goon I agree, largely—my partner and I watched it while we were in Italy.
I greatly admire the job the showrunners are doing interpolating the very scanty Second Age material to which they have access. It was a very good decision to make season two revolve around the demise of Celebrimbor. That was an arc that seemed to inspire the creators, at times I felt they were drawing on their own experiences in their development of his psychology.
The way Sauron went to work on Celebrimbor as Annatar was one of the better depictions of an abusive narcissist operating in a relationship I've seen lately. Meanwhile some of the nuances concerning Sauron—for instance the few hints he reproduces evil due to the horrors he himself experienced from Morgoth—are worthwhile layers of the original material even if they don't reflect an outlook that Tolkien would've likely preferred. To me, this season put some good flesh on the bones of story matter Tolkien largely neglected.
Charlie Vickers has performed very well as Sauron. I'd be happy to watch him in a Hollywood vehicle after these showings, he's doing much more hard work than the likes of Richard Madden or Kit Harington ever did.
I've broadly appreciated both the Stranger and Moria plotlines. Elendil bores me hugely, but I'll enjoy Ar-Pharazon's comeuppance when the shit goes down.
It's very far from perfect. Firstly there's the occasional intrusion of tin-eared genre tropes and dialogue. Sometimes this is absolutely embarrassing.
Secondly there's the race representation. The uniform tokenism of the multiracial casting in which dwarves, hobbits, elves and Numenoreans are all shown to be "race blind" is racially illiterate, it's an erasure of both actual history and the tendencies of the source material, and it's arguably racist itself.
It's roughly the same issue I had with Villeneuve redoing DUNE's "space Bedouin decolonial uprising" as a multi-ethnic affair. I don't find it an acceptable political landing point for these contemporary productions. I get why it's happening but it's not a good thing.
