The Rings Of Power Season 2 Will Be More Breaking Bad than LoTR
The headline may leave you puzzled and even shocked. What The Rings of Power can even have in common with Breaking Bad, you ask?
Well, the answer needs to be a bit long. And it has to start with a reminder, that when you are at the center of fandom attention, you better watch your tongue. Particularly if you have just delivered something mostly disappointing to most of the fans, like The Rings of Power Season 1 – just look at its pretty abysmal audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, if you don't believe that disappointed fans are in the majority.
And Patrick McKay, one of the series' creators, did not watch his tongue carefully enough. "Sauron can now just be Sauron, like Tony Soprano or Walter White," McKay said in an interview. "He's evil, but complexly evil. We felt like if we did that in season one, he'd overshadow everything else. So the first season is like Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight is the next movie, with Sauron maneuvering out in the open."
Well, Internet being a web of Chinese whispers (despite everyone's ability to check for themselves what people actually said!), it is no wonder that very soon you could see headlines like "The Rings of Power Basing Season 2 On Breaking Bad. "
The article in question at least took trouble to "explain" that "The showrunners for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are taking inspirations from Breaking Bad's Walter White to tell the origin story of Sauron" right after the headline. Which, you know, also deviates from the meaning of McKay's original words, but at least retains some relation to them. But who reads past headlines in this day and age? A lot of Internet users certainly don't. Not that the original choice of comparison was exactly on point, as the immediate reaction of Reddit to the original comparison of Sauron with Tony Soprano and Walter White was: "so Sauron will have a middle life crisis?"
But the way McKay phrased his comparison was even more unfortunate. Again, people latching onto your very first words regarding some topic, is just something to be expected on the web. And so, from now on, a lot of people will know that The Rings of Power Season 2 will be more Breaking Bad than LotR. And even those who understand the situation and the context exactly will meme about that!