Few shortcuts to horror are as good as depictions of eye injuries, a film device that goes back to the opening moments of Un Chien Andalou (and probably before). Want to make audiences squirm? Threaten a character’s eye with something sharp. This episode of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power features an excruciating (but effective) sequence that finds Arondir locked in battle with an orc who brings his blade this close to the elf hero’s eye (and loses his own in the process). Veteran TV director Charlotte Brändström — who’s responsible for quite a few memorable images in this outing — stages it for maximum squickiness, but much of the episode is staged that way, if less intensely. Consisting almost entirely of a battle between orcs and humans (with a stray elf here and there) that plays out over several days, it doesn’t skimp on the carnage or gloss over the ugliness of battle. Our heroes all survive — though the final moments raise some questions — but the show features both brutal depictions of civilian casualties and a long scene in which Bronwyn, a healer, cannot heal herself.
The episode’s clearest precedent is the siege of Helm’s Deep, a central part of The Two Towers (both book and film). But The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power puts its own spin on the multitude-of-orcs-fighting-a-handful-of-humans trope, with the presumed Helm’s Deep stand-in getting destroyed in the opening moments and a fakeout where it’s actually humans fighting, humans rather than orcs, for a good chunk of the battle.
Before any fighting starts, however, Adar pauses to plant a seed in the name of “new life … in defiance of death.†This, we’ll later learn, is a prebattle elvish tradition, and though Adar has strayed from elvish ways in other respects, this is one he keeps alive. That may be partly because he doesn’t see himself from straying from elvish ways, at least not in some important respects. He’s not above committing wartime atrocities, but he does so in the name of his “children,†the orcs who adore him.
It’s worth remembering that as those orcs turn into seemingly mindless hordes, and especially worth remembering it in this episode’s final act. But first: the fighting.
After Adar has a Henry V moment in delivering an inspirational speech, his forces hit the tower where the villagers have holed up only to find it empty. Or at least mostly empty. After Adar spots the shrine to Sauron, No. 1 Sauron fan Waldreg asks about the big guy but doesn’t get much of an answer before the fighting breaks out. Arondir’s around to snipe a few with arrows and launch some devastating booby traps that destroy the tower and take out a lot of orcs in the process. (Think Home Alone but with more bodies crushed by bricks.) The day is saved!
Except it’s not, and both Arondir and the villagers know this. They flee back to the village and prepare for the next stage of battle.
Meanwhile, out on the ocean, Isildur makes friends with Galadriel, who admires his eagerness and his love of “the real Númenor,†which Galadriel assures him really existed and exists still “if only in the heart of the lowliest stable sweep.†When she learns his name, she connects it to his father. These two seem destined to have a history together, one that may involve solving the mystery of Isildur’s mother’s death beyond Elendil’s terse “She drowned.â€
But that history will have to wait. First, they have to travel upriver to reach the Southlands, where trouble is once again brewing. Arondir can’t destroy the hilt of Sauron’s sword, and the villagers have to rush to prepare for the coming battle, boarding up tunnels and sharpening tools and weapons (and tools that will have to double as weapons). To win, they’ll have to engage in guerrilla warfare and find other ways to beat the odds. Meanwhile, women, children, and the aged are to wait out the battle in the “keep†(a.k.a. the tavern). After Arondir gets his own Henry V moment, they’re ready to fight. But not Theo — he’s charged with “protecting†the women and children in the keep.
First, however, he asks his mother to repeat an inspirational speech of his own, including the advice that if you “find the light, the shadow will not find you.†But is this true? The action that follows doesn’t really bear it out (sure seems like the shadow found them!), and it’s not clear if The Rings of Power is interested in interrogating these sorts of sentiments or just using them for dramatic effect. Whatever the case, Bronwyn soon has other matters on her mind. After a moment alone with Arondir in which he also plants some prebattle seeds, she hears him say he’ll stay with her and Theo, and — in a moment that could have been punted for several seasons of will they, won’t they tension — they kiss.
When the battle arrives, The Rings of Power immediately signals how ugly it’s going to be with a shot of an orc slitting the throat of a female villager. This won’t be easy, and there will be losses, even if the villagers have some clever tricks up their sleeves, like burning carts and rooftop archery ambushes. The battle goes on for quite a while, and it’s all splendidly staged. Peter Jackson’s Helm’s Deep sequence sets an impossibly high bar for faux-medieval orcs-vs.-humans battle scenes, but this is quite impressive.
It also includes a disturbing twist at its conclusion: Some of the foes aren’t orcs at all but fellow villagers, turned into cannon fodder by Adar to fight their own kind. Then, with little warning, the battle starts up again, sending everyone to the tavern for shelter, including a badly wounded Bronwyn, who receives some anesthesia-free cauterization to save her life.
In the tavern, they become a captive audience for Adar, who takes to killing hostages in pursuit of Sauron’s hilt. It’s another instance of The Rings of Power not shying away from the ugliness of warfare in this episode. No deaths come to characters we know well, but they’re not anonymous digital figures seen from a distance. How long this could have gone on is anybody’s guess. Before too many perish, Theo gives up the hilt to Adar.
When the forces of Númenor arrive, however, it becomes a disaster delayed rather than averted. Led by Galadriel, they swoop in and put an end to the nonsense. (And again the series does a terrific job with the action.) As the battle draws to a close, Galadriel chases down Adar, who’s escaping on horseback with the hilt. He might have gotten away with it if it weren’t for a meddling Halbrand, who soon reveals he has a personal grudge against Adar when he asks, “Do you remember me?â€
He doesn’t. Whatever he has done to Halbrand — and whoever he has taken from him, be it wife, child, or another figure — Adar doesn’t remember. He wants vengeance, and only Galadriel’s plea stays his hand. Soon, however, the roles will be reversed.
When Galadriel interrogates Adar, she confirms that he’s one of the first corrupted elves that formed the basis of the orc race. (Perhaps the series will get into this in more detail later, but in Tolkien’s writings, the coming of orcs dates back to the conflict with Melkor, who captured elves and twisted them to his own purposes, a practice continued by Sauron. In Jackson’s films, Saruman describes orcs as “tortured and mutilated, a terrible, ruined form of life.â€) “We prefer ‘Uruk,’†Adar says to Galadriel. He also tells her a tale of Sauron’s quest for power, one that hit some snags. “Something was missing,†Adar tells her. “The shadow of dark knowledge that kept itself hidden even from him.†Tired of watching Sauron sacrifice Adar’s “children,†he killed him.
This raises a lot of questions the episode doesn’t answer about what happened to Sauron, who we know will return at some point. (He can’t really be dead, but is Adar lying or does he think he killed Sauron?) The sequence brings up another issue: Is Galadriel the Middle-earth equivalent of a racist? She talks about brutally eliminating the orcs under Adar’s command and making him watch. It’s not clear how direct a parallel The Rings of Power wants to draw. In Tolkien’s work, the orcs don’t have a lot of moral shading. Nor do they here, but when Adar says they’re “as worthy as the breath of life and just as worthy of a home,†then tells Galadriel, “I see I’m not the only elf alive who’s been transformed by darkness,†it’s hard not to ponder the question a bit.
It’s easier to ponder, of course, when the world isn’t falling apart. In a triumphant moment, Halbrand reveals himself as the Southlands’ true king, but the moment doesn’t last long. Theo confesses to Arondir that he’s still drawn to the darkness of the hilt, and Arondir counters that he should give it to the Númenóreans and let them sink it to the bottom of the ocean.
Unfortunately, he can’t.
Theo doesn’t have the hilt after all. Waldreg has taken it, and believing that Sauron alone can fix things, he attempts to make Middle-earth great again by using the hilt as a key at the Sauron shrine. This has almost immediate and catastrophic consequences: a flood, tremors, and a volcanic explosion that appears to consume Galadriel. And on that cliffhanger-y note, the episode ends.
Mithril Links
• Moment for moment, this is the most exciting episode of The Rings of Power we’ve seen, perhaps in part because it’s so narrowly focused. Aside from one shipboard scene and a shot of the Númenórean army racing in, it’s tightly focused on the villagers and their plight and nicely balances character moments with impressive battle scenes. I’ve enjoyed every episode, but this one confirmed that the show’s attempt to do Tolkien on TV can be sustained and do more than just fill some narrative gaps the author left behind.
• Circling back, is the show attempting to create a more morally sticky universe than other Tolkien adaptations have done? Adar is evil and has done horrible things, but he does have a point. He also seems to care about his orc followers, even if he’s not above sending them into battle. (It helps that he can put humans on the front lines.)
• Did we just see the formation of Mount Doom? It certainly appears so. If true, it’s worth remembering that this is, of course, where the One Ring is destroyed. But it’s also where that ring was forged, an event the series seems to be setting us up to witness.
• So what exactly is Halbrand king of? The extent of his kingdom remains a little vague (and will doubtless be changed by the geographic shifts of this episode). And what exactly is “the real Númenor�
• Another question: Will we learn what happens in the next episode, or will we be catching up with other characters?