Okay, let’s get the big important news out of the way: the official renewal of the series for season 3 is expected any day now, the show runners have pretty strongly shot down the suggestion that the Dark Wizard of Rhun (Ciaran Hinds’s character) is Saruman, and the writer’s room for season 3 is acquiring writers from The Crown and Coronation Street. The first is welcome news to anyone with half a brain, because it makes no sense for Saruman – who in LOTR had been seen for a long time as a helpful but perhaps flawed ally – to be Obviously Evil when Gandalf first encounters him. The second is promising news because one of the show’s most crippling weaknesses in these first two seasons was the writers’ inability to mimic Britspeak, especially the dignified idiom Tolkien used for the Elves and Dunedain. I hope the new writers help with that.

Anyway, on with the usual disjointed thoughts and spoilers for all kinds of things:

Shadows Under Khazad Dum

-I realize that Durin II was probably getting away with running amok because the dwarves didn’t want to raise their hands against their king, but it’s not really clear why Durin IV couldn’t send the army under Narvi to the aid of Ost-en-Edhil while he-Durin IV tries to talk his father down off the ledge.

-I also didn’t get what Durin III actually accomplished in jumping on the Balrog as the cave collapses, aside from personal redemption. Noble but futile attempt to protect his son and his people? Mistakenly (and inadvertantly) reassure the Dwarves that the fiery beastie is dead and they can go on living in Khazad-dum? Maybe we’ll find out in two years.

-I’d also largely forgotten the passing reference to Durin IV having a brother or brothers that came up in season 1.

-Aside from that, no real complaints about the dwarvish subplot. Well-acted as always, comparatively good dialogue (as ROP writing goes), very solid special effects including a Balrog framed by a cloud of smoke that acts kind of like wings. Disa’s pointedly harsh and political attitude in the final scene is particularly interesting to those of us who think she might have a more ruthless side.

–The streaky vertical veins of mithril in the cavern looks a fair amount like the images from the season 1 story of the “Roots of Hithlaeglir,” which depicted mithril as the by-product of a fight between an Elvish warrior and a Balrog over a Silmaril. We have the veins, we have the Balrog, will we by any chance have an Elvish warrior? If so, does he happen to have a beautiful Elvish wife with golden hair and a mean sword arm? *waggles eyesbrows*

Land of the Star, Land of the Gift, Realm of Ar-Iznogoud

-It’s not really clear why Pharazon would interpret his palantir vision of Halbrand in volcano-land (from an earlier episode) as proof that Halbrand was Sauron. *Pharazon* doesn’t know that this is the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie and the One Ring will be forged. The palantir vision really needed an overdubbing of one of the bazillion reenditions of “I have many names” and maybe Galadriel identifying him as Sauron from ep 108.

-Pharazon does do a good job using this against the queen, including claiming her alliance with Sauron gave her power over the kraken.

–at first I thought Pharazon’s blue-green robes coordinating with the Faithful leadership’s blue-green robes meant that he was going to try to flip most of the Faithful to his side in order to isolate Miriel. Instead he went for a more obvious play.

-Some of Gandalf’s more anguished moments in season one seemed to be influenced by imagery from Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, and the Faithful leaders being indignant and suspicious at being convoked at such a late hour has vague parallels to a scene from the same movie, where the more virtuous half of the Sanhedrin storm out of the late night meeting because they don’t want to be part of a kangaroo court condemning the innocent Christ.

-Our Star Wars moment of the episode: Earien covers for her dad’s escape by telling the stormtroopers that these aren’t the droids they’re looking for. Is the Elvish blood in her, by way of her ancestor Tar-Elros, brother of Elrond and founder of Numenor, strong enough to allow her to pull off a Jedi mind trick? Well, maybe not, but her status as the daughter-in-law elect of Ar-Pharazon Iznogoud shuts them down, anyway.

-Miriel’s and Elendil’s farewell is tastefully done, without quite the aggressive shipteasing of the earlier episodes. The unsheathing of Narsil was a poignant moment for those of us who recognized its significance. (I did have to explain to my co-watchers: “this is the Sword That Was Broken, before it was broken.”)

Soap Opera Over Pelargir

-The bromance between Theo and Isildur really feels like they’re setting up Theo to be the King of the Dead. This is a scene where both young actors, whose characters had been so annoying in season one, really step up to the plate. Hair and makeup also do an impressive job of styling Maxim Gondry (Isildur) to look like a younger version of Viggo Mortensen, who played Isildur’s descendent Aragorn.

-The thing between Isildur and Estrid sounded awful on paper but makes some sense in context. They’ve always had good chemistry; now she’s on the edge of a serious commitment to her betrothed, feels like she isn’t ready for it, goes to see the Mysterious Numenorean Guy, things get kind of out of hand.

-A scene between Estrid and her boyfriend Hagen before Isildur tries to bring her along to Numenor might have been helpful, but I think we got the gist of it: Hagen has at least some vague idea of Estrid’s interest in Isildur, and doesn’t want her to go to Numenor with him.

–Usually the names of non-Tolkien characters in ROP don’t mean a great deal, but Estrid’s boyfriend is an interesting exception. Hagen is the name of an important character in the story of Siegfried/Sigurd. He often portrayed as the one who kills Sigurd by treachery, although Hogni (his counterpart in Tolkien’s retelling of the story, Sigurd and Gudrun) is generally the responsible adult in the room.

-Yay! Isildur is going back to Numenor in time to save a fruit from the White Tree! Boo! It looks like Berek the Wonder Horse isn’t going with him. The awkward reunion between Kemen and Isildur was well-handled. Kemen is trying to be nice (by season 2 Kemen standards) because this is his girlfriend’s brother, who saved his life last season, but ultimately Kemen’s gotta Kemen, and he quickly ruins the moment by telling Isildur about the situation in Numenor, in the nastiest, most Kemeny way possible.

Way Out East in Rhun

-First off, I regret to say that there is no reason, aside from uniting all the proto-hobbit clans and a pointless Sauron red herring, why we should have been spending all that time with the harfoots in season one. The show could have covered basically the same material by having Gandalf’s meteor come down in Rhun, make Nori and Poppy characters there, and have the all important travel maps and wandering song be artifacts of a past period of nomadism on the part of the Rhun-dwelling halflings, which are used to guide them into into their future nomadic life after the destruction of their town.

-Our cowboy moment of the episode: I was less bothered than some by the Dark Wizard telling the Gaudrim “take care of the halflings and leave the other Wizard to me” in the earlier episode, only for Dark Wizard and the Gaudrim to converge on the Stoor village with Gandalf not far behind them. Something about the staging made me think of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, or For a Few Dollars More, and the way the different characters are constantly chasing after/catching up with each other in those movies.

-I didn’t need to see Ciaran Hinds constantly bugging his eyes out, but Dark Wizard’s attempt to get Gandalf on his side was earnest and plausible, far more like the smooth, political Saruman of the novels than like the (admittedly highly entertaining) Extra-Strength Dracula version of Saruman from the LOTR movies. If I couldn’t get to see Politician!Saruman in the movies, at least I get what is probably a Blue Wizard equivalent to him in ROP.

–If Amazon sets out to finagle permission for actual names for the Blue Wizards from the Tolkien estate(1), they are more likely to want Morinehtar (Darkness-slayer) for Dark Wizard, and Romestamo (East-Helper) for any hypothetical third wizard we meet in Rhun.

–Dark Wizard says there are five wizards in total; Gandalf is accounted for; Saruman and Radaghast are negatively accounted for in the sense that Dark Wizard is neither of them, and there’s not really any obvious reason to bring them to Rhun at this point. I suppose non-wizard Bombadil covers the quirky treehugger slot that belonged to Radaghast in the movies, so I have no idea what a hypothetical Fifth Wizard named Romestamo would be like. Maybe a quirky-decadent magical ruler of Men? Shades of Herod in well, Passion of the Christ?

-The extreme destructiveness of the Istari’s fight in the Stoor village seems to indicate that in this continuity, the Istari are more powerful than you would think based on their Third Age activities. Presumably they rein it in by the Third Age because they’re tired of trying to swat a fly with a sledge hammer. It’s not consistent with Tolkien’s thoughts on the Istari (explicitly depowered as part of their incarnation in somewhat permanent bodies) but it is consistent with the Valar’s dilemma in the Silmarillion of “We can’t do anything because everything we do is overkill that’s going to destroy continents.”

-To me, Nori’s goodbye to Gandalf felt angrier and more bitter than necessary. I suppose they might have been going for something along the lines of George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life: an ordinary person who dreams of big adventures but whose biggest adventure is helping others in a small community. It didn’t quite work for me.

–On a related note, I think the people hoping we’ve seen the last of the halflings are overly optimistic. A best case scenario is that we check in with them once a season as they move west and try to stay out of Main Plot Developments; kind of like that play/movie Rosenkrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead, which follows the story of Hamlet from the POV of two minor courtiers. More likely, we’ll be stuck with more aimless halfling hijinks, this time without Gandalf to elevate the proceedings. In any case, I’m pretty sure where this ends: before the fall of Numenor (and subsequent presumed timeskip), a pregnant Poppy, Meriamac and most of the Stoors will settle downstream from the Gladden Fields, while Nori and the other halflings keep moving west. We will probably hear Poppy and Meriamac debating whether to name their kid Smeagol if a boy. The halfling activities after the timeskip will probably include Nori founding the Shire, possibly meeting Elendil along the way(2), which would be AWESOME, and the series will end with the finding of the One Ring by Deagol and Smeagol.

-The Grand-Elf gag and Gandalf’s sudden foresight into his actual name (“They will call me Gandalf”) were…fine. They didn’t annoy me as much as much as they did some people. I feel like ending the episode on Gandalf and Bombadil singing would have been more Tolkienesque and was *possibly* the original intended end-point, but someone at Amazon wanted to end on the more epic, and PJ-esque image of Gil-Galad raising his sword.

–Yes, like everyone else on the planet, I now want a hedgehog teakettle.

Elves, Uruks, and Gorthaur the Abhorrent, also called Sauron

-First off, a fond farewell to two cool sets: Celebrimbor’s forge and the courtyard outside. You guys really brought that old school Bray Studios/Shepperton Studios vibe, and you will be missed.

-Charles Edwards finally lives up to the hype in his death scene as Celebrimbor; a very vivid portrayal of a quirky, vulnerable, unheroic kind of person suffering through terrible tortures for the sake of what he holds dear. He earns a kind of victory, for the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. I know a lot of people wanted a more macho, Feanor-like Celebrimbor, but this scene would not have worked as well with that take on the character.

-Most annoying gaffe: Celebrimbor has a beautifully written and delivered speech about dying and going beyond the sunrise where Sauron can’t follow. It works great…assuming you don’t know or can just ignore the fact that Mandos, the Limbo Elvorum where the Elves stay before being reembodied, is in Valinor, the Uttermost West.

-The handling of Adar’s alienation of Glug (aka Domestic Orc With Wife And Kid) had felt a bit perfunctory in previous episodes, and I think it weakens the brief moment where we see Sauron begin to subvert Glug. The fact that Glug sounds like a Ferengi when he talks (I think it’s the similarly shaped fangs) is not at all helpful in taking his concerns seriously.

–No other complaints about the subversion of the Uruk-hai by Sauron, except that there were better ways of staging Galadriel’s inability to save Adar (easiest one is to have the orcs move in to guard her when Adar moves away, and then have the guard-orcs join in the frenzied attack on Adar’s corpse.)

–Adar’s final minutes were genuinely touching. On a related note, I just realized that he might not have met Melian (Elrond’s ancestress) in Menegroth; if he’s one of the earliest Elves, he might have known her when she and some of the future Istari came to Middle Earth to instruct the first Elves.

-Thought the fight between Sauron and Galadriel was fairly well-done. Him mocking her by taking her shape worked for me; him turning into Celebrimbor just felt like an excuse to let Charles Edwards try on the Sauron persona for giggles. If her faster sword attacks and float-jumps were supposed to reflect her ring’s power, it worked for me but not the co-watchers. I didn’t mind Sauron taking the Nine from her; it really felt like she had done everything humanly (elvenly?) possible at that point to keep them out of his hands. I felt like Charlie Vickers (Sauron) did a better job of selling the shipteasing stuff, in a twisted, evil possessive way, than Morfydd Clark (Galadriel) did, especially in the moment when he presents himself as a glammed up Halbrand. She’s supposed to look like she’s paralyzed by the memories of someone she cared about, instead she just looks confused. She is more convincing when she trolls him with Nenya (for no apparent reason) a bit later. That part feels like the pre-temptation Galadriel of Fellowship of the Ring, both film and book, where she comes off as shrewd, charming, and capable of being pretty manipulative if she wanted to be.

–Our other Star Wars moment for the season: after having been told by her friends not to face the Enemy alone, Galadriel does so, gets a brutal beatdown, and only escapes from his manipulations by throwing herself from a high place(3) and being found, comforted, and healed by friends. Gandalf wasn’t the one on Dagobah this season, Galadriel was!

-As Gil-Galad, Benjamin Walker continues to have moments of major narm (“Dwooorves!”) but he finally grows into the part of the priest-king-warrior in the final scenes, with his attempt to exorcise the darkness from Galadriel making far more sense on the “priest” front than him apparently deciding that she gets to go to Valinor way back in episode 101. But please dude, do not attempt the Raised Index Finger again without figuring out how to make it look natural. I have some recommendations, but you have to *really* love Rrrreceived Pronunciation to sit through them….

–Didn’t see anything particularly wedding-ish about Elrond returning the ring to Galadriel. It’s part of a larger sequence of the three main male elves all showing her (platonic) love and support. Elrond deciding whether to use Nenya on the other hand, was painfully drawn out and tiresome. I did like him going berserk when his King is threatened earlier in the episode though.

-Aaand, we get one more muddled piece of writing when the Elf leadership hangs out in Probably Rivendell and debates whether attack or defense is their best option right now. A “sword or shield?” metaphor gets thrown around. Galadriel quotes Celebrimbor in a way that seems to favor defense, and then, without any sense that Gil-Galad is contradicting her or disagrees with what she’s said, he raises his sword and the remnants of his army and the Elves of Eregion cheer. It really looks like the Elves are about to choose the shield, and then it really looks like they’ve chosen the sword, with no transition in between. I rolled with it because of the acting, the music, and the imagery, but it was still annoying, and that is ROP in a nutshell.

Wrapup

-I’ve devoted this much time and energy to ROP, which was maybe a 6/10 show in s1 and a 7.8/10 show in s2, because I feel like a lot of criticism of the show is overblown virtue-signaling that misunderstands or flat-out lies about the show’s actual strengths and weaknesses.

–We may have some idea of Sauron’s motives once he’s out in the open, but those motives are pretty obviously evil, not “gray.” The Orcs may have some capacity for not-evilness, but they still pretty consistently choose evil, and the main reason the proto-Orc Adar, with his somewhat greater capacity for not-evilness, chooses good at the end is because of the healing powers of one of the Three Rings. It’s a long way from the moral relativism the show is frequently accused of endorsing.

–The demographics are kind of wonky relative to more realistic settings with this level of travel tech, but the acting is generally pretty good.(4) Music is attractive and generally well-done, although I felt like Bear McCreary got a little sloppy in s2 in his decisions about scoring certain scenes. Sets, costumes, action scenes, FX, all are fine at a tv level, certainly better than the blatantly amateurish Acolyte, which looked like a moderately ambitious fan film, not a $200mil+ Hollywood production. The ROP writers at least try to represent both male and female characters as well-meaning people who sometimes make bad judgment calls. They’re just not good enough writers to make it work. As a result, episodes 101-106 appear to be generic stuff about how girlbosses are always right, even when they’re taking blatantly irrational decisions…until the volcano blows up, and we realize that Galadriel and Miriel (and the male good guys involved) have made a serious error.

-And that’s really the core problem with ROP; it’s badly written, and not in the modern sense of being about Message first and Story second, or being intentionally and unnecessarily hostile to the source author’s values; but in the slightly older sense of being about Cool Moments first and Plot Logic last.

-On a related note, it’s also clear now that season 1 of ROP suffers from Phantom Menace Syndrome; it simply starts the story too far back for not really any good reason except to show us this world before it all goes sideways. You could skip Forodwaith, start with Galadriel prowling around the Southlands looking for Sauron, finding what she thinks is the lost king of the Southlands among the refugees from one of the towns, and then have the two of them get captured by Active Numenorean Colony Pelargir and then shipped back to the homeland. You could cut Isildur’s sea trials, as I’ve mentioned in past posts, and condense the halfling plot and push it back far enough to where the meteor coincides with the White Tree shedding petals, another sign and portent for the Numenoreans to freak out over. You could reduce some of the more repetitive bits in the Elrond-Durin arc, and set the season 1 Gandalf arc in Rhun, with a confrontation with the Dark Wizard in place of the forest conflict with his minions. In this version of season 1, we would get through the established story line in something like six episodes, with a less rushed forging of the Three Rings, followed by actually showing Elrond stealing the rings and taking off for Lindon, interspersed with the aftermath of Tar-Palantir’s death, as seen on Numenor in early Season 2. This in turn would save us at least half an episode’s worth of time in season two, combined with slightly cutting down the dwarf and halfling arcs, and gives all the storylines more breathing room.

-Ultimately, this show has three areas it really needs to work on: dialogue, plot logic, and editing. Hiring people who can do Britspeak should help with the dialogue. If the producers were smart enough to bring the film editors into the story development process, it might help with the editing. But only time will tell if they can figure out this whole plot logic thing.

Endnotes

(1) this has been happening on a case by case basis, as seen with the use of “Armenelos” for the capital of Numenor, a city which is not named in any of the books that Amazon has the rights to.

(2)in the books, the Shire is in a section of Middle Earth that Elendil settles after the fall of Numenor. I don’t recall whether there’s any indication of the hobbits knowing Elendil specifically, but they accepted his successors as the King of their region. By the time of Bilbo, when the Kings had dwindled into the Ranger chieftains who ultimately produced Aragorn, it had become a custom among the hobbits to say “When the King comes back” and mean: “It would be nice, but it’s never going to happen.”

(3) I know Elrond did it first but the show makes a really strong effort to present the two scenes differently.

(4) unlike some other shows I’ve seen, where the actors seem to have been chosen more for their value as diversity tokens and sacrificial victims to controversy than for their comfort level with the roles they’ve been given. The actress playing the main villain in Kenobi is a good example: a very acclaimed performer who just didn’t seem to “get” the setting until the later episodes. I don’t know whether that was due to her getting to interact with Star Wars veteran Ewan MacGregor in the later episodes (who was maybe in a better position to talk about the Jedi, etc in terms a fellow actor would understand), or the creators actually did not explain to her the character’s backstory and the parts of the setting that related to it until that late in the game.