I say "thoughts" because my prior posts were immediate reactions, put down as I was watching. I posted the first episode reactions before even watching episode 2 (as in, episode 2 started playing while I was on RAFO.com). And afterwards, my mother, brother and sister wanted to watch so we all sat down together to watch it, and now I could just watch without thought.

And it wasn't THAT bad. Aside from utterly violating the themes and principles of the original story, they got a lot of facts and characterization in the backstory lore wrong.

But leaving that stuff, it was a half-decent generic fantasy mystery, and the proto-Hobbit Harfoots are kind of amusing. Some of the acting is suspect and the dialogue can be overblown, with pseudo-intellectual meaningless lines posing as deep thoughts or insights, but there are the visuals and production values, which are pretty good.

If you aren't too attached to the original works, you might not consider these episodes a total waste of your time.