THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER “Shadow and Flame”

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Season two of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power wrapped itself up with an eventful (and surprisingly brief, at only slightly more than an hour) finale that could have used a little more room to breathe, evincing all of the pacing issues with the show and underlining its main problem: it’s trying to do too much.

But we can’t take anything away from that opening sequence, as King Durin meets his fate and Durin’s Bane earns its nickname. There are all kinds of reasons to be annoyed by this from a purist’s perspective, but honestly, seeing Khazad-dûm at the height of its glory has been worth the price of admission, which in this case means the show once again screwing around mightily with the timeline in order to remind you of one of the most iconic scenes from the original film trilogy. If you rolled your eyes when the Balrog’s whip caught Durin’s leg, just be thankful we didn’t get some variation on “You shall not pass!” Instead, we got a heartfelt scene between a father and a son, and while some of the speechifying has been a little heavy handed and the various ways they go back and forth a little bit tedious, this was an earned emotional moment. It helped having Peter Mullan play it; probably the best actor to portray a Tolkien dwarf since John Rhys-Davies. Durin takes off his ring before meeting his fate and we’re not really sure how we’re supposed to take that. If he realized the ring was bad, why not go to his death wearing it? Why leave it behind with the implication that it’s part of his son’s inheritance?

In Rhûn, fucking Gandalf (ugh) wanders the ruins of the Stoor village, which has apparently been ransacked by the Gaudrim off-camera. We realize that many viewers consider this whole storyline a waste of time, but it might help it to feel more integrated if the storytelling on this one arc wasn’t so disjointed. Not-Yet-Gandalf finally comes face to face with the Dark Wizard and the whole conversation is annoyingly obtuse in the way that no one will come right out and say what their name is, even when NY-Gandalf outright asked or when someone uses the sobriquet “Dark Wizard” and he gets all petulant about it. Anyway, the Dark Wizard produces an unharmed Nori and Poppy and kills one of the Gaudrim for being too threatening with them, which mirrors something Sauron will do later in the episode when he kills the loyal orc soldier Glug right after he swore allegiance to him. He calls Gandalf “old friend” and says that five Istari came to the world in order to combat Sauron. It was our hope that these two characters would be the Blue Wizards of Tolkien’s legendarium, not least because they’re wide-open characters whose stories are untold and fates unknown. Failing that, we were holding out some hope that if the Stranger really was Gandalf, then Gandalf himself was one of the Blue Wizards and for some reason not yet revealed, either doesn’t acknowledge it in the Third Age or doesn’t remember going by a different name. But the DW made a point of mentioning five wizards, which means at least one of the Blue Wizards is unaccounted for, and that’s assuming that DW is the other one. We really hope he doesn’t turn out to be Saruman. A rather bold Poppy calls him out for blithely killing a man right in front of them and he mocks the idea of having pity for those who would harm them, warning that “Pity will not defeat Sauron.” This show can be annoying about the way it screws with the mythos or the ways it relies too much on connections to the films, but one of its most important saving graces is that the creators do show a deep understanding of Tolkien’s ideas and themes. Pity did, of course, defeat Sauron, as Gandalf would later recount to Frodo that it was Bilbo’s pity of him that kept him from killing Gollum, who would eventually go on to be instrumental in the destruction of the ring, which would defeat Sauron once and for all. The DW tells Gandalf that if he follows him, they can both defeat Sauron and become his successors. The Stranger replies that he’d rather wander the desert nameless and forgotten than follow him. The DW has a hissy fit and blows up some rocks, destroying the village even further and killing a couple of Stoors along the way until Gandalf uses his Jedi powers to protect the village. When the dust clears, he sees the stars he’s been looking for overhead. Destiny: UNLOCKED.

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In Númenor, Earien summons the faithful to the king’s throne room, where it is announced that Miriel was able to escape the sea worm because she’s allied with Sauron. We’re not entirely sure what Pharazon saw in the Palantir. There was a flash of Halbrand, but it’s hard to tell from the dialogue whether he knows Sauron had already been to Númenor and stayed there as a guest of the Queen Regent, which does sound pretty damning when you put it that way. As always with Númenor, things shift rapidly and countless unnamed characters are put in danger because the people are led to believe a different outrageous thing every other day and seem to blindly go along with it. Soldiers start rounding up the faithful all over the city and Earien, suddenly realizing she backed the wrong team, runs off to warn her father. The blossoms from the white tree blanket the city in response. Last season, Miriel called them the tears of the Valar. Instead of leaving the city immediately, Elendil runs to Miriel (how he got into the palace is not explained) and makes plans to take her with him. She says that her place is in the city (Why?) and gives him Narsil and tells him to reclaim his lordship. This is, of course, the sword that will ultimately de-ring Sauron and will eventually be reforged as Anduril and bestowed upon Elendil’s descendent, Aragorn. The scene of Elendil unsheathing it calls back to an extremely similar scene in The Return of the King, but this struck us as a necessary callback. Not everyone remembers the original name of Aragorn’s sword, after all.

We return to Eregion, which is truly besieged and overrun with orcs. There’s a fairly impressive “one-shot” (that was patched together from several shots nearly seamlessly) showing the devastation and landing on Galadriel plunging a sword into every orc she encounters as she leads some of the citizens to safety. She takes them through some old dwarf tunnels that lead outside the city, where they are immediately beset by more orcs. She tells them to take her to Adar and when asked for a reason why, she pulls out the rings and says “I’ll give you nine,” which is such an incredibly dumb thing for her to do. Fortunately, the orc wasn’t smart enough to realize he could just kill her and take the rings for himself, so he follows her order. Inside Celebrimbor’s forge, Sauron is fully mask-off as he tortures the devastated elf nearly to death, piercing him with half a dozen arrows in order to reveal where the nine rings are. Celebrimbor is defiant until the end, managing to get in several really good shots at the dark lord, not least of which is calling him “Shadow of Morgoth,” hitting him where it hurts by calling him a lesser version of a greater dark lord. He also hits him with some good old-fashioned elven prophecy and announces that he will never be the master of the rings, but instead their prisoner, with one of them being the total ruin of him. Charles Edwards is absolutely wonderful in this scene; defiant and taunting, even as Sauron tortures him, even after being gored by a spear. The show is really losing something with the death of his character. Sauron sheds a tear, not at Celebrimbor’s passing, but his prophecy. Glug and a bunch of orcs come in tentatively and ask him if he’s Sauron. In response, Sauron asks him his name and addresses him as Uruk. Ever the deceiver, capable of giving someone exactly what they want most. In Glug’s case, it was recognition.

In Pelargir, Isildur is packed and ready to leave on the Númenorean ships which have just appeared and once again, we feel like a scene or two went missing in this story arc. He has a nice scene with Theo in which they bond over the respective deaths of their mothers. Theo was always one of the least interesting, most annoying of the new characters in this show, but we genuinely like his interactions with Isildur. Estrid stops by to basically announce that she’s in love with him, even though her fiancé has started building a new home for her. They finally kiss. Estrid is another new addition we don’t mind. They invested a lot of time in the Bronwyn storyline last season and when the actress opted not to come back, the show was in danger of losing a connection with the “low men.” Kemen disembarks and it would appear that they’ve finally done enough work to make him a worthy villain for the show, because we groaned and said “I hate that guy” as soon as he appeared. Like the best Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon villains, every time he shows up, we find ourselves wondering how painful and horrible his death will be. At some point, the show is going to have to find nine male human characters to give rings to and there’s a part of us that would love seeing the life get sucked out of this one as he gets turned into a Nazgul. Anyway, he covers his shock at seeing Isildur, but the mask of friendship slips almost immediately because that guy can’t help being an asshole. Isildur says that he wants to bring Estrid back to Númenor with him, which comes as a huge surprise to Estrid’s fiancé. Kemen turns him down and informs Isildur that his father is wanted for treason and that Kemen’s father is now the king. Isildur lunges at him, which is perfectly understandable. Kemen announces to the Southlanders that Pelargir is now a military outpost of Númenor and if they want to live there and be fed, they will provide an unending supply of timber, reminding them “they’re only trees,” and somewhat slyly reminding us of the promise Arondir made to the nearby ents.

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The orcs take Galadriel to Adar. She addresses him as Uruk and tells him she accepts his terms if he will call off the attack on the city. He reveals that he has her ring and more, that it has healed him and returned him to his original elven form. Galadriel softens immediately at the sight of him and seems to realize in that moment that the orcs are not as far from her kin as she would have liked to believe. She even somewhat regretfully admits that she’s probably killed more of his children than any other elf. He dances around revealing his original elven name in that annoying manner too many characters on this show tend to do. We wondered who he might be that Galadriel didn’t recognize him (Celeborn’s obviously out), but it didn’t matter because he was dead a few minutes later. Still, the ring allowed him a revelation that softened his anger and led him to promising peace as he handed the ring back to her. In other words, Nenya didn’t just heal his form, it saved his soul, more or less. His death came off truly tragic, with his children delivering to him the same fate he delivered to Sauron millennia before. Kind of a shame to think that he could have sailed into the West someday with all of the other ring-bearers. We might have pondered this further but we were struck by how insanely stupid Galadriel was for just standing there and watching. Forget the danger to her own life, she’s carrying the nine rings and wearing Nenya. She’d have to be an idiot not to realize immediately that Sauron was nearby. Girlfriend should have hightailed it out of there at top elven speed the second the daggers came out. But hey, we got one hell of a swordfight out of it. Like the goodbye between the Durins, the rage behind this fight felt well-earned and established after two seasons. These two beings know each other intimately and hate each other fiercely. He paints his obsession with her as one having romantic undertones, but we honestly think, as she does, that it’s simply another deception on his part. He certainly pulled out all of the stops, first appearing as Halbrand when she most admired him, then turning into her to repeat her line about the evil becoming part of her, and finally as Celebrimbor, to blame her for setting all of this in motion by bringing Sauron to Eregion in the first place. She manages to draw Sauron’s blood, which puts her in extremely rare company among Middle-Earth’s greatest warriors. We’re not sure if the show intends this interpretation, but we felt that the ring was helping her quite a bit in this fight. She’s clearly an incredible fighter on her own, but Sauron is the final boss in the game and she held her own for an admirable length of time. After she makes it clear that the door is shut for good between them, he stabs her with Morgoth’s crown. Oooh, that’s not gonna heal easily, we bet. He takes the nine rings from her and tries to get her to hand over Nenya, but she dives off a high cliff instead. He kills Glug in response, underlining the very Tolkienian point that allying with evil is never going to be to one’s benefit.

In the city, Elrond, Gil-galad and Arondir (who evidently recovered from being gored by Adar’s sword) are captured by the orcs and forced to watch them destroy Celebrimbor’s library, which they treat as a grievous offense, which is a good and correct portrayal of Tolkien’s elves. Suddenly, the dwarves show up and the tide of the battle turns. Sort of. Narvi informs Elrond that Durin is in mourning and can’t make it to the battle. They regroup and try to heal Galadriel, although frankly, we think it’s a bit much to accept that she fell from a skyscraper height and survived it. Her wounds are too much for Gil-galad to heal, even with his ring, but Elrond is a talented healer who will one day administer to Galadriel’s daughter (and his own wife) Celebrian after she suffers grievous wounds, and of course he will heal Frodo from his Morgul blade wound. Morgoth’s crown is clearly capable of inflicting the same sort of life-extinguishing wound as the one Frodo received from the Witch King. Elrond knows that Nenya has great healing abilities and he completes his arc for the season by putting it on and helping to heal his friend.

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In Rhûn, Poppy and Nori are helping the surviving Stoors pack up what they can and move on from their devastated village. The Stoors all stop to thank the “grand elf” for saving them and we buried our faces in our hands at the sound of it. Here we go. But before he takes up his name, staff and destiny, like so many Tolkien characters, he has to break up his fellowship and allow them all to go on different paths. It looks like we were kind of right in our prediction that Nori would be the Moses of her people, eventually uniting the clans. In a way, we hope most of this happens off camera, because we honestly can’t see a point in keeping any of them in the story anymore. Nori feels terrible about what she brought to the village and Poppy gives a very Samwise Gamgee-esque speech while a montage shows Eregion falling, the dwarves in mourning, Elrond leading the elves away from the city, Miriel in shackles as charges are read against her, Elendil riding away from the city, and Isildur heading home while Estrid tries to pretend she didn’t try to ditch her fiancé. She and Gandalf have a lovely goodbye which also feels earned. As soon as she leaves, he finds his staff in the rubble and heads off to Tom Bombadil’s pad for a sing-along. We still don’t love the characterization of Tom as some sort of Yoda-like mentor figure, but if he’s just a guy Gandalf likes to hang out and sing songs with while he figures out his purpose, we have no problem with that.

In Khazad-dûm, Prince Durin’s ascension to the throne is not assured and a barely mentioned brother is making a claim while the leaders of the other Dwarf houses are demanding their rings. Somehow, King Durin’s ring survived the avalanche.

Elrond leads the surviving elves to a valley away from the city, where Galadriel eventually awakens. The top-tier elves (Elrond, Galadriel, Gil-galad and now a newly promoted Arondir) confer as to what their next steps should be: waging war or protecting themselves. We don’t really get an answer. Gil-galad just raises his sword and the 30 or so remaining elves (this very expensive show is often very bad at depicting crowd scenes of any size) cheer. It sounds like they want to fight, but given that they’re standing in the spot where Elrond will establish Rivendell, it’s not clear at all what the final seconds of the season are supposed to be conveying.

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On a whole, we found this season to be an enormous improvement over the first one, which was never as bad as the nay-sayers made it out to be. Almost all of the various plotlines (and there are far too many) got more interesting and engaging, and the shape of the larger tale is starting to take a more definable form. The acting also improved, with the two Charlies – Vickers and Edwards – doing the best work of the season. Charles Edwards in particular is worthy of an Emmy nomination, although we don’t think it’s likely. The pacing is still terrible, as evidenced by just how much story they shoved into the finale, and characters often seem to just move from position A to position B and then back to position A again. How much story has progressed in Númenor, really? In Pelargir? In Rhûn? Ciaran Hinds barely did a thing and we don’t even know who his character is, but he’s supposed to be Gandalf’s nemesis, which is an utterly terrible setup. But it does feel like the “setting up the story” portion is now behind us and the characters all face a world more recognizable as the one from The Lord of the Rings. This show is never going to make the most ardent Tolkien fans happy, but its faithfulness to the legendarium is less important than its ability to tell a story. We found improvement in both areas and we’re looking forward to season three, whenever it may come.

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