(avg. read time: 51–103mins.)
Episode 4
And we’re back. After the recap (which seems rather pointless in the era of streaming, but whatever) and the rest of the opening credits, we see that a new writer has joined Payne and McKay, at least for this episode, if nothing else. Her name is Stephany Folsom. She has more experience than the other two in that she actually has writing credits to her name. She is currently working on a show called Paper Girls, but most famously she helped write the screenplay for Toy Story 4. Let us see if this more experienced touch adds a notable uptick in quality (spoiler alert: no, she does not). They do at least drop the Harfoots plot for this episode, but that is not exactly a good trade-off for the other plotlines, as we will see.
A Nightmare Opening, Just Like This Show
We start off with yet another case of characters within the story telling other characters within the story what they should already know as Tar-Míriel is in a ceremony with several women where she is blessing their babies after telling them that this place is where they make decisions affecting the future of the kingdom. (The fathers of these babies are apparently not important for this ceremony; we will need to wait for another plotline to get the sense that fathers are important.) I know this has been a tendency of the script to this point, but it is particularly confusing here when we find out this opening scene is a dream sequence. Why is Míriel saying such things to her own citizens in her dream?
As the ceremony goes along, we see that something is wrong. At first, the rumbling is brief, which prompts Míriel to say, “Sometimes our island just needs a stretch.” What an odd throwaway line for anyone in any era to say. And why would anyone go along with it, as if to say, “Oh yeah, that makes sense, I need to stretch sometimes, too”? Of course, when we see what is causing the rumbling, it is unclear why there is a pause in it considering how massive the cataclysm is. But I guess even world-changing cataclysms respect dramatic timing and line delivery.
Next, we see that the rumbling comes from a massive wave engulfing Númenor. For whatever reason, Míriel continues holding the baby she was holding when the rumbling started. And the mother of this child is just standing in the background. She did not even ask for her baby so that she could flee like the other mothers did. This might have made a bit more sense if all the other women stood still in horror, but it is almost as if the mother is just a prop for this scene. This gives us a peek of things to come when Númenor will be destroyed, but it seems the anticipation is killing even the structures, as they collapse apropos of nothing before the wave crashes against them (and if it is supposed to be the shaking doing this, one wonders why this hall is not more affected and why we do not see any other shaking). But hey, it does set the tone for much that will happen apropos of nothing in this episode.
Where Now Is Númenor and Its Writer?
In our next Númenórean scene, we see Discount Gerard Butler out and about riling people up against the Elf and her mate. His speech is broken up into two parts by the insertion of a cutaway to Pharazôn, but we will treat it all in one go here. He claims that the Elf is whispering poison in the queen’s ear. I guess because racism? It is apropos of nothing that he has seen. Does the crowd assume he knows better? Are we just being made to believe that the Númenóreans are here to be the stereotypically dumb crowd? He also plays upon an idea he said in harassment of Halbrand the previous episode of Elven workers coming to take their jobs, even though there is only one Elf that was fished out of the sea. He even starts a chant of calling the queen an Elf-lover, and the crowd just goes along with it. This is what we are getting thus far in place of what Tolkien wrote as the conflict between Númenóreans and Elves. It couldn’t even have been something more reasonable and in line with what we have seen so far, where the guy could point to the specific behavior of Galadriel, how she looks down on them, how she speaks disrespectfully to their queen, and so on. But that would have the audience treating the bad guys as if they had a point about the main character and how unlikable she is. Even this would still be a poor substitute for what Tolkien wrote.
In Tolkien’s writing the conflict stemmed both from the Ban of the Valar forbidding the Númenóreans to sail west beyond sight from their shores (they would explore the vast seas in every other direction, but this expanse became forbidden fruit to them) and, more importantly, from the fact that the Elves had the immortality the Númenóreans envied, for, despite their longer lifespans, many grew ever more fearful of death. What the Valar and the Elves had considered the Gift of Men, which in time they would come to envy, was considered by Númenóreans in the later days to be the Doom of Men, and they thought these people from the West were withholding the secret of immortality from them. None of this shows up in the story thus far. The lengthened span is still never mentioned in this episode, nor is the envy of immortality. In our first two episodes with the Númenóreans when we are supposed to be establishing important things about them, we know nothing of these crucial parts of their story. Instead, what we get in this episode is a thinly veiled allegory of a particular construal of Western politics in our own day. What a waste.
Anyway, as I mentioned before, we have a scene of Pharazôn here shaking hands and kissing babies, as it were (he is not literally kissing babies, of course, but you get the idea). A lad, who turns out to be his son, comes to find him and says, “I didn’t realize you were in the middle of something important.” Pharazôn responds, “Statecraft is the art of attending to small matters as diligently as grand ones. I should like to think you’d learned that by now” The lad then responds, “I was only trying to be clever.” Pharazôn’s line is fine as a line from a politician, even though it does not really fit the man Tolkien wrote Ar-Pharazôn to be. It would have been more fitting for that character to apply what he learned as a mighty military commander to matters of statecraft, but this is not Tolkien’s Pharazôn, so whatever. More baffling, though, is the son’s response. What he said was not clever by any definition. I think they thought this was a synonym for “sarcastic,” but “witty” would be more appropriate. Of course, he was not being particularly witty either. I guess this guy can’t do anything right.
In fact, his dad pretty much reinforces that idea when he responds, “Cleverness is for men of small ambition. I’d much rather you were wise, my son.” This makes the previous part of the exchange look like yet another contrived setup for a later line. Given how these terms have such overlapping semantic domains, it is unclear what he is trying to say about the distinction between the two that sets apart the men of small ambition from the men who are better. Maybe try defining your terms? No?
Oh well, we’re on to the next scene with Pharazôn, where his purposes in manipulating the crowd are not entirely clear, because the message gets muddled, but it seems to be for some basic purpose of growing his base of power and influence. The line by which he calms the chanting crowd quite suddenly is, “And if the Elf were here now, what would she see? Men of Númenor or a gaggle of mewling children?” He goes on to make the rather obvious point that it is stupid to think that one Elf could overthrow the kingdom. The writers are thus pointing at the stupidity of their own setup, but they think that it makes Pharazôn sound wise. As usual, they seem to only know how to make characters seem smart by making other characters dumb.
One thing that Pharazôn says in this speech that really caught my attention was how they were the people of Elros, whose host conquered Morgoth himself. What are you on about? First, we are supposed to pretend that the Elves defeated Morgoth, since nothing since the introduction indicated any sort of intervention. Now, we are told that Elros was some leader in the defeat of Morgoth, which he wasn’t. Oddly enough, we will get the true-to-Tolkien version of what happened later in the show, presumably because the writers forgot about what has been said (and not been said) and/or they expected the audience to ignore it. Nor does it make sense to say that this is some alternate mythology that the Númenóreans have passed along among themselves (an idea that is not otherwise indicated in what is written; you would simply need to assume it for the benefit of the show). They are clearly aware of how their ancestors were rewarded this island, so how could they have thought of this idea out of that origin? Are we supposed to think they believed that their ancestors won the war, and the Valar gave them the island for a job well done? They clearly think they earned the island, but it makes no sense to say they thought it was so in this fashion, especially since the land in which the war was fought, Beleriand, is no longer around.
In the process of this speech, we also get confirmation of an error that the writers have made with the source material. Pharazôn speaks of Armenelos as “the triumph of our civilization,” which gives us verbal confirmation along with the visual confirmation we had last episode that this only city of Númenor that we have seen is Armenelos. Once again, the writers are just wrong about the setting. Armenelos was not a port city; this clearly is a port city; they have just moved its location because they wanted to.
Pharazôn eventually moves his speech to the most unimpressive set for Númenor (at least until the throwaway scene with Isildur and Eärien later on). He tells the crowd, “Trust in me. By the callouses on my hands, I swear to you that Elven hands will never take Númenor’s helm. She will remain, as always, a kingdom of Men.” This causes the crowd to cheer because the writers want us to know that they are dumb. Consider that Pharazôn’s speech began with undermining the idea that one Elf could undo them. In fact, most of his speech supported that point. But then he completely switches gears to say that he will ensure that the Elves never control them. The crowd that was willing to speak seditiously against the queen—considering what the Númenóreans did to her father for being favorable to Elves—is now easily swayed by Pharazôn’s “relax, bros, I got this” declaration.
But I guess it also helps that these Númenóreans are apparently ruled by alcohol. Recall that in the last episode Halbrand initially got the Númenóreans to like him by buying them drinks. And now Pharazôn gets the crowd in his favor by saying, “Drinks all around!” The closing of his speech literally goes like this: “She will remain, as always, a kingdom of Men. Drinks all around!” And as if by a summoning spell, people appear carrying drinks for the crowd (though it doesn’t look like nearly enough). Here is yet another contrivance for an already contrived situation.
Speaking of contrivance, we need to have a forced, utterly uninteresting romance between Pharazôn’s son, Kemen, and Eärien. Kemen clearly starts off quite well by trying to hit on Eärien by hating on his dad. Maybe he thought they could bond over not liking their dads? In any case, this scene also features another completely unnecessary contrivance where Kemen asks for her name and immediately her boss yells out her name and tells her to bring the plans. Why was that needed? If there is not even going to be a significant pause, why not just have her tell the man her name? There is not even a hint that she is trying to keep her name from him, even though the interjection would have made sense in that case.
Like Two Iron Heads Smacking Against Each Other
But now our terrible main character must make an appearance with the scene shifting to her audience with the queen. Tar-Míriel opens with saying, “You vex me, Elf,” and that was the last thing she said that was reasonable. After all, she follows with, “I welcome you as a guest, yet you gallop off to our countryside to steal ancient scrolls whilst your Southlander companion assaults our citizenry.” One, she obviously did not welcome Galadriel as a guest, so why is she trying to pretend that she did now? Two, she accuses her of stealing when she obviously checked this stuff out from the library by the authority of the captain the queen specifically appointed as her guard. If she “stole” this, why would she be presenting it to you? Three, she accuses her of stealing ancient scrolls, when she is obviously dealing with manuscript pages in a bound volume, not scrolls. Is the queen blind? Why has no one said something about her terrible eyesight (in stark contrast with her father, by the way) before? Four, she claims that Halbrand assaulted her citizens, which she could have only concluded by stupidity. Obviously Halbrand got excessive in abusing these props for his fight scene, but how did you gather that he assaulted them when there were four of them?
What is even odder is that Galadriel never once appeals to Halbrand acting in self-defense. She never even claims he was in the right. She simply says he needs to be released because he is the rightful king of the Southlanders, and he is needed for the fight against Sauron. This did not need to be an either-or approach; she could have appealed on both fronts. But it just seems odd that she is not the slightest bit interested in his innocence; she is just interested in his utility for her ends. She even tries to make the point that “His people are scattered, leaderless.” Yeah, I have definitely never heard a nearly identical description of the people of some should-be king in scene 24 of the Extended Edition of The Fellowship of the Ring (or the third scene on disc 2). It doesn’t ring a bell.
The rest of the conversation does not go well; after all, we are dealing with two rather obtuse characters. Galadriel proposes an alliance between the Elves and Númenor to vanquish Sauron, to which Míriel responds, “In this court we hear many proposals. I daresay yours is the most surprising and ambitious I have heard in weeks.” WEEKS? What? What are you even trying to say? Do you just get proposals like this as a matter of course in this line of work? What is of comparable scale? Are you trying to downplay the significance of her proposal? For what purpose? Would it not make more sense to just say that she is asking too much?
Then Míriel says in any case, regardless of who Halbrand is, he will face judgment. Again, Galadriel did not even try to challenge the charge. Her argument amounts to, “He should be a king, so who cares?” But do you want to know what is even worse about this whole aspect of the conversation? After this, Halbrand’s judgment is never brought up again. Ever. Oh, we see Halbrand still in jail. But the prospect of his judgment and what they can do to address the issue of his imprisonment are so unimportant to the writers that they apparently completely forgot about it by the end of the episode. He is even walking freely. And this is only one of the inconsistencies we will see between the setups in this episode and its ending.
Galadriel then tries to get her way by saying she will speak to the manager … I mean the king, Tar-Palantir. What she hoped to accomplish with this is something only the writers can bumble an explanation for. She knows already that Tar-Palantir was forced from the throne, so it is not as if he has the means to enforce a decision that could overrule Míriel. Seriously, even if he issues a judgment in agreement with Galadriel, no one obeys his commands. It is an empty threat whose only purpose is to antagonize Míriel and to upset her. As we have established, Galadriel has no people skills. The show itself will acknowledge this later on (I wonder if that was the contribution of the new writer), but the way they try to address it is still so remarkably out of keeping with Tolkien and incoherent with the show that it will require some extensive commentary.
And, of course, we must continue the annoyingly incompetent trend of Galadriel’s dialogue building on catchword linkage that is not well thought out. Míriel says Galadriel is a castaway grasping for a handhold in a tempest as a way of saying that she has no authority to demand what she does, to which Galadriel responds, “There is a tempest in me! It swept into this island for a reason. And it will not be quelled by you, Regent.” The thing is, she could have kept her annoying tendency—though it would have been better to drop it—and she still could have made better sense of her point here by simply saying a tempest brought her here. She would be doing as she had done in the previous episode of appealing to a higher power (one she, in her own words, still lacks the conviction to name). (She also could have said that it will not be “stilled,” “dissipated,” or “dispelled,” as any of those would go better with “tempest” than “quelled” does.) But no, she has to say the tempest is in her. Just in case we did not get enough of an impression of how disturbed she is from the line that the evil is not gone from within her in episode 1, now she is appealing to a chaotic force within her. That is, she is appealing to her own feelings once again when the context would suggest that she has a better basis for appeal than that. Amazon Galadriel, with her complete lack of people skills, once again must insist on her own importance as her point of end-all appeal. Although I suppose the “tempest” within her is the writers’ way of trying to smooth over the complete 180° turn she has taken since the last time she has seen the queen from wanting to leave the island as soon as possible to now wanting to stay in order to build an army on this island she wished just yesterday that Elendil never brought her to (apparently once wishing that she had just been left to certain death, at least before the contrivance that was the solution of her mystery). I know that the writers have tried in a most contrived fashion to explain this complete about-face in the previous episode, but I have already analyzed the many problems with that contrivance. And we are still stuck with the problem that Galadriel has such a poor awareness of other people and how they might be thinking that she does not even see a problem here to address in light of how much her purpose has changed in the last twenty-four hours from the standpoint of someone who is seeing her for the first time since the complete change. No, instead she needs to get herself thrown into jail for sedition.
Isildur, We Hardly Know Ye
Our next scene brings us to Isildur out on the sea in one of his training exercises. He is hearing voices again, and we are still left wondering if anything is going to explain the voice or if it is just an apparent externalization of his feelings telling him, “Go West, young man.” For all of this, Isildur does something remarkably stupid and selfish. Of course, it is not necessarily a problem for the script that characters make mistakes; it all depends on the context. In this context, Isildur makes the decision just now to sabotage his chances in the Sea Guard by letting a rope he is pulling slip. His friends Valandil and Ontamo try to fix his mess, but the sail-master decides to punish Isildur by dismissing him, as well as his two friends, since he knew that Isildur acted deliberately in a way that endangered the crew. Of course, the sail-master’s punishment makes no sense, unless one posits vindictiveness, because the other two were clearly trying to adjust to a problem Isildur caused. But I am just wondering how we are supposed to sympathize with a character who is so focused on what he desires that he thinks the best way to get it is by endangering other people. Of course, in reality, this is a contrived setup for the following conflict scene with Isildur and Valandil (who I guess Isildur is supposedly going to name one of his sons after), and for the three amigos to volunteer for an expeditionary force at the end of the episode. We know Isildur has wanted to get out for some time, but they could have set it up so that he quits and Valandil tries to talk him out of it, then they have their falling out. Instead, the writers need to make Isildur look worse by doing something he knows will endanger others.
The aforementioned contrived conflict scene is also useful for padding out the runtime, something else we have seen multiple times in this series. You would hope that anything else could be accomplished in this scene if they were going to such lengths to force it into the story. But all we get are repetitions of what other scenes have told us (such as Valandil talking about how Isildur’s brother used to spew about western Númenor), plus one minor bit of extra information. That minor bit of extra information is the confirmation that Isildur’s mother is dead—as I expected they would write—which we learn of when Valandil says Isildur has done nothing but brood and blubber about his dead mother. Of course, having the friend say this in a bout of anger is once again an artificial means of getting us to sympathize with Isildur when, as a matter of fact, we have been given nothing with which to connect with these characters. Why are we supposed to be invested? This is the second time we have seen the friends and we barely know this show’s version of Isildur. We’re just being forced to watch strangers fight.
Adar Is Elvish for “Yawn”
But enough of that. We then cut to Arondir in chains. His plot armor has kept him safe from the consequences of his actions so far. And we will see how that armor continues to hold up throughout this episode. According to the last episode, he was to be taken to Adar, but instead he is chained up and waits for Adar. But Adar does not come to him; he comes to the wounded Orc.
We see that Adar is just a corrupted Elf. We do not know much of his story, even by the end of this episode. The most we do know about him is that he speaks with a rasp and mumbles his lines for no apparent reason (somewhat like Adam Sandler’s performance in Little Nicky, Ralph Fiennes’s performance as Hades in Clash of the Titans, Eddie Redmayne’s performance in Jupiter Ascending). Nor do we get any clarification on why this Elf would be called by the same title as Morgoth was (at least, as this show says he was). And we see now that in his entire outfit only the gauntlet he wears makes him resemble Sauron, the same gauntlet the camera focused on near the end of the last episode. Thus, it was quite a deliberate red herring, but only for the audience, not for Arondir. What a waste. I don’t think these red herrings are necessary in any case, but if you are going to use them, why not commit to a red herring for the characters involved in the story?
Adar also has an … odd scene where he mercy kills the wounded Orc. I’m not sure what we are supposed to get out of all this touching, caressing, and tearing up, or if anything will come of it. I have nothing to orient me to whatever is happening here from Tolkien, since Adar is a show-only character. I guess it is supposed to be a creepy cult leader vibe. But if he is a cult leader, as later lines will indicate, will we learn anything about the cult? Maybe, maybe not. If they are going to end up featuring the cult aspect for Númenor’s downfall, why feature it multiple times? And would they have any sort of variation, or will it just be a continuation? These are not questions that need to be answered now, but these are things this odd scene makes me wonder. Hopefully, it will not all lead to a disappointing conclusion.
After that mercy killing, the rest of the Orcs just leave, presumably to go bury the body (so the Orcs are superior to the Harfoots at least in that regard). Adar is then left alone with Arondir. There is an odd bit here that will lead to nothing and serves no clear purpose when Arondir grabs something on the ground to use as a weapon. I don’t know what it is, but it is neither particularly sharp nor in any other way useful as weapon. We see when he wraps his hand around it that it is barely longer than the width of his hand. He doesn’t even try to use it, though, so all such issues become meaningless, just like the camera shots of him holding the thing.
Adar asks Arondir where he is from. And only now, ONLY NOW, does the script mention Beleriand. I’ve mentioned Beleriand a couple of times in this review series because it was the main setting for the events of the First Age, and it is no longer around. But just like with the Silmarils, the writers had opportunity before to mention it and just didn’t. They did not need to give all the details for these references at the start, but they could have at least kept these bits of information together like they should have been (e.g., show Beleriand on that first map instead of just referring to “Middle-earth”). It is mentioned here because Arondir says he was born in Beleriand. But that’s kind of like saying you were born in Europe, as there were several regions and realms within Beleriand. Also, by this show’s confused chronology, this shows that Arondir is well over 1,000 years old, since Beleriand is not around anymore after Morgoth’s defeat (another indication to this effect is Revion asking him in episode 1 what he did “before the war”). He only spent seventy-nine of those years stationed in the Southlands, so it does leave one to wonder about his background. Will they ever fill it in? Probably not, but we will see.
Adar has an odd response to this answer. He says, “By the mouth of the river?… I went down that river once, when I was young.” What is odd about this is that he is acting like Beleriand was a small land, which it certainly was not, and thus he could narrow down where Arondir could have been born that quickly. It is also odd because the line assumes that there is only one river in Beleriand. And, well, just look at this map. What is the sense in this exchange?
Another odd feature in all of this that is as unnecessary as the shots of the thing in Arondir’s hand is the Warg in the background. That Warg has been there this whole time, but only at an arbitrary point in this conversation, apropos of nothing, does the Warg think, “Okay, time to lunge, bark, and growl now.” It is a totally unnecessary way of making this scene less quiet and is there only to startle the audience (presumably hoping that they would so drawn in by … something in this scene).
Arondir asks Adar why the Orcs call him “Father,” to which Adar gives this cryptic and surely meaningless non-answer (I say “surely meaningless,” because it is most likely one of those other lines we have seen that pretend like they are full of meaning but are actually empty): “You have been told many lies. Some run so deep, even the rocks and roots now believe them. To untangle it all would require the creation of a new world. But that is something only the gods can do. And I am no god. At least not yet.” Notice that this line is once again apropos of nothing. They could have had this line, which they obviously really wanted here for our bad guy’s characterization, and at least given us something that leads into it. But these writers have difficulty with figuring out how conversations work. And they got overly focused on delivering a line that tells us that Adar wants to be a god, which is difficult to take seriously and get invested in because all we know about him is that he is an Elven leader of Orcs. He is weird, but not especially impressive; we have seen nothing to show that he is especially competent; nor has he shown himself to be especially knowledgeable, so that we might think he knows a dark path, maybe not to “godhood” per se, but to something almost similarly threatening for a villain; he has shown no peculiar power; and he is less threatening than the Orcs he commands.
Of course, there are many ways to establish a villain in their proper intro or even their proper introductory episode as a whole. The writers are not bound to follow any one path, but it would help if they could learn from competent writers how to do this important task for their story. One example I can think of from writers who clearly knew what they were doing is with Wilson Fisk in Daredevil. Daredevil was another show made for streaming (Netflix, specifically) and so it was similarly less bound to traditional TV show time constraints (or of the need for hooks to bring viewers back from the commercial breaks). It also first features its major villain for season 1 at the end of the third episode but does not properly introduce us to him until the fourth episode. Daredevil was also juggling multiple storylines in the process and managed to have more plot development and characterization than ROP with its even longer episodes. Indeed, by the time we end episode 4, we have an idea of who Fisk is, that he is different from what we might have expected, and yet he also justifies the fear linked to his name (in the previous episode, a character killed himself after revealing Fisk’s name because he was that afraid of him). The writers manage to get us oriented to this villain in a number of ways. First, they build him up by having him mentioned cryptically throughout the first few episodes, but the first time they show him, he is away from all the people who have been talking about him. Second, the first time we see him he is in an art gallery staring at a painting, which the artist, who it turns out he is attracted to, talks with him about. He invites her on a date, and through both the invitation and the date itself, we get to see him as being somewhat blunt and socially awkward, but there is a quiet charisma to him as well as an air of intrigue and mystery surrounding this rich, powerful, cultured, and influential man. He is also in a rather intimate situation where, if we didn’t know better, we would be rooting for the guy to come out of it on good terms. In all of this, we see nothing of the villain everyone has been talking about. But, third, then comes the point where his criminal dealings intrude upon his personal life. He has clearly tried to keep them separate, and now he needs to deal with the fallout, which includes an initial rejection from his date about seeing her again. The next time we see him, he brutally beats a Russian crime lord and decapitates him … with a car door. Fortunately, we do not get too up close and personal with this process, but it is clear enough what is happening from what we do see and hear. From then on, we know that this character has two sides to him, even as Daredevil does, and the dark side is truly intimidating and terrifying. And the fact that this dark side exists within the same person who was otherwise likable in this episode prior to this scene, as well as that he can flip the switch between these sides so simply, make him all the more intriguing and unsettling at the same time.
Now that is an effective way to establish a villain. The whole episode is not about Fisk, nor is even most of it. But already we have heard enough about the character and, more importantly, seen enough about the character to get an idea of who he is, to make us interested in him, but also to leave us with intrigue and the wish to know more, as well make us wish for him to be stopped. Obviously, ROP’s writers do not need to copy this exact strategy, as it would not fit this show, but it is something to learn from about ways to establish your major villain. What can we say about Adar? He is an Elf who commands Orcs. He apparently wants to be a god. But what do we know about him as a person? What sense do we get of his capabilities? After all, we have the vaguest of ideas of his purpose, but we have no sense of his ability to achieve said purpose. There has only been build-up to him since the last episode in a couple of lines, but those lines say nothing about him, except that he is a possible successor to Morgoth, and he appears only to be a red herring for Sauron, the actual overarching villain. The only visual storytelling elements we have of him are from that red herring appearance and the mercy killing of the Orc. What is there to this character that is getting us invested in the story concerning him except for mere plot material, not any character material? That is, by the end of his first proper episode, we have no sense of who Adar is. We only know his role in the plot.
Anyway, we end all this with Adar sending Arondir off to deliver a message to the Men taking refuge in the old watchtower where he used to work. What is the message? We cut away before Adar says it. Part of being a good fiction writer is knowing when to build suspense and when to just get on with it. In this case, there was no point to the suspense because everyone in the audience knows that the most obvious one is, “surrender or die.” Trying to build suspense by making us think it could be something else and then just doing the obvious thing anyway is yet another means of padding out the runtime. Otherwise, the last scene with Arondir and Bronwyn would be redundant, and we could have saved time. He could have just whispered it to her, and we would have known what was said. But besides that pointless suspense, something even more baffling about this part of the story is that Adar allows Arondir to return without escort and fully armed, and he does not pass on a message to the Orcs between there and the tower to let him through. Even more baffling than that is that he allows Arondir to take the message in the first place, but let us pretend that this in any way resembles a good idea in the first place. The act of giving him an escort would have been particularly effective, as anyone who saw him with the escort, even despite any restraints put on him, would have grounds for doubting Arondir’s loyalty. They would think that with him being so escorted and bearing a message from Adar, he could be a spy. I wonder if such an idea will be introduced in the next episode. If it is, note that they cut off a more reasonable route to get to that goal for the sake of Arondir’s action scenes and pointless suspense, all to pad out the runtime.
The Southlands and How to Contrive a Plotline
That leads us to our first scene with Bronwyn since episode 2. She is leading in the refugee situation of the Southlanders coming to the watchtower because … she is the only one who bathes, I guess (seriously, even a crisis like this that has gone on for some time will not prevent this woman from looking much cleaner than everyone else around her). We hear her say at one point that this new batch of refugees means that they have now accounted for every village “from here to Orodruin.” There are a couple of problems with this line. First, Orodruin is the Elvish name for what would become known as Mount Doom. Why is she calling it by that name? Do the Southlanders who have lived there longer than the Elves have been stationed not have a name for it? Otherwise, why would they use an Elvish name? Of course, it would not make sense to call it Mount Doom yet, but surely they could have come up with another name. It’s not as if we are strictly sticking to Tolkien by any measure anyway, right? Second, this watchtower is supposed to be near the far end of the Ered Lithui, which means it is likely 400+ miles from Orodruin. How did the people coming from villages even close to that far away avoid getting attacked by Orcs, especially since there are Orcs in the village Bronwyn is from? Third, related to this, have Orcs then constructed not only the massive tunnel leading from here to hundreds of miles southwest near the Ephel Dúath, but also tunnels that would span some portion of that far due west as well? Is the whole land of what will become Mordor resting atop thousands of miles of tunnels?
We find out that this refugee camp is desperately short of food. Theo suggests going into town with a small party by day when the Orcs are fewer. By “small party” it turns out he just means the twit from episode 1 (named Rowan) and himself. But that is the less important issue. The more important issue is that there is apparently still food left in the village that no one had thought to bring. Maybe you could have taken more time to gather supplies to start with, because what is the point of leaving food behind? Or maybe one villager could have shared a brain cell with another villager and thought, “Hey, why don’t we at least clear out the tavern?” You would think that would be the first place they would have tried to clean out for food and supplies. But no, however much time has passed, there is still food in the tavern and quite a bit of food left elsewhere in the village so that it loads up a cart. Believe it or not, this thin thread of asininity is what the rest of this plotline in this episode hangs upon. I am not kidding. If they had brought food from the village, Theo would not have a reason to go back there. If Theo did not have a reason to go back there, he would not use his sword of evil for the Orc to see. If Theo did not use his sword of evil for the Orc to see, the Orcs would not have started searching for him. If the Orcs did not spend the rest of the day and into the night searching for him, he would not have been in the right place at the right time for Arondir to rescue him. If he was not in the right place at the right time for Arondir to rescue him, we would not have the chase scene through the woods. If we did not have all of this happen previously, we would not have the scene where Waldreg (the dirty butcher/tavern owner) reveals that he has used a sword of evil, too, and Adar would have no information on the whereabouts of the blade he was looking for. If this does not demonstrate how contrived the writing for this show is, I want to know what would. And I sincerely hope that no one tries to argue that they could not think of a more natural, logical way to get from point A (Bronwyn and Theo are in the watchtower) to point B (the conclusion) than this bout of village-wide brain damage.
And this whole contrived setup is a real shame, too, because it is obviously stupid for Theo to go into the tavern when he knows that the Orcs are in the village and they are going to be indoors when there’s light out. But Theo needs to be stupid because the plot requires it. How else would we get our cheap horror movie setup, where the Orc pulls all the tricks Mike Wazowski pulled in the cabin in Monsters University. Then the Orc attacks him with his blade, yet he also he pauses for just long enough that Theo can reveal the blade and then show he knows how to use it.
Let’s talk about how Theo uses this blade. Most people are not masters with blades. But most people can intuitively use them to the extent that they know the pointy end goes into the person they’re fighting. Theo’s use of this weapon, even after learning that his blood can make it extend as if it is reforming itself, is not intuitive in the slightest. Thus, however long it has been since he first learned this secret of his blade, he must have been practicing this. But if he has been practicing, how has he done it where no one notices until later on? It is obviously pretty crowded at the watchtower and if you look at the approach, where you need to take a bridge to get to it, you obviously can’t sneak out easily without someone noticing, and you would think there would be someone watching with the concern about the Orcs. How, then, can he keep getting away with it? And apparently this blade needs a fresh transfusion of blood every time you use it, so how long does it last in its extended state? If you reach a time limit, does it just shrivel up and require more blood? I wish I could appeal to something in the lore of Tolkien to help explain this, but I can’t. It would be up to the writers to explain, and I doubt they have such clear ideas of function.
When the Orc sees what Theo has, his instinct is not to attack him and do everything he can to take it from him. No, that needs to be saved for later in order for a contrived and convenient Arondir save to happen. Instead, the Orc just tells him, “Give it here.” Literally. I guess it’s a good thing that the Orc completely changed his tactics for the convenience of the plot. Otherwise, Theo would surely be dead.
Theo then runs out of the tavern and hides to where the Orc can’t find him. He apparently has incredible speed, because we find out later that he somehow hid the blade in the bag of grain he had, which seems to imply that the blade retracted rather quickly. And he did that in the split second he had before he had to get down the well before the Orc made it out of the tavern and looked around for him. Indeed, it appears that this show may push new boundaries for how stupid the Orcs are supposed to be. They have never been portrayed as particularly bright, but they are also not complete nincompoops. Even so, that is what this Orc appears to be. He doesn’t check the well first, which would seem to be the most obvious place to hide that is near the tavern. After he drinks from the bucket at the well, he hears it hit Theo, but he does not react to the sound he heard until he conveniently took a few steps away. Why does the Orc sneak up to the well in this case, considering that Theo has no way of escaping? The world will never know. But even if the Orc is too dumb to think of such things, and he thinks that Theo is in that well, all he would need to do is wait long enough to see if Theo comes up for air. But conveniently he leaves the well a couple second before Theo emerges from the water that is deep enough for him to completely submerge in. Even though he is making more noise than before with the water splashing and the gasping for air, the Orc does not hear a thing. Good thing for Theo that the Orc has plot-convenient stupidity and lack of senses, otherwise he would surely be dead. It’s also a good thing that the rest of the hours Theo spends in this well never leads to other Orcs coming by the well that might be more sensitive to sound, that no Orcs ever hang around that well during a conversation, or that Theo is always able to dive deep enough and hold his breath long enough that no Orcs detect him.
Elrond and the Show’s Worst-Kept Secret
After an episode-long hiatus, we are back with Elrond in Eregion. Our first shot here shows us that the tower Celebrimbor wanted built is now well underway. Elrond comments on this construction as Elves and Dwarves working together. They couldn’t even get out of the first visual of this plotline without causing some problems. One, at the end of this plotline in the second episode, Durin III was clearly suspicious of the Elves’ proposal. But I guess resolution to his doubts was unimportant, as it happened offscreen. It is almost as if that dialogue was filler. Two, we are told that Elves and Dwarves are working together, but we don’t get any visual indication of Elves or Dwarves specifically in that construction. We could not even have a close-up shot of a small group of Elves and Dwarves and then follow up with this wide shot of the tower in progress. Three, we never get a clear idea of how long this construction has been going on. This show has had enough problems with having any consistency with Tolkien’s chronology, but its own chronology is an impenetrable mess. If the jumps between various scenes were ever supposed to give us an indication of rough synchronicity (as is clearly implied at the end of episode 1 when Asteroid Man crashes to the ground and is seen by all these different characters in the process), there is no way to make sense of what we have seen. Of course, if we are to take the distances seriously, Arondir had to travel hundreds of miles both ways to get to this point in the timeline, and he made it to Hordern around the time shortly after Elrond and Celebrimbor met. They had to make their own trip of hundreds of miles to Eregion from Lindon and then from Eregion to Khazad-dûm and back, and they don’t exactly fast travel Elder Scrolls style (at least, it would not be reasonable to assume so). If there is synchronicity between when Galadriel arrives in Númenor and when Arondir arrives in the labor camp, then two, maybe three days have elapsed by the time this plotline in Númenor ends (which would require Arondir to traverse an incredibly long distance in an impossibly short time). Somewhere in all of that, we have to fit the work on this massive tower that is already dozens of feet tall (they have three layers of this spiraling tower with a massive base complete and are working on a fourth). But all of this does fit with a precedent we have established: this show cannot consistently handle the coherent setting of things in time or space. Time is an especially severe problem for the writers, but so is space (especially when it comes to the Southlands).
But enough of that, we have more contrivances to set up. What is the contrivance this time? We need to force a theme about relating to fathers in this plotline, so only now will there be a mention of Elrond’s father. There would have been occasion to mention it before, most recently when referring to Elros and Elrond in the previous episode. And if Eärendil had been set up in the prologue, like I had suggested, this would be some good background to provide viewers about Elrond. But it’s convenient to the writers to bring this information up now, so that is when it is brought up. Specifically, it is brought up by Celebrimbor suddenly looking at Elrond and saying how he reminded him of his father Eärendil. Celebrimbor said that he met Eärendil many times. This is not established in any of Tolkien’s works, but it is a reasonable inference, since Celebrimbor was also a refugee from Gondolin. Although Eärendil was only a child at the time when the great city of Gondolin fell, it is not unreasonable to infer that he and Celebrimbor would become familiar due to their proximity and shared experience as the former grew up.
Of course, this is not all there is to this backstory. Celebrimbor tells Elrond, “Do you know, I remember once he said to me, one day, my future would be in his son’s hands. He said it quite casually, as if one might speak of tomorrow’s rain. And I’d forgotten that until this moment. Isn’t that odd?” Yes, Celebrimbor, it is odd. It is almost as if the writers forced it to be that way. You would think with the quality of Elven memories, with the work already well underway, and with Elrond and Celebrimbor having been in contact for some time now that there would have been occasion to bring that memory to the fore already, even in the last episode they appeared in together. But this convenient remembrance is for the benefit of the audience, whether or not it makes sense for the characters (much like how they did not remember to talk about Elrond’s relationship with Durin until they were within sight of the western gate of Khazad-dûm in episode 2).
Celebrimbor is also acting unsettled here. He tells Elrond that he thinks Durin (IV) is avoiding him or hiding something. The implications of this are odd, not in terms of character, as we already saw distrust and secretiveness in this relationship from Durin’s father previously, but in terms of the manner in which this relationship works. We saw already from the map in episode 2 that it looks to take a couple days to journey from Khazad-dûm to Eregion (or, more properly, Ost-in-Edhil), though it probably took longer than usual with the initial expedition of a large group of workers coming with all their equipment. Has Durin IV been liaising between the two places by traveling back and forth repeatedly, so that Celebrimbor could notice a change in behavior? How long has he been doing that? If not, has Celebrimbor been liaising? That would not seem to make sense, as it is his project and his city, so you would think he would want to stay there and oversee everything. If they are only writing or otherwise having messengers sent between them, how could Celebrimbor discern such behavior without Elrond also noticing? Most likely, the writers mean to imply the first possibility, but they just did not think through the logistics thereof.
We immediately cut to Elrond back in Durin’s house, where he interrogates Disa. And here we have absolute confirmation that Elrond was not banished. Any inconsistency with what Durin said in front of his people is apparently unimportant. No objections are ever voiced and then addressed. There is no grumbling against Durin. Alternatively, the writers could have arranged it so that Durin ultimately enforced the banishment, due to how apparently serious this contest and its consequences are supposed to be, and they would have needed a go-between or Durin would need to travel out of his kingdom for them to maintain contact. That way, the trip to his house would have been consistent with the consequences of losing the contest, but it really was just a side-trip on the way out. Or it could have been that Durin III is said to have lifted his banishment as part of diplomatic relations with Eregion. Any of these things could have signified that the writers actually took seriously the things they wrote in episode 2. But they didn’t, so why should we? Indeed, why should we take anything they write seriously?
As Elrond interrogates her, it is quite obvious that she is lying. She is not that good at it. Maybe this is a testament to her character that she is not used to lying. Or I would think that if I could not just attribute it to incompetent writing. In fact, she initially did a lot of damage to her cause by reacting far too casually to the suggestion that she is a liar. The coy smile does worse for her cause than if she were to at least pretend to be offended at the idea that this guest in her house who is supposed to be a close friend of her husband’s would lay such an accusation against her. Her metaphor of how such an accusation against a Dwarf in her own home is a “recipe for strong gravy” is not effective either. Who doesn’t like strong gravy (if you like gravy at all)? Of course, the most damaging thing she says for her case is the idea that a Dwarf like Durin can make what should be a descent of two days (she wrongly says “several days”) in a few hours. I guess Dwarven climbers are spider-men (or spider-Dwarves). But the writers are not too concerned with keeping this pretense up. In fact, the very next scene abandons any hint of ambiguity about if she is engaging in deceit.
Durin and Disa discuss the deception and what is really going on in an extremely public place. That is, they decide to have this conversation on a bridge in the open air, not anywhere nearby, particularly under cover, that would have been better for doing something secretive. Not only are they out in the middle of this bridge talking about secrets, but they conveniently never look to the side to see Elrond off in the distance listening in (somehow). It is as if nothing much would happen in this show (even of what little has happened) without characters being afflicted with plot-convenient stupidity and senselessness.
After Elrond hears about where Durin is actually digging, we get this awkward extreme close-up where we cut to Elrond’s eyes and then move down to his mouth as he says, “the old mine below the Mirrormere.” They are laying on the foreboding rather thick here. But why is that location supposed to be foreboding at this point in history? Nothing terrible has come from there. The writers are obviously trying to set up the Balrog/Durin’s Bane to be part of this series, even though (as I said before) that is thousands of years later, near the end of the second millennium of the Third Age. Even though it is apropos of nothing in Tolkien’s work, people remember the Balrog from Jackson’s LOTR, so for a show that inappropriately has The Lord of the Rings in the title, we obviously need it here whether it fits or not. Furthermore, we have another issue with setting in space. Elrond has come to Khazad-dûm by the western gate and the Mirrormere (which Dwarves would refer to as Kheled-zâram) is outside of the realm of Khazad-dûm on the complete opposite side from there. Based on Tolkien’s chronology in LOTR, it would take at least a day-and-a-half journeying to get from one side to the other. In Jackson’s FOTR, Gandalf said it was a four-day journey to the other side, but this seems to be misconstruing what Tolkien wrote, “But going straight, without mishap or losing our way, we shall take three or four marches, I expect. It cannot be less than forty miles from West-door to East-gate in a direct line, and the road may wind much” (II/4). In any case, we are not dealing with a quick afternoon jaunt here.
But after Elrond fast travels, he is where he needs to be. He finds the secret door to the mine because he sees three sequential footprints—and only those three, as there are no others further back—leading up to it. Now how does he get the door open? This is something truly rich. He knocks on the door at the tempo with the rhyme, “Rich crone, kiss the stone, / Polish your gems and gold.” Where did he learn this rhyme? He overheard Gerda, Durin and Disa’s daughter, reciting it earlier. Gerda even says it is a knocking game she is playing with her brother. Either Durin taught a secret code to his children because he’s an imbecile, or Durin has used a popular Dwarven children’s game/rhyme for this super-secret entrance to the super-secret mine because he’s an imbecile. If he had a safe, I am sure the combination would be 1, 2, 3. If he is this remarkably dim-witted, one would wonder why his dad puts him in charge of anything. Or maybe we’re just dealing with more contrived writing here.
When Elrond goes in, we get confirmation that the mystery box that was not at all mysterious did in fact contain mithril. Elrond first sees the strange substance himself because the Dwarves have conveniently not mined this mithril that is close to the entrance, maybe because they wanted to be caught at what they were doing. Otherwise, considering how dangerous this stuff can be to mine, you would think they would want to extract as much as they can from the safer areas of the mine.
Then Durin walks in on Elrond, asking him, “Come to spy on me, Elf?” Elrond responds, “Hardly.” Okay, so Elrond has told another blatant lie to this supposedly good friend of his. Spying is all that he has been doing on this trip to Khazad-dûm. He then asks Durin, “What is this place?” One problem with this line is that his hushed reference to “the old mine below the Mirrormere” would seem to indicate that he did know of the place, whether or not he had been there. Another problem is how this line fits with what comes after. Since Elrond does not know what is here and what it is for, Durin should know that he has not figured out the secret that he cares so much about preserving. He could have come up with any number of excuses for not telling him the secret. He could have come up with a cover story. But he jumps right to swearing Elrond to secrecy “hand to mountain.”
However, the need for secrecy is undermined in two ways in this very scene. One, the only reason Durin gives for why the Dwarves have been so secretive about it is that it is perilous to mine. But that is not a reason for keeping it secret from Elves. He could have said something about how he did not want many other Dwarves to know about it because of all the problems that would cause. That would make sense. But they are specifically keeping the secret from the Elves. Every Dwarf Elrond has asked about this matter has “put him off” (as he says in the scene with Disa), but they didn’t say they didn’t know. Two, Durin does the worst thing he could have done if he wanted to ensure that the substance and the mine of mithril are kept secret. After Elrond lies to him (since he said he came all this way not to learn about what he’s up to but because he has been away too long), Durin actually gives him a piece of mithril as “a token of our friendship.” He must know that he is increasing the chances that, whether or not Elrond says anything, someone could see that piece and the secret would already be at least partly out. Even if someone saw it and Elrond says he couldn’t talk about it, things would be set in motion that Elrond could not prevent inquiries being made. But this secrecy won’t matter in the long run. We just needed more content to fill the runtime, as well as something to lead into a mining accident.
If the Great Wave Came Right Now, Nothing of Value Would Be Lost
Speaking of content to fill the runtime, we go back to more (teen?) romance stuff with Eärien and Kemen. It’s just a scene with two meaningless characters we have been given no reason to connect with or care about. Ema Horvath seems like a good enough actress, but she is let down by a script that gives me no reason to get invested in her character. There weren’t even any scenes where she was the focus prior to this romance angle. She’s just someone who’s there. And so is Kemen. There’s not really much else to say at this point.
But there is a scene that has so much to talk about. This is the scene where Halbrand tries to teach Galadriel how to relate to people. I will quote it in full and then I will dissect it, because this needs to be on display:
“As much as I admire your habit of charging at every obstacle in your path like a colt in full gallop, has it ever occurred to you that you’re not battling Trolls or Orcs but Men?”
“Are you really about to advise me in the art of war?”
“No. No, I wouldn’t dare. But then the queen’s court isn’t exactly your usual battlefield, is it?”
“Go on.”
“In an instance like this, it seems to me that you’d do well to identify what your opponent most fears…”
“And exploit it.”
“No. Give them a means of mastering it, so that you can master them.”
“So by your standards I am in this cell because I have yet to identify what the queen most fears.”
“My very low standards, yes.”
“And I suppose you did, having met her for all of a few moments.”
“During which you managed to demand a ship, insult her people, defy her orders, none of which quickened her pulse. Now, all of a sudden she throws you in a cell. Why?”
“I asked her to fight for your people.”
“But that wasn’t what provoked her anger, was it?”
*buffering* “I demanded to speak to her father, the king in the tower, who no one has seen in years.”
“See what happens when you stop galloping and you give yourself a moment to think.”
“Cease comparing me to a horse.”
“Cease trying to convince me to leave this island and you have a deal.”
Oh boy. First, let’s start with the overall function of this scene. The idea that Halbrand is going to teach Galadriel how to relate to people indicates one of two things. One, the new writer came in, noticed what an unlikable person Galadriel is and told our two main writers that something needed to be done to address this. Two, the writers intended to get to this scene all along, in which case they were well aware of how insufferable Amazon Galadriel is and wanted to show that they were aware of the problems with the character. In that scenario, this is a hollow reassurance for the audience that the writers know what they are doing with this character, that she is going to need to learn a thing or two (or two hundred or two thousand). I say it is “hollow” because it is going to turn out that Galadriel needed to learn nothing from this exchange, and she is just going to be shown to be right by forces outside of her control. If the writers actually knew she was unlikable and yet have forced us to follow her as the main character without doing anything to address the problems with her characterization, then they are incompetent. Even if they did know, just saying that you know something is dumb or bad does not absolve you of still doing it. The only reason they can give for why things will improve are empty promises that it might get better next time.
Second, I have said again and again how polar opposite this character is to Tolkien’s Galadriel, especially in the department of people skills. If this scene did serve the function it was supposed to, we would still be left with the idea that a character the show invented is supposed to be the one who (at least at first) led Galadriel to acquire one of her most remarkable characteristics. It’s not as if he is a master of the field either, he just has some people skills and therefore is better than her in this area. If they were to follow through on such an idea, it would be an obvious degrading of a character being adapted for the purposes of elevating the importance of one the adapters invented. And all of this would be for the purpose of trying, in vain, to hold together a story that is an extreme departure from Tolkien. In any case, they are making a worse character and giving her the same name as a better character. Among the many other changes, instead of a character who knows intuitively more than just about anyone how to see into people’s hearts and minds and how to appeal to people, we get a character who knows nothing about appealing to people. She knows she has things she wants/needs, and she just needs to demand that others fall in line with them. In fact, the queen is won over to her side in spite of her attempts at appeal. But trust me, we will get to that.
Third, as the first example from this very scene of how badly she understands other people, she responds to Halbrand’s remark by saying, “Are you really about to advise me in the art of war?” He is obviously speaking metaphorically here, but she cannot even grasp that. Of course he is not advising you in the art of war. If your skull and ears weren’t made of adamant, maybe you could have perceived that. But we know that this character only has plot-convenient knowledge of things, not any real perceptiveness.
Fourth, Halbrand poses a question to her that gets Galadriel attention and gets her to listen to his point. His question is, “But then the queen’s court isn’t exactly your usual battlefield, is it?” This is another thing that shows us how far we are from Tolkien. The queen’s court is exactly where she belongs. She was not a queen by birth. She became queen and Celeborn became king by virtue of how other Elves acknowledged their worthiness of leadership. She had the qualities of a good queen before she was ever declared one, and other Elves followed her for such reasons. She first became such a queen early in the Second Age after spending centuries learning from the Maia queen of Doriath, Melian, the greatest queen any realm in Middle-earth ever knew. And this was even after attaining much wisdom and skill of her own in the Undying lands. But the writers needed to strip this character of everything interesting and start us with her at pretend square one and make her a warrior with no depth (as I have said before). No one wants to follow Amazon Galadriel, and no one should; people only ever go along with her when some other power or authority pushes them to do so. I do not want to keep repeating these criticisms of Galadriel compared to her counterpart from Tolkien because it gets tiresome for me. But on an occasion like this with such a scene, I had to go over this material again.
Fifth, Halbrand tries to say that Galadriel needs to identify her opponent’s worst fears and Galadriel assumes that the next step is to exploit them. In case the first half of this season has not reinforced the point enough for us that Galadriel has no people skills, we get this line. Her first thought when hearing about people’s fears is figuring out “how can I exploit this?” It seems to be played for some clumsy comedy, but it’s not particularly funny or endearing, because Amazon Galadriel is not an endearing character.
Sixth, Halbrand’s advice is about identifying the fears of others so that you can give them the means of mastering their fears, which means you can master them. It is another one of those things that is made to sound profound but does not stand up to scrutiny. It could be that you are dealing with someone who has already mastered or is already mastering their fears. In such a case, what they fear is not a weakness by which to exploit them, but something that they are the most prepared to face. Unless we are just supposed to think that Galadriel is afraid of nothing, which I would not be surprised if that is what the writers want us to think, surely she would understand this. Admittedly, though, this would be a much more effective line if it had been set up already that the fear that is driving so many in Númenor is the fear of their own mortality. This could be an effective characterization line for Sauron in that context, since that is how he plays the Númenóreans with deception after they capture him (most particularly, in his advice to Ar-Pharazôn to invade the Undying Lands to seize immortality). Though the context in which he is captured, corrupts the Númenóreans, and deceives them about how to master their fear is completely different from what we see in this show.
Seventh, in that same line, we have here more fodder for the popular speculation that Halbrand is Sauron in disguise. As I said, this line would fit with Sauron. But it would fit him much better in the context Tolkien gave him for mastering the Númenóreans through their fear. Some have tried to connect this with the idea of him helping to make the Rings of Power, and thereby mastering others, but, at least in Tolkien’s story, the Rings are not a means of mastery through fear. From Sauron’s perspective, they were meant to work by desire (especially the desire to preserve something loved), as well as by the power they offer to enhance one’s own capabilities in achieving’s one’s purposes (including by making unseen things seen). Could it be that the writers will change how the Rings will work? I would certainly not put it past them. Could it be that the writers will ignore all the problems created with making Halbrand Sauron, such as those I pointed out in the last review? I would certainly not put it past them. I simply think this line of Halbrand’s is pseudo-wisdom from a show that has dabbled much in pseudo-profundity and not a thinly veiled hint that Halbrand is actually Sauron. I am not yet convinced that this speculation is accurate. But if it is and that is made clear by the end of this season, you better believe that I will be there to talk about all the ways this ruins Sauron’s character. At least, I cannot imagine a way that they can make that revelation work well with everything we have seen either from Tolkien’s work or from the show itself.
[Update after the season finale: Rather than retract this claim that I was wrong about, since Halbrand is Sauron, I want it to be on record that I was wrong. I want it to be on record that I gave these writers the slightest benefit of the doubt about this major mystery of theirs and I was wrong. I want it to be on record that these writers cannot be trusted, even when given this slightest benefit of the doubt. This is one major reason why I will not be returning for season 2.]
Eighth, for all intents and purposes, this whole exchange, and especially the central lines about fear, are yet more filler apropos of nothing. What makes me say that? To start with, unless Galadriel is less intelligent than this show has made her already, I cannot see how she could be convinced of the idea that she is in prison because she has failed to learn what the queen and the other Númenóreans fear most. That is, of course, only the first step in what Halbrand says, as she has not offered any way to overcome said fear either. She is here because of how utterly disrespectful and openly seditious she was towards the queen. She is not here because she has failed to persuade; she is here because she has been acting a fool. If this was more of a direct consequence of her failure to persuade, his line would at least seem more appropriate as advice. Furthermore, she does not succeed in her endeavor by the end of the episode because she has identified the fear and provided a way to master it. In fact, the actions she takes immediately after this conversation have precisely nothing to do with identifying fear or giving the queen/the Númenóreans the means to master it. The scene that is even conceivably related to such an idea happens by coincidence, not Galadriel’s intention.
Ninth, it is actually because of how Galadriel is written, not because of what Halbrand was actually saying, that she thinks he was talking about why she is in jail, which means that he has completely misdiagnosed why she is in jail. Halbrand was actually talking about how to be more successful in her attempts at persuasion. His idea has problems, as already noted, but he could have just said that she missed his point. But when she asks if he thinks, by his standards, she is in the cell because she has yet to identify what the queen fears most, he affirms her. He should have said she misunderstood him, since he was talking about why she has not succeeded. Instead, the script needs him to tell her that she is right anyway.
Tenth, remarkably, even with all of the leading Halbrand does, Galadriel requires multiple attempts to remember why she has been thrown in jail. It is funny how selectively bad Elven memory can be. It happened just earlier that day. But she had trouble remembering the thing that happened immediately before she was sent to jail.
Eleventh, after Halbrand’s second reference to her as “galloping,” she insists, “Cease comparing me to a horse.” But why though? You must be aware of how common it is for people to be compared with animals and even in inanimate objects in some respect. And it is not exactly a disrespectful comparison. Don’t you like horses? The whole horseback riding sequence in the previous episode was the only time you have shown a toothy grin in this series to date. This isn’t even like that exchange in A Knight’s Tale when William tries to speak romantically to Jocelyn and clumsily says, “Your beauty will be reflected in the strength of my arm and the flanks of my horse.” He was trying to say she was his inspiration and that he would win his jousting tournament for her, but the linkage to his horse ended up particularly unflattering to her. Here, it is simply in terms of galloping that she is compared to a horse. But in terms of unflattering description, didn’t she compare Elrond, a supposedly longtime friend, to an Orc? But she is so sacrosanct that she cannot stand being compared even to an animal she likes?
Twelfth, Halbrand responds to this line with, “Cease trying to convince me to leave this island and you have a deal.” What an utterly ineffectual and misaimed reply. It is apropos of nothing in the foregoing conversation. It harkens back to the last episode, but it does not fit this context. He has just told her about how to achieve her purpose, a purpose he knows includes bringing him with her to the Southlands. His own dialogue is at cross purposes. It is also overshooting his target, as he is asking for something much more in return from her than she would receive from him. I guess he thinks it’s a bold strategy. Too bad it won’t pay off for him.
Now after all of that foolishness, Pharazôn comes in. He is escorted by four guards and says that the queen has reached a decision. Galadriel is to be sent back to the Elves under armed escort tonight. Galadriel got what she wanted in the first place, but now she doesn’t want it anymore, so you better believe she is going to cause problems. And from all that we can tell, there is no subterfuge in this, no deceit, and no conspiracy. She is not resisting a plot by Pharazôn or the queen. She just wants something else than she stated before everyone the first time, and that is why she makes everyone else’s lives more difficult. She will not leave until she can speak to the manager … I mean the king.
In fact, Galadriel proceeds to effortlessly fight off all four guards and pushes them into her cell while Pharazôn stands on the sidelines, sword half-drawn. Halbrand convinces him to stay out of it, particularly since he can tell Pharazôn where she’s going (because it is obvious to him and to us). This exchange is so important that the camera focuses on it, rather than the action in the scene. Obviously, the choreography must have been so awesome that it could not be beheld by mortal eyes like ours. It was certainly not such an obviously trash fight that drawing the camera’s attention would only expose how bad it was. How dare you even suggest such a thing? It is not as if we get nonsense from what we can see of the action—like the prison door that opens outward and clearly closes reopening for no apparent reason after it was clearly closed in order for Galadriel to push all the guards in her cell—right?
The Island of Confusion
After a meaningless interlude with Isildur and Eärien, which might as well have been a loading screen (it does nothing to advance their stories, but it does remind us that they, too, are in this episode), we are back with Galadriel. Having, apparently, identified the queen’s greatest fear in the previous scene (at least according to the dialogue with Halbrand), is Galadriel now on a mission to give her the means to master it? Nope. She is here to see the manager … I mean the king. Even though he is not on the throne, she thinks he can still do something.
Now how does she get to the king? Don’t know. The showrunners don’t care. We do not need to see how she climbed up this tall tower from the outside. We do not need to know what equipment she used or how she acquired it. We can only assume she once again used her Assassin’s Creed urban exploration skills or her previously unmentioned spider-Elf powers. Nor do we need to see how she broke through a glass window and metal lattice (we see the other windows have similar lattice patterns), presumably with her bare hands. We do not need to know how all of this happened. The writers need her there, so here she is. That is all you need to know. And it turns out that Míriel is there already, so this was all for naught. Fortunately for Galadriel, the queen is now amenable to talking with her.
Also, for some reason that is never explained, the queen is trying to keep secret how much Tar-Palantir’s health has declined. Is it just a matter of privacy? Otherwise, what does it matter politically? He is not on the throne anymore. He can make no commands. It does not affect her situation as queen whether or not he is in poor health. It will simply mean that the day when she can drop “regent” from her title is closer at hand. And why would she care if Galadriel, specifically, knows? Númenóreans in general look on her with contempt. She would not have their ear. Why would anyone listen to her?
But anyway, Míriel has a heart-to-heart with Galadriel. Here, the script is at least accurate to say that Tar-Palantir was insistent on Númenor’s repentance and that there was rebellion. It is not possible to fit with the rest of the timeline outside of Númenor, but we have already gone over how the damage has been irreparably done. Let it never be said that I do not recognize when this show is consistent with the lore, even in limited ways.
Of course, where the show diverges is in claiming that there was some dramatic escalation with an announcement of plans to renew relations with the Elves. Furthermore, in making such a claim, the show has not even begun to explain why relations were broken with the Elves or why such an intense hatred for the Elves developed that there would be such a rebellion at the mere suggestion of renewed relations with them. This is why the order in which you present information is important. The audience has been given no context for any of this. They just know that Elves used to be welcomed on this island and now they are not anymore. Because nothing has been said about the fundamental conflict in the heart of Númenor and what brought it about, no reason is given for such severe reactions and events.
Míriel was not chosen to rule in his stead. She was supposed to succeed him after his death, but, as we noted previously, Pharazôn had other plans. This explanation for why she is queen also poses some problems. First, why was his daughter chosen and not someone else from the noble line? That person could then have married Míriel to further secure his power … a little bit like what actually happened in Tolkien’s story. You would think that, if there is such a strong prejudice against Elves in this kingdom, the people would want to avoid the liability presented by installing the daughter of an Elf-friend on the throne in his stead. Second, it makes sense within Tolkien’s story why her name would be Tar-Míriel, as this is an Elvish name, and she was following after her father in observing the ancient tradition (rather than the more recent one) of adopting a title in Quenya following “Tar-” (generally meaning “high”), though she never really had the chance to rule. But in this context, where she is sole ruler and she, at least publicly, has distinctly distanced herself from her father in this regard, why would she take an Elvish title for herself and not a Númenórean/Adûnaic one? She should have the name Ar-Zimraphel in this context, as Ar-Pharazôn would give her that Númenórean name when he took the throne (this is the equivalent of her name in Quenya, as both approximately mean “Jewel-daughter”). Third, except that it is convenient for the plot developing in a particular way for this show, it is never explained why Míriel went along with all of this. She could have resisted and been more loyal to her father, but she never explains her reasons for why she was so weak-willed as to betray him in this way. But we know why. The writers want to contrive a redemption arc, so she needs a backstory to be redeemed from, even if that backstory does not make sense.
After the dust settled on that whole affair, Tar-Palantir apparently brought Míriel to the top of the tower to look into the palantír they have there. The one good thing I can say about the use of it here is that it is more appropriate in size than what we saw in Jackson’s films, where it was a bit too small (at least according to information we have from Unfinished Tales), provided that this is supposed to be one of the smaller ones. But it is supposed to have the appearance of solid black glass or deep black crystal, be utterly smooth (which Jackson’s films did get right), and be practically unbreakable even by great power. But this is neither deep black nor particularly smooth in appearance. In fact, we can see a lot of what look like cracks, and those cracks are even made part of the portrayal of how one gets a vision from the palantír.
Beyond the appearance, some other aspects of the script in this scene introduce problems. Míriel says that there were once seven palantíri and that the other six have been lost or hidden. Only that one was passed to her father. Either the writers got this horribly wrong, or they are going to show the other palantíri later in the series. If they got this horribly wrong, why did they get this wrong? The fact that the Faithful took seven palantíri from Númenor is exceptionally clear from LOTR. You don’t even need to go to the appendices to learn that. Just read chapter 11 of Book III. As in Númenor before, these were the means by which the kings kept in contact with key areas in their kingdom and were able to see vast distances. If they are going to show the others later in the series, why even say that the other six are of unknown whereabouts? Why not just say the other six are scattered throughout the kingdom? Are we not supposed to know there are other cities in Númenor? It serves no purpose to introduce the erroneous statement here, even if they do correct it later on.
When Míriel warns Galadriel about what she is to see, Galadriel says she has touched palantíri before. This is itself not a problem. Tolkien says nothing about this one way or the other and the history of the palantíri before the Eldar brought them as gifts to Númenor is left mysterious. The problem comes with the queen’s nonsensical assertion, “But you have not touched this one.” She could not possibly know that, so what is the line even here for? We cannot confirm she is right, and there is no reason why it would matter if she was. It is only here because it is a foreboding line. And as we have seen already in this episode, the contrivance of foreboding is more important than making the foreboding make sense in the context of the story.
After the silly transition, Galadriel sees a vision that matches what Míriel saw in her dream at the start of the episode. It also ends with her being overcome by the great wave. After Galadriel steps away in shock, Míriel says that she saw the end of Númenor. Galadriel tries to reassure her, “Palantíri show many visions, some that will never come to pass.” Míriel responds, “It has already come to pass. The vision begins with your arrival.”
Before we move on to the rest of the scene, we need to talk about some things here. First, in terms of consistency with Tolkien, this is not how the palantíri work. They were primarily used for communication and for seeing over great distances. They were not fortune-teller balls that actually worked. As for the ability to see the future, there is a brief reference in LOTR to the idea that a solitary palantír could only see “small images of things far off and days remote.” The phrasing is ambiguous and could imply days remote in the past and/or days remote in the future (cf. the end of IV/6), but it does not involve grand visions like this in either case. Its primary association with seeing the future would simply be in terms of knowing the plans of others who similarly communicate mentally using their palantíri. The prophecy of the doom of Númenor came not from the vision of the palantír, but from Tar-Palantir’s capacity for foresight, as he had that name due to his keen vision in being able to see farther than others in both space and time.
Second, also in terms of consistency with Tolkien, there is a problem here in Galadriel’s vision as well as Tar-Míriel’s dream. In both cases, the wind blows the petals of Nimloth into the hall before the wave arrives. But in Tolkien’s work, Ar-Pharazôn’s act of cutting down Nimloth represented the final break of Númenor with its ancient ways, and it was in connection with it that Tar-Palantir prophesied the end of Númenor, for the fortunes of the Kings of Númenor were ultimately bound up with this tree. This was done well before Númenor’s destruction, as it would be sometime after that, and after Sauron installing his cult involving human sacrifices, when Ar-Pharazôn would assemble his navy to invade the Undying Lands. That navy’s invasion would ultimately lead to the change in the fashion of the world, which had as a consequence the destruction of Númenor. Nimloth should not be here in this vision. The writers just wanted it here for the visual of the blowing petals.
Third, concerning Galadriel’s line here, it is obvious that they are trying to mimic the scene of the Mirror of Galadriel from FOTR. Unlike with that mirror, though, we never get any indication from LOTR that the palantír point to any false vision or something that may not come to pass. Sauron used it as a tool of deception for Denethor not because he could produce false visions, but by controlling what Denethor could see, so that by these selective images Denethor’s despair increased. (As for the burning of Minas Tirith in Jackson’s ROTK, this is different from the book, but it is at least conceivable, as that would show the future in terms of Sauron’s plan. It would not be a false vision in that sense.) As Gandalf says, and he would know better than Amazon Galadriel, “The Stones of Seeing do not lie, and not even the Lord of Barad-dûr can make them do so” (V/9). Galadriel’s line is also part of a vain attempt to introduce the idea of the destruction while also giving the possibility that it could be avoided. Since this is a prequel series and it is obvious where the story goes, the introduction of this feigned suspense for the benefit of the audience is pointless. Númenor obviously does not survive into the Third Age. This attempted provision of a way out is completely unnecessary and is only caused by the problems introduced previously with the utter collapse of the chronology and setting the first season this late in Númenor’s history. It’s almost as if they just shouldn’t have done this in the first place.
Fourth, Tar-Míriel’s line illustrates yet another case of how the showrunners have difficulty figuring out when something needs to be shown, when it needs to be said, when both need to happen, and when things need explanation (as well as when something should be skipped altogether, but that is a different matter). Their batting average is remarkably low in all of these respects. In this case, if you had cut out the fluff we have had from this episode, and just added even less than a minute of screentime here, the vision could have featured Galadriel seeing herself arrive in Númenor, a couple other events that have happened since then, and then end with the titanic wave. Otherwise, we have a dissonance between what we are shown—where all that she sees is the wave destroying Númenor—and what we are told. Galadriel’s vision did not begin with her arrival in Númenor. And why would she “enter” the vision at only this point? It is not like she is entering a movie theater where the movie is already playing.
Tar-Míriel notes that the Valar gave this island to her people in a day of virtue and that they can take it away should they turn to the paths of darkness. It would have been better to say “continue” down the path of darkness, since they are already there. But here is where we get what seems to be Galadriel’s attempt to apply Halbrand’s advice in a way that ultimately does not succeed. Having learned what Míriel fears, Galdriel appears to give her the means to master it by … lying. She says, “The virtue you speak of was your ancestors’ loyalty to the Elves.” No, it went rather beyond that. They got the island for their resistance to Morgoth and their friendship with the Eldar was part and parcel of their loyalty to the higher powers who gave them the island in the first place, and to Eru Ilúvatar above them. She is only saying this because she can spin that idea into the Númenóreans doing what she says because she is an Elf. Virtue is doing what she says. After all, she is not speaking of loyalty to some greater Elf cause, as the other Elves are not seeking out Sauron, much less engaging in war with him. She is only talking about showing loyalty to the Elves in terms of showing loyalty to her.
This does not sway Míriel, as she says, “My father believed that. His path nearly destroyed us. That is why tomorrow I will announce that you are gone and this crisis ended.” Although we have lacked crucial depth to the things that have been said, this is a reasonable response given everything we have been told. She should have done it earlier, as we have had no reason for the delay in wanting to get the Elf out of here as soon as possible, if for no other reason than to try to avert the nightmare. And it is what Galadriel wanted in the first place, but now she thinks she needs an army to land with her in the Southlands because of that ludicrous revelation scene in the last episode. Míriel’s fears about Númenor tearing itself apart should she put Númenóreans at risk for the sake of this Elf are justified, and so we can easily understand the course of action she takes. Keep all of this in mind for later.
Galadriel tries another tactic, which could at least indicate a sudden emergence of people skills out of nowhere. It breaks down into two parts that need to be analyzed. One, she tries to appeal to a similarity with the queen, saying, “I know what it is to be the only one who sees, the only one who knows. Perhaps neither of us have to bear that burden alone.” Ah yes, the writers need to remind us how they have contrived this scenario where only Galadriel knows what the story needs her to know. She is that lone wolf baying against the darkness while all other Elves slumber. Why? Because only Galadriel can be so virtuous. And what is it that Míriel knows? Only that Númenor is heading to destruction. She does not know how and why it gets there, nor does she know what to do to avoid it. So what is her burden of knowledge really?
Two, Galadriel says to choose not the path of fear, but of faith, “Stand with me. Let Númenor fight alongside the Elves once more.” The phrasing is clearly borrowing from Haldir’s line in Jackson’s TTT. But it makes no sense to say “once more” when Númenor, as such, has yet to fight alongside the Elves. The Edain did, but that was before Númenor. Also, the contrast of faith and fear sounds nice, but what does its content really consist of, particularly as regards “faith” in this context? The only content that is given is following Galadriel, doing what she wants. The trust is in her. The loyalty is to her. We are given no other indication of what it could mean. The faith is not directed to Eru Ilúvatar and all that is thereby entailed (including maintaining bonds with the Elves); it is ultimately reductive because the writers have not invested any work in even outlining the contents of this “faith.”
Land of Contrivances
Then we cut back to the Southlands. Rowan has made it back with a lot of food, which is absolutely not enough for everyone in the watchtower, but it is better than nothing. Bronwyn asks where Theo is, and the cowardly but smarter Rowan doesn’t know. We then see that Theo has managed to avoid detection all day because not one Orc managed to catch him in the well. In fact, as he climbs out of the well and makes his escape, the whole sequence is contrived just so that no Orcs detect him. He is not particularly good at stealth; the Orcs are just bad at seeing him. One particular aspect of the scene that illustrates this is when he hides in some tall grass from an Orc bearing a torch. But we then see an Orc approaching from the opposite direction with a torch who absolutely should have seen at least his silhouette because Theo was in his line of sight. This is just one of those sequences where the audience is asked to pretend that if something is not on screen, it does not exist. This is all so that we can have another Orc sneak up on him and catch him after the audience is misdirected. The obvious thing for this Orc to do is sound the alarm to say he found the boy. But luckily for Theo and for his Elf savior, the Orc lets nobody know anything.
Oh yes, Arondir is here to make the save for Theo. I guess Adar, who had a scene showing how much he supposedly cared for a dying Orc, did not care in the slightest about the fact that sending Arondir back alone with all of his weapons was going to result in dead Orcs. You would think that sending him back with just a message would be reason to send him back unarmed. Then maybe we could have seen Arondir’s resourcefulness, even if the writers did not follow the more obvious idea of sending him back with an Orc escort to sow dissension among the Men he is trying to protect. Nor did Adar pass along a message to his Orcs not to inhibit Arondir at all (since he needs to carry the message for Adar to the Southlanders). But Adar does not care about anything the writers dictate he does not need to care about (regardless of what earlier scenes would suggest).
This is then followed by a slow-motion chase in the woods. You would think a fast-paced chase scene would be the more exciting option, but Amazon didn’t pay you a lot of money. We need to draw out the runtime and the showrunners want to make absolutely sure that you see Arondir catch the arrow—which is traveling through the air like it is traveling through molasses—in order to shoot it back. We also need to clearly see Bronwyn showing up out of nowhere, somehow divining exactly where her son is. And even though Theo is limping through all of this chase, the Orcs aren’t exactly bearing down on them.
Through it all, Theo, his mom, and his new daddy make it into a clearing, and we now need to pretend that they are saved by the sun. All those Orcs at the edge of the forest are quite clearly not fully protected from the sunlight, there is plenty of exposed skin, but they are not burning. They would surely be extra motivated to push through the pain, considering that they have found what they been digging for (literally). But no, it is just that easy for this trio to get away. It’s a good thing, too, that the Orcs stopped shooting arrows just long enough for us to get this dramatic shot while the three runners are standing completely still instead of continuing to run. Only when they resume running do the Orcs continue to shoot the arrows. Well that was considerate and sporting of them.
Going Back Underground
Then we return to Khazad-dûm, where we have an unnecessary chanting scene. I call it “unnecessary” because of how immediately its function is undermined by what follows. But it does show us an aspect of Dwarf culture related to the resonating we heard about it, yet now it is a chant that functions as a kind of prayer. The other Dwarf women here are suspiciously lacking in beards, or it would be suspicious if it was not already clear that the showrunners do not care about this feature. The chanting itself was … fine. I might have expected something of higher quality and more moving given all the resources Amazon would have had to work with. It is not exactly on the level of chanting like this, which was made without the budget of Amazon. We are told later that the chant is an appeal to the rock for the bodies of the miners to be released with the breath still inside them. But during the chant itself, we see some shaking happening, which is again supposed to give us a sense of foreboding that points to the Balrog, despite the fact that the Balrog does not belong in this period of history as anything but a creature who is remaining dormant.
But as I said before, the chant and all the dramatic force it could have had is curtailed by the fact that Durin comes in immediately after the chant and brief conversation between Disa and Elrond to say that he pulled all of the trapped Dwarves out alive. But the real main function of this scene is to tell us about a conflict Durin had with his father offscreen. They had this big fallout, something that would have been more dramatic than any exchange we have seen onscreen in this episode, Durin III shut down all mining for mithril, and now Durin IV never wants to speak to him again. Like I said before, the showrunners have an abysmal batting average in determining what they should show, what they should tell, when they should do both, and what they should explain. This is yet another example.
This talk of Durin falling out with his father prompts Elrond to talk about his dad. It is finally at this point, halfway through the first season, that the show reveals how Morgoth was actually defeated. Eärendil sailed to Valinor with the help of the light of a Silmaril to appeal to the Valar to join the war and vanquish Morgoth. Because of Eärendil’s deeds, and because of his being half-Elf and half-Man (as was Elwing, as well as Elrond and Elros), he was given a choice as to his fate being with his Elven ancestors or his human ancestors. He chose the Eldar’s fate, but his heart was still with Men in Middle-earth, and since he was not allowed to return to the lands of Middle-earth upon setting foot on the Undying Lands, he was set as a voyager in the skies with the Silmaril bound upon his brow, so that its light might shine upon Middle-earth as a star in the sky. Not mentioned here is how he also participated in the Great Battle/War of Wrath wherein Morgoth was finally defeated, and Eärendil slew the greatest dragon that ever existed: Ancalagon the Black. But that is besides the point. Elrond brings all of this up to say that he worries of how his great father would see him if he looked down upon him, but he would be happy to hear any judgment if it meant he got to have one more conversation with his father. Durin ought to take these words to heart and not waste the time he has not speaking with his father. This was actually a decent scene. It fit with the lore, even of what can be told only from LOTR, there are sensible character dynamics at work here, and we actually get good character work and meaningful conversation. It’s a shame that everything leading up to it had to be so contrived in its placement or unnecessarily compressed, as I have mentioned before, but this part of the scene itself was adequate. More scenes like this would not make the show particularly notable, but they would make it better.
We also get some banter here that is … okay. Disa asks Elrond about how he and Durin met. They give conflicting versions of the story as to how many Hill-Trolls were involved and who saved who. It’s all quite natural and played for comedy. The delivery is fine. As I said before, Durin is probably the best at it from anyone we have seen in the show so far. This is one of the few times where it seems like we are not just being told that Durin and Elrond are friends, but we are actually seeing how they interact as friends. We may yet be a ways off from seeing how they were “like brothers,” but it’s a start.
We then get the scene of Durin IV reconciling with his father. This scene is also okay. But its effectiveness is undermined by the fact that we never saw the falling out scene. We were only told about it. But apart from that undercutting effect, nothing is inherently wrong with this scene. Beyond the reconciliation bit, it is just reiterating the suspicion that exists between the Elves and Dwarves, so now the next step will be for Durin IV to head to Lindon with Elrond to find out more about the Elves’ intention behind all that has been happening. I’m not sure what the point is in keeping such things mysterious, but maybe we will see how they stretch to justify it next time (spoiler: it is worse than I could have imagined).
Wrapping Up the Nonsense in the Southlands
Now that that plotline is wrapped up, we must wrap up the plotline in the Southlands. Of course, we end the pointless suspense from earlier to find out that Adar’s message is “surrender or die.” It is utterly predictable, but the writers wanted to create contrived suspense so as to subvert our expectations by making the thing we expected to happen happen, but only after a long delay. They subverted the idea that there was possibly going to be a subversion of expectations. Also, it’s odd that Arondir and Bronwyn were trying to be surreptitious about their relationship before, but now they are carrying on in the most public place imaginable in this watchtower. Why the change? Who knows? Who cares?
On the other side of this plotline, we learn that Waldreg knows Theo’s secret, since he’s basically a devil-worshipper. He shows his scar that looks like Theo’s, indicating that he used the blade himself. How did he hide that before? The first two episodes he wasn’t even wearing a shirt, so how was he hiding that rather unusual mark on his arm? Perhaps one could argue that he did not need to hide it from fellow villagers, but you would think he would at least want to hide it from Bronwyn, Arondir, and any other Elves that came by. But he took no steps to do that. He is also being remarkably open with this kid when he absolutely does not know that he won’t rat him out. In any event, he claims this blade was fashioned for use by their ancestors by Morgoth’s or Sauron’s own hand. We will see if such a remark actually means anything going forward or if he’s just plain wrong. But one thing we do learn is that he is directing the audience to think that the “star fall” of Asteroid Man is supposed to signify Sauron’s return. Sauron’s obviously been at work much earlier than that, but again it is unclear if the writers are even trying to be accurate with these claims. And if they are just red herrings, what is the point of listening to this guy yapping on? Or did we just need some dialogue to take up some screentime?
We then get one scene that lasts all of a few seconds where Orcs come to tell Adar that the weapon they were looking for is in the tower. What was the point of putting this scene here? We already know he is coming for the tower. He said as much in Arondir’s message. Did we actually need a scene of Orcs making the incredibly long trip to Adar—and who knows how long that took them to traverse the hundreds of miles—just to tell him this, especially if that was all the scene was going to accomplish? But the fact that the writers are reiterating for the audience that Adar was so incredibly far off in the wrong direction for the weapon he was seeking makes him look just a little incompetent, doesn’t it? Honestly, the only way they could have redeemed this quick scene and made it worth watching is if he responded to the news about the blade’s location with, “How were we so far from our target? Who are we? Galadriel?” That would have even provided a direct transition to the next scene. But that bit of comedy is just too much self-awareness for this show.
Galadriel Takes What She Wants
Now, unfortunately, we must return to Amazon Galadriel’s plotline. The Númenóreans give her this fairly elaborate farewell ceremony. They put her in a rowboat to take her to a bigger boat while everyone awkwardly watches. It is curious why they did not just pick some part of the harbor that could handle a larger boat and put her on it directly. Nor is it clear why such a large ship is needed. But all such things will become irrelevant as this ending plays out, as this is all only a feint from the writers.
You see, Galadriel did not succeed in persuading Tar-Míriel. No matter what she said, she could not ultimately assuage the queen’s concerns about how her kingdom would react to her helping this Elf or about if this was what she was supposed to do. What convinces her otherwise is the fact that there is a gust of wind that blows a bunch of petals from Nimloth, which she interprets as a sign that she was not supposed to send Galadriel away alone. It is apparently much worse now than before, even though petals were already falling. But again, some higher power—namely, the writers—must do Galadriel’s job and convince the queen that she was right all along, even when her demands changed.
Tar-Míriel then recites the lines she said to Elendil in the last episode about what the Faithful believe is the meaning of the petals of Nimloth falling. This leads her to say that she has decided to personally escort Galadriel back to Middle-earth to aid the Southlanders. To punctuate this declaration, Galadriel comes in and pulls her hood down just as she enters the chamber. I guess that was for the audience’s benefit? Was it also for our benefit that we skipped over what must have been an awkward scene of Míriel running to the docks to ask Galadriel to come back, followed by the rowers slowly turning back around? And so many people would have seen her by now that the secrecy makes no sense. It makes even less sense when we see what unfolds.
We are told that the ships she is taking with her depart in ten days. Pharazôn even seems fully behind this idea. Maybe he is scheming, but for now, based on what we know, it is a direct contradiction without explanation with what he said to the crowd earlier about not letting Elvish hands take the helm of the kingdom. The ships will be carrying an expeditionary force made up of volunteers. Why did they not first get volunteers from the military, the actual soldiers with experience? Don’t know. But I guess any non-soldiers will get all the training they could need within ten days? Frankly, this seems like a terrible idea in light of everything we have seen and been told about the prejudice of Númenóreans against Elves. It was what made Míriel’s decision to send Galadriel off seem reasonable. But now, instead of even meeting Galadriel halfway to say, “I will send scouts ahead to assess the situation,” she is just going full boar with bringing an army. She does not know what is actually the scene on the ground from any reports; she is just going along with what Galadriel has said. She does not know how many troops they need, nor is there any apparent plan to have a backup force to leave Númenor in a second wave, you know, just in case it turns out you need more troops than initially anticipated. Given what she knows about the people’s prejudice against helping an Elf, she should not expect a large force of volunteers. In fact, given the distrust of Elves and given the last public interaction people saw between Galadriel and Míriel, you would think they would be deeply suspicious that the Elf has cast some spell over Míriel’s mind.
But after all that setup about the Númenóreans and about how these same people rebelled against her father for even proposing renewing relations with the Elves, their collective response is, “Nah, it’ll be fine.” Míriel does not need to face the same consequences as her father, even though nothing has changed from the point of view of the citizenry. What was the point of all the setup then? The general citizenry is incredibly amenable to the idea of going to fight and potentially die to fulfill the purposes of this Elven interloper. They are completely unconcerned about the queen’s change in tone towards Galadriel and the fact that she is aligning her thinking with the Faithful, who are obviously not popular. Instead, everyone and their moms and their dogs volunteer. Apparently, this was the whole reason the writers wanted Isildur and his two friends to be kicked out, so they could volunteer for this expeditionary force. There’s no reason they could not have done that and still been part of the Sea Guard, but whatever. The military is clearly not important here. All that actually matters is that, despite all resistance and all her lack of people skills, Galadriel got her way in the end, even though it took an ending so out of place with the rest of the episode, especially the parts demonstrating the hatred of Elves in Númenor, that it seems like this silliness should have been a dream sequence. But we don’t get to wake up from this one. It is just how we end this episode that lasted 66 minutes and almost 45 seconds pre-credits.
The Mystery Boxes of Power
We are now halfway through this season, and we are left in a spot not all that far from where we started. We have been to plenty of places, but not much has been accomplished for over four hours of a show. All we have are promises of things to come. This means we need to talk about mystery box storytelling at this halfway point of the season.
What is mystery box storytelling? You can look up J. J. Abrams explaining it in a TED Talk, but I have a rather more negative view of it than he does. Mystery boxes by themselves are hardly new, but they are best used in exciting the audience’s imagination about possibilities when the answer does not actually have to do with the focus of the story. Mystery box storytelling is an approach to storytelling, which should not be confused with storytelling in mystery works per se, popularized by Abrams and his company Bad Robot, most famously with Lost and the Star Wars sequels. Lost had the advantage that this show does not of giving us interesting character work and thus multiple good characters to connect with (though certainly not all of them were written well and the writers put too much focus on awful characters). It is an approach in which the storyteller overly relies upon setting up all these mysteries to draw an audience in to figure out what all the mysteries are about, even if the writer has no clear idea of the answers to the mystery or how to unfold the answers to the mystery. It is these mysteries, rather than any other aspect of storytelling, that the writer relies upon for investment to buy time to keep the audience engaged. Ideally, the audience will want to know what is in this mystery box, or the many mystery boxes, the writer has set up. Of course, both the examples I cited, and others, ultimately came up with poor or no resolutions to the mysteries set up.
Where do we see mystery boxes with this series? We had one that was already pointlessly set up and paid off with mithril being kept a secret in one episode and then revealed to no one’s surprise in the next installment of the plotline. Though here, of course, the mystery “box” was more literal. Who is Asteroid Man? Mystery box. Who is Adar? Mystery box. What is the deal with the sword of evil? Mystery box. What are the purposes of Gil-galad and Celebrimbor? Mystery box. Why does Isildur hear voices that are not just in his head? Mystery box. What is the deal with Anárion? Mystery box. Who is Sauron? Mystery box. And there are still more. I am confident more will be added.
Even though most storytellers across the span of the ages have not used mystery box storytelling because they had other, more competent means of keeping audiences engaged with their stories, it is an approach that is especially attractive to people hired to produce “content,” not good stories, by big corporations like Disney and Amazon. The mystery box is an illusion to buy your time and your confidence to get you invested to help the producers make money while they drag on a story with the promise of a compelling resolution to match the interest invested in the mystery. The mystery box is a trick to make you think that there is a grand plan in place, and that you need to join in to see the plan unfold in all its glory, that the ending it is leading you to will be worth all the wait. The mystery box is a diversion that allows for regular deferrals on the promised recompense on your time, attention, and interest until some promised endpoint where everything will eventually make sense if you just keep watching/listening/reading. In the meantime, the approach hopes to excite your imagination about possibilities, so that you end up thinking of better material than they have any plans to write (in fact, Abrams says the primary appeal of this mystery box approach is the “infinite possibilities,” not the actuality, the imagination of what could be and not the reality of what is). The whole mystery box approach ceases to be effective, though, when you, the audience, realize that the storytellers are not owed your trust that they will make these payoffs in a narratively satisfying way. They are not owed your time to see if they are true to their promises. They need to earn such things, rather than engage in the long con. And that will mean putting in the work to get you invested from the start with competent storytelling, engaging worldbuilding, engrossing plot, and interesting, compelling characters, rather than mere promises that these aspects will eventually get good. I am only watching because I have obligated myself to watching this first season for the purposes of review, and I am highly doubtful that they will do anything to maintain my obligation beyond this season. They have done nothing so far to earn my investment of time.
But ROP is an especially baffling example of mystery box storytelling. What is the point of all this mystery in a prequel show? If you know where the story needs to end up beforehand, the extraneous mysteries just waste time. Otherwise, if they deviate from where the story needs to go, then they are only further ruining continuity with the material that they are part of the work of adapting. The writers would be cutting the branch on which they are sitting, since the show would not have been worth the massive investment of money if not for its connection to a preexisting story that gave you an audience that you did not build up. No matter which way you slice it, it is not worth having mystery boxes in a prequel story.