RoP : S2 Ep 5: Halls of Stone

Man oh man, is this show on crazy fast-track. It’s dizzying. Time to dive into some particulars while I have some energy.

The Rings of Power already featured Star Wars–style time spans and spatial logic in season 1, but they’ve kicked it into hyperdrive. Some of the plot developments seem like many months have passed, while others (like the crafting of Seven Rings for Dwarves) seem to have been made over, like, a weekend. All seven rings got started after Adar and his Orcs set out from Mordor but were completed and delivered to the Dwarves long before they reached Eregion. Durin the Younger has had time to go back and forth from Eregion to Khazad-dûm a few times during that journey. Crazier still: The Seven were forged entirely off screen between episodes. What gives? This is a show about the Rings of Power, isn’t it? It’s weird to skip over actual subcreation so much.

I lament for the time and care the Elves in the books put into their craft. Rings of Power Celebrimbor’s forge is like the drive-through of magical jewelry. RoP Sauron and RoP Celebrimbor seem, to me, so different from their text counterparts that I almsot want to call them Rauron and Relebrimbor. They are traversing such an alternate storyline from what’s written in The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales (where, to be clear, Tolkien actually worked out, if incompletely, the actual events of the forging of the Rings of Power).

I do want to keep saying, they are enjoyable characters as they are. I don’t want to take that away from the actors. They’re being convincing. The acting is ratcheting up, and I am enjoying many individual isolated moments. They’re just not stringing together right in my legendarium sensibilities.

It makes me think of The Fellowship of the Ring, when Frodo asks Gandalf about Glorfindel, how he saw him shining and not growing dim. The wizard explains that Frodo “saw him as he is upon the other side.” Referring to the fact that Glorfindel is one of the mighty High Elves who dwelt in Aman, the Blessed Realm; as such, he “live[s] at once in both worlds.” That’s how I am when watching The Rings of Power. I’m trying to be a contemporary fan of fantasy watching a good TV show while simultaneously existing as a reader of the deeper lore of Tolkien and it makes it impossible for me to overlook, for any length of time, the artificial gaps and inventions devised by Amazon’s writers.

You know the universal comedians’ joke about how reading is boring and TV is better because it’s faster and easier? (Also happens to be a bit that Jim Gaffigan perfected.) That feels like the philosophy here; like the showrunners know that most viewers will not have the patience for a richer plot than the one they’ve presented. (Which is rich but not Tolkien-rich, if that makes sense.)

As it is, I’ve seen people complaining about too many plotlines in the show. I don’t necessarily have any problem with that. But I know, realistically, that a Tolkien adaptation in 2022–? was never really going to go any other way. And it’s not like the Jackson films handled plots and timelines very differently. Cutting out the 17 years that pass between Bilbo’s birthday party and Frodo’s departure from Bag End with the Ring was nearly as jarring. It meant I was sitting with an audience that New Line wouldn’t trust not to walk out of the theater if the adventure and chases and sword fights didn’t get a move-on!

While everything is moving so fast in The Rings of Power and tim lines are crunching and leaking the richness of Tolkien’s world, I AM still finding many few shining moments. I am very glad that Relebrimbor has begun to push back against Rauron’s creepy remarks, for example. And Elendil, Valandil, Pharazôn . . . even Kemen. They’re all invoking strong emotions. Good on them!

Khazad-dûm

• Durin IV and Disa, keep ’em coming. I haven’t tired of either of them. In fact, give me a spin-off untroubled by larger themes tending to the lower stakes of day-to-day Dwarven matters.
• Setting aside the speed with which the Seven Rings were made, I’m a bit nervous about what powers they have. Sixteen rings were all made with Elves in mind (not 7 and 9), but since they’ve reordered and repurposed the Rings of Power—the central objects of this show—all we can do is roll with it. I’ve said elsewhere that Jackson made some stuff up, too. In the otherwise masterfully done prologue of Fellowship, voiceover Galadriel says, “For within these rings was bound the strength and the will to govern each race.” Which is a load of horse hockey, but moviegoers who were never going to read up on Second Age events, that was a perfectly functional choice for the story.

• So Durin III’s ring lets him feel out the mountain. This . . . works, even if I have to suppress my inner nerd. It’s so much better than him being able to, say, fuse together cracks or tunnel with it somehow. They could have done more egrecious things.
• But the insta-greed of the ring is a bit rough. I think I wouldn’t mind it so much if only days and weeks were passing by. Seeing the king’s greed amping up, fueled by the evil in the ring, would even fit the books just fine if it was a matter of years.
• I do love the emphasis on sunlight. The shot of the Dwarf gardeners getting light back on their plants is great.
• Durin III’s “pity those who dwell above” speech is great. The tyranny of the sun! This is an invented cultural detail I’m on board with. Anything that helps us get the perspective of a nonhuman race is a good thing. This has been lacking.
• Disa’s incident with the tuning crystal was fun, but the winding tunnel right off the market that leads to an unknown lake chamber was a bit of a stretch. The vibrations in the water have me immediately assume this isn’t just the lurking Balrog, but the Watcher in the Water. I now kind of expect that the Balrog’s release is what will free it as a future set-up. Still, the scene looked cool.
• You know what’s even better, though? The fact that the next scene with Durin IV has telling his dad to stop the digging because Disa “heard” something beneath it. I LOVE the implicit trust he has. In other shows—most other shows—there’d be a scene where the wife is telling us what she experienced and the husband dismisses it or tells her she’s crazy. Not this couple. I love what they’ve done with these two. It’ll probably lead to serious heartbreak later, but it’ll be earned.

• I don’t love that Durin calls it a “nameless evil, ancient and powerful.” For one, they’re overdoing it with “nameless.” Not everything is nameless, not in Tolkien’s world. He named everything! So those few things that are nameless are terrifying. This is too much hand-holding. At the Council of Elrond, Glóin says the Dwarves “woke the nameless fear.” Look, they don’t know what it is yet. Disa may have heard it, but it’s too much at this stage for her, or Durin, to go calling it ancient and powerful. If it’s the Balrog, will we soon have “shadow” and “flame” descriptors before it even arrives?
• I hope it doesn’t arrive. I would greatly respect it if the show made the Balrog’s rise a mere feint. The rise doesn’t happen yet, but it almost did. Something like that. I’m dubious.
• Durin III’s treating his Ring of Power like Bilbo does the One Ring feels like another callback to Jackson. Tying its properties so closely to the traits of the One, that doesn’t even exist yet, feels forced.

Eregion

• I really want to enjoy the map sequences and the travel logistics. I want that to not work against the plot. But it does. To me, of course. I know lots of people are just rolling with playing the show’s fast and loose treatment of space and time.
• We see Gil-galad reading a letter (the one in which Celebrimbor lies) that seems to have reached him from Lindon with . . . no problem? The messenger who delivered it to the High King had no trouble circumventing the encroaching Orc army and the big gorge (that Elrond and Galadriel had trouble crossing)?
• But later when Elrond comes to tell Gil-galad of the Orcs and that Eregion needs help desperately, that’s meant to be new information? I’m so confused. There has been so much back and forth between Lindon and Eregion up until episode 3, then almost none, except when convenient. Argh!

Eregion

• It’s cool to see the Doors of Durin, but a major bummer to see they’ve already been made. When? Another iconic Tolkien object created between episodes, off screen. Such an odd choice. The friendship I was hoping to see between Narvi and Celebrimbor we only saw in Durin IV and Elrond, I guess.
• Strange to have this ceremony celebrating Dwarf and Elf friendship only here in Eregion. Shouldn’t there be a corresponding one in Khazad-dûm? Yet if they did, it wouldn’t fit because of the way they’ve plotted this story. The political climate of Khazad-dûm doesn’t allow for it. This feels like more shoehorning.
• It’s a symptom of the problems made by reordering and compressing the timeline. In The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, the Elves settle in Eregion because of their friendship with the Dwarves, and because of mithril (which they love but don’t need as a soul-saving substance). Years go by before the Rings of Power are even conceived. But here in this show, the Elves and Dwarves just happen to be neighbors and then become friends and partners because of Sauron, because he manipulated Elves into needing mithril? Or is he? Is the Elves-saved-by-the-well-timed-discovery-of-mithril-deposits plot just a thing all on its own? It’s all a bit bonkers.
• Moreover, these decisions are undermining the peoples of Middle-earth. In the books, it’s when these diverse races and cultures unite that they overcome evil. And they do it all on their own (sometimes with the coaxing of wizards, sometimes not). It’s lovely. But The Rings of Power has contrived the situation so that it’s Sauron’s manipulation that leads to the forming of fellowships? Gah.
• Look, Charlie Vickers and Charles Edwards are knocking it out of the park with what they’ve been given. And what they’ve been given is straight-up an alternate and expedited sequence of events and motivations from what one can read in Tolkien’s works.
• For the record, I’m totally on board the gaslighting and psychological torment Annatar is putting Celebrimbor through. In theory. I don’t think that’s necessarily how Tolkien would have imagined it when he wrote it (but who’s to say?) because it doesn’t jibe with the Elves’ motivations for making the Rings of Power—the preservation of the beauty of Middle-earth and in making it a bit more like the bliss of Aman. Rather, RoP Sauron is basing his manipulation on the personal ambition of Celebrimbor alone, propping his desire for greatness on the pretense of helping the other races not be bothered one way or another by Mordor? How stretched that seems to me.
• So while Tolkien didn’t specifically write about how long any one Ring of Power took to create, the whole endeavor—from the original sixteen rings being forged to the Three made later—still takes the better part of a century. And in all those decades, I’m doubtful that Tolkien imagined Sauron corrupted the Elven-smiths by making them feel guilty or setting their egos against one another.
• Consider Tolkien’s own timeline:

But . . . whatever, I guess. That’s all fully within Amazon’s rights to use, or disregard, straight out of The Lord of the Rings.

• So in the RoP universe, the Nine rings, which Annatar specifically now wants made for Men, are the new driving force to continue. There’s no taking back the Seven to “fix” them. The Nine must somehow redeem the whole project. Errr, okay.
• An Elf turning invisible because she’s wearing a Ring of Power is a bit sketchy, and not very mindful of book lore. One can hand-wave this, since Sauron is right there among them, I guess, and he could be actively messing with spiritual matters. It’s clear they’re just trying to draw more parallels to the One Ring. The place to do that would be when the Nine are given to Men.
• On the face of it, I don’t mind hearing Sauron name-dropping some of the heroes of the First Age heroes, like Eärendil, Tuor, and Beren . . . but I also feel the show hasn’t really earned them. It’s clear the writers are not allowed to tell those stories, so they try to get credit by dropping the names of those characters without any kind of payoff or explanation.
• For example, this Sauron—Rauron—was clearly not really the lieutenant of Morgoth who got his ass kicked by Beren’s fiancée, Lúthien, and her dog friend, Huan. Book Sauron did, yes, but not Charlie Vickers’s version of him in this show. That’s all been excised. When the Elves in Valinor “brought war to Middle-earth” in Galadriel’s episode 1 prologue, the camera panned from Valinor to Eriador directly, where Lindon lies on the west coast. There was no Beleriand, where characters like Beren and Tuor had all their adventures. So mentioning Beren son of Barahir feels disingenuous.

• But wait, didn’t Arondir earlier mention Beleriand? Yup, but according to him it’s “a realm.” Not a big swath of continent that contained many realms. What part of the chapter “Of Beleriand and Its Realms” didn’t the writers or rights-holders understand?
• But I will say again, the acting is superb. Charlie Vickers is the Lord of Painfully Delayed and Perfectly Timed Pauses.
• The bit with the Elf Mirdania and Sauron is . . . pending judgment. I’ve heard some people say it was gross, and others instantly loving and shipping it, and totally okay with an ancient evil creeping on a girl (even if it’s just to trick her).
• But boy is Mirdania a fool, if Sauron is achieving inroads through flirtation. And hey, what woman doesn’t love being compared to another and more famously beautiful woman as a means of flattery, I guess?
• No, Mirdania is not Celebrían. Galadriel has been in Eregion before and spent time within that very forge tower where this is all taking place. Are we to think she missed noticing her daughter there? That would be awful. We don’t need another amnesiac in this story.
• Does Celebrían even exist yet? While it seems a shame that she doesn’t exist (when she ought to), it also wouldn’t make sense if she did based on the story at hand. Galadriel’s primary revenge-fueled character has been based on her brother. She doesn’t seem to miss Celeborn much, and made no mention of a daughter thus far. To introducer her now would be dogpiling the Galadriel they’ve already been running a bus over.

Númenor

• My chief complaint with the way they’re handling Númenor is simply in the time compression and expedited political machinations. Otherwise, it’s engaging, and it’s easy to care about Elendil, Míriel, and Valandil! Truly, I enjoy the time we have with them. The show’s changed some things, but I can roll with them.
  • Elendil as a Faithful-curious ship captain instead of a longstanding Lord of Andúnië who takes after his father.
  • Míriel as a blinded and snubbed queen-regent pushed aside by her cousin, and not forced into marriage by him.
• My only problem with setting aside Pharazôn’s forcable seizure of the sceptre from the books is that it’s made the people of Númenor fickle, far from the powerful people of Tolkien’s mind. Is that all it takes to back a king, popular demand? This take on monarchy is fractured.
• They didn’t put in the work to make Pharazôn a believable usurper. So far he’s just a usuerprer because the script/plot said so. We have only seen little snippets of this society, and nothing from beyond this one city and a few plazas. It’s coming across like Pharazôn is king only because he chose to approach the Eagle in that one moment and because one guy started chanting his name like a football fan. If that one person didn’t shout, “Queen of lies!” and Eärien hadn’t shown up with the palantir, what would have happened? I didn’t get the sense that the people of Númenor could have gone either way and that was somehow the tipping point. It seems like the general population would have accepted Queen Míriel just fine.
• So, Kemen. A strange name for the son of the anti-Elf, anti-Valar politician. The word kemen most notably in the name of the Valie of all growing things: Yavanna Kementári, Queen of Earth. But, err, right.

• I will say, they’ve made Kemen perfectly sniveling and established Pharazôn as Númenor’s cruelest dad. So there’s that. Well played. It’s working. We hate ’em!

• Now, Valandil. I really want to be clear in stating that I don’t dislike it when the show invents new characters; it’s what they do with them that matters. I like Valandil! I like that we get to know Isildur’s best friend, at least a little bit. Not only does it give us a slice of life among the different levels of Númenórean society, it also makes Isildur himself more relatable. One of the strengths of The Rings of Power show is in doing interesting things with new characters. It’s how they handle the preexisting famous ones that leave a sour taste.
• Still, I like Elendil, and I’m starting to come around on the idea of his being a ship captain first. I am sad that they’ve left out his own royal connections, being a lord among the Lords of the Andúnië. He’s supposed to not just be one of the Faithful, but an important member of a family known to be especially loyal to the old ways.

• The hint of Elendil and Míriel having a romantic relationship . . . to me, that’s cheap and unnecessary. It feels like throwing crumbs to a certain portion of the audience that is only watching for such things. I rather hope that stays where it is.
• The memorial and shrine. It was a solemn, lovely scene, the candles on the water, but some of its particulars are off.
  • For one, it’s a few notches too religious. True worship was reserved for Ilúvatar (and then done simply).
  • Tolkien’s “far green country under a swift sunrise” is such a marvelous line, and was used in Frodo’s dream, and then later, Frodo’s reality, as he sails to the Undying Lands. Peter Jackson misused the line (in an otherwise awesome scene) in The Return of the King, by suggesting that it represented some sort of heaven, when really it refers to Aman itself, a place where no Númenórean—where no mortals of any race—is allowed to go. In fact, for the Númenóreans, that’s the whole problem. They can’t go there, though they want to. (In the books, not this show. Not yet.) But to have a group of the Faithful—those who who cling to the friendship of the Elves and reverence for the Valar and who would know better—also misusing the phrase? It’s groan-worthy, and undercuts the whole scene. Jackson, and now Rings of Power, use the “far green country” as a shorthand for death. And it really isn’t.
  • Then we get the High Priest—he’s actually labeled this by the show—saying of the statuette of Nienna (the Valie of sorrow) that, “If she is not stored, the souls for whom she weeps will be lost.” Are we really to understand that the Faithful actually believe that if this physical icon is not placed in a proper place, then the souls of the Númenórean soldiers who died on Middle-earth some time ago will somehow become damned, dispossed, or displaced? The metaphysics in this show are all over the place.
• Kemen continues to earn the audience’s growing rage. Well done! Will his comeuppance be death, or future Nazgûlhood? Or will he be with his father and share his fate someday?
• Speaking of his father, I’ve got to say, this is a pretty sweet look.

• Trystan Gravelle is playing Ar-Pharazôn wonderfully. I am annoyed that they waited until the second half of the second season to establish the true reason behind the unrest in Númenor (that’s supposed to have been mounting for centuries): a desire to defeat death, in envy of the Elves and the Valar. I’m not sure whether to think Well, better late than never! or Too little too late! I guess I’m somewhere between these two sentiments. It feels more like the showrunners hadn’t secured some Tolkien Estate permissions in the first season to touch on this, but now they have.
• As for the fortune-telling crystal ball that this show is calling a palantír . . . I don’t know. It’s just doing a whole different thing. The future watery disaster that is the sinking of Númenor has gone from a catastrophe that surprises even the Valar, even Sauron, to something that multiple people already know about.

Just Outside Eregion

• Not sure how long it took the Orcs to cart the Galadriel-cage from where she was captured, but remember, she did manage to escape a Númenórean prison in short order. Why not now?
• This was a weird little moment. Was the director supposing that the viewer had no idea it was going to be Galadriel, who we saw captured by Orcs at the end of the previous episode? Why the pretense of a mystery captive?
• A backgroud Orc says the words “It’s okay.” It’s even in the official subtitles. So, yeah. Okay.