Amazon's The Lord of The Rings TV series should begin with Morgoth's defeat, despite a plethora of options available to its creative team. The highly anticipated series has been long in the making, with Amazon purchasing pertinent image rights for $250 million in November 2017 alongside a $1 billion five-season commitment that looks set to make The Lord of the Rings the most expensive TV production of all time. The Prime Video series will be set in visionary J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings Second Age, which begins some 3441 years before the events of the original trilogy.
Plot details remain under lock and key for The Lord of The Rings TV series, the Amazon show promises to follow "an ensemble cast of characters as they confront the re-emergence of evil in Middle-earth." While this unspecified evil undoubtedly leads to the rise of Sauron, Amazon's portrayal of the Second Age will likely flesh out Sauron's origin story, which is intrinsically tied with his one-time mentor: Morgoth. Morgoth is the dark lord directly preceding Sauron, whose defeat hastens the Second Age of Middle Earth in Tolkien's universe, making his presence something of a certainty in The Lord of the Rings TV prequel series.
Yet, Amazon's The Lord of the Rings should open their long-anticipated series with Morgoth's defeat in a scene akin to Sauron's original trilogy introduction. Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring establishes dread and dire stakes in equal measure with its epic opening battle sequence, which is a tactic Amazon's series should employ. Morgoth's fall also acts as a bookend for the Second Age in Middle Earth, meaning it flourishes as a natural starting point for The Lord of the Rings TV series.
Peter Jackson's The Lord of The Rings trilogy wastes no time laying down the importance of the scene unfurling before its audience. Galadriel delivers a brief introduction on The One Ring and Sauron's evil deception before launching into a titanic struggle on the slopes of Mount Doom in which multiple protagonists "fought for the freedom of Middle Earth." Apart from outlining how Sauron was defeated, this opening sequence establishes the high stakes at play and immediately demands undivided attention.
Amazon's The Lord of the Rings series should take a leaf from this playbook and follow a similar narrative delineating how The Host of Valinor defeated Morgoth. Opening with a valiant battle against evil would evoke memories of the original The Lord of the Rings trilogy and play on the nostalgia that the films still engender. On a basic level, The Hobbit prequel films failed because they were presented as separate from Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy instead of feeling like a continuation of the latter's tone and aesthetic. Amazon's TV series must be careful not to fall into this same trap.
Apart from replicating the beloved visual makeup of The Lord of the Rings, using the fall of Morgoth as a jumping-off point would also make perfect sense for the Amazon series while dolling out a helping of fanservice, as The Lord of the Rings TV series is confirmed to begin during the Second Age. In the Middle Earth canon, ages only change following cataclysmic societal shifts that loremasters deem worthy, so it would make sense to start Amazon's epic series with one such shift. Morgoth's defeat is undoubtedly an epic event worthy of kicking off such a highly anticipated series, and one which Amazon's The Lord of the Rings should not pass up the opportunity to use.
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