RoP : S2 Ep 4: Eldest

I’m going to try and keep this bullet list shorter, simply because it’s been hard to catch up. I wish they’d released these episodes one at a time, even from the start! It’s a bit exhausting.

Whenever possible, I’ve been listening to many opinions about The Rings of Power. Specifically the opinions of fellow Tolkien fans who approach it with an open mind. And specifically NOT the straight-up haters, those who approach every nugget of information, and every frame of the show, dead-set on despising and condemning it, usually from some overarching bigotry that defines them—and some of whom even try to profit from said hate by chasing clicks and views.

I do listen to those who, like me, actually care about Tolkien’s works and respect the themes and lessons in his books. This includes both The Rings of Power Wrap-up podcast (run by Alan Sisto of The Prancing Pony Podcast) and the Rings & Realms YouTube show (run by Dr. Corey Olsen and Dr. Maggie Parke). I do not share many of their opinions, but I do share some, and I absolutely appreciate the exchange of ideas and interpretations. It’s all you can do when discussing adapation. Discussion of the books is quite something different.

Lindon and the Barrow-Downs

• One thing some films, but especially TV shows, do is to introduce new conflicts just to add drama and in turn pad out the time. This is how I regard the arguments between Galadriel and Elrond, and of course Gil-galad when he shows up.
• To be clear: Allowing Elrond and Galadriel to have differing philosophies about the Three Rings is fine. It can make sense, and it can create some nuance and tension while other events play out. But they’ve made the drama the event. And that is a shame.
• The opening scene with Galadriel and Elrond arguing is unfortunate filler that miscasts the Elves.

Elrond: “We shall need an archer, two swordsmen. I trust you can recommend a set.”
Galadriel: “Trust? Me? Are you certain that’s wise, commander?”

• I can accept a more prideful and active Galadriel thousands of years before The Lord of the Rings (as long as it’s still appropriate to her maturity by the Second Age, which I feel the show doesn’t allow), but I greatly dislike passive aggressiveness in any Elf, even the least noble of them. It’s so very human, so very petty and mortal. Galadriel is supposed to have grown up under the light of the Two Trees of Valinor and interacted with the Valar and their people (the Maiar).
• I now find I’m waiting for someone to ask Galadriel, “Are you angry with me?” and she will respond with, “If you have to ask me, then I guess it doesn’t matter.” Followed later by, “I shouldn’t have to tell you. You should just know.”
• Bottom line is, I feel most of the writers don’t how how to write Elves, or just think of them as anything more than regular people who live longer and have pointy ears. We’ve been told a bunch of times that the writers and showrunners “know the lore” but I think only some of them might, and the rest are brought in to invent drama as they would in any other show.
• If Amazon remains successful in this show, what will future adaptations look like? Will it become watercooler talk, The Silmarillion by way of Game of Thrones or, worse, played out like a teen drama?
  • “Can you believe what Anairë said to Turgon in last night’s episode?”
  • “She was clearly making eyes at Curufin. It’s no wonder.”
  • “I ship them.”
  • “Curufin and Anairë? Right, who doesn’t?”
• The Barrow-downs . . . while a defendable argument can be made for them existing this far back in time, or even for the ability of Sauron to stir up evil spirits so that they inhabit the bodies of the long dead (in lieu of the Witch-king), the role the wights played in this episode was weak. A bit of a stretch.
• They looked cool. They moved cool. They were sufficiently freaky. I just wanted them to matter more. They just became a random monster encounter. There is a place for that! I love random monster encounters. But not in Middle-earth.
• I also just don’t think wights would bother Elves that much. Consider how fearless Glorfindel is about even the Nazgûl. He pursued three of them; they withdrew from him, and they’re Ringwraiths, not mere barrow-wights. Glorfindel is nervous not for his own safety, but for the safety of the hobbits, and of Frodo and his errand. Then Glorfindel still goes and harries them personally, all Nine of them, to drive them into the river.
• Legolas, arguably much less formidable than Glorfindel, is not afraid of the Paths of the Dead. “I do not fear the Dead,” he says. Why is a group of Elves of the Second Age, which includes Galadriel, a Noldor older than the Sun and Moon and who has seen the light of the Two Trees of Valinor, so fearful? And one of the Elves is slain by the barrow-wights, right quick, too. Come on.
• So often, it feels like the show just doesn’t want to let established ideas in the books to get in the way of their great story.

Rhûn

• On the face of things, I think Tom seems okay. I do like this actor, he plays the part passably (but doesn’t blow me away), even if he does feel greatly watered down from the Tom we know in Fellowship. Presumably he doesn’t have all that mirth in him from the get-go, and has to work up to it over the next few thousand years?
• Old Man Ironwood. Another lifting of what’s in the books and, to me, a cheaper facimile. If we had Tom calling various elder trees Old Man [whatever] or Old Woman [whatever] then I guess that would establish some kind of nomenclature. But I don’t think he does. It’s the show calling it Old Man Ironwood, since it appears in the subtitles.

• Old Man Ironwood is some fourth-wall-breaking fan service more than a necessary part of the story unfolding for us. If we accept this into our headcannon, then Old Man Willow in Fellowship is far less original or unique a being.
• Look, I do appreciate that there are themes and messages at work being ported from The Lord of the Rings, but this one feels especially lazy. It feels like the showrunners just want to make sure they get their money’s worth because they have full LotR rights.
• Prediction (I hope I’m wrong): Before he leaves Tom’s company, the Stranger will approach Old Man Ironwood again and handle it right, and be given the branch he tried to take as a staff. This will become his staff. If he ends up being a Blue Wizard, good, good. Then why not this method? If he ends up being Gandalf, then I guess we’re witnessing how he comes by his staff in the first place. Just like how the movie Solo needlessly gave us explainations for how Han Solo got all his trappings.
• We’re probably going to witness the Strange getting a wizardly hat, right? But not the Dark Wizard. Bad wizards don’t wear hats.
• Loved hearing Goldberry, but I don’t like the showrunners being coy. She’s not actually showing up, but they wanted credit for including her. Having their cake and not eating it.
• Tom’s home is a visual delight. I enjoyed the whole atmosphere and mood.
• But it still feels odd to have him way out here. He’s known locally, or at least to the Dark Wizard and the Gaudrim, as “the hermit,” which suggests that he’s been here quite a while. Yet Tom calls himself a wanderer. A far cry from the “moss gatherer” that Gandalf will one day label Tom. Does everything from LotR need to be either transplanted or subverted here? Does every character have to have an arc? I would think, of all characters to not require one, he who is “eldest” would be a perfect candidate.
• There’s much to appreciate about Tom, even here in the way they’ve portrayed him, but I don’t understand his role yet. So far he’s just beeing shoehorned in to provide exposition. But they’re positioning him as a mentor. He will teach one of the Istari how to use magic, then? Really? A wizard will be the padawan to Tom Bombadil, positioning Tom himself as a wizard. Is this Tolkien?
• That said, I am intrigued by the idea that the Dark Wizard was in the Stranger’s place once. That he, also, came to hang out with Tom once? Do we suppose he also was nearly eaten by Old Man Ironwood? If we found out that he had been, would fans be okay with that, too?
• But already Tom is feeling overtly magical. Lighting one candle and having them all flare to life? That feels wrong. It’s cheating. It’s hedge magic. Convencience magic. Here is a guy who, while maybe powerful and certainly immortal, has more time than anyone to inhabit the world and use it. A being who can take the time to light every candle individually and appreciate the simplicity of it, who doesn’t need to cut corners. But this Tom seems like he’d rather magically conjure water lillies than painstakingly collect them for Goldberry. This doesn’t feel like Tolkien’s Tom.
• The Stoors. I don’t know. I want to be delighted and excited to get more proto-hobbits, right? But I’m not. They’re . . . fine. No strong feelings. I wish I had strong feelings.
• I guess the closest feeling would be mild annoyance at seeing that we’re getting the origin story of the Shire when it wasn’t really necessary. Will we be shown the origin of mathoms? Will there be some side-joke made that gives us the reason why hobbits give presents to other people on their own birthdays?

Mud-worms and Ents

• I’m not sure how much time has passed between seasons, so I don’t really understand where the populations of Men are coming from anymore. There are those living in Pelargir (where were they during season 1?) and then there are the Wildmen, which seem to be the name for the non-orcs aligned with Adar. Is that right?
• All of this I’m reserving judgment on, as it’s fairly new territory. The Theo, Arondir, Isildur, and now Estrid plots have a ways to go before they arrive at something connected to the Rings of Power.
• At first, the scene with Isildur and Arondir sinking into the mud, with Estrid trying to help but unable to do so, felt like a mash-up of The Neverending Story‘s Swamps of Sadness and The Princess Bride‘s Fire Swamp. Personally, I think it does no fantasy show a favor by invoking other fantasy films. It just makes me want to see those again instead.
• The mud-worm. Kind of cool as a monster, as a thing stirred up by whatever it is Sauron is doing or when he stirred up such things. But calling it one of the “nameless things” from “the deep places of the world” gives me such an eye roll. Lifting lines not only from The Lord of the Rings but also from Jackson’s films, which means these things are said by different people in different contexts and yet coincide.

• The mud-worm is hardly deep-dwelling. Does Arondir have some special insight that he knows its somehow was drawn up from the deep? Seems precisely the sort of thing that, if it exists at all, would hunt on the surface.
• Arondir’s kill of the mud-worm, though, was so extremely cliché. Why, it’s the old uh-oh-I-got-swallowed-by-the-monster-but-now-I-can-just-cut-or-shoot-my-way-out-from-the-inside-while-being-entirely-unscathed-myself maneuver. I immediately thought of the final encounter in Men In Black, with Tommy Lee Jones blasting out of the Bug’s body after getting himself swallowed first. Like Arondir, he was totally unharmed by the process. It’s a trope now, and has been for a long time. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 did this, too. Even Sharknado did. It’s . . . an unfortunate choice for a Tolkien show.

• I now half-expect we’ll have a scene where an orc (or troll?) will get cut in half by some keen Elvish blade, but it won’t realize it at first; there’ll be a few seconds delay, then we’ll watch it slide apart.
• I have no strong opinions about the Ents yet. The effects were wonderful, even if their speech was a little too clear and amplified and not tree-ish enough for my taste. And their words were just a little bit too callbacky to Treebeard’s. “Winterbloom nourished many of those trees from seed and sproud” was just a bit too much of a retread of Treebeard’s “creatures I had known from nut and acorn” speech.

A Star Shines . . .

• A lot of people liked the ending of the episode, with Adar surprising Galadriel. To me, it was as cringey a callback as any in the show so far. Adar citing the “a star shines on the hour of our meeting” line might feel like a sarcastic Elf-Uruk thing to say, which—sure, why not—but it’s also yet another callback.
• “A star shines on the hour of our meeting” comes right out of “Three Is Company.” Frodo uses it as a greeting, but I don’t think it’s established in the text that it’s an official or common greeting among Elves (which, yeah, it sounds like it could be). To me, that moment is impressive because it’s like Frodo knew what all the words meant so he could construct a perfect Elvish-style greeting. It’s a real character moment. So why is Adar saying the exact same thing?
• By the way, we know from the trailers that at some point Galadriel will be caged among orcs. I’ve no idea where they’re going with that, but do remember how easily she got herself freed from a Númenórean cage of metal and stone. Will she slip her bonds from an orc-made wooden cage as quickly? I bet not, because plot.

Hypotheticals

• Let’s say, upon leaving the Stoors’ community, Nori and Poppy somehow actually meeting Gildor and a company of Elves—yup, way out in Rhûn. Yes, Gildor, who Frodo and the hobbits meet in Fellowship. Would this be okay? Would fans make up excuses for it and say how this was the right call?
• Imagine if one of the Elves in Gildor’s company says to Nori and Poppy: “This is indeed wonderful! Two Harfoots in a wood at night. We have not seen such a thing since [whatever, some random reference]. What is the meaning of it?” Would Tolkien fans who are also Rings of Power fans eat that up and be like, “Yay! We got Gildor! Perfect.”
• What if we got an ancestor of Ghân-buri-Ghân? What if Arondir next meets up with a Drúedain chieftain and that chieftain uses direct quotes of Ghân-buri-Ghân? The Rings of Power would be doing more “filling in” of things that Jackson’s films did not, like the presence of Tom Bombadil.
• What about if we get a Red Arrow scene, where one realm seeks the aid of another, except this is thousands of years before Rohan or even Calenardhon exist. Would this be regarded as righting a wrong, or would it also feel out of time?
• When are the callbacks and transplants too much? There’s no actual right answer here. I just wonder.

All right. I’ll stop yelling at the kids on my lawn. For now.