I’ve had a lot of doubts leading up to the release of the second season of The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power on Amazon Prime Video, but one thing I didn’t doubt of a second was that clever people would have fun making fun of the show. Chief among these is impressionist and YouTuber, Charlie Hopkinson.
Hopkinson’s ‘Gandalf Roasts’ videos kept me (mostly) sane throughout the first season. He’s done some great videos about various Star Wars shows as well, but you can’t beat Gandalf, baby Elrond and a rather ditzy Boromir, all of whom appear in these videos thanks to Hopkinson’s remarkable impressionist skills and some very goofy deepfakes.
But what really makes these videos so much fun is just how clever and witty the banter is, and how Hopkinson is able to really poke fun at the series in a way that isn’t mean-spirited but is nevertheless incredibly on-point. Perhaps the best line in this latest Gandalf Roasts video—the first of Season 2—is when Gandalf replies to Boromir’s suggestion that Celebrimbor just make new, uncorrupted rings with the line: “If you insist on bringing relentless logic to this show, Boromir, you’re gonna have a bad time.”
Watch the video below, and if you haven’t watched Hopkinson’s season 1 series you can find them and subscribe to his YouTube channel here.
My favorite part in this roast is when Boromir asks if Sauron’s death and subsequent transformation into a black, venomous mass is how Tolkien wrote the story in his texts. The following fake reading is better written than anything in The Rings Of Power.
“Is this really Sauron’s origin story, like how Tolkien writ it?” Boromir asks.
“Oh it’s all there,” Gandalf replies, holding up a copy of The Silmarillion. He pretends to read: “Having absorbed a rat and a cockroach and whatnot, Sauron who is now a thick, dark soup, flopped out onto the mountainside face-first, not unlike the movie Venom, and started dragging his rancid rat/roach broth-like body under hill and over hill. It was proper gross, sloppy roly-polies proving to be more effective than they looked. Until, when chance came, he road-killed his way up a rickety old cart and odd-globby rat-roached slopped onto the old washerwoman, Bertilda Muggenstink, and then that was like it. Bingious creature to fully-clothed dude in the blink of an eye. The dark lord Sauron had returned.”
“I’d always been under the impression that he was an almighty, terrifying force that commanded nothing but terror from his minions,” Elrond pipes in.
“Turns out,” Gandalf replies, “he was an uncharismatic pretty boy who got murdered by his own hat.”
And that, dearest reader, is why I look forward to more Rings Of Power episodes—both because I enjoy writing about the show and because I love these roasts so much. As far as the show goes, you can read my review of the first three episodes here.
