Nothing deep to go over here, just a few general thoughts:

Stuff I unapologetically liked and still like:

-Elendil, most things Numenorean and Dwarvish, Elrond, music, production design, cinematography. To a lesser extent, Celebrimbor, Stranger, lead harfoots.

Stuff I wasn’t bothered by the first time around but am now:

-Nothing so far, unless you count the fact that I saw Person of Interest in between my first and second viewings of ROP season 1, and although it had its failings (I hated Root with the burning passion of a million suns) POI convinced me that it was possible to interweave complex stories in a better way than ROP had done.

Stuff I wasn’t bothered by and still am not bothered by:

-United Colors of Benetton casting: This thing where actors of different ethnicities are jumbled randomly together, sometimes even as blood relatives(1) with only the faintest room for handwaving and explanations…it’s not how demographics would work in a world of slow travel and often isolationist cultures. But Amazon wants a controversy about it, may even (for all I know) be hate-astroturfing the actors’ social media accounts to get that sweet, sweet controversy going. So the correct response is not to give Amazon what it wants but to evaluate the actors as actors instead of as banners for keyboard warriors to rally around or rally against. Generally, they hold up pretty well.

-Sequence of Galadriel jumping off the boat, treading water, and starting to swim: I felt like they did a good job setting up her feeling that she isn’t pure enough for Valinor and shouldn’t go there with a vengeful heart. In that context, her bailing makes a reasonable amount of sense. As far as swimming back to Middle Earth, maybe it looks kind of dorky, but in the Silmarillion she first reached Middle Earth by traveling an unstable and dangerous set of glaciers called the Grinding Ice. On foot. Tolkien’s Elves, especially the Calaquendi (those who saw the light of the Two Trees of Valinor), are tough and hard to kill. Conceptually, there’s nothing inherently wrong with her going for a long swim with only the vaguest hope of finding a ride. It’s just not well executed.

Stuff I was bothered by but am more reconciled to:

-The whole raft sequence is more tolerable now that I know from spoilers that we’ll be revisiting this set of events with more of a Halbrand POV.

-Gil-Galad sending Elves to Valinor: Elrond frames it as Gil-Galad interceding for them to go to Valinor, which is somewhat more in line with Tolkien’s ideas than “High King of the Eldar decides who sails West.” The mechanics of how he could so intercede are kind of unclear to me, but I could make something up if I cared more.

-Knowing that the series is not endorsing every piece of arrogant stupidity Galadriel commits, and wants us to see her as flawed/misguided, makes it somewhat easier to take all that arrogant stupidity, even if this is a character who really should have more common sense and courtesy than portrayed here. Points to Morfydd Clark, who is almost entirely responsible for what moments of empathy I’ve felt for “Angrodriel” in this rewatch.

–I will add that she at least tries to be diplomatic when she first arrives before Miriel, she just escalates to extreme levels of hostility at the first sign of pushback.

-Charlie Vickers’ Halbrand is a lot more palatable after reading an interview to the effect that his character is trying to manipulate Galadriel from day one. The obnoxious groupies trying to whitewash Halbrand/Sauron’s sins and pair him off with Galadriel really blinded me to a lot this actor was doing right. It’s interesting to see his character’s true nature peep out here and there.

-Isildur: I still don’t like the character’s whinging and waffling, but I feel like the actor sells it better than I remember.

-Harfoots: we are not yet at the most tiresome and repetitive parts of their story arc, but I think I’ve softened a little bit towards the culture overall. They work harder than I remember at conveying how horrified everyone was at Melba threatening to take the Brandyfoots’ wheels, for instance. I also enjoyed their quirky proverbs (“M’father always told me a harfoot with no manners was about as much use as a wagon with square wheels,” that kind of thing.) Mocking the beestung victim of anaphylactic shock remains a dubious choice in a show so much concerned with political correctness in other ways.

-Gil-Galad: I think it was a mistake to introduce him saying a speech someone else wrote for him, however funny it is to see speechwriter Elrond mutter along. Outside of that, the High King comes off mostly as a strong personality riding herd on a bunch of other strong personalities, and I think, for instance, that his high-handed treatment of Galadriel makes more sense once you understand that she’s not supposed to be some kind of Slay Queen Mary Sue but a messy, complicated person with loose cannon tendencies. Not quite sure why he feels the need to steamroll Elrond quite so vigorously.

Things that bothered me and still bothered me:

-the handling of the Elf-human interactions in Numenor and the Southlands tend to come off as somewhat endorsing elf bigotry against humans, to an extent that Tolkien would not have done. If there’s any point on which the people making this show live down to the stereotypes of show business being populated by arrogant elitists, it’s here.

-failure to include Celebrian: I like this Elrond and want to see him romance his future wife, preferably with Durin IV and Disa as the Greek chorus urging them along.

-They couldn’t be bothered to cgi in a few tents and extras in front of Khazad-dum, to suggest that Celebrimbor and Elrond have traveled a long ways and pitched camp outside the gate? Lame, guys.

-Every time this bogus story of Finrod hunting Sauron comes up, I want Elendil to sit Galadriel down, show her the Ring of Barahir and tell her the real story of how and why her brother died. I don’t know why exactly she wouldn’t know it; unless the survivors of the fall of her brother’s realm told her a very self-serving version of events.

-Lindon is a rare fail in the production design department. Bunch of trees. Bunch of elf women in weird clothes. Random pieces of pretty stonework that aren’t attached to anything. NO INDOORS.

-(not technically part of this batch of episodes although groundwork is being laid.) The “apocryphal” (Elrond’s word) origin story for mithril, and the accelerated Elf-fading thing. Intensely complicated if you don’t know the lore, intensely obnoxious if you do, just an annoying maguffin all around.

-Nori’s googley-eyed crush on the Stranger. Maybe this is the start of some kind of arc of her coming to understand that this isn’t someone she can approach in that way, but Nori’s scenes in these early eps have a vibe of unrequited, quasi-romantic interest on her part, and I find it uncomfortable.

-the Adar fanbase: ugh

-The Sauron fanbase: double ugh.

(1)Thinking here of Tar-Palantir and his daughter Miriel, for instance.