The hour was so late and the episode was so long, we’d no rest nor comfort, no comfort but song, not enough rest to tackle 202 and 203. Unlikely to watch them before Saturday, so any posts on them would go up Sunday at the soonest. These are impressions, rather than deep thoughts, and below the cut, they include spoilers for anything that crosses my mind, including rumors about late-season-two plot developments.

The Short Version: so far, I really feel like the events of season one should have been covered in about four or five episodes, and the events of this episode should have been part of the second half. If we get to a moment in a later episode where I can honestly say: “I think season one should have ended here,” I will try to remember to point it out. Maybe the editing geeks who spend their time endlessly recutting the PJ Hobbit movies and the 1980s Dune will take a shot at ROP whenever it ends. ROP’s acting and visuals remain good overall, but dark scenes are barely watchable even in a dark room, and the day for night shooting in the Rhun scenes could have come out of the old spaghetti westerns that the Spanish location used for Rhun undoubtedly hosted at one time or another. Thought the directing was good if self-indulgent. Writing seems somewhat improved, but is a long way from flawless.

Elvish Conflict:

-People talk about the black and white morality of the Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion shares that clearcut sense of right and wrong, while also focusing on more people (both human and elvish) who are messy and morally compromised. Both works also insist on the felix culpa, the morally dubious or flatout immoral decision that remains what it is even when the repercussions lead to great heroism and the triumph of good. I feel like this show is clearly trying for that felix culpa, and that Silmarillion vibe of morally compromised people trying to force back the darkness in spite of their own weaknesses. I don’t know if the show quite pulls it off, but it looks like that’s what it’s aiming for.

-Galadriel is genuinely humbled and repentant when she confesses to her involvement with Sauron. I’ve expressed my ambivalence in the past about the whole storyline of Sauron successfully conning her, but this moment of acknowledgment that the audience was right to see her earlier self as wrong-headed was to me very powerful. She comes off as kind of manipulative and opportunistic towards Elrond, particularly at the Grey Havens, but I always got a vibe from the FOTR novel that she was capable of that, at least until her final test. ROP Galadriel is still flawed, but she feels like a person of much more emotional stature and substance than the simplistic Angry Elf of season one. I liked Morfydd Clark better than her character in the first season and I’m glad she seems to be getting better material this time around.

-Gil-Galad is somewhat improved in wardrobe and personality. “Who is this man?” works better in context than in the teasers. His big musical number (an earworm of a very different style from This Wandering Day, but no less effective) is great. His private moments of somewhat respectful sarcasm with Galadriel were likable and humanizing, if a little too Precinct Captain bickering with Dirty Harry or “Cobra” Cobretti. His attempts to bully Elrond – portrayed here as much younger and lower in status than Gil or Gal – continue to come off as flat-out bizarre(1).

-Cirdan was going to be a hard character to sell: a wise, supportive shipwright who has dedicated his life to teaching other Elves about ships, shipbuilding and the sea; the oldest Elf still living in Middle Earth (in some versions, one of the original, parentless Elves created by God Himself in the depths of time); and also one of only two Elves to have a beard. Ben Daniels is excellent – you believe he’s seen so much go so horribly wrong over the millennia that he’s become very zen about jewelsmiths inadvertently taking craft advice from evil sources.

-Robert Aramayo remains my favorite onscreen Elrond, but I feel like he goes too smug on the character’s more righteous moments (notably when the orders to withdraw from Middle Earth are given). I got where he is coming from on the Three Rings, but I don’t know how well it would work for people who don’t know that Elrond’s family was the direct target of two Kinslayings (elf-on-elf battles/wars) because they possessed a magical jewel, while Galadriel (in ROP) and Gil-Galad (in the Silmarillion) seem to have been kind of collateral damage in the second of those Kinslayings and not at all involved in the first of those two Kinslayings. No beef with Elrond leaping over the waterfall ala Bruce Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Tolkien’s elves are hard to kill, and Elrond is one-sixteenth angel.(3)

–There are rumors of a kiss, later in the season, between Galadriel and an unspecified character who is neither Sauron nor Celeborn, and some people interpret this as being between Elrond and Galadriel. Their basis for this is some snark about “messing with the genealogies” in a Polish review that mentions the kiss but not the other character involved, and the same Elrond/Galadriel bits from the promos that I was complaining about some posts back. I can just barely imagine some kind of scenario where the power of Nenya (Galadriel’s ring) is somehow influencing Elrond to act out of character, and this is a headsup to them both that Elrond’s not wrong to fear the Three – bonus points if Sauron throws “All shall love you and despair!” at Galadriel shortly afterwards. But I really can’t get my head around this idea of an Elrond/Galadriel kiss otherwise.

—on a related note, a section of the Haladriel shippers like to swear up and down that Aramayo and Clark have no chemistry, “not even platonic.” I think the two have a very warm and friendly vibe, and the touchy-feely moments to date feel like the very theatrical renditions of familial love that you might see in certain movies from India.

-the Healing of the Great Tree didn’t hit me as hard as some viewers, but it managed to be visually beautiful and not corny, and I enjoyed it. The scene of the tree glowing at the end may be a callback to Laurelin, one of the Two Trees of Valinor seen in the prologue of episode 101.

-Almost forgot the goofy Star Wars moment where Galadriel quotes Darth Vader (“Escape is not his plan”) about Elrond.

Among the Tusken Raiders of Rhun

-I didn’t have a problem with this strand overall. I felt that it was a nice contrast to the Elvish existential angst and the grimdark orc-and-Sauron pony show. Poppy’s reintroduction more or less worked in context (Nori and the Stranger were going in circles and Poppy had figured out a while back that they needed her help.) There was a bit of the chronic wheel-spinning that plagued the Stranger plotline last season, and the hunt for the landmarks from This Wandering Day was simultaneously corny and weirdly compelling. The mysterious people following them were very steampunk Tatooine.

-Nori and Poppy are still cute, likable people who wouldn’t be all that interesting without the Stranger or other characters around as foils. They don’t feel like they have the inner toughness of the book hobbits, the family-in-all-but-blood vibe of Movie Frodo&Sam, or the “reinforcing each other’s wacky hijinks” vibe that Movie Merry&Pippin start off with and eventually grow out of.(3)

–I remain ambivalent about the harfoots’ occasionally dark sense of humor, last seen in the snailing song towards the end of season one, and coming up here in a discussion about singing dancing songs to the wriggling live bugs the harfoots are eating. It’s not wrong for their lifestyle, but like the darker aspects of that lifestyle, it sits uncomfortably beneath the overlay of cutesiness and charm assigned to the harfoots. The darker side beneath the cutesy veneer doesn’t make them seem tougher or more resilient, it just makes them seem a trifle creepy.

-I liked Daniel Weyman’s Stranger quite a bit in the first season, inspite of his lame storyline, and to me he really upped his game in this episode. I like Elrond, I like Elendil, but if you put a gun to my head and asked me to name the most charismatic man on ROP, I’d probably name the Stranger at this point.

–Various hints in full-season reviews of season 2 make it clear that the Stranger will be explicitly revealed as Gandalf, and the “Dark Wizard” played by Ciaran Hinds will be somewhat explicitly labeled as Saruman. I’m resigned to this, I guess. I like the Stranger alot better than some other takes on Gandalf, and I can see why they’d want to include this Third-Age ring-bearer, even if Narya is currently on the hand of Cirdan. As for Saruman, he really shouldn’t be obviously evil this far back in time (in both books and movies Gandalf et al trust him right up until he turns on them(4)). But given the shift in Galadriel’s character, I’m willing to sit back and see if the show really is capable of pulling off “Gandalf turns fallen comrade back to the light, shame that he tragically falls again in the Third Age.” Or some version of “Token Pragmatic Teammate will eventually, a few millennia later, turn out to be Big Bad Friend.”

The Wanderings of Sauron

-The conscience of this subplot is the doomed old man whom the subtitles name Diarmid. While Cirdan emphasizes the idea of extending grace to flawed people and their creations, Diarmid emphasizes that you can always choose to do the right thing, but you have to keep choosing it. It’s blunt, but it works in context, and it utterly rejects the idea that Sauron’s evil is anyone’s fault but his own.

-There were minor timescale and timeframe issues with this one. It takes a certain amount of inferring to figure out that since the incident with Jack Lowden’s Sauron takes place shortly after the defeat of Morgoth (first dark lord and Sauron’s former boss), and the fall of Morgoth is pretty ancient history in the present-day of the show setting, it takes Sauron a long time to build a new form. My cowatchers don’t pay attention to spoilers or the constant online gabble of Vickers’ fans (real or astroturfed) unpacking his every scene. And so it was that the cowatchers were briefly bewildered by Halbrand suddenly showing up as a prisoner in Mordor; they thought this was another flashback to his history with Adar.

-Sauron in Venom-style parasite form eating his way up the food-chain: not how it works in the books, where it’s implied to be just spooky evil spirit building a new body ex nihilo over a longish but unspecified period of time. But it’s a better fit for Tolkien’s brand of eldritch horror than a lot of stuff in the movies, it’s a good symbolic representation of Sauron’s parasitic, predatory nature, and it rubs the Sauron groupies’ faces in the fact that there’s a cruel and ugly entity behind the blandly attractive faces of Mr. Lowden and Mr. Vickers. What’s not to like?

-I continue to be very meh on the Halbrand persona. It’s well-acted. In this particular episode, it’s relatively well-written. And the Halbrand persona does work better when we’re allowed to understand what he really is, especially in the moment when he turns against Diarmid, and the moment when he Sees an Opportunity Named Galadriel. I just don’t find the Halbrand persona all that compelling to watch. I guess we’ll see if the more glamorous Annatar persona works better for me.

-New Adar is excellent, one of the best things about this subplot. He captures the stillness and intensity that were the most interesting things about Previous Adar, with a bit more swaggering warrior in him, which in turn makes him more believable as someone the orcs would willingly follow. It’s not an objectively better performance than Previous Adar, or than Vickers’ Halbrand, but I found it to be more fun to watch. Not in love with New Adar’s makeup FX, but it’ll do. Still don’t care about his orc minions.

-I’ve seen Jack Lowden take some flak for his portrayal of pre-Halbrand Sauron online. I thought he worked okay, if not great, as a semi-repentant Sauron who’s recently failed to schmooze his way into the good graces of Eonwe, angelic herald of the Valar and commander of the forces that had just overthrown Sauron’s boss. In that context, Lowden’s also believable as someone who’s not really reading the orc-room, but I can see where it wouldn’t work for people who aren’t up on their Silmarillion. The final mauling of his body kind of reminded me of David Prowse’s fate in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell.

-The cowatchers were confused by whether Celebrimbor knew that Halbrand was Sauron; I knew from spoilers (and could probably have guessed from story tropes in general) that Celebrimbor did not.

Final Feelings: pleased and amused rather than wowed, fairly interested in seeing the next two eps but not bursting with anticipation.

Footnotes:

(1) I mean, seriously, dude, are you mad at Elrond because his great-great-granddaddy made your daddy and granddaddy learn Sindarin? Totally the wrong person to take it out on. Are you mad at him because he was partially raised by the least awful of Feanor’s sons? Still the wrong person to take it out on.

(2) Elrond’s great-great-grandaddy (the one who made the Quenya speakers learn Sindarin) fell in love with a Maia, an angelic being of roughly the same kind as Gandalf, but with a more beautiful form.

(3) I actually enjoyed PJ’s LOTR movies a lot at the time but putting up with twenty years of semi-literates misinterpreting the books (especially Elrond, Aragorn, and Denethor) through the lens of the movies has soured me a bit, and magnified the films’ failings. But the movies do the Hobbits and the Rohirrim very well. And it may be that by the time I am pushing seventy, I will be equally tired of the Haladriel shippers projecting Vickers’ Sauron and Clark’s Galadriel back onto the LOTR books, and that I will be equally intolerant of ROP’s many shortcomings.

(4) Galadriel preferred Gandalf as head of the White Council to Saruman, only to be overruled by the other members of the White Council and by Gandalf’s lack of enthusiasm for the job. But that doesn’t mean she thought Saruman was evil, just overhyped and less reliable or compassionate than Gandalf.