VisionQuest has concluded its first season, including a post-credits scene with big implications for Avengers: Doomsday. The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power is back with a third season, continuing the story of a Middle-earth set thousands of years before Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. The Body is also available on Netflix, delivering a fun and campy high school drama with some religious horror thrown in the mix.
Thriller lovers have some shows to look forward to. The Good Daughter, a 6-episode series based on Karin Slaughter's bestseller, has just been released. It’s adapted by Slaughter herself, making her the rare novelist who’s also the showrunner for her own story.
There’s also 12 12 12, starring Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan, as two men involved in a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game that starts with a robbery. We have a few picks for lovers of documentary and true crime. Murder in Galicia is streaming on Netflix, telling the story of the murder of 66-year-old Isabel Fuente, who was beaten in her sleep, with her husband claiming that some intruders had gotten inside their house.
There’s also HBO’s Silent Night, a series based on the murders that took place on Christmas Eve in 1976 in a small community in Poland. Lastly, if you want something a little breezier, there’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Orange County, premiering on Hulu and Disney. The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power is back with a third season, exploring the tales of Middle-earth thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Season 3 tries to course-correct a series that has never managed to get things right. Set five years after the events of season 2 and billed as a soft reboot to welcome in new watchers, the season finds Sauron establishing his power. Prequels always have difficulty justifying their existence since it’s a foregone conclusion how the story will end.
Last season, Rings of Power leaned into that inevitability in the same way as the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, building a Shakespearean tragedy from the corruption of the dwarf king Durin III (Peter Mullan) and the elven smith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards). There’s still some of that in season 3 as the island kingdom of Númenor and the dwarven stronghold of Khazad-dûm inch closer to their dark fates. But the show also spends too much time taking the same approach as Solo: A Star Wars Story, providing unnecessary origins for everything from the construction plans of Lothlorien to the origins Gandalf’s hat.
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