MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER SEASON TWO, EPISODE SIX, AHEAD!
The question posed in the title of The Rings Of Power season two, episode six – “Where Is He?” – is one the show has already answered: in fact, to clear up any confusion on that front, we were given the full rundown on everywhere Sauron (Charlie Vickers) has been in the last millennia of Middle-earth’s history. We’ve followed his movements so closely this season that there can be no doubt as to where he is at any given moment (usually Eregion, but he does make a quick excursion to the Dwarven kingdom of Khazad-dûm in this episode). The suspense comes from waiting for the characters in-universe to figure it out for themselves, with the limited information they have at their disposal.
Sauron and the Balrog | youtube.com
Ironically, the person closest to Sauron physically, Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards), is the furthest from the truth, his mind beginning to fracture under the pressure of constant emotional abuse and manipulation tactics, even as his soul stubbornly defies corruption. Having waxed poetic about Edwards’ masterful turn as the tortured Elven-smith many times already, I always fear that I will run out of words to express the fullness of my awe and admiration for his talent, or that they will begin to feel hollow, but as his performance evolves subtly from episode to episode, new praises always rise in my throat. Edwards conveys his character’s deeply internal disintegration with discomforting palpability while never resorting to trite affectations – one particularly forceful example of his unconventional, heightened approach to the subject matter his fiery reading of an almost Shakespearean monologue as he labors over the Nine Rings. Something that Edwards ensures we never forget is that Celebrimbor is not a human, and he’s not just any Elf either – he is one of the mightiest of the Noldor, proudest and wisest of all Elves.
Per usual, Vickers matches Edwards beat-for-beat, his “Annatar” morphing into a more overtly devilish figure with each day that passes, trading out his humble white garments for a somewhat unsubtle black robe with gold trim. The seemingly genuine regret with which Sauron tortures Celebrimbor makes him a far more terrifying villain than if he took great pleasure in his atrocities – he has convinced himself that his ultimate goal, building a utopia in Middle-earth, will justify the suffering he must necessarily inflict on its denizens to force them to accept him as their rightful ruler, but he hates that he feels he has to be violent. After all, he was originally an angelic being who delighted in perfection and order, and abhorred chaos. In a sequence near the end of the episode, Sauron ensnares Celebrimbor in a wide-scale simulation of Eregion at peace – while in reality, the city is under siege by Adar (Sam Hazeldine)’s army of Orcs – and although the deception is intended to pacify the Elven-smith and keep him in his forge, Sauron himself is deeply immersed in the illusion.
Sauron and Celebrimbor | msn.com
The elaborate transition back from hazy, gold-hued fantasy to stark reality, a combination of complex camera-work, practical effects, and VFX, has become one of the season’s most talked-about moments: a showcase for director Sanaa Hamri and cinematographer Alex Disenhof. As the camera circles Sauron, the last vestiges of illusion fall apart, day turns into night, and the quiet sounds of idyllic life give way to weeping and wailing. On the other side of the river, Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) begs Adar to stop his assault on Eregion, warning him that he’s playing right into Sauron’s hands, but Adar is intent on ridding the world of Sauron once and for all, and he feels that the Elves have failed, now it’s his turn. His motivations are noble, but what Adar fails to realize is that he’s turning into the very thing he seeks to destroy, leading his children to battle like lambs to the slaughter – the very thing Sauron threatened to do that resulted in him being Julius Caesar-ed by Adar thousands of years earlier.
Unfortunately, I can’t help but feel (especially in retrospect, now that the season is over) that the series rushed through the steps of Adar’s character devolution, hitting all the vital beats, one immediately after another, without enough time and space between to give each one weight and meaning. Adar is far and away The Rings Of Power‘s most compelling original character, a fascinating and valuable addition to the legendarium, and I’m not sure the writers were fully aware of the potential their own creation had, or he would have been afforded the necessary screentime to let his journey play out organically, at a more natural pace.
In what is becoming a major problem for the show, we bounce back-and-forth between disconnected subplots throughout this episode, never spending quite enough time in one setting to get immersed or totally invested before we’re moving on. In Rhûn, we catch up with The Stranger (Daniel Weyman) towards the tail-end of what has apparently been…days? weeks? months?…of rigorous training with Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear), who seemingly advises him – without actually saying it outright – to stop worrying about his friends and start seeking out the staff that will bestow upon him unfathomable power. Of course, such a message would be antithetical to the themes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing, which is why I say “seemingly” because, as is fairly obvious, Bombadil is testing the Stranger. Meanwhile, Nori Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh) helps prepare the Stoors for a confrontation with the mysterious masked horsemen who roam the desert, while Poppy Proudfellow (Megan Richards), who is inexplicably heterosexual in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, shares an eve-of-battle kiss with her Stoor boyfriend of approximately one day, Merimac (Gavi Singh Chera). Aggravatingly, both the Stranger’s and Halflings’ subplots cut off abruptly at this point – before the Stranger’s final test and presumably spur-of-the-moment decision to forsake the quest for his staff and find his friends, or the battle in the Stoor village. Next time we see them, in the season finale, the Stoors are already prisoners and the Stranger has arrived to help, with no connective tissue between these scenes whatsoever.
Tom Bombadil and The Stranger | youtube.com
In Khazad-dûm, Disa (Sophia Nomvete) and her husband Durin IV (Owain Arthur) spend the entire episode engaged in environmental activism, blocking Durin’s increasingly covetous father King Durin III (Peter Mullan) from digging deeper under the mountain. There’s a cool moment where Disa sings to summon a swarm of bats that attack the King’s miners…and that’s pretty much it on that front. For two such vibrant characters, Disa and Durin are routinely given some of the least engaging material to work with, and it’s an injustice to Nomvete and Arthur, who are both delightful actors.
On the isle of Númenor, Elendil (Lloyd Owen) stands accused of treason, while the King’s son Kemen (Leon Wadham), who murdered a man in a place of worship, unsurprisingly gets off scot-free, his “punishment” a governorship in Middle-earth’s Southlands. I must confess to feeling rather miffed that the murdered man in question, Valandil, is never mentioned again after his death – he wasn’t a major character, per se, but he appeared in eight episodes across two seasons, Elendil treated him like a son, and he was the best friend of Elendil’s children, Isildur and Eärien (Ema Horvath), the latter of whom….knows about his death and her boyfriend Kemen’s involvement? Doesn’t know? Will we ever know? I don’t know! What I do know is that the show’s diverse ensemble cast does not immunize it to all criticism of how its predominantly white writers actually handle characters of color (Valandil’s actor Alex Tarrant is of Māori, Samoan and Niuean descent), and fans are well within their rights to raise an eyebrow at The Rings Of Power‘s trend of casually killing off characters of color this season – including Valandil and two out of three non-white named Elves.
On that note, we should probably talk about Míriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), who increasingly feels more like a prop than a person as the season progresses. Míriel, the usurped Queen-Regent, abruptly insists that she be put on trial in Elendil’s place, and upon being cast into the ocean to face judgement from a sea monster, the sequence even more abruptly cuts away before anything actually happens. The scene, which I was excited to see play out, ultimately left a bitter taste in my mouth for a couple of reasons – firstly, because I love a good sea monster, and this is the second time now that The Rings Of Power has teased a sea monster only to show it onscreen for maybe ten seconds: secondly, and more importantly, because this is ostensibly an important beat in Míriel’s fragmented character arc this season, a moment of truth for her and all that she believes in, and yet we as the audience have virtually no access to her thought process and internal conflict throughout. For a sequence which culminates in her staggering out of the ocean, having been found innocent, accompanied by cheers of “Tar-Míriel!” (strongly implying a shift in her favor that was either unintentional or was immediately undone offscreen between this episode and the finale), this scene needed to hold greater weight than it does. Míriel’s lack of interiority is a problem, one that becomes especially apparent any time she’s paired up with Elendil, who has so much.
For example, Elendil’s disintegrating relationship with his daughter Eärien is the focus of a truly moving scene shortly prior to the trial, where the two speak for what they believe to be the last time, Eärien begging him to repent for his crimes and accept Ar-Pharazôn (Trystan Gravelle), something that Elendil cannot bring himself to do. I mentioned in my review of episode five that Elendil and Pharazôn are more similar than they’d probably care to admit when it comes to parenting, and this scene exemplifies that. Elendil isn’t wrong, but he’s so assured of his rightness that he refuses to explain to a clearly distressed and confused Eärien why he’s choosing to die for his beliefs over staying alive for her, after she already lost her brother (so she thinks); pushing her away instead of letting her in. Is it any wonder that her and Kemen get along, when both their fathers are severe, closed-off, and patronizing? Elendil, to be fair to the guy, is all of those things without meaning to be, but he needs someone to knock some sense into him, and my money’s on Amandil, his own father, whom we’ll presumably meet in season three.
Míriel and Elendil | Twitter @TheRingsofPower
As the episode pinballs between the numerous subplots it’s being asked to rush along, perhaps we do lose sight of our main villain – and The Rings Of Power‘s central throughline – somewhat, making the title “Where Is He?” more apt, albeit ironically. If I were to summarize this episode into a single word, it might be “nebulous”. Not bad, not boring, but unfocused and a bit vague about what it’s trying to accomplish. As a prelude to the Siege of Eregion, it tries to slowly ratchet up the tension, but there’s just no time to make Adar’s dramatic heel-turn feel entirely appropriate for his character at this moment, while as a stepping-stone in various other story arcs, it feels almost irrelevant, with both Míriel and the Stranger undergoing trials we don’t get to see and which don’t move them forward so much as reassure them that they were already on the right path. It’s not my least-favorite episode of the season, but it has the misfortune of being wedged between two excellent episodes that make the dip in quality feel more drastic.
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 Seven Rings | youtube.com
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.
Celebrimbor and Annatar | msn.com
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.
Disa and Durin | geekgirlauthority.com
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).
Kemen and Ar-Pharazôn | meaww.com
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.
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.
Pharazôn and the Eagle | youtube.com
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.
Queen Regent Míriel | telltaletv.com
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.
Shelob | youtube.com
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.
Celebrimbor and Annatar | thedailybeast.com
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.
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE RINGS OF POWER EPISODE FOUR AHEAD!
“At the feet of the mountain were built the tombs of the Kings, and hard by upon a hill was Armenelos, fairest of cities, and there stood the tower and the citadel that was raised by Elros son of Eärendil, whom the Valar appointed to be the first King of the Dúnedain.”
– The Silmarillion: Akallabêth, p. 312
The text I have quoted above, which comprises part of a brief description of the island kingdom of Númenor in The Silmarillion, contains the very first instance of the name Armenelos in J.R.R. Tolkien’s posthumously published writings on Middle-earth (when Tolkien passed in 1973, he left The Silmarillion unfinished, and the task of piecing together a cohesive narrative from his scattered notes fell upon his youngest son, Christopher). Since The Silmarillion‘s publication in 1977, the name Armenelos has popped up again in Unfinished Tales and a few other places, but it never appeared in The Lord Of The Rings or its appendices, and was never added retroactively by either of the Tolkiens.
Galadriel in Númenor | empireonline.com
This may seem a small thing, but if you’ve been following my blog for any length of time, you probably know where this is going. Yes, I was surprised – stunned, even – when the name Armenelos was casually used in conversation in the fourth episode of Amazon’s The Rings Of Power: which has until now drawn on The Lord Of The Rings and its appendices exclusively for information regarding Númenor and the events of the Second Age. Discounting all the place-names from Unfinished Tales that appeared on Amazon’s first official Rings Of Power tie-in map, which have deliberately been left off the map used throughout the series during scene-transitions, this usage of the name Armenelos marks the first time that something supposedly off-limits to the showrunners and writers has worked its way into The Rings Of Power.
So how did this happen? As far as we know, Amazon does not own the rights to The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, and there is no evidence to suggest that has changed. In this very episode, two characters reminisce about the land of Beleriand that sank beneath the sea at the end of the First Age, but they refer to locations there like the Mouths of Sirion only in vague terms, as though the writers were legally unable to use names from The Quenta Silmarillion (the third, and longest part of The Silmarillion, which deals with the wars in Beleriand) and instead had to resort to implication. My fool’s hope is that the Tolkien Estate is providing Amazon access to materials in both The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales on a case-by-case basis.
Until we learn more, however, I will lower my expectations slightly and assume that the terms of this agreement with the Tolkien Estate apply only to the specific chapter of The Silmarillion where the name Armenelos originated, Akallabêth – an appendix of sorts that deals with the history of Númenor and its people. And make no mistake, Akallabêth may only be thirty pages long but it’s a goldmine: of all Tolkien’s writings on the Second Age, it’s the only one that covers the decline and eventual downfall of Númenor in great detail. It is here, and here alone, that Tolkien transcribes the dialogues on death between the mortal Men of Númenor and the immortal Elven ambassadors out of Valinor; here, and here alone, that he reports on Sauron’s seduction of the Númenóreans; here, and here alone, that he records the warnings of the Valar, which went unheeded by all but a few. With minimal expansions and additions, the materials in this appendix alone could easily fill out three or four seasons of The Rings Of Power.
Still, if the writers are theoretically allowed to use anything in Akallabêth that the Tolkien Estate is willing to sell (and Amazon is willing to pay for), one has to wonder why they settled on the name Armenelos, and how they convinced the higher-ups at Amazon to spend what I can only assume was a hefty sum of money for this obscure place-name, which they’ve used exactly once – not on the map of Númenor, where it would arguably help viewers get geographically situated, but as part of an improvised speech by the Númenórean politician Pharazôn (Trystan Gravelle) outside the Guild-Hall, where guild-members are gathering to complain about the possibility of tireless, immortal Elves stealing their jobs (more of that one-note fantasy racism that the writers must have thought was clever enough to include at the expense of character-building moments). Gravelle’s Pharazôn, a charismatic dictator in-the-making,reminds them that they alone are responsible for all of Númenor’s great accomplishments throughout history, from the vastly overstated military victories of Elros Tar-Minyatur, the first King, to the building of Armenelos, and vows that Elves will never take that away from them.
But while Pharazôn gains favor with the citizenry of Númenor, Queen-Regent Tar-Míriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) alone amongst her people can see that Númenor is falling out of favor with the Valar, Middle-earth’s gods, as her people turn away from Middle-earth in its hour of need, forsaking their old bonds of fellowship with the Elves. The falling petals of the White Tree growing in the Court of the Kings are a clear sign that the Valar weep for Númenor, one that even Pharazôn recognizes, but Tar-Míriel has seen in her dreams something far worse – a vision of the sea rising high over Númenor’s green hills before crashing down upon the land, carrying away the towers and palaces of fair Armenelos, pulling Míriel and all her people to a watery grave.
Galadriel, Elendil, and Tar-Miriel | nme.com
J.R.R. Tolkien was haunted by a similar dream throughout his life, and it was a trait he passed on to both his son Michael and to the character of Faramir in The Lord Of The Rings. From this vivid dream sprang fully-formed the story of Númenor, an ancient island kingdom comparable to Atlantis, sucked into the abyss by a “great dark wave”. Though the tale evolved over time, the significance of the Great Wave never diminished. Quite the opposite. In-universe and to some extent in real life, Tolkien postulated that dreams of the Great Wave were attributable to some cultural memory of Númenor left to linger in the minds of Men by the descendants of that traumatic event’s survivors – who naturally began referring to Númenor as Atalantë (the Downfallen), which then became Atlantis, by which name we know it today.
As one of the first recipients of this unsettling dream, chronologically at least, The Rings Of Power‘s Tar-Míriel has no way of knowing whether the “great dark wave” is a literal or metaphorical manifestation of the gods’ discontent, but it doesn’t really matter to her – either way, she’s just witnessed the imminent destruction of all that she holds dear in Númenor, and that can’t be a good thing. Searching frantically for a solution, Míriel first has to reverse-engineer her own problem. She comes to the bewildering conclusion that Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) is the problem, so she has the Elf imprisoned…then has her released and sent back to Middle-earth to try and appease the Valar…then realizes at the last minute that the Valar brought Galadriel to Númenor for a reason, so she calls her back.
Structurally, this storyline is by far the weakest of the four we’re currently following because there are so many other characters in Númenor besides Galadriel and Míriel that The Rings Of Power is simultaneously trying to establish, which frequently requires jumping away from the characters that matter most to spend time with characters like Pharazôn’s unexciting and extraneous non-canonical son Kemen (Leon Wadham), who I gave the benefit of the doubt going in because other non-canonical characters like Eärien (Ema Horvath) had impressed me, only for him to disappoint greatly as a character in terms of both personality and design. As a result of all this needlessly urgent subplot-hopping that leaves little space for organic character and plot development in the main storyline, our protagonist’s motivations change from scene to scene with barely any build-up.
With all that said, when Galadriel and Tar-Míriel actually do interact, their scenes are invariably among the episode’s highlights – boasting some of the most eloquent dialogue in the series, and two phenomenal performances from actresses of equal regality whose characters balance each other out: the one confident, reckless to a fault, and slightly incompetent (I love Galadriel, but we all know it to be true), the other self-doubting and subsequently slow to action, but a capable leader when nudged in the right direction. They are also alike in many ways. Galadriel tells Míriel that she knows what it is to be the only one aware that something is terribly wrong, and the only one whose opinion is never asked for, or dismissed when proffered, because speaking the harsh truth makes her unpopular with those who would sugarcoat it.
However, as Galadriel’s suspiciously politically-savvy traveling companion Halbrand (Charlie Vickers) advises her while the two spend time together in a Númenórean jail-cell, there is a time and place for sugarcoating the truth when it will benefit you. It’s an underhanded tactic, one which Galadriel has never had the patience for, as she prefers to rush head-on at all her problems with the mindset of a warrior: even when attempting to follow Halbrand’s advice, she still resorts to beating up Pharazôn and a few Númenórean guards and breaking into the chambers of the old king, Tar-Palantir (Ken Blackburn), without any consideration for the consequences of her actions. Thankfully for her, Pharazôn either has a very short memory or was offered something by Halbrand after the camera cut away from them that convinced him to hold his tongue.
Pharazôn and Kemen | telegraph.co.uk
While this could conceivably count as a plot-hole, until and unless additional context for Pharazôn’s inaction comes to light, it doesn’t quite beggar belief like the idea that a single Elf could persuade Númenor to go to war in the Southlands based on one man’s unreliable testimony, without the backing of her own High King and without even fully comprehending the situation or the strength of her opposition. I understand that Galadriel is reckless, but Tar-Míriel is evidently not, and yet she demands no further information from Galadriel than the two scraps of paper she stole from the Hall of Lore that “prove” Sauron is regaining strength in the Southlands and that Halbrand is the long-lost king who can unite the Southlanders against him. Funny, isn’t it, that Halbrand is behind all of this?
What Galadriel doesn’t know is that the enemy in the Southlands whom she has been led to believe is Sauron (again, by Halbrand) is in fact an Elf – one played with cold majesty by Game Of Thrones‘ Joseph Mawle – who goes by the title “Adar“, the Sindarin Elvish word for father. Theories abound as to who this character is, or could have been in the distant past: popular suggestions include Maglor, the only surviving son of Fëanor who was scarred, physically and mentally, by the burden of the unbreakable Oath he and his father swore and which they could never fulfil; Maeglin, a Dark Elf who betrayed the location of Gondolin to Morgoth in the First Age and was thrown from the city’s parapets as a result (although in the chaos, no one ever recovered his body from the flames below); and the nameless Elf captured by Morgoth long before the First Age began, who was corrupted “by slow arts of cruelty” in the dungeons of Utumno until they became the first Orc or half-Orc.
There are clues pointing in every direction. Adar’s dark hair would suit either Maglor or Maeglin. The metal gauntlet he wears on his left hand supports the theory that he’s Maglor, whose hand was burned by the Silmaril he carried for a time…but Adar also has burn marks along the sides of his face, which could have come from centuries of torture in Utumno, or from being tossed into the fires that raged around Gondolin. It is he who mentions growing up in Beleriand and traveling down “the river” (likely referring to the River Sirion), and his breastplate depicts a winding river as well. Maglor would have gone down the River Sirion on his way to the Third Kinslaying. But what could have happened to Maglor that would soften a Fëanorian’s heart towards Orcs, the greatest enemies of his people? That’s more of a Maeglin thing, and Maeglin could have traveled down the Sirion with the refugees from Gondolin as well.
The problem with most of these theories is that most of the characters Adar could be, like Maglor and Maeglin, are mentioned only in The Quenta Silmarillion – and as we’ve established, Amazon probably doesn’t have those rights. If they do, it’s not something they’ve indicated yet, and the time to introduce Maglor and/or Maeglin was long ago, in the prologue to The Rings Of Power‘s very first episode. To retroactively explain who these characters are, and what their relevance is to the current story, would require extensive flashbacks at this point, which seems wasteful seeing as neither Maglor nor Maeglin is relevant, quite frankly, to the story of the Second Age. Both the Silmaril that Maglor carried and the city of Gondolin that Maeglin betrayed are lost forever beneath the waves of the Sundering Sea.
Well…there is one other connection between these characters and the current story that could be exploited for dramatic effect in The Rings Of Power, but only if Amazon has the rights to do so. Both Maglor and Maeglin are linked to the character of Elrond (Robert Aramayo). It was Elrond’s grandfather who pushed Maeglin off the walls of Gondolin after Maeglin tried to abduct his wife and son, Elrond’s father Eärendil. And during the Third Kinslaying, when Eärendil and Elrond’s mother Elwing fled across the sea to Valinor, it was Maglor (with his brother Maedhros) who rescued their twin sons and hid them in a cave, raising them as if they were his own children. None of this has been mentioned in The Rings Of Power yet, but Elrond has been talking a lot about his father recently.
“Adar” | gamesradar.com
What we learn about Eärendil in this episode is virtually everything that The Rings Of Power can legally say about him – that he was a great mariner, who led the host that defeated Morgoth at the end of the First Age and was afterwards appointed by the gods to safeguard one of the three Silmarils, which he took into the heavens with him. Once again, I have to applaud the writers for taking all of this arcane information, which to the average viewer means absolutely nothing on its own, and making it relevant in the context of the show. When Elrond observes his friend Durin IV (Owain Arthur) struggling under the weight of his father’s impossible expectations for him, he shares the story of his own father’s legendary exploits and awkwardly tries to make a point about family in a sincere attempt at outreach that comes across as self-centering and slightly condescending.
This has been a problem for Elrond, however, since the very first episode – when he told Galadriel that if she stopped fighting for once, she could focus on being his friend…as if Galadriel, who is several-thousand years older than Elrond, doesn’t have slightly more important things to do with her life than help an aspiring politician impress any one of his many morally ambiguous father figures. In this episode, it’s revealed that Durin IV and his wife Disa (Sophia Nomvete) don’t even trust Elrond completely, not so much because they think ill of him personally but because they can sense he’s being manipulated. Durin tells his father that he intends to go to Lindon and figure out what High King Gil-galad is using Elrond for, but he really ought to be keeping his eye on Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards), who is even more blatantly weaponizing Elrond’s innocence for his own gain.
Durin gets the upper hand by forcing Elrond into a tricky situation from which the Elf can only extricate himself by swearing an oath to protect the greatest secrets of the Dwarves – an oath nearly as dangerous as that which Fëanor and his sons swore, with the potential to curse all of Elrond’s kin to sorrow if broken. This whole plot-point was created for The Rings Of Power, but I suppose it could explain why, canonically, Elrond’s family was so singularly unlucky. No spoilers, but the poor guy is abandoned by pretty much everyone he loves. If you’re familiar with Peter Jackson’s film trilogy, you probably already know about the fateful choices of Arwen Undómiel, Elrond’s daughter, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. His grief has multiple layers.
All that Elrond gains from swearing this terrible oath is advance-knowledge of mithril, the new ore discovered by the Dwarves in the mines beneath Khazad-dûm…and it’s not like Elrond can do anything with that information yet anyway, although he does walk away with a small chunk of mithril, a gift from Durin IV – from which I am certain either he or Celebrimbor will forge a Ring of Power in the near future: specifically Nenya, one of the Three Rings made exclusively by and for the Elves without interference from Sauron, which was given to Galadriel. Seeing as Amazon is compressing the timeline of Middle-earth’s history to the point where Khazad-dûm will likely be destroyed before the end of the Second Age (was that a Balrog’s roar we heard as the mine-shaft collapsed around Durin and Elrond?), mithril will soon become a scarce and prized commodity in the show, and even a little will go a long way.
Now that we have reached the midpoint of the first season, which has been quietly laying the groundwork for the forging of the Rings, it’s safe to assume that Elrond and his supporting cast of characters will gradually come to the forefront in the remaining four episodes until the season finale presumably reveals that their subplot has been, all along, the main event. I am still fairly confident – despite all the mounting evidence that Halbrand is a baddie – that Sauron is already deeply entrenched in Eregion, where he’s manipulating Celebrimbor. Halbrand I believe to be a servant of Sauron’s, likely the future Witch-King, assigned with keeping Galadriel distracted in the Southlands until Celebrimbor’s great forge is ready to take its first commission.
Disa | msn.com
And Sauron being the type to try and kill two birds with one stone, I believe that Galadriel will accidentally remove the last obstacle standing between Sauron and his plans to conquer the Southlands – Adar, who is clearly revered by the Orcs that used to follow Sauron. With Adar gone (because there’s no way Galadriel doesn’t personally take him off the board before season’s end), Sauron will be able to swoop in and effortlessly regain control of his old armies, but first he’ll give the Orcs plenty of time to inflict heavy casualties on the Southlanders and Númenóreans, thereby ensuring that there will be little resistance to his eventual takeover when he gets around to it.
There’s one wildcard that Sauron probably hasn’t taken into account, and that’s Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin), a young boy who is now in possession of a magical sword bearing the mark of Sauron, which seems to have powers and detrimental side-effects like those of the Morgul-blades wielded by the Nazgûl in The Lord Of The Rings – except that Theo isn’t affected by these side-effects which appear to be leaving a toll on his friend Rowan (Ian Blackburn), and nor is the old barkeep Waldreg (Geoff Morell), in whose barn Theo discovered the sword. Waldreg even rolls up his sleeve to reveal that he repeatedly used the sword in the same way Theo has, by stabbing its hilt into his forearm to activate the blade with his blood. My guess is that they both come from a long lineage of Sauron-worshippers, but that doesn’t explain why Adar is so desperate to get his hands on this sword.
In a harrowing long-shot sequence that once again demonstrates why Middle-earth is a veritable playground for horror auteurs interested in experimenting with fantasy elements on a grand scale, Theo is hunted by Orcs through the burning ruins of his hometown, smoked out of various hiding-places, and eventually lured into the arms of Vrath (Jed Brophy), possibly the most genuinely terrifying Orc to date in any adaptation of Tolkien’s works – so naturally he, Vrath that is, is killed off immediately. The Rings Of Power has many more well-designed and almost entirely practical Orcs where he came from, but none played by Brophy, who gave Vrath a little more personality than your run-of-the-mill Orc.
The Orcs’ canonical aversion to sunlight is also being played up, which means that action scenes involving Orcs end abruptly as soon as the sun rises and begin again after nightfall, except indoors and underground – assuming The Rings Of Power remains consistent with regards to this, and the Orcs don’t suddenly develop an immunity to sunlight when it’s time for a battle, we could be in for some really compelling “keep them fighting until the dawn” type scenarios where the characters are worn down and exhausted, but still need to hold out for an hour more: a bit like how Gandalf defeated the Trolls in The Hobbit, but sans the ventriloquist act.
Something else I had written down in my notes – while Wayne Che Yip’s direction and cinematography remain superior to J.A. Bayona’s in my opinion, he needs to chill out with all the slow-motion, because after a certain point it starts to get really obnoxious. The use of slow-motion also particularly de-emphasizes the innate speed and agility of the Elves, which could be intentional if the idea here is still that the Elves are just ordinary people with an aloof attitude they haven’t earned, but given that this episode finds Elrond eavesdropping on Durin and Disa from at least a mile away with the help of his enhanced eyesight and hearing, I kinda wish The Rings Of Power would choose a direction and commit to it fully. Are the Elves “magical” or not? Do they have special abilities as a reward for being Eru’s favorite children, or is all that pro-Elf propaganda we’ve been fed in The Silmarillion merely lies, to paraphrase Adar?
Tar-Míriel and Galadriel | nytimes.com
Personally, I would admire The Rings Of Power greatly if it deconstructed some of Tolkien’s favorite problematic tropes (namely, as you can probably guess, the whole Race Of Inherently Beautiful People Predisposed Towards Good trope that has proved so popular with white supremacists over the years), and I feel like if ever there was an opportunity to do just that, it would be in a story that encompasses all the greatest failures of Men and Elves in the Second Age. Now that we’re halfway through the first season and I’ve seen what the series’ best writers are capable of, I’ve come to expect more from The Rings Of Power in this regard than the occasional threadbare metaphor for racism (we haven’t reached Shadow And Bone-level lows, thank goodness, but we’re too close for comfort). While the fast pacing doesn’t often allow for much nuance and depth, that’s a problem the writers and director need to sort out if they ever plan to tackle Akallabêth.
Showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay (who co-wrote this episode along with Paper Girls‘ Stephany Folsom) have guaranteed that The Rings Of Power, with its bright color palette and heroic protagonists, welcomes no comparisons to House Of The Dragon – but that doesn’t mean it must shy away from being complex, even subversive, in the way Tolkien’s own writing increasingly grew to be as he revised it later in his life. Otherwise, it runs the risk of appearing merely trite, and no amount of lore sprinkled into the dialogue will be able to redeem it then.
