Season one had an almost U-shaped quality graph, with opening and closing episodes that weren’t perfect but were at least trying to do interesting things and a stretch of middle episodes that felt laborious and contrived. Reader, we are once again sliding to the bottom of the U….

Bratty Elves

I liked Elrond and Galadriel’s good-natured needling when they are introduced, and their last conversation, but everything in between is ROP at its worst. Elrond is smug and judgmental, Galadriel is ominous and unhelpful about the Big Bad’s activities, like a bad imitation of Peter Cushing in Satanic Rites of Dracula. Gil-Galad apparently didn’t budget for Elrond’s squad to have horses. Adar is apparently circling around to the southwest of Ost-end-Edhil to attack it and meet Gal and friends when the southeast side should be closer to his base of operations in Mordor. Galadriel randomly heals a dude with Nenya to no useful(1) purpose. Elrond makes a bad choice solely in order to make Galadriel and her ring Nenya look smart. Meanwhile everyone looks like an idiot in the barrow-wight sequence. I mean, forget the ring, guys – you’re going into a geographical feature with the Sindarin root “gur” (death) in its name. Shouldn’t you at least assume there’s something nasty and dangerous in there? And why isn’t Elrond yelling at people to look for weapons from the barrows the moment the wights show up?(2)

Supposedly Tom’s comments on the barrows in FOTR indicate that men used the barrows before migrating westward and meeting Galadriel’s brother the Noldor and Sindar, which would have been long before the kingdom of Arnor and its wars with the Witch-King, and the barrow-wights and barrow-blades we see in FOTR. I assume that’s the rationale for having haunted barrows with corpses dressed in a less westernized style.

Didn’t really have a problem with the “ack! back to Lindon to warn Gil-Galad” direction of the plot. It’s clunky from a plot POV, and turns the drama about Celebrimbor learning Annatar’s true nature into a series of comedic near-misses, like Gilligan or Kathryn Janeway constantly getting almost un-stranded. But it is the strategically correct thing to do once they have intel on Adar’s movements, as is the attempt to keep Nenya out of his hands. Galadriel’s fight scene is cool, but Adar undermines her far too quickly and easily, and the new actor continues to double-down on the Bond villain aspects of the character. (Which to be fair, are nothing new – remember his volcano plot from last season).

His Coat is Blue and His Boots are Yellow

My mental image of Tom Bombadil owes a lot to the Mind’s Eye audio adaptation; this version here is more sedate (and seemingly somewhat influenced by Beorn from the Hobbit), but still quirky. They offered at least some explanation for what he was doing so far east (traveling out of curiosity). Cowatchers were thrown by the reference to the Withywandle (“It’s that place close to the Shire where he normally lives” was my explanation). Goldberry’s voice…my headcanon is that she’s back home but Tom can talk to her telepathically. Gandalf was irritatingly dense in parts of this, notably his attempt to break off a wand from the tree.

In our Star Wars reference of the episode, we get Tom refusing to be Gandalf’s Yoda, which is a very Bombadil thing to do.

Nori, We’re Not In Kansas Anymore

I didn’t actually mind the Stoors. The guy Poppy was crushing on was as childlike as she was, so that part didn’t bother me as much as expected. (I might note that he does have a bit of a good-Smeagol vibe, which is interesting for those of us who’ve speculated about Poppy as an ancestor of Smeagol). I liked the background lore relating to Lenny Henry’s character (from last season). I don’t really get why the fandom is all “ooh, the Shire” – to me that seemed like the obvious endgame for the halflings all along. They could have shaved a bit of time off the establishing shots of the village and put them into, say, Galadriel fighting Adar or something, but compared to the colossal waste of footage the harfoots represented last season, this was a pretty lean halfing miniplot that didn’t overstay its welcome.

The Gaudrim (golden-masked people) threatening the Stoors gave us our cowboy moment for the episode; a vague riff on the bandits bullying the villagers in Magnificent 7 and similar movies.

Pelargir and Vicinity

Arondir and Theo are good; Isildur is fine, though overly sulky about Estrid’s boyfriend showing up. Estrid’s storyline strikes me as overly complicated for what it is. I mean, if the only point of her was to give Isildur someone to talk to in the previous episode about his mother, they could have found some way to play that scene with Arondir as the confidante. Nobody remotely gives a toss about Isildur’s love life. The line about Theo as Lord of Pelargir didn’t make a lot of sense; I hope it’s supposed to be a joke.

The Ents are of course the high point of the episode; menacing, poignant, alien. Every now and again, as with Cirdan’s discourse on judgment, or Annatar presenting himself as an angel of light, this show suddenly gets it, and the Ents were one of those moments.

Footnotes:

(1) No useful plot purpose I mean; I’m sure the dude is happy to be healed.

(2) Frodo does kill or disable the barrow-wight in the book using a sword from the barrow, which is probably the inspiration for the bit of wight-killing lore invented here. Five out of five stars, would steal for my own work; just not Tolkienesque.