The showrunner for Amazon Prime’s woke The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power streaming series is now claiming that the J.R.R. Tolkien classic is about “climate change.”
Patrick McKay, one of the Rings of Power showrunners, comparied the destruction of the dwarf city of Khazad-dûm to climate change, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The producers have chosen to make the fall of the Dwarf kingdom and Khazad-dûm (also called Moria) a more protracted event. The fight over the subterranean city will stretch from season two — which has just ended — into season three. In Tolkien’s original works, the fall of the city is not described as having fallen over a long stretch of time, it is just said to have fallen to the monstrous dragon known as the Balrog who’s fiery wrath caused the Dwarves to flee their great city.
McKay was asked about how his show is treating the fall of Khazad-dûm, and he insisted his treatment of the story has parallels in global warming.
“This is a thing where, how do societies fall? Usually it’s gradually, and then all at once,” he exclaimed. “If you want to use climate change as a metaphor, climate change is not an event. Climate change is a process that ebbs and flows, that’s always headed in a dark direction.”
“I think a kingdom as great and powerful as Khazad-dûm does not fall in a moment,” he said explaining his decision to stray from Tolkien’s original stories.
“The fall is the product of many disasters over time. And I think it would sell Khazad-dûm short for the Balrog to get out and then it’s all over. It’s more complicated. We think there’s a bigger story to be told here,” the TV executive concluded.
Unlike McKay’s vision, in Tolkien’s Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings, Khazad-dûm is not described as having taken years or decades to fall. Tolkien said the city was abandoned about a year after the terrifying and powerful Balrog rose to invest the city.
The passage reads:
Thus they roused from sleep a thing of terror that, flying from Thangorodrim, had lain hidden at the foundations of the earth since the coming of the Host of the West: a Balrog of Morgoth. Durin [the Dwarf King] was slain by it, and the year after Náin I, his son; and then the glory of Moria passed, and its people were destroyed or fled far away.
While all this may seem too be getting into the Tolkien weeds, it clearly shows that McKay’s woke decision over the fall of Khazad-dûm is a big departure form the source material. It was nothing like the “fall of a society,” and had absolutely no parallel to “climate change” in Tolkien’s original work. In the actual Tolkien stories, Khazad-dûm fell quickly.
It’s all just another sad example of the woke agenda being shoehorned into a classic tale.
Sadly this is not the first time the Amazon Prime series has done so. The entire production has been replete with virtue signaling about “diversity,” and “race” issues. And by the end of season one this billion-dollar production had lost 63 percent of its audience. And, unsurprisingly, it saw a similarly sharp drop off after season two.
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