I was unimpressed with last week’s episode of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. So little happened that I was forced to consider bigger-picture questions about the show, such as my confidence in its ultimate direction. And things were not looking good. About what we were going to see this week, I predicted that “the plight of the men in the Southlands seems a haphazardly constructed pathway toward the sort of orc siege of a redoubt of men that we have seen before.”
Boy was I wrong about that. The obvious story of an orc siege of a redoubt of men was literally destroyed in just the opening minutes. What we got instead was an unconventional, gripping, and brutal series of fight scenes, cleverly done and with lots and lots of blood. My expectations were thoroughly defied. It helped that, at last, we got the convergence of two of the major storylines of the show so far, as the Númenoreans rescued the Southlanders in classic eucatastrophic fashion. They did not come in time to prevent all of the carnage and loss, however. Nor was Númenorean heroism presented as purely triumphant; one young fighter said the effort was, for him, enough fighting for a lifetime. Moreover, what at first seemed like a kind of season finale, with a major threat being apparently vanquished, was seriously undercut by the forced eruption of a certain volcano, placing many of the show’s main characters in serious peril.
This week’s events also added complexity to several of the show’s main players. The way Galadriel’s quest for vengeance may be corrupting her, alluded to in last week’s episode (one of its few interesting elements), became more evident this week. A striking, wordless sequence, as she watched helplessly while realizing that her actions had placed so many in direct danger, drove this home. As did a fascinating (and lore-rich) conversation with the mysterious Adar (Joseph Mawle). Revealed as one of the first orcs, a race corrupted by Melkor himself, Adar nonetheless accused Galadriel of having been corrupted herself by her obsession with revenge. Adar’s mix of plausible contentions with outright lies (that he nonetheless seems genuinely to believe) made him a truly unsettling and threatening antagonist in a way he hadn’t quite yet proven to be; we haven’t seen the last of him. Halbrand also seems to have some kind of bitterness toward him, a bitterness that forced out of Halbrand yet again a darker side whose true nature is still a mystery.
On the whole, this episode seemed almost designed to reassure wavering skeptics like me. But it should also rebuff other criticisms. Galadriel may have her heroic moments and has driven much of the story, but she is no Mary Sue; she is clearly flawed and has made many mistakes. References to such deep-lore concepts as the Secret Fire were welcome; even the way Adar tried to advance orcs (“uruks,” as he prefers) as creatures worthy of respect takes interesting advantage of ambiguity in Tolkien’s own thought about the nature of orcs as a race.
Still, it remains to be seen whether Rings of Power can stick the landing this season. Only two episodes remain for both the gigantic implications of this week’s events to be explored and for this season’s other stories (involving harfoots and intrigue between elves and dwarves) to be concluded satisfactorily; these were entirely absent this week. But after this episode, my confidence in the show’s ability to do these things has been considerably restored.