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Prime Video Amazon Studio’s LotR, The Rings of Power - Time compression

Posted Melbourne Tolkien Fellowship FB May 2022

‘In the novels, the aforementioned things take place over thousands of years, but Payne and McKay (RoP showrunners) have compressed events into a single point in time. “…. “If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four.”’

Vanity Fair Article 10th Feb 2022

There is some irony in telling a story in which the prevention of the decline of time is a major theme of the Second Age, the showrunners are using time compression in the storyline.

Prime Video want a coherent story with mass appeal that will entertain audiences at a scale befitting its budget, whilst capturing the grandness, sense of ancientry and tragedy of the Second Age. Compression may be inevitable given the medium of TV but it will require some good writing to make it work.

Prime Video will use time compression to minimize the massive gaps in time between the major events of the Second Age, condensing over 3,000 year story into “a single point in time.” We don’t know how many years, decades, centuries this will mean.

How do they plan to blend the Elven and Mannish plotlines into a coherent TV series?

A central theme of the Second Age deals with Sauron manipulating Elves and Men based on what they desire most:

Men - immortality

Elves - to slow the passage of time and 'fading'.

The plight of both Men and Elves played out in the bitterness of mortality, and the sorrow of lingering.

With a condensed timeline how can we get a sense of the struggle of the elves trying to cope with being immortal, unchanging beings in an ever-changing, even decaying world. Over time, the Númenoreans don’t understand why they in all their faithfulness and piety are doomed to die, and soon rebel against the Gods with a cataclysmic end. With compression how do we see the generations of increasing corruption of Númenor?

 The writers are including a number of relationships and interactions between characters who by their very nature experience the flow of time differently; Bronwyn and Arondir, Galadriel and Halbrand, Elrond and the dwarves of Khazad-dûm.

Artwork by: Christopher Tolkien, Mellorian, MarkvA, SaMoart, Angus McBride, Weta, Gradivus, Ivan Cavini, JGlover, John Howe

 

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