RoP : S2 Ep 7: Doomed To Die

Let’s get to it.

Khazad-dûm

• Oh, those Durins! What wacky antics are they getting up to now?
• Ohhh. Oh. Yikes.
• I’m glad Narvi now sees reason. Narvi’s been underused, and probably will be going forward, what with the creation of the Doors of Durin having been just panned by.
• Gratifying to see Elrond and Durin meeting up again, truly. But I admit, even that moment is distracted, for me, by the erratic geographical jumps. So now armies from Lindon have so easily traversed the distance when Elrond and Galadriel’s team couldn’t do it in one small group.
• Durin IV’s speech was actually great. What a bunch of highs and lows this show has, such a mish-mash of good and perplexing ideas that never mix well. I keep wondering: Why are the good script-writers and plot-writers not the only writers?

I love this shot. I want to see them both in battle.

• I can understand the heightened drama of giving Durin a painful dilemma (lead an army to help Eregion or stay and deal with his crazy dad), but it involves an unfortunate bit of telling, not showing. Narvi, wounded, comes running to report that the king is attacking dwarves (as in murdering?!) in a manner that sure sounds like Jackson’s prologue-Sauron sending Men and Elves flying with every mace-stroke. But we don’t really see what’s happened, so I guess we’ll come back to this in the final episode of the season?

It’s nice being in mostly one location for an episode. . . .

Eregion

• There’s so much about the Celebrimbor and Annatar dynamic that’s invented for this show and not adapted from Tolkien’s text directly, but there are some decisions within the new framework that work well.
• Case in point: Celebrimbor caught in an illusory time loop is pretty darn cool. A bit of a Groundhog Day situation, almost (that would surely have been interrupted by the presence of the team of assistant-smiths and that’s why they had to go). I really do like that. And I appreciate that Celebrimbor was able to perceive it eventually, and that Sauron’s illusion-making had such a limitation. That is cool.

• Mr. Mouse is my hero.
• Celembrimbor seems to be at peace with the idea that the project eventually will finish, that “all things must end.” I’m not sure how to feel about it, considering that in Tolkien’s text, it’s precisely the desire to forestall things, to preserve the world unchanging, that led the Elves of Eregion to fall for Annatar’s trap.
• Sauron’s impatience for the completion of the Nine, and the cracks showing through that impatience, feels like a good fit for him. But only in this Rings of Power Sauron. Book Sauron is far, far more patient. The Rings of Power, all sixteen, take decades to make, in the text. He plays the long con. But Rauron here has places to be; he’s on a tight schedule. All right.
• Much was made about Orcs not being able to handle the sunlight. And sure, their barrages against the city are making the air smoky. But it sure is bright out there in the daytime.
• Mirdania may have been a smith, but however many days or weeks Eregion has been under siege, she’s still in the same wardrobe and seems to have picked up part-time work spouting exposition and giving Annatar siege-and-security updates.
• Annatar said, “You have proven your quality, Mirdania.” Ugh. *wink*

• When Adar starts easily damming the river with avalanche stones that break off just perfectly (and not for nothing, but some of those stones fall like the stone staircases in Jackson’s Moria), I really wanted:
  • To see where the water went! Rivers don’t just stop flowing, or turn around and go back where they came from. The water goes somewhere. Can we not get at least one shot of where it’s going, what it’s affecting? The only possible clue we get is later, some water is pouring down some stairs inside the city, but if the whole river was going through the city it would be more than that.
  • To see the flopping-around fish of Gil-galad’s Ringvision™ who had lost all their water. I mean, they set that up for us! Why not use it?
  • For the Elves to not be so flabbergasted about the river, like they know nothing about the location of their city.
• The Elves who aren’t main characters continue to disappoint. They’re bumbling and incompetent, and just seem like what they are: humans in costume not given enough direction. They don’t seem proficient with warfare. A case could be made that they’re a bit rusty and there haven’t been any great wars for a while, but most of them are hundreds or thousands of years old and have been through a lot. Not just battles against Morgoth’s forces. Some of these Noldor will have marched across the Grinding Ice during—
• Well, wait, no. Probably not. The flight of the Noldor is very obviously not an event that occurred in this version of Middle-earth. So never mind that.
• But still, even in The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf remarks about the land and the nature of the Elves of Eregion (Hollin).

‘There is a wholesome air about Hollin. Much evil must befall a country before it wholly forgets the Elves, if once they dwelt there.’

‘That is true,’ said Legolas. ‘But the elves of this land were of a race strange to us of the silvan folk, and the trees and the grass do not now remember them. Only I hear the stones lament them: deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone. They are gone.’

• When I see the panicked Elves in this show, I just don’t see these as the same ones Legolas is talking about.
• Mirdania’s end was intended to feel gut-wrenching, I think. To me it was borderline goofy, and the nearly unfazed reactions of the Elves looking down at her continues to shock me. RoP Elves are like fainting goats. Useless when surprised.
• Elrond leads a cavalry charge, then halts the charge remarkably smoothly when he sees that Adar has Galadriel confined to a rickety cage that she cannot get herself out of, even though she was able to get free from a underground Númenórean prison in Númenor. Am I the only one harping on this a little? I can handle plot contrivances, but then whey are like twenty too many, it does grate.

The Kiss

• All right, real quick . . .
• While the plot provides a semi-believable reason for the Elrond-Galadriel kiss—ostensibly as a distraction aimed at Adar and the Orcs—I believe that the showrunners’ (or at least the marketing department’s) real motivation for it is to get people talking. To create contraversy. To tantalize the demographic that this sort of event feeds.
• This is so obvious. When Elrond does kiss his future mother-in-law, the camera doesn’t pan over to Adar or his tent-security Orcs to see eyebrows raise or anything. And, honestly, would they care? Are they romantics? Elrond could slap Galadriel in the face and achieve the same thing. But showing us how the distraction succeeds would be he honest thing to do.

• But no. That’s not the real point. The camera focuses on the kiss with the utmost drama, while Galadriel’s musical motif soars (and it is lovely), providing fodder for fan fiction.
• Confession: The first few seconds of the kiss I didn’t actually balk so much as think, “Let’s see where they’re going with this . . .” because I 100% assumed Elrond was actually passing her the ring, Nenya, from his mouth, and that she would escape somehow with the magic of the ring. But then I thought, ohh, c’mon, that’s so not Tolkien. When I realized it was only about the Elven Brooch of Lockpicking, it felt worse.
• You know, this is going to make their future Jackson long-range telepathic conversations awkward sometimes.

Eregion

• I liked seeing Galadriel sneak around the Orc-camp, but I wish they didn’t have her mess up at every turn. For one, why leave behind the brooch? And then she wanders around with one lock of blond hair hanging out of her hood. We the audience didn’t need that to identify her, only the plot did. I’d rather the sharp-eyed Orc-woman spot a fair face within the hood than to spot her “pretty hair.” A minor point.
• Galadriel’s “There is a dearth of Elven heroes this night. It would be a pity to lose another,” shouldn’t make me think of The Princess Bride, but of course it did.
• I’m not sure how to feel about Sauron’s woe-is-me speech to Celebrimbor. On the one hand, it bumps him up as a villain, rightfully so, and Celebrimbor calling him on the BS that it is (“You can deceive even yourself.”) actually bumps him up as a hero. I like that. On the other hand, is this meant to be pure lies, more gaslighting on Sauron’s part? Or is the show really leaning into this narrative? That is, the idea that Sauron was abused by Morgoth (Melkor) and didn’t actually revere him, and that’s why he feels it’s okay for him to abuse others?
• If so, it’s yet another invention. From Morgoth’s Ring:

But there was seen the effect of Melkor upon Sauron: he spoke of Melkor in Melkor’s own terms: as a god, or even as God. This may have been the residue of a state which was in a sense a shadow of good: the ability once in Sauron at least to admire or admit the superiority of a being other than himself.

• Sauron is nowhere ever described by Tolkien as being miserable in Morgoth’s service—not like the Orcs are under both Dark Lords. There is no hint that he’d ever have to tried to overthrow his boss. Sauron simply pivoted and took up the mantle when the Valar removed Morgoth altogether, looking to organize (dominate) what his boss had tried to destroy.
• Ultimately, Sauron’s justification in The Rings of Power sounds too much to me like the Joker’s do-you-want-to-know-how-I-got-these-scars routine.
• It does strike me as . . . odd that Celebrimbor, the greatest Elven craftsman living on Middle-earth, can’t free himself from a pair of seemingly nonmagical manacles. So I think that was dumb. But his act of desperation and determination in the means of his freeing himself was very appropriate to this story.
• Celebrimbor’s reunion with Galadriel was cool, emotionally gratifying. But his little speech (“But perhaps, the Elves need only remember that that it is not strength that overcomes darkness . . .”) that follows just felt awkwardly dropped right in. It was WAY more Tolkienien a message than the previous season’s “touch the darkness” mantra that Faux Finrod spouted, but I think it should have been delivered elsewhere and by someone else.
• The siege goes on. Why all the explosives? To me this undermines, just a bit, the deviltry of Saruman in the battle of Helm’s Deep. (Or the black powder of Jackson’s Saruman.) It’s yet another callback, isn’t it?
• Troll time. His recycled name (Damrod) aside, the hill-troll sequence was quite fun. He was satisfyingly the center of attention.
• I could spot Arondir climbing on top of him, Legolas-style, a mile away, though. Arondir has been cool in this show—it’s such a shame that he’s been made to walk in the footsteps of Legolas. I wish they’d let him be his own Elf. I guess sometimes he does. Ismael Cruz Córdova seems like one of the few actors who took “act like an Elf” more seriously.
• The hill-troll was like Chekhov’s gun. Since we met him early in the season, it was inevitable that he was going to show up in the battle. But I do wonder, if he’s super strong and has no problem killing Orcs as well as Elves, how had they kept him in check while marching with the army? “Send him in,” Adar says. From where? I have a hard time imagining him just idling somewhere, waiting for permission.
• What was Damrod’s beef with Sauron? He showed up in the first place asking where Sauron was, presented as his motivation for coming at all. We never got that answered. Did Damrod and Fancy Red-robed Sauron have a history together, from like a thousand years ago?!
• Arondir’s fight with Arondir and with Elrond await conclusion. I’m assuming Arondir is not, in fact, dead. Question is, will Galadriel get her ring back and heal him, or does Arondir’s story come to end (despite all the Theo and Ent stuff) now that his girlfriend is no longer a part of the story?