DISCLAIMER: Here be spoilers.

Like most nerds of my generation – lapsed or otherwise and to varying degrees of commitment and intensity – I cling hard to the pure memories of my earliest viewings of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

While the books weren’t childhood favourites – I was knee-deep in Marvel comics up until my early teens – I did bone up on them while the films were still in the early stages of pre-production, goaded on by another close friend who would move back to Canada with his family before we would get a chance to see them in the Maltese cinemas together.

But there were other friends who would’ve filled the gap in the meantime, some of whom I was, by this point, playing Dungeons and Dragons with.

So in my mind, this period now forms a mash-up of time where a store of fantasy imagery was taking root in my ‘mind palace’, which would serve as a source of comfort and self-identification for years to come… in many ways it still serves that function to this very day, albeit in somewhat altered form.

I’m thinking about all of this after finally having caught up with the second season of The Rings of Power – Amazon Prime’s bid to secure their own Game of Thrones franchise by pre-committing to five seasons of the thing and even launching a reserve long-form adaptation in the form of The Wheel of Time should this one go bust.

This cynicism seeps through the operation and, unfortunately, I feel it’s particularly evident in this second season, which toggles in a perfunctory fashion from one of the many sub-plots to another, the only real connective tissue being the long-game machinations of Sauron (Charlie Vickers): here a svelte Machiavellian figure whose Season One disguise as sea-faring lone wolf ‘Halbrand’ pulled the wool under the eyes of none other than Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) herself.

(In Halbrand-mode, he could’ve easily fronted one of those neo-Britpop acts… there’s something disarming in the image of Galadriel bopping to Kasabian.)

The thing is, I was quite chill about The Rings of Power when it first appeared. Unlike many others, apparently, I was willing to give Season One a chance, with its slow burn and trickle of ‘new’ characters and fill-in-the-blanks exercises riffing on the sketches of lore the showrunners and their writers had to work with.

It felt, at the very least, the start of something that could grow into an organic story with its own heartbeat… and Galadriel-as-fundamentalist struck me as a bold-enough narrative choice which, I suspected, would yield some interesting detours further down the pike.

But, hand on heart, I can’t quite say that the second season is exactly rewarding my investment on this front. Where we previously had a gorgeously photographed and put together spark of potential, now we have that, only with the potential snuffed out in favour of a flattening and overstretched story that is really just a set of fan-fictiony vignettes ticking off boxes, all scattered across disparate geographical locations on Tolkien’s famously vast and detailed map of Middle Earth.

It’s yet another reminder of how the magic we associate with fantasy literature in particular – that thrill of immersion all too often written off as simply ‘escapist’ – has very little to do with by-the-numbers tropes and settings and everything to with an innate poetry that speaks to a wider yearning.

The yearning for a world which is more mysterious and more alive, where traveling means discovery, danger and difference and where transcendence can be mapped out and understood but never replicated in rote human terms.

But replication is so ingrained in pop culture now. In a sense, it is its only real faith. The belief that for something to work – for something to even be conceived – it needs to have worked before, and on a massive scale.

You can of course imagine that such an approach doesn’t do too well when attempting the kind of fay whimsy that is very much part of Tolkien’s fictional universe, no matter what the more macho strands of the fandom would have you believe.

It’s why the sequences with not-(yet)Gandalf and his duo of not-Hobbit buddies are the dullest in the show, and why Rory Kinnear’s Tom Bombadil, while certainly a welcome presence on screen after being infamously excised from the Jackson trilogy, feels just like another placeholder mentor figure – a wizard whose only USP is a higher quotient of chill than his counterparts – instead of a baffling and refreshingly unexplained spirit of sylvan inevitability.

Perhaps this is why The Rings of Power is at its best when zooming in on still-human-shaped Sauron and his horrifically ingenious acts of arts-and-crafts based gaslighting. Let’s face it, it’s the all-too-human cruelties on lurid display that helped Game of Thrones nab a healthy swathe of the non-nerd audience, because this is stuff that soap operas are made of and as long as we want power, sex and exist among people who desire the same, the electric charge of it will never cease to appeal.

So it’s clear that the showrunners are confident in their abilities to tighten the noose around poor Celebrimbor(Charles Edwards)’s neck, as Sauron – disguised as the outwardly benign jewellery savant Annatar – makes good on his moniker as the Great Deceiver, and how.

For all that the show is littered with instances of orcs, giant spiders and other gory creatures whose mere presence is meant to trigger our gag reflex, none of them can hold a candle to the gross yet precise – precisely so gross because it’s so precise – way in which Sauron ingratiates himself into Celebrimbor’s workshop (really, the seat of this craftsman-monarch’s very kingdom). I don’t remember feeling this disgusted by a TV character since the John Paul (aka ‘The Prick’) from the first season of Bad Sisters.

This is just about the only instance of genuine emotional frisson we’re allowed to feel during the season, where we’re allowed to wince and hiss at displays of moral callousness because how else are we gonna react? Same goes Kemen (Leon Wadham), the PG-13 Joffrey of the show: nepo-baby son to the scheming aspirant to the Númenórean throne and the custodian of the most smoothly slappable faces this side of Westernesse. (Thankfully, it’s a face that *does* get slapped once or twice already, though we’re meant to understand that his true comeuppance is yet to come and given how padded out the show is, this’ll be a case of delayed gratification for the Ages).

But there’s an elevated flip-side to all this. Namely, that Celebrimbor’s rise and fall constitutes a decent stab at a Greek-style tragedy. But this is the kind of stuff we’ve internalised a long time ago and now keep regurgitating with ease… and arguably, the real lasting value of Tolkien’s work lies in how he decided to side-step the otherwise ubiquitous Hellenic legacy in favour of the knottier and gnarlier brambles of Beowulf and the Norse Sagas.

Of course, you can never go home. (This is true of the denizens of Eregion in more ways than one, after Sauron’s done with them). Nobody’s asking a new show to try and rekindle the same magic we felt when we first read The Lord of the Rings or watched the Peter Jackson adaptations. (And if they are, they really should reconsider what they expect from their pop culture artifacts.)

My suggestion? Pick up The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany. It’s a good deal shorter than both The Lord of the Rings – slimmer than any of its three books, actually – and you’ll likely work through it even quicker than you would sitting through this latest season of That Second Age Show.

It’s the kind of book that Tom Bombadil would’ve written, because Bombadil understands the world and its denizens better than they understand themselves, and can sing a story that still remains a song.