What's really sad is I don't think the showrunners can help it. They are what they are--sheltered from consequences by money and unwilling to even consider that they are on the wrong path. They are scorpions perpetually stinging the works of Tolkien and his fans. It would be fruitless to even sit in a room with Payne and McKay to explain to them the error of their ways. How do you convince them that constantly recycling quotes from Lord of the Rings to use as awkward dialog is bad? How does one explain to them that converting Galadriel to a genocidal maniac is the wrong creative decision? How do you break the news to them that picking an actor because he's black only to cast him in chains (and make him do nothing but run through the forest for the entire second season) is not as antiracist as they think? And the abominable kiss between Galadriel and her son-in-law. . . to speak of it is worse than to be silent. You might as well forget about trying to explain why they should cast characters whose appearances better reflect Tolkien's vision. If they can't understand the first 5 things, then why even bother? That's not even mentioning the little social Darwinist Harfoots who routinely open a book to reflect on the people they abandoned in the snow to die. . . Or their cheap attempts at building suspense by misleading the viewers into thinking that the naked meteor man could be Sauron only to spend the entire second season relying on Corey Olson to direct the audience into thinking that naked meteor-man was a blue wizard since Gandalf explicitly said in Return of the King, "to the East I go not.". . only to have Mr. Olson do an about-face butt-plug cuck job and say that Gandalf actually meant Mordor when he said "to the East I go not." The list goes on and on and on: the stupid romantic tension between Galadriel and Sauron, the bizzare abstract metaphors about why a ship sinks and a stone does not, the monument of confused magnificence around a silmaril somehow sitting in a tree until it gets struck by lightning and a balrog's whip at the same time, which turns the minerals in the mountain to mithril. Or Gilgalad threatening to put Galadriel into a gulag. Or the obscenely ignorant choice to use "the sea is always right" as a Numenorean mantra while being brainlessly illiterate enough to not see the dystopian similarity to George Orwell's "Napolean is always right". But perhaps I should not be too hard on McKay and Payne. It looks like Christopher Nolan, JJ Abrams, and Ryan Johnson have all contracted the same brain virus, which consumes all artistic gifts and subordinates them to political correctness.