*Waggles hand* Meh. About on par with the last one, maybe a shade less good. Charlie Vickers groupies and the idiots who think Middle Earth is all about the fight scenes might grade it more generously than I do. In other news, my cowatchers and I have been rewatching (and for the most part enjoying) the extended editions of the LOTR movies, and I may put up a post about that at some point in the near future. The main relevant points for now are that watching ROP and LOTR side by side a). really underlines how much better Jackson/Walsh/Boyens were at simulating Tolkienesque dialogue than the ROP team, and b). how much ROP unnecessarily remixes bits from the movies, especially bits that were so inane that I recognized them at the time I saw the originals in the LOTR rewatch but they’ve fallen out of my head by now.

Galadriel and Adar and Uruks, Oh My!

-This is simultaneously New Adar at his most Sean Conneryesque and New Adar at his most Bond Villainesque. I don’t know how to explain it. I also don’t understand why Galadriel was supposed to be impressed with his extremely vague hint that she could save Elvish lives by cooperating with him.

–his “When I was in your capture” line is a good example of why some people claim that ROP is AI-written. To me it sounds more ESL-speaker written, like dubbed dialogue in the kind of Spaghetti Western that has no Brits or Americans in it.

-Galadriel, I’m just going to let ol’ Peter Cushing say it for me, because he says it far more elegantly: You’re far too trusting. We’re back to Season One Galadriel, always stepping on rakes the moment an angsty bad boy shows up.

-On a vaguely related note, I am always happy to see Arondir’s fight scenes and I don’t mind Arondir himself, but his brief scene didn’t serve much purpose except to establish that he was in a position to head towards the Eregion conflict, and that some of the orcs continue to be disgruntled with Adar dragging them out of their new home and into war. People are going to complain about the orcs having basic instincts of self-preservation again, but to me that seems like kind of the point of the whole Adar arc: to the extent that the orcs are capable of better or saner instincts, the wars they are put through (by Adar now, Sauron later) are going to grind that out of them.

–Bummed that Isildur’s apparently not going with Arondir. I thought they were good foils for each other.

Fiery Projectiles Over Ost-en-Edhil

-Why the Frak can’t they recycle the mithril from their failed ring experiments, instead of just junking the mini-ingots of mithril alloy that aren’t working for whatever reason? Any alloy can be de-alloyed, especially in the kind of super hot furnace Celebrimbor is allegedly using for the Seven and the Nine.

-The Haladriel groupies keep sneering about Mirdania being “corrupted” by Annatar, when so far, she’s showing about the same level of naivete around Sauron as, well, first-season Galadriel. If a very plugged-in reddit mod were not so insistent that Mirdania is not Celebrian, I would be back to thinking that she was. Partly because of the parallel arc to Galadriel and partly because love-bombing the heck out of the estranged daughter of the elf-woman who turned against him last season feels like a very ROP Sauron move.

-Celebrimbor’s annoying and fake joviality earlier in the season was apparently meant to contrast to his current snappishness. Wonder if those dumdums were shooting out of order and confusing the actors again.

-Could they really not have set up Annatar hijacking the government of Eregion at least one episode before the opening shots of the Siege of Eregion?

-The references to the Silmarils took a lot of explaining to my co-watchers. It’s nearly a month since we binged the first season, where Celebrimbor talked briefly about Morgoth stealing them and becoming obsessed with their beauty.

-Flashy Annatar illusion scene: it’s unfortunate that almost the only thing the show does well and in a unique fashion is the bad guy being bad.

In the Halls of the Mountain King’s Family

-The scene where Ringbearer Durin III blows off Annatar’s attempts to bargain for more mithril, for reasons of greed, is the Seven Rings in a nutshell: inflaming the Dwarves’ worst tendencies without making them more susceptible to Sauron’s control.

-Conflict between the Durins is too overwrought, especially given Durin IV’s obvious affection for his father in the following scene.

-Disa was correct as usual, but we also got hints of a darker side, with her Lady MacBeth-like ambitions for Durin IV(1), and the suggestion that she came from a dysfunctional family. Her scene with the bats presumably involved her using her sonar abilities to stir them up, and certainly that lovable simp Durin IV approved, but even so, it came off as kind of sinister to me. She’s looking like a better candidate for Second Bearer of the First of the Seven Rings than her husband Durin IV at this moment, IMO.

-I liked Narvi’s brief bit; you could tell he was very conflicted about the whole situation. Actor has improved alot from his first ep.

Meanwhile, Back on the Rhunish Ranch…

-Cowboy moment of the episode: the Gaudrim riding along the ridgeline.

-Poppy and Meriamac are cute together, but here’s a PSA, kids: do not kiss each other while milking a poisonous snake for its venom, okay?

-Bombadil continues to refuse to “teach” Gandalf in the conventional Yoda sense, or even the slightly less conventional Mr. Miyagi sense

-It seems pretty clear that Gandalf setting out to rescue his friends is the “right” answer to the dilemma Bombadil poses to him, and that Bombadil would regard it as such, and will probably reappear and tell him so at some point. This would be in contrast to Yoda and Force Ghost Obi Wan, who remain convinced to the bitter end that Luke’s emotion/intuition-based “save them all” approach is wrong.

–That being said, this was the worst possible place to dump a paraphrase of Gandalf’s “Many die that deserve life” speech.

Religion in Numenor Part Deux: THAT’S NOT HOW THIS WORKS, THAT’S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS

-In the books, the Valar take a very hands-off approach to Men, partly because they felt like they fouled up by being too heavy-handed with the Elves and partly because Men do not wholly belong to this world, and have the power to challenge fate itself. Ulmo, the Vala of water, takes a closer interest in Men than the other Valar, but he’s also the most laissez-faire and noncontrolling of his kind.

–This means that the Valar are ruddy well not going around sending krakens to determine who’s guilty or innocent in freaking Numenor, okay? I assume these moronic writers are doing this because they feel like the need to build up to the Biblical-style smiting of Numenor (which was not the Valar’s doing but the Creator’s), but mostly, as with the religious stuff from last week, it just paints the good counterparts to Morgoth and Sauron in a negative light. Tolkien portrayed the Valar pretty consistently as well-intentioned but occasionally misguided, never emotional about insults against them, just willing to note that the attitude behind the insults was going to bite the owner in the backside.

—By contrast, the belief system of the the Faithful in ROP portrays the Valar as fickle, easily offended, and prone to meddling very directly with Numenor, when the entire reason Pharazon can go as far as he does in the Akallabeth(2) is because the Valar take a pretty hands-off approach with the Numenoreans, more consistent with the Eagle scene earlier this season than this Trial by Abyss nonsense.

Politics of Numenor

-The Elendil/Miriel shipteasing grows ever more tiresome, but it has a vague kind of parallel in some of Tolkien’s notes, where Pharazon and Miriel were contemporaries of Elendil’s father Amandil, and Miriel was engaged to Amandil of the Faithful faction, but preferred bad-boy imperialist Pharazon of the King’s Men, and married him instead.

-Elendil continues to carry this subplot on his shoulders, with a great speech about what it means to hold onto your beliefs, somewhat undermined by the fact that for the first part of the story the belief he’s willing to die for is that the stupid queen who thinks Pharazon deserves the throne is actually the rightful ruler of the country. Earien finally got some meaty scenes, and continues to support my belief that she’s going to get some kind of shot at redemption, which she may or may not flub. Miriel’s actress also did well with her material; especially the underwater scene and its aftermath. Pharazon’s Tarkin-wannabe buddy is fine but not a patch on the real thing.

-I don’t really know where they’re going with Pharazon from here. Miriel’s renewed popularity, after surviving the Trial by Abyss in front of a presumably more Faithful-leaning audience than the one in the throne room some episodes back, seems like an obvious setup for him and her to enter a political marriage, as does Miriel’s apparent openness to him being King in the previous episode. But it looks like they embarked on this whole complicated handling of Miriel from episode 103 onwards in order to *not* have her as a damsel in distress dominated by Pharazon, and I don’t know how they square that particular circle.

–On a related note, Pharazon seeing Halbrand in the palantir feels too much like Vizier Iznogoud latching onto someone he thinks he can use against the Caliph he wants to replace. What’s interesting about the dynamic between Pharazon and Sauron in the source material is that Sauron is somewhere between a POW and a slave,(3) and still manages to manipulate Pharazon. Pharazon thinking “Some Low Man I bargained with for information about the Elf-woman(4) is actually more powerful and important than I thought” just isn’t as interesting to me.

Footnotes

(1)Which last surfaced around this time last season if IIRC.

(2)The section of the Silmarillion dealing with the Fall of Numenor

(3) Pharazon frightened Sauron’s armies into retreat and then took Sauron to Numenor in chains.

(4) back in Season 1