Disclaimers: Spoilers below the cut for anything that crosses my mind, from Tolkien arcana to details from later episodes confirmed by reviewers, to the weirdest rumors about the later stages of the show.

Short summary: There’s still clunkers big and small, at a writing level, and there’s at least one major screwup in the choice of music to score a particular scene. But I enjoyed these, felt like these worked well overall, with the “earthier” 203 maybe being somewhat less good than the highly philosophical and mystical 202. I also feel like I’m getting a better sense of which first season choices in story-telling were justifiable, and which weren’t.

Khazad-dum:

-Overall, a great example of the show’s interest in world-building helping to ground (heh) its narrative: tremblors triggered by Mount Doom damage a critical part of Khazad-dum’s infrastructure, and the inhabitants have to figure out what to do about it. It all makes reasonably good sense if you’ve seen even one movie about mining and one about earthquakes, let alone read about this stuff, so I don’t know why people are being all thick-headed and whiny about not understanding what’s going on. Dialogue is iffy in spots, with overwrought metaphors (“I wouldn’t trade his heart for a mine full of fire opals”) and mildly annoying anachronisms (“disrespect you” instead of “show you disrespect”) being cheerfully steamrolled by the (high entertaining) World of Ham acting most of the Dwarf actors use. I was disappointed in the actor playing Narvi, the King’s advisor (and future craftsman of the doors to Khazad-dum seen in LOTR). I think he was aiming for socially awkward miner/craftsman having to do people stuff, but his weird pauses made the character come off as either drunk or in the early stages of dementia. I thought Peter Mullan (Durin III) was good but nothing extraordinary in season 1, found him much better here.

-Looking back on season 1: I was unimpressed with the Stonesinger sequence from the first season, felt like it was too mystical and didn’t line up well with Disa’s earlier description of her job as basically, a musical version of ground-penetrating radar. The equivalent sequence here does a good job of pulling the mystical and mundane sides of the stonesingers’ work together; although I maintain that it would have worked better in the back half of the first season. I also thought that the Durin vs. Durin blowup last season was hammy and overwrought, and I think you could have toned it down from “disowned his son and reduced him to Cinderfella” to “the King and his heir have turned against each other,” and achieved pretty much everything you needed to set up the events of this episode, and saved a bit of time last season that might have gone towards other stuff. Would we have missed out on some nice worldbuilding stuff and Durin IV/Disa character moments in this episode if the Cinderfella stuff was ditched? Yeah, but it would have been necessary, if this was the back half of season one instead of the second episode of season two.

Lindon/Grey Havens:

-Overall, this was mostly character development and setup for later adventures. It contained the worst single block of dialogue in these two episodes, where Galadriel and Gil-galad go from talking about Sauron as deceiver and seducer…to Gil trying to assure Gal that Celebrimbor is safe from Sauron because Celebrimbor’s city is well-protected in the military sense…and then from there to Gil talking about Sauron being a Capital-D deceiver who’s gotten into Gal’s head. This subplot also contained the single best block of dialogue (see Cirdan’s pep-talk to Elrond, below).

-Cirdan: I agree with most of his pep talk to Elrond, especially the importance of Elrond trying to reach out to his friends and offer what guidance he can, but I do have to quibble a bit with this part I’m about to paraphrase: “Judge the work, and leave the judgment of the maker to the One who judges all.” It’s a powerful speech, and philosophically I agree with it, in the sense that I can admire the Pieta while recognizing that Michelangelo was a pretty messed-up guy. But I’m not putting money in Michelangelo’s pocket when I admire the Pieta, and I can understand people “voting with their wallets” against still-living creatives who have done something that seems to the wallet-voters worthy of punishment. (Roman Polanski being the obvious example.) Shunning or harassing people who don’t vote their wallets the same way you do, well, I don’t think I’m okay with that.

–I don’t really understand why they felt the need to show Mr. Famously Bearded Elf in the act of shaving, but as someone who’s often mocked the movie versions of Aragorn, Faramir, etc for running around the woods with their electric razors set on permastubble, I’m kind of digging it. In Death Rides a Horse, you catch glimpses of Lee Van Cleef’s character maintaining his mustache by taking a couple days’ stubble off his face and leaving the stache alone, and Audie Murphy’s character in Posse from Hell appears to grow the beginnings of a beard over the couple of days (IIRC) that the second half of the movie covers. This is the way real men handled facial hair before electric razors: they had a target “look” they wanted to achieve, and when they had a barber/valet ready to hand, or the time and energy to do it themselves, they achieved it, and when they didn’t, they kind of let it slide.

-Gil-Galad: as in episode 201, it’s kind of a case of two steps forward, one step back. He still comes off as pompous at times, and the one chunk of dialogue mentioned above really makes him look like an idiot for no good reason. But Gil and Gal bond nicely over the visions their rings are showing them, and Gil’s decision to send Elrond and Galadriel jointly to Eregion to balance each other out makes me think of President Lincoln’s “Cabinet of Rivals” concept. (Gil’s actor played this President in Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter).

-Elrond: I felt like this character should have started off in a somewhat different place than he’s shown here, but I don’t know how to express it – maybe more conflicted over the Ring business as a whole, caught between the beauty of the results and the wrongness of his friend Galadriel railroading him into helping make them? Granted the starting point chosen by the show, I thought Aramayo did well.

-Galadriel: if last episode’s confession scene gave us a glimpse of what she would become by the time of the Third Age, in these two episodes we got a glimpse of what the character should have been in the first season of ROP: driven, proud, willful, at times manipulative, but still something much deeper and more interesting than just a petulant young adult barely capable of holding a civilized conversation with someone she needs something from. I’ve said before I think Amazon might have leaned on ROP’s creatives in the first season to make Galadriel the kind of female lead Amazon wanted, but if so, it’s looking like the creatives have successfully done an end-run around the suits.

–Due to certain rumors/leaks mentioned in my impressions of episode 201(1), I am keeping a weather eye out for anything that looks like Elrond/Galadriel shipteasing, and my impression of their scenes here is that she wants validation/support from him in somewhat the same way she wanted validation/support from Halbrand last season. To put it in Tolkien-adjacent terms, Galadriel believes she’s sundered until death from her soulmate Celeborn, and she’s unconsciously expecting first Halbrand and then Elrond to somehow fill the gap. A fan of The Wheel of Time, or A Song of Ice and Fire, might find a less…elevated way of expressing it. If this idea of mine is correct, then we should get some kind of reunion between her and Celeborn in season 3, with a sense that she becomes stronger supported by his love than when she’s trying to find substitutes for that love. As far as Elrond’s reactions go, they seem consistent with my theory that Gal’s ring (Nenya) is drawing him towards Galadriel in a way not consistent with their past relationship.

Gunfight at the Rhunish Corral

-I loved the spaghetti western vibe of this subplot, especially the climactic scene triggered by the well’s alarm system. The Rhunish characters stalking the good guys felt more like Sergio Leone bounty hunters and less like Tusken Raiders this time.

-Gandalf’s essentialist view of naming (he’ll know his true name when he hears it) sits poorly with the fact that in the books he seems willing to take any name given to him, but there’s room to grow I guess. The start of the debate about what to name him was funny, but the renewed debate, after they see the shorter, more dangerous route, was just dumb, and could have been cut.

-Ciaran Hinds’s performance and dialogue as the Dark Wizard just feels kind off when we finally meet him. He says or implies he’s not a mortal, but he talks of the Istar (“wizard,” meaning Gandalf) as if the latter were a different class of being. The acting mostly feels like a bad and charmless imitation of the dark joviality Sir Christopher Lee brought to Saruman (and Scaramanga, and Dracula’s more hospitable moments, and…and…and). Who is this guy and why should we care?

Numenor and Its Wayward Son, or What Season 1 Did Wrong

-A lot of what we’re dealing with in the Numenorean subplot here is the fallout from writing-level screwups in the previous season:

–It’s now clear that they should have cut Isildur’s failed sea trials from the first season, and just introduced him in the tavern scene with Elendil and Earien. Elendil wants to know why his son doesn’t want to join the navy. Isildur, conscientious objector son, says it’s because he doesn’t like what Numenor is becoming and doesn’t know if he wants to fight for it. Elendil is the patriot veteran dad; like Isildur he disapproves of the changes in the culture but thinks men like the two of them need to stay in the system to try and fix it from within.

–When Isildur volunteers for the expedition, he can explain that this seems like a worthier cause than just joining the navy for the sake of joining the navy. Elendil either grudgingly accepts this or some other authority figure (Pharazon, perhaps) taunts him about trying to shield his son from the dangers of the expedition, and he is forced to let Isildur join. A bit of bonding among Isildur and buddies in the framework of the training session with Galadriel, and that’s all we need to know about the other two guys. Between streamlining the Isildur and harfoot storylines, maybe dropping some of the more repetitive bits of Galadriel being a brash moron in Numenor, and Elves and Dwarves pussy-footing around the mithril maguffin, and shortening the balrog tease, you could probably save forty-five minutes worth of season 1 screentime, which is most of an episode. The writers might have been able to squeeze Adar’s flashback to his “assassination” of Sauron into 107, and Sauron’s flashback to his misadventures after that into 108. Viewers would probably have come away from season 1 at least somewhat less bewildered and annoyed.

–You might still need to show Kemen trying to blow up the ship and Isildur saving him when the ship blows up, depending on what kind of interactions the two men are supposed to have during the Adventure of Isildur and the White Tree of Numenor (a season 3 or 4 event, if it happens). But the ship thing would probably play somewhat better without Isildur’s past foulups weighing on the viewers’ minds.

–On a related note, the writers really should have explicitly set up this color thing, with red being the mark of the King’s Men and white being the mark of the Elf-Friends, back in season 1. It kind of comes out of nowhere in episode 203.

Numenor/Pelargir/Mordor, Not Necessarily In That Order

-first off, including Elendil releasing Isildur’s horse Berek as part of episode 203 instead of the recap plays hob with the timeline and confuses people unnecessarily.

-Berek the wonder-horse is awesome but there’s some holes in the story around him. If the Numenoreans are telepathic with their horses, Berek ought to be able to convey to Elendil that he-Berek believes Isildur is still alive, and Elendil should let him go, hoping against hope that the horse is right. (Yes, admittedly, another season 1 problem.) And a horse capable of killing an orc on his own and getting into and out of a cave of magical spiders should be capable of ridding himself of some bandit horse-thief without Isildur’s or Theo’s help. But then we wouldn’t get that moment where Theo overhears Isil’s story about his mother, and loses it, or that cute “classic western” scene where Theo and Isil try to steal Berek back, or the setup for the two young men and Berek to possibly meet Ents.

-In general, I liked the “refugees of Pelargir” subplot. Theo and occasionally Arondir were jerks, but it was consistent with their grief over Bronwyn, and Isil’s interactions with them were interesting. Estrid seemed like a sympathetic character; you could tell she wasn’t leveling with Isildur but she liked him and wanted to be nice to him, and the actors have decent chemistry together. Her decision to burn off the Sauron brand could mean she’s a baddie, or just someone who did bad things to survive and wants to put them behind her. Isildur recovered way too quickly from that nasty leg injury, going by the fact that the horsethieves are still in the area. And what exactly was Theo’s plan for escaping the horsethieves? The creatures – probably Ents, based on promo footage and the emphasis on the bandits chopping trees – that attack the bandits kind of take the situation out of his hands, but how was Theo planning to get away before that?

-The references to Beleriand by Elrond/Cirdan in 201 and Arondir in 203 really threw the co-watchers. It hadn’t registered that deeply as “that place Adar and Arondir are both from” in season 1, and the whole idea of drowned countries other than (future) Numenor, although logical when one stopped and thought about it, seemed to them unnecessarily complicated. Should have been part of the episode 101 prologue.

-I found new Adar a bit more generic in episode 203 than in his first outing in 202. Maybe the show was shooting out of order again, and this was his actual first sequence in the role. Less bothered by the “orc nuclear family” thing than some people. “Tortured and reengineered from elvish stock, reproduce like Elves and Men” is the best-known of Tolkien’s many attempts to explain what Orcs were and where they came from, and it’s the one ROP has been using since last season. It makes sense that the Orcs might have a less dysfunctional society under Adar than they would have had under Morgoth or Sauron, even if Adar is (probably) ultimately going to squander their lives in his quest to destroy Sauron. Damrod the troll was mostly interesting as a red herring to throw people off about the creature that snatched up Theo (actually probably an Ent).

-Miriel trying to comfort the Numenorean version of Cindy Sheehan is probably the actress’s best moment in the role to date.

-Whoever told Earien’s actress to get a facelift to make her look more like grownup Emma Watson did Earien’s actress a great disservice.

-We get yet another cowboy moment when Isildur’s buddy Valandil asks Kemen to step outside the tavern so they can settle their argument about the queen man to man. I enjoyed it – see comments about spaghetti western and classic western moments above. But this particular cowboy moment seems unnecessary, and it’s hard to believe Pharazon would go out scheming with his best bud, his loose-cannon son, and his son’s girlfriend, in a public tavern in the older (read: rougher and lower class) part of town.

-I don’t really have a problem with the main “bad guy” story beats of the coronation scene. It would be nice if it were a little more obvious that Pharazon had stacked the hall with his supporters, if the writers had set up the red vs white thing in season 1, if the crowd movements were better choreographed. But the business with the Eagle seemed pretty obvious to me: it came to bless Miriel’s coronation, it became angry with Pharazon for interfering, and it took off when it became clear that nothing short of violence was going to stop Pharazon. (The Eagles of Manwe don’t really go around attacking Elves or Men in the Silmarillion or LOTR). As for the humans, they were seeing what they wanted to see, as humans so often do.

–The real problem is how this sequence portrays the good guys. The Numenorean Archbishop of Canterbury is only slightly more dignified than his counterparts in Princess Bride and the animated Little Mermaid. Elendil gets one good moment where he shouts “Silence!” which should have been followed by a short but fiery speech and a round of fisticuffs; instead he gets blasted by the palantir (why?) and shoved around like a mook. Miriel’s big rebuttal to her attackers is well-delivered but nonsensically written (second worst block of dialogue in this set of episodes), and her reaction to the Eagle’s arrival is bizarre, with a face that looks as though she can see the Eagle and feet skittering around more like a child than a blind person on uncertain footing.(2)

–The other main problem with the scene is the score for the Eagle’s departure and Pharazon’s (temporary?) victory. Too conventionally triumphant and heroic, needs a sadder or grimmer tone to it.

The Shadow Over Ost-en-Edhil (Eregion)

-First off, the people fawning over what an awesome, brassy conman Sauron is need to shut up, sit down, and watch whichever version of the Music Man comes to hand, even the Matthew Broderick version. That is an awesome, brassy conman, living by his entirely human wits, charisma and instincts. ROP Sauron is just a sociopathic demon who’s really good at getting lesser life forms to give him what he wants, and Charlie Vickers played that very well without trying to blatantly grab the audience’s sympathies or camp it up into entertaining Large Ham territory. It shows an almost frightening awareness of the spiritual dimension of the character. Don’t idolize Mr. Vickers; pray for him. As we’ve seen with some of the interpreters of Batman’s Joker, it’s not always safe to understand the darkness that deeply.

–I’ve heard, though I’ve not looked into it that deeply, that the Catholic Church considers dark or sinister phenomena preceding an alleged heavenly apparition to be one of the “tells” of a false or demonic apparition. The leadup to Halbrand revealing himself as Annatar to Celebrimbor seems to be inspired by this idea: dark and stormy night, evil faces in the fire before Annatar emerges, etc.

–Sauron kind of flubbing the sales pitch to Durin IV ties in with the idea from the books that Sauron was never able to dominate the fierce, painfully stubborn Dwarves through the Seven Rings, only corrupt their desires.

-More minor notes: Eregion remains cooler-looking than Lindon, even if Lindon finally got some indoor scenes in season 2. The creation of Ithildin (patterns drawn in mithril that shimmer under moonlight and are otherwise invisible) was a nice inclusion. If Mirdania isn’t Celebrian going by a nickname because she’s mad at her mother Galadriel, the writers missed a wonderful opportunity for family drama. Celebrimbor’s joviality felt fake and insincere in the early scenes before he meets Sauron again. Possibly the actor was going for “frustrated/anxious for news of the Three Rings, trying to hide it” but it doesn’t work. The actor improves a bit in the Halbrand scenes and alot once the Annatar persona is in play. Writers really should have emphasized in season 1 that Celebrimbor was a descendent of Feanor, not just a fanboy.

Footnotes:

(1) For those just joining us, it’s been claimed by foreign language reviews (written by people with access to the whole season) that there’s a nonplatonic kiss from an unlikely character (not Sauron or Celeborn) to a surprised Galadriel, with Elrond being the most likely candidate. I have speculated that, if this is true, Nenya, Galadriel’s ring, is somehow the cause of him acting out of character.

(2) Leaks from before the release of season 2 hinted towards the editing department fighting to cut Numenorean material, and the producers fighting to put it back in. This and the fact that the more pro-Amazon reviews tend to badmouth this subplot even if they cut slack to every other aspect of the show feels to me like someone at Amazon just doesn’t like this subplot. Did Lloyd Owen or Cynthia Addai-Robinson refuse to get on somebody’s casting couch and this is their punishment?