“The Rings Of Power” Season 2, Episode 5 Finally Puts The Rings In Focus
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON TWO, EPISODE FIVE AHEAD!
In Middle-earth, pieces of magical jewelry are almost inevitably the catalyst for widespread death and devastation, and in and of themselves are often objects of psychological horror. The Silmarillion is presented as a compilation of legends recounting how several generations of heroes and villains were driven to self-destruction in their relentless pursuit of the Silmarils, three jewels shaped by the legendary craftsman Fëanor. The Hobbit is a whimsical children’s story that abruptly morphs into something much darker when the Arkenstone is introduced, closely resembling a Silmaril in both appearance and narrative function. The Lord Of The Rings follows the quest to destroy the One Ring, which is semi-sentient and does everything in its considerable power to prevent its wearer from wanting to take it off or give it away, much less do harm to it. And Amazon’s The Rings Of Power attempts to piece together the story of how that and nineteen similar Rings came into being; how they were tainted in the making by the Dark Lord Sauron (Charlie Vickers), and how they almost brought all of Middle-earth under his authoritarian rule forever.
The Rings Of Power is the only one of these stories not told in full by J.R.R. Tolkien. A much abridged version of the tale can be found in the Appendices to The Lord Of The Rings, and slightly more detail is given in a short epilogue to The Silmarillion and in a fragmented outline published in Unfinished Tales, but Amazon only bought the rights to The Lord Of The Rings from the Tolkien Estate, so the Appendices are what their writers have to work with: excepting a few stray names exclusive to The Silmarillion and/or Unfinished Tales (like Sauron’s alter ego in Eregion, Annatar) that were apparently the result of separate bargains. Every interaction between characters on the show has been the invention of other minds and hands besides Tolkien’s own. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because as I’ve said previously, The Rings Of Power thrives when it’s given free rein.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in the dynamic between Sauron and Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards). In The Lord Of The Rings, all that is said of the second-greatest Elven craftsman after Fëanor (besides having helped construct the West-gate of Khazad-dûm, an event the show covers very briefly) is that he was deceived by Sauron’s fair form and his promise to help the Elves rebuild Middle-earth after the catastrophic wars of the First Age. Together, they forged sixteen Rings of Power, and three Celebrimbor made separately from Sauron. But were the Rings his idea, or Sauron’s? Was Celebrimbor ever suspicious of his partner before the day, it is said, when Sauron first put on the One Ring he had forged alone and the Elves knew they had been betrayed? What, if any, signs of Sauron’s true agenda did he miss or look past nonetheless? What was their relationship? These and other details simply don’t exist.
Yet The Rings Of Power navigates skillfully through the gaps and cracks in the pseudo-historical narrative, weaving an almost unendurably intimate story of one man (well, elf)’s anguishing descent into paranoia under the soothing manipulations of a sociopathic deity that has only a loose basis in the text but is about as quintessentially Tolkienian as anyone could hope to write, evoking the tragedy of Fëanor, inevitably – but also, and arguably even more so, the deeply depressing Tale Of The Children Of Húrin, or Narn I Hîn Húrin, whose sibling protagonists eventually commit suicide after discovering that they had been bewitched by a malevolent dragon into an incestuous relationship with each other. Obviously, not quite the same situation (though the dragon Glaurung, with his ability to mesmerize and deceive, is actually very similar to Sauron), but as The Rings Of Power‘s Celebrimbor begins to wake from the spell Sauron cast on him, learning from his friends in Khazad-dûm that the seven rings he gifted to the Dwarves have malfunctioned horribly in some way, he experiences all the same emotions – most viscerally, a sense of horror and revulsion with himself.
Sauron, still posing as the lovely Annatar, is there at once to guide Celebrimbor gently but firmly through his crisis, assuring the Elven-smith that even though it was his fault the seven rings do not work as intended, together they can make things right by forging more: nine more, to be precise. Sauron’s unwavering composure, in stark contrast to Celebrimbor’s increasing panic and bewilderment, is another classic manipulation tactic, giving Celebrimbor the illusion of something steady to hold onto as his world seems to be falling apart, while simultaneously misleading onlookers to their relationship into believing that Sauron is the sounding board for Celebrimbor’s erratic outbursts. Within their controlled environment, the boundaries of which continue to shrink as Sauron isolates Celebrimbor from his people, the once-powerful elf retains just enough agency for it to seem plausible, even to him, that he is in fact responsible for all his actions over the past several weeks, intensifying his feelings of confusion because he keeps making choices that seem right and they keep backfiring.
Vickers and Edwards, separately and especially together, continue to be the season’s standout performers, with Edwards more than making up for his lack of screentime throughout season one and the first half of season two. His mildness, easily mistaken for meekness, belies his true strength and force of will, which Edwards summons to the forefront of his depiction as the two smiths clash more frequently in episode five. Realizing that he cannot convince Celebrimbor of the necessity of the Nine Rings, Sauron enlists their young pupils to help him forge the Nine in open defiance of Celebrimbor’s orders, all before his very eyes. Sauron is not the smith Celebrimbor is, however, and Celebrimbor eventually feels compelled to intervene and lend them his aid, if only to prevent any of his cherished apprentices from being injured or inadvertently killed. No doubt that was Sauron’s intention, to strongarm the stubbornly virtuous smith into finishing the job they started by cruelly exploiting his love for his people, which Celebrimbor could not hide even if he were trying.
Vickers, meanwhile, begins stripping the already thin layers of humanity out of his character, his eyes becoming colder, his posture more statuesque, and his demeanor more aloof and unkind as the project grinds to a halt just inches away from completion. The almost imperceptible fidgeting of his fingers or the twitch in his jaw whenever the forge is briefly still, and his soulless mimicry of Celebrimbor’s genuine care and concern for the smiths all speak to his growing impatience and willingness to start shedding blood to get what he wants.
I should probably mention Mirdania (Amelia Kenworthy) at this point: the only named smith besides Celebrimbor, she acts as a representative for the whole group, and The Rings Of Power inevitably puts her character through a great deal of emotional and mental abuse on their behalf – but where Celebrimbor and other male victims of Sauron’s manipulation are shown to fall slowly under his spell and are allowed to keep their dignity even in their darkest moments, Mirdania is won over by a single compliment about her physical appearance, rather than her skills, and her role almost immediately reduced to Sauron’s hopelessly smitten, willing plaything. Given that she is, in addition to being the only named smith, the only named female character in Eregion and one of a handful of named female Elves on the show, the decision to utilize her in this manner is an extremely unfortunate one.
The Dwarves weave in and out of Sauron’s plans, mostly impervious to his attempted manipulation of their minds, but not entirely incorruptible. The typically sober and cautious King Durin III (Peter Mullan, who has scoffed at fans who take the show “ridiculously seriously”, but is by no means phoning in his performance) is emboldened by the Ring of Power on his finger: at first making use of the heightened perception it grants him to locate a place in the cavern wall where the Dwarves can safely chip away, permitting a thin beam of sunlight to reach the dark-enshrouded underground city of Khazad-dûm. Of course, because we’re already on episode five of eight, it’s not long before the King’s newfound ability leads him in the opposite direction, deeper into the mountain’s ancient foundations, probing for the untapped natural treasury he knows lies just out of his reach.
Concurrently, his daughter-in-law Disa (Sophia Nomvete) takes a wrong turn in the market and ends up on the shores of a vast subterranean lake (hate when that happens), where she makes an unsettling discovery: the Dwarves may not be alone in Khazad-dûm. Something deep under the city is awake, the force of its breath stirring the waters of the lake. But Disa and her husband Durin IV (Owain Arthur)’s attempts to warn the King prove unsuccessful, so together they devise a plan to prevent him from delving any further. The fiery Nomvete steals most every scene she’s in, but Arthur’s performance is equally impressive this episode, as his character finally stops hiding behind his cantankerous humor and opens up about his complicated feelings towards his father.
Fatherhood is a prominent but understated motif in The Rings Of Power, and the show depicts a wide range of father/child relationships, often complex and tense: you have the Durins double, who are at each other’s throats half the time but still love each other deeply, even if they have a hard time expressing that; Adar (Sam Hazeldine), whose name in Sindarin literally translates to ‘father’, doing what he thinks is best for his adopted children, the Orcs, and inadvertently causing them to resent him; the Silvan Elf Arondir, in many ways Adar’s parallel, struggling to form a connection with the mortal youth Theo, whose mother Arondir loved; and you have Ar-Pharazôn (Trystan Gravelle) and Elendil (Lloyd Owen) in Númenor – two very different men on opposite sides of an ideological divide, who have more in common when it comes to their parenting skills (or lack thereof) than is probably evident at first glance.
That’s not to say they’re equally awful fathers: Pharazôn straight-up does not like his son Kemen (Leon Wadham), and blatantly manipulates him with an empty promise that he’ll tell Kemen what his dead mother foresaw of his future if he agrees to do his dirty work. But Elendil, while he’s a heroic character where Pharazôn is not, is almost as emotionally detached from his children. He loves them, but he doesn’t know how to talk to them, and makes very few attempts (at least that we see). His daughter Eärien (Ema Horvath) is well within her rights to be confused and upset by his actions: he campaigned hard for Númenor to go to war, got her brother killed (so they both think), and now refuses to speak of it, except to spout the vagaries of the Faithful. Unfortunately, she’s had so few scenes this season that her decision to move fully into Pharazôn’s camp and join him in overthrowing the government still feels like a sudden heel-turn, but I get it.
I can’t bring myself to hate Eärien, but Kemen? Well, let’s just say that’s a different story. He may not have willingly ransacked a holy site and intimidated people peacefully praying if it weren’t for his father’s instructions, but goading a man into fighting him, and then killing that man dishonorably by stabbing him in the back after said man spared his life – that was all Kemen’s doing. And it would be bad enough if it were some random Númenórean extra we didn’t know previously, but it’s not: the man in question, Valandil (Alex Tarrant), is an endearing character we’ve known from season one, whom Elendil loved as his own son, and his death comes as a complete shock. The imagery of him bleeding out in Elendil’s arms, while Kemen casually cleans his blade in holy water, cements Kemen as The Rings Of Power‘s worst character – by which I do not mean that Wadham is giving a bad performance, or that the character is poorly-written (underwritten, yes), but rather that he is so despicable he gives Sauron and other, more competent villains on the show a run for their money. He faded into the background in earlier episodes, but no longer.
Episode five, Halls Of Stone, achieves an almost perfect balance between the subplots in Eregion, Khazad-dûm and Númenor that the season as a whole could have stood to replicate. Writer Nicholas Adams, who also wrote the standout sixth episode of season one, Udûn, finds and focuses in on the emotional core in every scene of his precise, yet richly nuanced script; a focus maintained by co-directors Sanaa Hamri and Louise Hooper. Adams will not be returning for the show’s yet-to-be-officially-announced third season, sadly, but this is the quality of writing The Rings Of Power really ought to be matching from here on out (as the second season is now complete, I can say it comes so close as to make little difference in the final three episodes, but falls just a little short).
With this episode, The Rings Of Power rights itself after a short rough patch (short, I say, but two weak episodes still constitute a quarter of the season), and gives us a glimpse of what might have been if the season had been stripped of its slow-burn accessory subplots in Pelargir and Rhûn. Everything falls into place around Edwards’ Celebrimbor, Vickers’ Sauron, and the titular Rings – which are not just props, but protagonists (or antagonists) in their own right, with a degree of sentience and agency. Finally, that’s actually starting to feel like the case.
Episode Rating: 9/10
“The Rings Of Power” Season 2, Episode 4 Indulges In Fan Service
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON TWO, EPISODE FOUR AHEAD!
Although the term “fan service” used to refer primarily to random scenes of female nudity or gratuitous violence in Japanese anime and manga, in recent decades it has come to be more broadly defined as anything included in a piece of media to please the perceived target demographic, usually the diehard fans of the universe to which that piece of media belongs: and it can range from the inoffensive (a meaningful reference or detail only fans will catch) to the in-your-face (shoehorning in a beloved character just to have them do or say “the thing”, or revisiting an established location when any other would have sufficed). As a rule of thumb, fan service should only have a small, positive impact on a person’s enjoyment of the story being told. It shouldn’t be the story.
Shouldn’t be, I say, but it all too often is, because in every fandom there are some who believe that the sole purpose of stories is to service them, and who consequently treat storytellers as fan servants, with whom they can be as cruel and demanding as they like. These fans do not want their favorite franchises to offer them anything new or unfamiliar – and since they tend to be conservative, straight, cisgender white men, that inevitably includes anyone who doesn’t look like them. Unfortunately, these people have a way of amassing power and influence over fandom spaces by claiming to want what’s best for the fans, and then act as gatekeepers, which is why studios insist on courting them even though it’s been proven time after time that franchises which bend over backwards to try and placate these fans leave themselves nowhere to grow, and for nothing, because these fans will never be satisfied, especially not if they know they can wield their power and influence to prevent their favorite franchises from ever evolving or experimenting, as happened just recently with The Acolyte.
Amazon reportedly has no intention of ending The Rings Of Power prematurely, which is reassuring to hear, but they’re still making efforts to reach “fans” (loiterers, at this point, seems a more accurate term for them) who claim to hate the show; an admirable and probably pointless endeavor, if even the overt fan service in the first season, of both the innocuous and egregious varieties, wasn’t enough. The very act of compressing the three-thousand year timeline of the Second Age, making it possible for the show to adapt all of the major events of the Age without having to switch out the entire human cast between seasons, was a kind of fan service. Bringing in proto-Hobbits and a wizard heavily implied to be Gandalf is fan service as far as I’m concerned, since these characters have yet to fold back into the overarching narrative (and, in fact, stray further afield with each passing episode).
In its second season, and particularly in episode four, The Rings Of Power doubles down on aggressively targeting people who will never admit to watching the show regardless of whether they do, when it should be focused on telling a cohesive story. With everything else the show is trying to accomplish in just eight episodes, there’s simply not enough time to squeeze in appearances from Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear), the Barrow-wights, Shelob (in episode three, but she still counts) and the Ents – none of whom have any good reason to be here, with the possible exception of Tom (ironically the last character who should ever need a good reason for anything).
It would be one thing if we didn’t know about most of these cameos beforehand – then at least the shock of seeing a Barrow-wight or an Ent would distract, on an initial viewing, from how extraneous their few scenes really are. But Amazon put it all in the marketing. We’d seen pretty much the entirety of the Barrow-wights sequence, for example, split up across various trailers, teasers, and behind-the-scenes clips long before the episode dropped. Though, to be honest, that was only one of several factors in why that particular scene fell flat for me, not least of which had to do with the atrocious optics of introducing a new Elf, Daemor, played by a Black actor, Oliver Alvin-Wilson, and then killing him off almost immediately; the only casualty of the wights. Never mind that what makes the encounter with the wights so terrifying in The Lord Of The Rings is that they didn’t kill their victims straightaway, instead putting them to sleep and dressing their bodies in the garments and jewelry of the barrows’ original occupants for uncertain, but obviously ritualistic, purposes. The Rings Of Power‘s Barrow-wights are just your run-of-the-mill reanimated skeletons, and not scary in the slightest.
Even before they showed up, the wights were getting on my nerves, because I could sense the characters were being forcefully shoved in their direction. My internal alarm bells started ringing when Elrond (Robert Aramayo) mentioned crossing the “Axa Bridge” to reach Eregion. “That’s funny,” I said to myself, “I don’t know an Axa Bridge.” As it turns out, there’s a good reason for that. It was made up for the show, and crosses the River Baranduin south of the Old Forest, on a road leading through the hills of Tyrn Gorthad (better known as the Barrow-downs). All of which is fine. There could conceivably have been a bridge there in the Second Age. It’s just…there’s no reason for Elrond and his company, speeding across Eriador, to go anywhere near it. Draw a straight line from Lindon to the capital city of Eregion on a map of Middle-earth and it takes you across the Baranduin at Sarn Ford, many miles to the south of the non-canonical Axa Bridge, which (according to the map shown in the episode) would have taken Elrond’s company northeast, out of the way entirely.
And that’s not even the most confusing part, nor is it when the group reaches the Axa Bridge, and it’s revealed to span an impassable canyon, deep and wide with sheer sides (on the eastern border of what becomes the Shire, not an area known for having rugged geography). No, it’s the fact that this bridge contrived to take them directly to the Barrow-downs is broken, and so the group’s map expert Camnir (Calam Lynch) declares that to circumvent this canyon that shouldn’t exist, they must turn south through the Barrow-downs…which do not extend south of the Axa Bridge on the map shown to us mere moments before, and in fact, lie somewhat to its north. So either Camnir is extremely, like, embarrassingly bad at following maps, or the writers are. And I’m inclined to believe it’s the latter.
Maybe I’m being nitpicky about the bridge, but I think it’s fair to say that any fantasy story with such a large scope should aspire to give its audience a general sense of where things are in relation to each other, and of the distances between them, especially when that information is often critical to understanding the plot. Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and Elrond traversed the long leagues between Lindon and Eregion in a matter of seconds back in episode one, but three episodes later the same journey in the opposite direction is long, perilous, and requires a map-expert. There’s an even greater distance and many more natural obstacles between Eregion and Mordor, but The Rings Of Power has on multiple occasions treated that span of over a thousand miles as a mere insignificance, easily covered by Sauron (Charlie Vickers) in human form twice, both times while pretending to be wounded, and now by Adar (Sam Hazeldine) and his legions of Orcs, without anyone noticing except a pair of Ents in the Southlands.
But if I don’t stop ranting about maps now, I never will (maybe it’s a subject for a separate post), so let’s move on to the Ents. They’re scarier than the Barrow-wights, which is a surprise. Olivia Williams and Jim Broadbent lend their voices to this dendriform power couple, named Winterblossom and Snaggleroot respectively, who rip people limb-from-limb if they raise axe to tree. They’re great characters: I would have loved to spend time with them in a show that actually had time to spare on an environmentalist murder mystery subplot, but The Rings Of Power is not that show. And although it’s in the process of investigating these Ent serial murders that Isildur (Maxim Baldry) and Estrid (Nia Towle) become conscious of their romantic feelings for each other while Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) proves himself as a father figure to Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin), I find it difficult to believe there wasn’t a far more efficient route to the same destination (help, I’m about to make this about maps again). A conflict between the Southlander refugees and those who swore fealty to Adar could have easily provided a backdrop to all of these developments, and simultaneously done more to deepen our investment in the people who will one day become Isildur’s people when he goes on to found the Kingdom of Gondor, whereas following the Ents, even though it’s to rescue Theo, pulls Isildur out of that environment.
Isildur, marooned on Middle-earth and thrust into a leadership position he didn’t ask for, has an unlikely (but, given his…connection to hobbits, rather fitting) mirror-image in the Harfoot Elanor “Nori” Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh), who also finds herself separated from her family and everything that represented home to her in season two, lost in a strange land, forced to take refuge among a people wary of outsiders, and gradually becoming a respected member of their community and helping them in their fight to save their homes. There’s even a burgeoning romance in both subplots, though it’s not Nori herself, but her best friend Poppy Proudfellow (Megan Richards) who falls head over heels in love with one of the Stoor hobbits they encounter in Rhûn; the slightly peculiar Merimac (Gavi Singh Chera). However, seeing as I still strongly feel that Poppy wasn’t originally intended to come back for season two, Nori and Merimac may well have had a relationship in an earlier draft.
But Nori already has a much more interesting relationship with the Stoors through their leader, Gundabel (Tanya Moodie), who reveals to her in a surprisingly powerful scene that the ancestor of the wandering Harfoots was a Stoor, who left the narrow gorge where they’ve always lived in search of a promised land called the Sûzat, a land of rolling green hills and clear rivers. It’s written as Sûza-t in The Peoples Of Middle-earth, but the meaning is the same: it’s derived from a word in the Westron tongue, sûza, which means province, county, or…shire. Sûzat or Sûza-t, therefore, denotes The Shire. This arguably falls under the category of fan service just like Ents and Barrow-wights, but it doesn’t bother me the way those do for two reasons: one, it’s relatively subtle (yes, you can find the translation easily, but the show itself doesn’t provide one), and two, it isn’t just a reference for the fans. This is what Nori’s story has been building towards, all along. She will unite the estranged Hobbit tribes and lead them to a permanent home.
There is one small problem with this, and that’s the timeline. Canonically, the first hobbits to cross the River Baranduin (how do we keep ending up back here?) into The Shire were the brothers Marcho and Blanco in the year 1601 of the Third Age, almost two-thousand years after the events of The Rings Of Power. The showrunners have shown no qualms about compressing three-thousand years of history into what feels like a couple of months, so I wouldn’t be shocked if they extended the history of The Shire back by a millennium, but I’d much rather they didn’t, to be honest.
Alternatively, they could have Nori lead the hobbits to the Gladden Fields, where we know Stoors at least were living about a thousand years into the Third Age, and where Sméagol was born and raised. We’re probably going there one way or another, because the Battle of the Gladden Fields is where the Second Age comes to an end. And it’s worth noting that Isildur, Nori’s parallel, is involved in that battle, so to have their storylines finally segue at the very end would be thematically satisfying. But I’d hate to miss out on the perilous crossing of the Misty Mountains by the hobbits, so maybe Nori will make it to Eriador, and settle her people in the Bree-lands, the only place in Middle-earth where Men and Hobbits coexisted during the Third Age.
It may come as a surprise to learn that I want more of Nori, Poppy, and The Rings Of Power‘s proto-Hobbits – I’ve been complaining bitterly that the storyline in Rhûn is eating up screentime, after all. And it still is, but the problem is not and has never been the Hobbits. It’s the Stranger (Daniel Weyman), whose search for a gand (a wizard’s staff) is turning into the most frustrating kind of fetch-quest. Weyman is charming, but he can’t elevate relentlessly dull material. Tom Bombadil’s appearance feels timed to inject a shot of energy back into this subplot, but it’s not enough – especially not with how subdued the show’s take on Bombadil is in comparison to the bold, boisterous version we meet in The Lord Of The Rings. I understand that a more book-accurate take on the character, who dances wildly about and breaks into song without the slightest provocation, might have scared off some casual viewers, but that’d be preferable to boring them and underwhelming fans with a solemn and mature Bombadil who mumbles his songs under his breath.
The parts of Tom’s portrayal that I truly enjoyed are all attributable to Kinnear – his hearty laugh and big smile, his ungraceful gait, the twinkle in his eye when he starts to ramble and the distinctive Cornish accent he settled on for the character – all the little things he nails, that assure me he would have been quite comfortable playing Tom as originally written. There’s something to be said for juxtaposing him with Weyman’s reserved and quizzical Stranger, too, as the clear contrast between their personalities makes Tom feel more vibrant and more whimsical than he really is. But as I said back when it was first announced that Tom would be making an appearance in season two, he is a character defined by his refusal to acknowledge the importance or urgency of any narrative that happens to cross his doorstep, and if you, as a screenwriter looking to utilize Tom in your adaptation of a story that didn’t even include him in the first place, aren’t prepared to start there, you’d probably be better off using any other character from the legendarium.
The Rings Of Power‘s Tom Bombadil not only takes an active interest in the Stranger’s journey, but aggressively pushes him to confront the mysterious Dark Wizard (Ciarán Hinds) before his power becomes one with Sauron’s and they set Middle-earth aflame, as the Wizard’s already done to Rhûn. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised that the writers went this route, but I’m not happy about it. For all the changes it’s made, The Rings Of Power has never, to my recollection, committed such a blatant mischaracterization – Tolkien having only sketched out in the broadest of terms what most of the protagonists of the Second Age were like as people, and characters like Galadriel and Elrond, whom we know from the books, being significantly younger here even by Elf standards, has given the writers leeway. But Tom is, in his own words, “eldest”, predating the first raindrop and the first acorn. It’s hard to handwave away the differences in his depiction by saying that three-thousand years changed him, seeing as he’s roughly fifty-five thousand years old.
There is one side-effect of Tom’s inclusion, I should note, that almost – almost – justifies his inclusion; that we get to hear his song, lyrics lifted straight from the pages of The Lord Of The Rings and set to music by the brilliant Bear McCreary, belted out by Rufus Wainwright over the end-credits with ethereal backing vocals from Raya Yarbrough, who has a voice cameo in the episode as Tom’s wife Goldberry. It’s a poignant rendition of a nonsensical ditty, befitting the version of the character we see in the show, and it’s never leaving my playlist. McCreary’s work on season one received widespread acclaim but was shamefully snubbed for an Emmy nomination: I pray that voters do not make the same mistake again next year. The technical categories are where The Rings Of Power has its best chance of nabbing gold – in terms of music, visual effects, production design, costume, hair and makeup design, there’s simply nothing else on TV that comes close to matching it. But I don’t seriously expect it to pick up so much as a single nomination in any of the major categories, which might as well forbid entry to non-HBO genre television. And that’s a real shame, because in a fair world, Charlie Vickers and Charles Edwards’ symbiotic yet distinct performances as Sauron and Celebrimbor could plausibly secure them both trophies.
Their absence from this episode, the first (and thankfully, the last) of the season not to check in on the situation in Eregion, is felt strongly. Without Sauron physically present to keep The Rings Of Power‘s various story threads fastened to the central throughline he represents, they come loose alarmingly quickly, disrupting the smooth flow of the narrative. Bolstering these subplots to the point where they can eventually stand on their own is a matter of finding the time to do so: time, the only resource in short supply on the most expensive television show ever made; wasted – in this episode at least – on superfluous cameos.
Episode Rating: 6.8/10
“The Rings Of Power” Returns To Númenor In Season 2, Episode 3
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON TWO, EPISODE THREE AHEAD!
The fact that it takes The Rings Of Power three whole episodes, almost half its second season, just to reintroduce all of the major characters from the first is demonstrative of a major structural weakness: it doesn’t have enough time or space for all the far-flung subplots it insists on treating as though they do anything to advance what is in theory if not in execution the overarching narrative of this season. That’s not to say that spending time in Pelargir with Isildur (Maxim Baldry) and the Southlander refugees is unimportant in the long run, but here and now it absolutely is, and every second spent there is a second that could have gone towards further fleshing out Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) and his relationship with Annatar (Charlie Vickers), or the bare-bones story of how the titular Rings of Power come to be, which is currently being told in bits and pieces between the substantial blocks of screentime devoted to peripheral characters.
Even the most critical subplot on the show, that of Númenor and its people, is being shortchanged. We spend a grand total of fifteen minutes on the island kingdom of Men in the third episode, jumping straight into a funeral ceremony for a character most casual viewers have probably forgotten entirely in the intervening two years since the first season finale where he quietly passed away; King Tar-Palantir. The audience has no emotional attachment to him, which is fine, we don’t necessarily need to care about the guy to understand that his death marks a turning-point in Númenor’s history…unfortunately, the extremely brief sequence doesn’t convey the magnitude of the moment either, instead feeling oddly hollow and mundane.
The parts needed to assemble a compelling story rife with political intrigue are all there – the old king’s unpopular daughter Míriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), already acting as his regent, stands poised to take the throne, as is her right, while her charismatic cousin Pharazôn (Trystan Gravelle) is positioning himself as the figurehead for a revolution – but there’s only so much that can be done with them in under a quarter of an hour, and taking time across multiple episodes to build slowly towards the inevitable coup isn’t really an option when the season is already close to being over.
This may be the result of a disagreement between the show’s editors and producers over how much screentime to give the Numenoreans, reported on by Fellowship Of Fans in August of last year, though not knowing how many and what kind of scenes were left on the cutting-room floor, I can’t definitively say that their inclusion would have helped – besides which, I can’t pass judgement on what I imagine we might have seen from this subplot (ideally, a gripping succession drama rivaling House Of The Dragon‘s in terms of complexity and depth), only the version that Amazon saw fit to release into the world: which it brings me no pleasure to report lacks any and all of the aforementioned qualities.
While the character of Pharazôn stands out in his few scenes, entirely due to Gravelle’s spellbinding performance, he is also the greatest victim of the edit – or, perhaps, the writers? Whoever it was, let me say, that made him an opportunistic spectator to the coup we are meant to understand was the culmination of his political machinations. He certainly doesn’t shoot down any of the treasonous ideas being bandied around the dinner-table by the overtly duplicitous Lord Belzagar (Will Keen) and the ambitious young architecture student Eärien (Ema Horvath), but he seems almost disinterested in their conversation himself. It is Eärien who disrupts Míriel’s coronation ceremony by exposing the Queen Regent’s treasured seeing-stone, her palantír, and Belzagar who spins the arrival of an Eagle of Manwë (obviously intended for Míriel) into a sign for Pharazôn and leads the crowd in chanting his name.
Pharazôn, for his part, gives Míriel one last chance before her coronation to simply follow his counsel, offering her a choice between a red gown he says represents Númenor’s glorious future and a white gown representing its somber past. Míriel chooses the white, declaring it the “humbler” of the two options. Humble is perhaps not the word I would use to describe any dress that comes with a mother-of-pearl mosaic collar, but then, I am not a Númenórean monarch. It is a gorgeous piece, far and away my favorite costume on the show, and you can read my interview with The Rings Of Power‘s costume designer Luca Mosca, where I asked about it specifically, here. Pharazôn, however, is visibly irritated by her virtuosity. If the idea is that he might have called off the coup if she had chosen differently (i.e. demonstrating willingness to be molded into a more pragmatic leader), it’s not explored any further, and just makes Pharazôn seem confused.
It’s a great scene for Míriel, though. Some viewers may find her staunch faith and moral integrity to be uninteresting qualities, but I see her as The Rings Of Power‘s most quintessentially Tolkienian protagonist: noble, fair and cold, in possession of a quiet strength she does not project outwardly, because she does not seek to be regarded as unassailable or unapproachable. This is illustrated beautifully when she embraces a grieving mother who had slapped her across the face just moments before, taking that nameless woman’s pain and sorrow upon herself as if it were her own. She may not have Pharazôn’s skill for addressing crowds and choosing words that can apply to many situations, but one-on-one, she is the more genuinely compassionate of the two. And most of that is down to Addai-Robinson, who on top of everything else, is playing a blind Míriel in The Rings Of Power season two (something that the show, admittedly, hasn’t done much with, but which factors into the fear that she is “weaker” since coming back from Middle-earth).
Apart from these two, no one else in Númenor has had enough screentime to make a strong impression this season. Eärien’s grief and rage over her brother Isildur’s apparent death in the Southlands, the driving factor behind her decision to break away from her father Elendil (Lloyd Owen) and join Pharazôn in overthrowing the Queen Regent, is referenced once or twice, giving her at least the impression of interiority, but her boyfriend Kemen (Leon Wadham), Pharazôn’s son, exists solely to fill out crowd shots as far as I can tell. Even Elendil just stands around. His only scene with any meat on its bones is one that’s been copy-and-pasted over from the first season – specifically, the scene in which Elendil, unable to calm Isildur’s distraught horse Berek, lets the animal run free in the Southlands.
The scene ended there in season one, but this time we follow Berek back to the place where he lost his rider, amongst the smoking rubble of what used to be the human village of Tirharad, before Adar (Sam Hazeldine) and his Orcs moved in. Wandering into a nearby cave, he finds Isildur trussed up in webs, in line to be devoured by Shelob. The iconic monster’s inclusion in The Rings Of Power is, unfortunately, the most shameless form of fan-service: she could just as easily have been a creature invented for the show, like the mud-worm in episode four. You won’t learn anything about her that you don’t already know from the books or movies, though in fairness, I suppose there’s not much more to know. She’s a giant spider that eats people (even her brood-mother Ungoliant is just a giant spider that eats everything; these are not exactly Tolkien’s most complex characters we’re talking about here). While the sequence in Shelob’s lair isn’t likely to be anyone’s highlight of the season, it kicks the episode into gear – and as an arachnophobe, Shelob’s design and movements are all sorts of icky. She is smaller and less heavily armored than in The Lord Of The Rings, but what she lacks in size she makes up for with increased speed and agility.
Just as the ancient hero Beren, fleeing from giant spiders, stumbled upon Lúthien dancing in a hemlock grove in the Forest of Doriath, so Isildur escapes Shelob and meets Estrid (Nia Towle) – but the similarities between their love stories end there. Estrid, mistaking Isildur for an Orc, stabs him in the thigh, and then, while apologizing profusely, pulls the knife out of the wound (big no no), setting the tone for their interactions going forward. They make a pretty cute couple, if you like your romantic leads to share exactly one braincell between them. Estrid’s theme, softly undulating with a hint of mystery, also happens to be my favorite track off the OST. But is that enough to justify her and Isildur’s combined screentime greatly exceeding that of Celebrimbor and Sauron in this episode?
Once they’ve reached their destination, the Númenórean outpost of Pelargir, and linked up with the Southlander refugees, Isildur and Estrid’s short-term goals are fulfilled – sure, Isildur wants to go home and reunite with his family and friends, but he’s safe, and the show could have conceivably left him and Estrid there until a more opportune moment to pick up their story thread again. It doesn’t do that, which is why we end up lingering in the Southlands far longer than was probably necessary, with a pair of Ent serial killers and the “Wild Men”, the show’s term for the Southlanders who have chosen to serve Adar (no relation to the Wild Men in The Lord Of The Rings). I strongly suspect that Nazanin Boniadi’s herbalist-turned-reluctant-leader Bronwyn, the season one protagonist of the Southlands subplot, would have somehow provided the connective tissue between these leftover pieces of a narrative: but Boniadi chose not to return for The Rings Of Power‘s second season and the role was not recast. She is instead revealed to have died offscreen, leaving her son Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin) an orphan and the Southlanders leaderless.
Regardless of intent, Bronwyn’s death accentuates the themes that underpin all of J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories of Middle-earth, this one especially: the inevitability of death, and the fear of it. That fear is the driving force behind the creation of the Rings of Power, something the show was trying (albeit awkwardly) to convey in season one when it imposed a deadline on the Elves to either halt the effects of the passage of time on their bodies and souls, leave Middle-earth forever and return west across the sea to the Undying Lands, or fade, becoming intangible and powerless. In season two, the show gets the same idea across more gracefully using the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm, whose survival is dependent on a resource – sunlight – they have precious little of, and less and less with each tremor that threatens to bring the weight of the Misty Mountains down upon their heads. Celebrimbor, the smith who saved the Elves, is happy to help the Dwarves out of their own predicament, and no less so when Sauron shyly confesses that High King Gil-galad has forbade the making of any more Rings.
But while it would be no overstatement to say this is the single most important plot development of the season thus far, The Rings Of Power doesn’t communicate that by giving the lion’s share of screentime to a character like Isildur, who has plenty of time still to morph into a convincing protagonist before he’s called upon to perform the great deeds that will make him a household name. I’m doing my best not to spoil what’s coming for Celebrimbor, but he doesn’t have much time left, and the show needs to do a better job – and quickly – of managing its jostling subplots so they’re not squeezing the “A” story.
Episode Rating: 6.5/10