I’ve been trying to interrogate why, on balance, I feel a little less judgmental about this series than I do about Jackson’s film trilogy. And I want to be really precise with the language here – it’s not that I enjoy the series more than the LOTR films. That’s certainly not true yet, and maybe it won’t ever be. I have some concerns about the writing and pacing still, and I’m not entirely sure where we’re going (in a way that I was never going to be with an LOTR adaptation, of course), so I’d say my enjoyment of the series as entertainment, while still pretty high, isn’t as high as my love for the LOTR films. But my reaction to what I see as a bad choice by Jackson (let’s take his treatment of Faramir of Gondor as my example) is different qualitatively than my reaction to what I see as bad Rings of Power choices (I am not super happy with Galadriel’s being apparently devoid of either husband or child, since both of those elves play major important roles in the legendarium), and I think in reflecting on that difference, I’ve realized why this series plays differently for me.
With The Lord of the Rings, the source material is a novel – one of the great novels in the Western canon in my estimation, at least. It’s rich with detail, and I know it back to front, and it acts as a really refined version of Tolkien’s storytelling: all the pieces in it are intended to fit together, and they do so in really important ways. So a film adaptation’s deviation from the novel in (what I see as) unnecessary changes…that gets under my skin a little easier. Faramir, for example, really is meant to remind us of all that’s good about Gondor – a counterpart to his brother and his father, and a last remaining glimpse of all that was best of Numenor in its heyday. He shows us what it means to engage ethically with both power and warfare, and to the extent that anybody in the novel grapples with the problematic elements of racial depiction (which I wrote about numerous times back when I posted my way through the book), he does. Jackson totally revising the character’s introduction and conduct, repositioning his relationship to the hobbits and to the Ring, etc., really sticks in my craw – I just don’t see what it adds to the story to approach it that way, and because I know Faramir from the novel so well, it’s hard not to think of him when I’m watching the movie (even though my guess is that he works pretty well in the movie for people who aren’t big nerds about the books – he’s probably fine from a screenplay perspective, that is).
With The Rings of Power, conversely, the source material is….well, what is it? The Appendices, and scattered references in the text of the LOTR, almost always fragmentary. Perhaps they have rights to the extensive material I’ve reviewed here in #JamesAndTheSecondAge posts, and perhaps not, but even if they did, it’s not possible to adapt everything from those unpublished notes and make a coherent narrative. And taking Galadriel’s story as my touchstone here – Christopher Tolkien himself, in Unfinished Tales, notes that the multiple competing/contradictory narratives about her life (and her husband’s) are some of the most perplexing problems in the whole of his father’s legendarium, and they simply don’t resolve into a neat single arc. So, would I have approached her family situation the way these show runners have? Nope! I think there’s a lot of power in Celeborn and Celebrian as characters – power that I think wouldn’t diminish the avenging angel figure of the Galadriel we’ve met (and who doesn’t slow down in Episode 4, does she?). In fact, I think they’d only help with that portrayal, since the contrast between her monomania about Sauron and the loving husband and daughter she’d be abandoning (in my treatment) to chase that triumph would really clarify all she was losing and all she had already lost in the pursuit. But I don’t have a relationship to Second Age Galadriel the way I do to Faramir in LOTR – she’s always been a fascinating character to me, and someone who’s very cool and powerful and intriguing, but I don’t have ONE version of her in my head, and therefore it’s kind of interesting to see a really different version of her. The fact that Tolkien himself could never resolve the problem of her history means that it’s not really irksome to me to watch show runners present me a Galadriel whom Tolkien never wrote quite like this – not as long as she feels “Tolkienesque” to me. And she does. They’re borrowing a lot more from elves like Feanor in constructing her psyche, and I feel like that’s in bounds. Anyway, other folks may find their mileage varies, of course, but for me, The Rings of Power feels playful as a Tolkien nerd experience in ways the LOTR movies never did – the LOTR movies were works of art that I needed to see done RIGHT. This series, on the other hand, is just a chance to indulgently explore someone’s imaginative engagement with a tangled web of characters and themes – something I wouldn’t know how to do RIGHT and can therefore let go of in that way.
What’s going well for me, then, in Episode Four? Well, anytime the dwarves are on screen I’m loving it – I think the writers understand the dwarves better than any of the other characters so far, and as someone who’s always found Tolkien’s take on the dwarves a little dicey (as he himself I think came to diagnose and try to resolve), I think the show runners have elegantly found ways to distance themselves from the most problematic elements associated with the dwarvish people. These are proud, generous, feisty, determined folk, and gosh, I just want more. And Robert Aramayo’s depiction of Elrond, man, it warms my heart. Hugo Weaving’s a fine actor but one of the few whose performances always ran a little cold for me in the LOTR films – he’s SO grim and frosty that I think it’s hard to see life at Rivendell as being the kind of “Last Homely House” vibe that clearly touches every single character who spends time there. You get the sense he’s the server who keeps checking in with you, ostensibly to see if you need refills or anything, but actually to remind you that, uh, if you’re done he really needs the table, he’s got a group of six that he can’t seat until you’re gone. And Aramayo is just so different – clever without being crafty, direct without being harsh, someone who can accept the correction a friend gives with an open hand. Put him with the dwarves and it’s like peanut butter and chocolate – I can’t get enough.
What am I struggling with a bit more? I can’t decide if the show is pacing Numenor in the right way – it feels to me like they weave back and forth between diving so deep into the lore that a casual fan won’t get what we’re up to, and pulling back so far from that kind of depth that the show is just spoon feeding us plot elements in a way that feels more like telling than showing. But the acting is ON POINT – Lloyd Owen’s Elendil is so full of life to me, funny and burdened and unsure of himself the way a dad would be, and goodness I cannot say enough about Trystan Gravelle’s Pharazon, who pulls off a monologue worthy of a Shakespearean villain in Episode Four that is cunning and calculated and so, so charismatic. I can see where he will go with this character and it’s a ride I want to be on. The specific dot-to-dot movements of Galadriel and Miriel in this episode were, again, not its strength for me, but it’s not like I found any of it unengaging, and there were some lovely glimpses of at least a couple of artifacts we will see again, thousands of years later, in the end of the Third Age. Very fun to realize all the ways they’re trying to tie everything together.
And what’s just fascinating to me? This Adar fellow is something else – we knew from Episode Three that he was special to the orcs, and this Episode helps me see a little more of what that might mean to them. But otherwise he’s just a mystery – I mean, who is he? A rival to Sauron? Sauron’s lieutenant? Sauron himself in disguise? And based on the conversations we see him having, he must be ancient – if he’s telling the truth about his memories, then I think it’s also important to ask, who WAS he? Does he have a past with some of the other ancient characters in this show? I don’t know how much more of him we’ll get on screen, but I’m looking forward to what they’ll do with him, and I hope whatever it is will take me at least slightly by surprise.
Okay, that’s the best low-spoiler take I can give this Episode. Check out the comments if you want a couple of more direct thoughts I’ve got, based on specific moments/elements from this week’s script, and please, as always, offer your own thoughts!
Comments:
As always, spoilers ahead – turn back if you want to avoid such things! Okay, at first I really thought the reveal of the Numenorean cataclysm was a bad move, giving away some truly epic imagery too early. That kind of thing should take us by surprise later, I thought, to have its full effect. But on second viewing, I’ve got to say, I think it’ll probably prove to be the right call – Numenor is a tragedy, and in a tragedy, you see the end coming from the beginning. That’s what makes it tragic – that despite all the ways the outcome was evitable, somehow you understand it was inevitable all along. So giving us that view will, I think, allow the audience to experience that tragic horror as the Numenor plot advances – this isn’t going to be like the Red Wedding. Also, I think we need the imagery to understand Miriel’s motivations here – though of course they could have written the plot differently and this is one of the points I’d change, myself – since she has to go from washing her hands of this elf business to marshaling an army in defense of Middle-earth, and the only way we’d get that as an audience is if she gets some kind of magical cue. The falling of those petals/leaves from Nimloth being such a trigger from her palantir visions and her nightmares was pretty critical to making that work, I think. Anyway, I do like that there’s a sort of echo here – Gil-galad thinks that Galadriel’s commitment to oppose evil may well bring evil back into action, and I think it’ll almost certainly be true that Miriel’s attempts to avert the disaster awaiting Numenor will be crucial causes in bringing it about. We’ll see it all revealed in time, I think.
I think I’m increasingly convinced that Sauron is already at work in Eregion with Celebrimbor – the series has done too much to establish Elves as immortals who have NOTHING but time for it to be coincidence that Celebrimbor keeps insisting that his forge be built by spring. What would make him feel urgency? I think a gifted craftsman who’s setting that timeline – a kid named Annatar, I suspect. Now, though, here’s the question – why would it be urgent for Sauron? He’s been in hiding a LONG time. Maybe he’s worried about being discovered by the Elves, of course, but I wonder if Adar isn’t a foil for him – his Second Age Saruman – and Sauron’s realizing he’s got to stop futzing around and get this ring stuff done before he loses all his orc allies to a creepy dark elf. Adar’s got to mean more than that on some level – he must have his own reasons for being here, etc. – but at this point I do wonder if he’s primarily here to create some of Sauron’s plot.
And I do want to say, I love that the writing on the show isn’t taking too many easy outs. Like, after that moving and lovely tribute to Earendil from his lonely son Elrond (the poor dude has lost EVERYBODY), it would have been such an easy hack move to make Durin go find his dad and discover his dad is dead (should have moved FASTER!), And then we get that scene where he comes in, and the old king isn’t moving, and I thought “oh no” – but then the old king gets up. And it turns out Old Durin understands the mind and heart of New Durin pretty well, and connects with him in a really affirming way – this show doesn’t need to milk artificial conflict out of their generation gap, etc.