--- title: "The Rings of Power | Mike Pohjola | Negotiator 128" titleOriginal: "Mahtisormukset | Mike Pohjola | Neuvottelija 128" episodeNumber: "128" guest: "Mike Pohjola" datePublished: 2022-03-31 duration: "31:48" youtube: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBiRpF60Wx4" originalLanguage: "fi" topics: ["free_speech_society"] subtitleMethod: "none" provenance: "Owner page assembled from YouTube metadata, the neuvottelija.fi episode record and the publisher's own chapter marks, translated one for one. The marks are genuine: six of them, with gaps from 59 to over 1100 seconds, tracking the recording rather than a grid. No transcript is published here — the channel has no English caption track for this episode and the Finnish one is YouTube's automatic track. The episode was recorded in March 2022, six months before the series it speculates about was released, so the predictions in it are unresolved at the point of recording. The passage about Finnish film production describes a dispute involving the guest's own work and named production companies, and it is his account of it; the other parties are not represented." fiCanonical: "https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/169-mahtisormukset-mike-pohjola-neuvottelija-128" canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep128-mahtisormukset-mike-pohjola/ --- # The Rings of Power | Mike Pohjola | Negotiator 128 English subtitles are not available on this page. This is an episode summary, not a curated transcript. ## Chapters - [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBiRpF60Wx4&t=0s) Introducing Mike Pohjola: screenwriting, The Office, localising it into the Finnish Konttori, Sami Hedberg - [03:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBiRpF60Wx4&t=210s) The Westeros correspondent: why seasons six and seven of Game of Thrones failed, particularly with Jon Snow and Daenerys - [06:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBiRpF60Wx4&t=365s) Amazon Prime's The Rings of Power: adapting Tolkien against Peter Jackson's films - [07:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBiRpF60Wx4&t=424s) Analysing the Rings of Power trailer: what looks good and what runs against the canon, ahead of the first season in autumn 2022 — Pohjola's and the host's expectations and speculation - [26:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBiRpF60Wx4&t=1566s) The Spede affair. Has the production culture of Finnish film decayed morally? Pohjola laments the loss of trust when, instead of approving a finished script, the production company announces it will make its Spede Pasanen film from a different angle. Does Finland need American practice here? - [30:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBiRpF60Wx4&t=1841s) What else Mike has in progress: the Agemonia role-playing game, historical fiction and more ## Summary The screenwriter and author Mike Pohjola takes up the difficulty of adaptation, with Jeff Bezos's billion-dollar bet as the main case: Amazon's The Rings of Power, which builds a series out of Tolkien's Second Age on the strength of the appendices alone. Pohjola and the host go through the trailer and speculate about what is coming. They also unpack the fan row about dark-skinned elves and dwarves, where Pohjola's observation is that Tolkien barely describes anyone's appearance at all. Earlier he explains how he localised The Office into the Finnish Konttori, and why the last two seasons of Game of Thrones failed. ## Adapting a chronology The Second Age exists in Tolkien mostly as appendices — dates, names and outcomes, with almost no scenes. An adaptation therefore cannot be faithful in the ordinary sense, because there is nothing at the scene level to be faithful to. Pohjola's point is that this makes invention the job rather than a failing, which reframes most of the argument about the series. ## The casting row, restated Tolkien hardly describes what anyone looks like. That single observation moves the dispute about dark-skinned elves and dwarves off the ground of textual fidelity and onto the ground of what readers had pictured — which is a real thing to argue about, but a different one. ## The same problem, twice Game of Thrones came apart when it overtook the books and had to write its own ending. The Rings of Power begins in that condition. Whether the comparison is fair is the episode's open question, and it was recorded before anyone could answer it. ## Watch The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: [Mahtisormukset | Mike Pohjola | Neuvottelija 128](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBiRpF60Wx4). A Finnish edition of this episode is published at [www.neuvottelija.fi](https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/169-mahtisormukset-mike-pohjola-neuvottelija-128). ## In depth The Neuvottelija AI editions carry a long-form write-up of this episode: [English](https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/ep128-mahtisormukset-mike-pohjola/) · [suomeksi](https://www.neuvottelija.fi/tools/ep128-mahtisormukset-mike-pohjola/). --- Cite as: Sami Miettinen, Neuvottelija — The Rings of Power | Mike Pohjola | Negotiator 128, https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep128-mahtisormukset-mike-pohjola/, 2022-03-31. For quotes include episode 128 and timestamp.