Part 2/10:
One of the most perplexing questions surrounding Rings of Power is how a show that claims to be the most expensive ever made could look so fundamentally cheap. Critics have pointed out the obvious shortcuts taken in production to save costs, notably in crowd scenes. A typical example is a line of about a hundred supposed extras, which—upon closer inspection—is nothing more than identical computer-generated images of the same handful of individuals copy-pasted repeatedly. One scene features a crowd of identical characters, all mirroring the same person with seemingly no effort to utilize real extras, raising suspicions about where the vast budget is actually going.