Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of NerdSoup.

I am Beau Oliver, join here today with Aaron, the NerdSoup Monkey, and we are back to review

Amazon Prime's new original series, Lord of the Rings, The Rings of Power, Episodes 1 and 2.

Obviously there were high expectations for this show and forgive me for my morning voice

because we're recording this pretty early, but at the nice little radio broadcast.

Yeah, I like your morning voice.

Thanks. Do I have morning voice?

Kinda, yeah.

The budget's been highly reported, one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive

television projects in the history of just the world, and just going based off of the first two

episodes, we're not going to get too specific because there's a lot. It's two hours of content,

it's essentially a movie to start your show, and we'll release our more in-depth spoiler discussion

probably this Sunday, but just going off of general thoughts, I thought it was good.

You could definitely see the budget, the scale, it's super impressive, it's probably the

biggest television show has ever looked. The story, it felt like the first episode was more of a

prologue, similar to how House of the Dragon opened their season, and it reminded me of the

beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, getting some of this backstory, seeing some montages of

characters traveling and some montages of battles, and setting up the Big Bad, Soron, he's back,

or this is the beginning. So it was breathtaking at times, but the story, I'm still waiting to

see where it all goes. It was one of the criticisms of the marketing is we don't know what this is

about, and there's obviously some hints at some bigger lore stuff, obviously the development

of the rings, it's in the title, so I guess that should have been a big clue, but I was impressed,

...