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More of the Rings of Power Reviews I Wrote During Season 2

More of the Rings of Power Reviews I Wrote During Season 2

Last updated on: October 6, 2024 at 3:53 pm by Jennifer Woodruff Tait

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More of the Rings of Power Reviews I Wrote During Season 2 2024-10-05T16:38:32-05:00 Jennifer Woodruff Tait

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Three: The Eagle and the Sceptre

-I thought Episode 2 was better than Episode 1 and I thought this episode was about as good as 2. Generally overall, the dialogue is better than last season and the pacing feels more suspenseful.

-No Plot Hole announcements from Edwin except he’s still annoyed about the Numénoréan military expedition to Middle-earth last season. This season and especially this episode we can see how it got all the chess pieces where they needed to go, but he feels like the seams of Because Plot are really showing.

-I am kind of tired of each episode starting out with something that makes me have to cover my eyes. Do we really need this many spiders no thank you.

-I like Isildur better this season. This is someone who will later be known as one of the greatest (albeit flawed) heroes of Middle-earth and most famous ancestors of Aragorn, and we’re beginning to get his arc going there. I liked the conversation with Estrid about his mom. (So did the kids. Edwin thought it was cheesy.)

-I also feel like Estrid has promise as a character. (She does however look so like the actress who plays Egwene in the Wheel of Time series that I kept expecting her to start channelling.)

-I apologize for not missing Arondír; he was actually quite good in this episode.

-I can’t quite put my finger on where they’re going with Theo. I’ve still got him in the “will go bad eventually and become someone we know” column but am not sure.

-Durin IV and Dísa continue to be perfect. Also, Durin IV really parallels Elrond in his reaction to the choices the other characters are making about the rings. I like that, given their bromance, and hope it’s intentional that they are being set up together as the folks who will continue to have reservations.

-Narvi is back!

-Don’t we all know a Celebrimbor. All you have to do is start fooling them and they fool themselves just to keep you happy. (I realize that sentence sounds like I’m Sauron lol.)

-Poor Míriel, but oh my goodness, her coronation dress. (And we all hollered out, which will make more sense once you’ve seen the episode, “She’s wearing white, but HE’S wearing red.”)

-In reference to a discussion from last episode’s post, I do not think the palantíri are being presented as actually evil. I think they are being presented as mysterious and Elvish, and because of that, the use of one by Míriel and her father is being used by some of the shadier Numénoréans to cast suspicion on Míriel. The only person who actually says the stone is evil is someone the episode has _already_ given us reason not to trust. Yeah, ok, the stone does try to zap Elendil, but we know from Aragorn centuries later that the stones were only meant to be used by the royal house. That’s why Aragorn’s right to the stone is enough to win it back from Sauron even though Sauron is a Maia and Aragorn is mortal. So I’m fully prepared to believe that it has some kind of safety mechanism that kicks in if anyone other than Míriel or her dad touches it,* which the Black Numénoréans – I’m just going to start calling them that – then are ready to suggest means something nefarious; and their audience is a populace, remember, which is already primed not to trust Elves. Míriel was already keeping her respect for the Elves secret last season.

-The consensus at this house is that the eagle was a real messenger of the Valar but that its message was deliberately misunderstood, or mis-guided for others to misunderstand, by the Black Numénoréans.

-I understand why they wanted to change Charlie Vickers’ hair when he transformed, but they should have changed it to something else. It is the stupidest wig in a show that is otherwise doing really well with characters’ hair. (Especially since Halbrand’s Viggo Mortenson hair did half the work of making us trust him last season.)

More, please, on Thursday.

*Yes, Elendil is going to become Numénoréan royalty, but he isn’t yet.

Four: Eldest

-As a whole, it was more uneven than the first three, and I really felt like a couple things were filmed on soundstages. That being said, some of the most Tolkienesque moments of the entire show were also in this episode.

-I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Tom Bombadil appears in the episode, since he was all over social media. I loved him. Like the dwarves, I feel that everything about him that was important in the book was captured on screen, including his humor, without him feeling at all silly or goofy. Some of the dialogue here came directly from Tolkien and was very effective. His song, heard in snippets throughout and in full over the closing credits, was beautiful. “Goat farmer humming” was the funniest piece of closed captioning ever. Yes, his boots are yellow.

-I did NOT like the fact that Tom referred to the Dark Wizard as an Istar (said wizard has so far not referred to himself as one), because that means they may be trying to pull the Saruman card, which I am profoundly against. I am hoping against hope for a Blue Wizard at this point.

-I also did NOT like the foe that Galadriel and Elrond bump into on their way to Eregion. It was derivative of the movies (even though this particular thing doesn’t appear in the movies) and unnecessary. So much about the trip was great, including the complex nature of the beef between Galadriel and Elrond layered against their deep friendship (and the actors are doing amazingly with that), and especially including the last thing Elrond says in the episode, but the foe that they fight was just stupid.

– I actually also feel like there was a Plot Hole right at the end of the elven trip sequence (that I can talk more about in the comments because everything about it is a spoiler.)

-Continue to be firmly in the “Theo as King of the Dead” camp. Some pieces of dialogue in this episode really tending that way.

-Like Estrid. Think she has great chemistry with Isildur. Please stop using clichéd tropes to ship them thank you.

-Yes, Isildur, we get it, you can make the ancient Numénoréan architecture work.

-Arondir was great in this. I hate to say it but I think he works better as a character when not interacting with Bronwyn because last season he was mostly just mopey about her. In this he got to be badass and interesting, and the script and cinematography nicely played up the difference between Elves and Men that you can see between him and Isildur.

-Arondir also has a conversation with two beings in this episode that was just beautiful. One of the “that has the spirit of Tolkien” moments I appreciated the most.

-The word “Sûzat” is a total Easter egg. The conversation in which that word occurs was one of the high points of the Nori and Poppy sequence of events (which, by and large, had some of the silliest dialogue in the episode, and then suddenly got absolutely magical.)

-Last line of the episode was a winner. One of the big Plot Holes Tolkien left himself was the theological status of the orcs. Whenever this show actually goes there, it has something really interesting to say.

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

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