'Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power' Is A Good Adaptation (Of 'Stranger Things')

 Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Did We Mention We Have Rings?) debuted this week, finally giving fans a chance to revisit J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastical world of Middle Earth via the same website people use to buy toilet paper and dinosaur-based erotica.

Not surprisingly, the show that reportedly cost around a billion dollars to make, looks pretty impressive, but there was also something oddly familiar about the story – and not just because we’ve seen the all the movies, read Tolkien’s books, and battled indigestion caused by Denny’s Hobbit-themed menu items. 

We mentioned earlier how The Rings of Power’s chief streaming rival, HBO’s House of the Dragon, was seemingly taking its cues from The Crown. Well, the Lord of the Rings show may be doing something similar, but with another popular Netflix series: Stranger Things. While we don’t expect that Kate Bush cassettes or cans of New Coke will ever show up in The Rings of Power, there are a number of similarities …

Obviously much of the show has been taken from Tolkien’s novels, including his lengthy appendices and the mythologically-dense, hippie-spiting book The Silmarillion. But some of the series’ new story elements feel distinctly similar to Stranger Things; like how The Rings of Power features a frazzled but badass single mother, who’s in a relationship with the town cop/elf-cop.

And whose son has a psychic connection to the evil villain …

The mysterious underground tunnels full of monsters? Seems to be straight out of the second season of Stranger Things. Not to mention the stranger who falls from the sky at the end of the first episode, only to be discovered in the woods –

– and secretly protected and fed by our young protagonists – which is not unlike what happens with Eleven (but, you know, with a giant half-naked dude).

Although, to be fair, if you just spent a billion dollars on a thing, attempting to emulate one of the most popular recent examples of that thing probably isn’t a terrible idea.

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Thumbnail: Amazon/Netflix