If Benioff and Weiss adapted Lord of the Rings

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are the brains behind the “biggest TV show ever”, Game of Thrones – a less than faithful adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy series of novels, A Song of Ice and Fire. Many fans of those books, myself included, have been deeply disappointed with the ever greater departures that D&D, as they are popularly known, have taken from the source material. And so I thought, “What if they had adapted another well-loved series of fantasy novels? What if they had been the ones to adapt The Lord of the Rings, and had done it for television rather than the big screen?”

Here’s what I think the outcome might have been.

 

 

THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING

• The ENTIRE SERIES is just called Lord of the Rings.
• There’s an opening credits tune you just CAN’T GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD.
• Merry and Pippin become one character: Mippin, a lovable rouge who doesn’t really do much.
• The Nazgul are cut. No explanation is given. Viewers just have to imagine why Frodo suddenly looks like death warmed up and why he’s walking to Rivendell as fast as his little legs will carry him (no horses. Too expensive).
• Aragorn is gay, and in a relationship with Legolas. There’s a gratuitous scene in which Legolas shaves Aragorn’s body hair before going down on him.
• Every single Elf except Legolas is cut.
• “Sauron” is deemed to sound too much like “Saruman”, and so is changed to “Morgoth” to avoid confusion.
• Saruman is cut.
• The Mines of Moria plot happens in five minutes, with only a smattering of goblins and an OMGWTF CGI Balrog that blew the entire season budget. It’s awesome to look at but only appears for two minutes.
• Lothlorien is populated by naked women who just have sex with each other all the time. This is apparently important to the plot.
• Boromir has a whole side plot about wanting to kill his father and brother and become king of Gondor.
• Gimli is a misogynist pig who we’re still supposed to like.
• The season ends with Boromir dying, as per the book. However, he’s joined in his fate by Sam and Mippin. D&D say that this was “to really show the danger these characters live in.”
• Gimli is captured by the orcs, so the Aragorn and Legolas power couple chase them to rescue their friend – even though he’s a dick.
• It’s never made clear just what the Ring is.

 

 

THE TWO TOWERS

• In response to the backlash over the lack of female characters in the first season, Gollum is rewritten as a female. She’s extremely attractive.
• Aragorn and Legolas rescue Gimli after all of one episode. Gandalf (recast) shows himself to them in Rohan.
• The whole Fangorn Forest plot is cut.
• Eomer and Eowyn are lovers. We see more of Eowyn’s naked – and female – body than is strictly necessary. No such exposure is given to Eomer’s male form.
• Grima Wormtongue is renamed to Snakeman, “for clarity”.
• We don’t see Frodo for five episodes. When we finally see him again, he has to hide from a Nazgul – who have been rewritten in as though they were never absent.
• We’re treated to a scene about Eomer’s mentally ill cousin, made up for the show. Mocking impressions are done for laughs.
• An evil wizard character is introduced called Ilvirith. He serves exactly the same plot role as Saruman, “but we’d like to make it clear that he’s not Saruman, he’s an original character who we thought it would be great to put into this world.”
• The battle of Helm’s Deep takes up an entire episode – and most of the budget.
• Gollum seduces Frodo. It gets graphic.
• The battle of Helms Deep ends with the orcs killing everyone inside the castle, including Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Theoden and Eowyn. Gandalf and Eomer arrive to find a smoking ruin.
• We still have no idea what the Ring is.

 

 

THE RETURN OF THE KING

• Gandalf brings Aragorn back to life in the first minute of the first episode. There’s one mention of how he’ll miss Legolas and then he’s never brought up again.
• Morgoth has captured Frodo and is needlessly torturing him. The Ring is never mentioned once.
• The Shelob and Cirith Ungol plots are cut.
• Gollum rescues Frodo, her lover, from the fortress of Morgoth. Frodo rapes her but it’s okay because “it becomes consensual”.
• Rohan and Gondor are merged. All earlier mentions of “Gondor” in the past two seasons are retconned as “alternative terminology”.
• Faramir is secretly working for Morgoth for no apparent reason.
• Most of the ‘Good vs. Evil’ plot is lost amid Aragorn’s growing angst and Frodo and Gollum’s romance.
• The battle of Minas Tirith is extremely epic. But most of the main cast dies.
  • Gandalf dies
  • Eomer dies
  • Faramir dies – and we’d just begun to like him
  • Arwen briefly reappears only to die
  • ALL the Nazgul die

• The final battle is just a one-on-one duel between Aragorn and Morgoth. No armies, just the two of them with swords. It’s cool but it’s not Black Gate cool.
• Gollum and Frodo end up in Mount Doom, and there’s an extremely rushed exposition of what the Ring is before it’s dropped into the lava.
• Gollum slips and falls into the lava just as it looks as though she might get to live happily ever after with Frodo.
• Frodo screams in emotional agony as Aragorn stares balefully into the camera. He closes his tear-filled eyes, and the credits roll for the last time.

 

When called up on how wildly different their adaptation was, D&D just reply with “we feel that we were faithful to the spirit of the books, and we reached the same ending even if we got there by a different path. But in the end, the books are the books and the show is the show, and yo have to treat them as two different stories.”

Lord of the Rings is a massive success that makes millions of dollars and wins every TV award going. Critics are labelled “stuck-up books fans”.