end of each episode, then the same for each season, then once again for the three-season (I think?) entire series. And with so many characters to wrangle—Galadriel and her quest for the growing shadow, Elrond and the dwarves and the mysterious (hah) secret thing they want to make, Arondir and the orcs, Elvish/Human racism and antipathy, the kid with the black sword, and oh yes the happy Harfoots scampering around while one of them protects the mysterious (hahah!) space alien that fell to earth in a meteor (I probably should have said “spoilers!” before this paragraph, but rest assured that this only covers the first episode)—it’s a lot.

So my kid and I talked about this, and then they tilted their head and said, “But the thing is, a story can be  simple, and still  good. In ‘Lord of the Rings,’ the story was incredibly simple—Frodo must take evil ring and drop it in the volcano. Boom, there’s the story.” Of course, we all know that by the time Frodo made it to Mount Doom a lot had happened and things had gotten very complicated, but the core story had remained the same all the way through. Every subplot, every character, everything important about the entire journey served that one very simple core story: take the ring to the volcano and defeat the power of evil.

Even after the Fellowship broke up and you had your Rohirrim over here and Minis Tirith there and Merry and Pippin riding a giant talking tree by Orthanc and Gollum chasing Frodo and Sam into Minas Morgul and Strider/Legolas/Gimli running consecutive marathons chasing Orcs, the story stayed constant. Frodo. Ring. Mount Doom. Defeat evil.

Rings of Power, in my opinion, wastes far too many episodes trying to “leave us with questions”—(ok ***spoilers forward a little***)—who’s the mysterious dude who fell in a pool of fire from the sky? Will Arondir escape the orcs to warn the rest of Middle Earth what’s up? What’s up (still) with the kid with the increasingly efficient and menacing black blade? What’s with this Halbrand dude Galadriel is hanging out with now? What’s with the orcs and this Adar guy? Will the Harfoot with the broken ankle be able to keep up with the community when they go on their next move? Just question after question—and they are interesting questions, to be sure. And then there’s the fan service—Look, it’s Elendil! Ooh, here’s Isildur! Ahhh, the city of Numenor! Oh yes, I remember about mithril mines in Moria!—lots of things to make us feel all warm and fuzzy about what we know of Middle Earth, even if almost none of us made it through The Silmarillion.

But what we do not know is: what story are they trying to tell? They are spending so much effort keeping us in suspense about what happens next that they haven’t taken the time to give us a reason to care what happens next.

Obviously the writers are also hobbled by the “canon” of Middle Earth lore, and they can’t just make stuff up wholesale or an army of Tolkein nerds—far fiercer (and faster) than Ents—would rise up and do battle all over social media. But what is the story? If the writers don’t know…then we don’t know. And we’re all wandering in the wilderness.

So, my suggestions, if I ruled the world and got to make these calls? (Which I am not, and I am aware that I am engaging in armchair quarterbacking here.)

Who is your main character?

First, I still believe that for every ensemble cast, there needs to be some main character on whose interlocking web of wants and needs the whole story hangs. (I wrote about this in a previous post.) In this series, it is clearly meant to be Galadriel: she’s the one who sees the shadow coming, who doesn’t believe it has passed, and who is convinced it will return. And our “simple” story, which we discover as we move through the season, is that the elf-warrior Galadriel sees  signs that the darkness of Morgoth isn’t fully defeated and must gather all Middle Earth to push back the darkness. Fine.
But in order for it to work, it needs to connect to the other strands of the story (I wrote about this too), and we have this huge cast of secondary characters who don’t seem to connect with the main story at all. Elrond and Galadriel meet in episode 1, but he doesn’t believe her about the shadow coming, and blathers along being political and mending fences with his old pal Durin (whose wife Disa is one of my favorite characters in the entire series). His story strand diverges from hers almost entirely. If Elrond, in his strand, were himself beginning to see (and show us he sees) the danger at the outset, then we would see the main simple story progressing whenever he’s on the screen. If the mysterious meteor-being (nope, we have no idea who this grey-bearded magic-working character may be, nope not a clue) could speak the Harfoots’ language and communicate the danger to at least Nori, and bring them into the main story, that would help too. And poor Arondir down in the south obviously knows the shadow is growing, but he too has no connection with Galadriel or Elrond or anyone except the pretty healer, so even though he is walking the same story as the rest of them, he’s utterly cut off from them. Could Galadriel access her mirror or something this early in the game to see what’s going on, or could there be a couple of those palantír globes for communication?

The most complicated and satisfying story can often, when we pull back the layers, be very simple.

This, of course, is taking me back to my own book, and challenging myself to find the simple story at its heart. For all my armchair quarterbacking, as I move back to my own work, I’m less and less sure that I’m nailing all of this even half as well as I need to—it’s harder with one’s own work than someone else’s, which seems very unfair. As I craft my blurbs and loglines for my story, I hope I can get closer to the germ of the story—and that it’s close enough that people will care when the big questions start coming.

We shall see!