Folks, I’m doubling up this time around, since I’ll admit that I found Episode 5 a really interesting but thorny puzzle to grapple with, necessitating a second viewing to even clarify for me where I was at in regards to its story. As always, the post is low-spoilers – this time around, very much so, since I want to talk in broad strokes again about the idea of adapting Tolkien using only brief allusions to these episodes as examples – and the juicier speculations/spoilery remarks are left for the comments at the end of the post.
I talked last time around about why I approach this adaptation a little differently than I approach Jackson’s LOTR films. I’d like to extend that a little further this time around (with the help of a comment Tolkien himself made), and I’d like to add in some observations about the layers I think are operating here which, to me, help explain why the series moves the way it does (and why I think it’s working). First, why is this adaptation different? One of my birthday gifts this week (thank you, Mom and Dad!) was a volume of the History of Middle-earth series that I hadn’t read before, and when I sat down with its foreword, I discovered Christopher Tolkien calling attention to a remark his father made in a letter – useful to him for one purpose in that foreword, but very applicable to us here as viewers of The Rings of Power. JRR comments, in a letter in September 1963 (so, a good ten years after LOTR’s publication), that he’s concerned about the publication of the collection of material he referred to collectively as “The Silmarillion”, since his opinion was that part of the appeal of LOTR as a novel was “the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed.” We can argue with that if we want, I guess, but I think there’s a lot of insight in it. And I think it has a lot of bearing on the events of Episodes 5 and 6 – and more broadly, on the whole The Rings of Power series as an undertaking.
To achieve that sense of depth and wonder that Tolkien (and Jackson as his interpreter) provides in LOTR, The Rings of Power does, it seems to me, have to do what Tolkien notes above – create new unattainable vistas. To do that in the Second Age, for good or for ill, means invention – and that’s JUST the thing that Tolkien nerds want to take the series to task about online (the ones who aren’t just openly racist). I think that’s what’s present in a lot of the moments I’ve found hardest to handle on initial presentation – Gil-galad’s apparent power over sending Elves back to Valinor in Episode 1, or the strange legend that plays an important role in Episode 5, or the mechanism that ignites a cataclysmic event in Episode 6. In each of these cases, though, I think that Tolkien (if he was feeling generous-minded that day) would agree that on some level any attempt to tell the stories of the Second Age would need to add such layers if the story was going to maintain the magical power of The Lord of the Rings. The series is NOT, I think, going to explain where Gil-galad’s power over the return to Valinor comes from (or even whether he actually has it or is only feigning it), any more than it will explain where the legend he discusses with Elrond came from or how true it is, or why that cataclysmic mechanism exists and who wrought it. Our sense that such things lie there, just beyond our reach, can be magical and not frustrating, if we let it. Sure, we can’t take this as carte blanche endorsement that ANY additions to the story are automatically and qualitatively good. But my feeling is that the things that have been added here are almost all additions that are in Tolkien’s spirit – an attempt to extend themes that were important to him, a commitment to create new vistas that won’t irretrievably spoil the landscapes we already know to exist. I hope that’s your experience also.
The other thing that I think is really evident in the series, and never more so than in the last couple of episodes, is that it’s trying both to be an adaptation of Tolkien’s Second Age material in The Lord of the Rings, AND it’s trying to be a prequel to the Jackson movie trilogy for folks who really only know the films. Since a large portion of their audience will, in fact, be people who love the Jackson movies but have never read the books (any more than most The Wizard of Oz movie fans have read the original book). An Oz prequel series would, inevitably, have to reference some details from the 1939 film even if they weren’t in Baum’s original text, and that same thing is happening in The Rings of Power, it seems to me – Isildur’s relationship to his horse mirroring Aragorn’s connection to Brego in The Two Towers, for instance. Most of the action scenes in Episode 6, honestly, bear really striking visual relationships to moments from the Jackson films in ways that I think can’t possibly be accidental. So I do think that it’s important to me to remember that also – that in some ways the series is for an audience very unlike me, and even unlike people who just love The Lord of the Rings as a book but haven’t read beyond it. Honestly, if you approach this as a prequel that has no textual material underneath it – it’s just a series designed to build out the backstory for The Lord of the Rings movies that PJ made – I think it’s really consistently interesting. This Galadriel is absolutely a good antecedent to a terrifying elf-witch whose imagination is bursting with a vision of herself as a godlike armored queen; this Elrond is a great example of an open-minded, trusting fella who will, after the events of this Second Age, become the far more brooding and jaded but still unyielding plotter that we see in Hugo Weaving’s portrayal of Elrond; et cetera. Elements that the Jackson films deal with basically not at all – where did Sauron come from, what is this glowing West the Elves dream of going to, why are orcs orcs, etc. – are being given really thoughtful and layered screen time. I don’t want to suggest that it doesn’t matter at all how the series handles its textual underpinnings – clearly I am FAR too interested in them, after all. But I think it’s important to remember that this work of art, like all works but especially any work that needs to find a commercial market in order to survive and reach its completion, is one that has an audience largely unlike me, and I’m hopeful that it’s well crafted to succeed with that audience.
The last note I’ll make here is that I think that the show runners are genuinely deep Tolkien nerds, and so, in spite of what I’ve said above, I think they’re doing this for us real nerds too. Like, there’s a moment in Episode 5 where, after a tough conversation, Elrond looks up into the night sky, clearly hoping for some guidance – looking, of course, into a sky where his absent father Earendil pilots the evening star. And then the scene cuts back to Numenor…but not just any shot of Numenor. Specifically, an establishing shot of a statue carved into the rock overlooking the harbor – a statue, if we realize it in the split second we get to see it, of Earendil himself, with the Silmaril strapped to his forehead that is that evening star. This is a cut so deep that you have to see the episode 2-3 times to catch it even if you’re the kind of person who would be looking for it, I suspect – and the layers it suggests are really fascinating (is this a reminder that Elrond’s struggles may find their answer in the Numenoreans? Or a reminder that what is personal to him is ancient history to humans because, as the series always emphasizes, Elves see the world differently than others do? Or a reminder to us simply that what might have seemed like Elrond just staring off into space is in fact a weightier emotional moment, and we should dwell on that side of his character?). There are, I have to say, SO many little glimpses like that in every episode – if you freeze frame just right, for instance, and you speak Quenya, you can decipher what it says on a ring that Elendil wears, and if you put that together with something he shares in Episode 6, you’ll get a deeper sense of his character’s internal struggles, too. You can’t say they aren’t giving this show their all, and I really think you can’t say that their missteps come from insufficient devotion to the source material – if anything I think their devotion is so intense that they may find it limits them as they move forward. But we’ll see.
Ultimately I’ll just say that overall I’m having a very good time, and that Episode 5, while it was my least favorite after one watch, may have become my MOST favorite episode so far after I rewatched it? The series has those depths, I think, and I’m not always quick enough to explore them the first time around.
Comments:
As always, spoilers abound. Okay, so the thing that most Tolkien nerds seem to have responded to badly (me included, the first time around) was the inclusion of this legend about mithril, for a bunch of reasons: a) the legend claims there’s a Silmaril in some tree and it gets hit by lightning to make mithril and we know all that’s not true, b) this whole line of argument about how the Elves need to bathe themselves in mithril to save their souls sounds really weird and out of context, and c) after waiting for a few episodes to get Gil-galad back, it’s weird that he’s causing all sorts of tension with Elrond because we think of him as a “good guy” given his reputation in The Lord of the Rings. I think all of that makes sense from a certain POV, but I’ve come around on all of it, and I’ll unpack my thinking here for you in case it’s helpful/interesting.
First of all, let’s be clear – Gil-galad calls it a legend, and so does Elrond. Elrond makes it pretty clear that he thinks it’s a fairy tale at best, and Gil-galad doesn’t argue with him – he just asks to hear it. So, it’s not clear to me that either of them thinks it’s the truth. Furthermore, every other “flashback” we’ve had (Galadriel’s visions of Valinor, the War of Wrath, etc.) have looked just as real as the rest of the show, but our image of this pure Elf and this evil Balrog was very clearly “animated”, so I think they’re also using the visual language of the show to tell us “this didn’t literally happen”. Separately but also importantly, we don’t know when the final resting place of each Silmaril became known to the Elves…nor do we know for sure that their final resting places as recorded in The Silmarillion are even true, given that two of them are functionally “lost forever”. So we could decide to be skeptics, honestly, about how to answer the question of whether a Silmaril high in the Misty Mountains was struck by lightning and created mithril, or at least the closely related question of whether Elves in the Second Age might genuinely believe that's what happened – certainly Tolkien doesn’t actually explain where the miraculous metal comes from, and it’s not shocking therefore that some legends would appear to explain the emergence of this luminous, powerful ore. What this all is, though, is just a textbook Tolkien move – we have layered source materials that offer different stories, and they tell us a lot about the kind of people who tell those stories and what matters to them. Whether they tell us anything about the Truth with a capital T is always a little less certain. Personally, my reading of this exchange on a rewatch is that Gil-galad is interested in Elrond’s reaction here, in part because he’s not sure what he makes of the legend himself, and in part because he thinks that Elrond’s explorations inside Khazad-dum may give him insight into whether or not any of it might be true, and he thinks he can read Elrond’s response (more on this later).
Second of all, yeah, Celebrimbor uses weird phrasing for it, but fundamentally, I think it’s clear what we’re getting here – this is the narrative that Sauron (in disguise as Annatar though that name never appears in LOTR so they may have to invent another false ID for him) has somehow fed Celebrimbor, to explain why the Elves need to make all these rings. The power Sauron initially has with the One Ring’s creation, that is, had to do with the fact that Celebrimbor and his smiths had made dozens, maybe hundreds of magic rings, and Sauron could suddenly see/connect to/master/dominate/what have you all those ring wearers when he put on the One Ring. This is the “mastery over the flesh” that I think Adar is alluding to in Episode 6. Anyway, what explains why all these Elves got suddenly into jewelry, other than maybe the invention of a Second Age version of Etsy? As a show runner, you need to create a narrative here, and Tolkien’s offered explanations a) are pretty abstract, and b) aren’t in LOTR anyway so who knows if they’re allowed to use them. So, weird as the wording is, I think what Celebrimbor’s setting us up for is the idea that all Elves need to put on lovely mithril rings to keep their souls pure – this will set up the One Ring situation for Sauron, and as a side note, from a dramatic perspective, it creates a helpfully dramatically tense situation between Elves and Dwarves where the Dwarves have supplies the Elves need but would rather not be in the business of handing it over if they could avoid it. And yes, if I’m right, at a minimum it means that Sauron has visited Eregion “in fair form” by now, and I personally suspect he is in fact there right now, and that he’s not any of the many other characters people have suspected of being Sauron in disguise (I even saw one person online claim they thought Poppy was Sauron, but I think that MUST have been fake).
Thirdly, Gil-galad – the more I watch him on screen, the more I think that we’re just being given a character arc for an important guy, much like we are with Galadriel. He needs to be frosty and Celebrimbor needs to be parental here so that Elrond is unwittingly playing into the hands of what Sauron wants in Eregion – I suspect that soon Elrond will realize he’s brokered a deal with the Devil (whether or not he knows exactly how or who is involved), but until then, Gil-galad being a pain in Elrond’s butt is in fact helpful to the story advancing. Also, I think we as an audience are being bait-and-switched a little, because let’s face it, that oath conversation he has with Elrond is actually a situation where if anything we should be sympathetic to Gil-galad – if the things he’s saying are true (and Elrond doesn’t argue with any of it, that we see), he has to face either the death of his people, or else a hasty retreat from a continent that will be overrun by evil, and Gil-galad's only chance to stop it is if he can just get confirmation that maybe there’s a legendary salvation in some secret ore in the mountains. And one of his most trusted Elf advisors can tell him for a fact if that legend is true….but this advisor apparently can’t say anything about it because he made a pinky-swear with his best friend. Now, if we as an audience had been with Gil-galad all this time and hadn’t seen much of Elrond’s friendship with Durin, Elrond would seem like a whiny child here, and frankly a potentially cruel one -- someone who's treating some private promise as more important than the safety of his people (or all of Middle-earth). So I think it would be too hasty of us to bash Gil-galad in this scene as being a jerk – he feels like a jerk to us because of what we have and haven’t seen, but all of that is controlled by the writing and direction, and they’re intended to put us where we are. I think that’ll pay off in the long run, but we’ll see.
I am still all in on Meteor Man as a Blue Wizard – though there’s no denying that Episode 5 makes him frightening again and that he’s being associated with the moon (both of which suggest alternative outcomes for his character -- Sauron? Tilion, the Maia in the Moon? -- that some of you have suggested previously). I just think the Harfoot migration has taken him SO far east that it’s very hard to give credence to the idea that he’s meant to be a player back in Eregion or in the Southlands, frankly, and I don’t know why a seeming wizard headed well east should be taken right now as anything other than one of the two wizards who most famously did just that. The moon cue, to me, is less about him and more about the three weird cultists who are pursuing him, since my theory (BIG spoilers if I’m right) is that they are three werewolves, who traditionally served Sauron back in the First Age, and that in fact they are the three creatures who attacked the Harfoots and were driven off by Meteor Man. I have no precise idea what they’re up to – more free agents like Adar, finding their own place in a post-Morgoth world? Sauron’s servants sent to track down that meteor (those meteors?) which he saw above his head as well as anybody else in all of Middle-earth did? I highly doubt that the head one of them is Sauron himself but I guess that seems as likely to me as that Sauron is Halbrand (sorry to those who think so!). Side note: the song Poppy sings, and the montage of the Harfoots traveling east through what will become the Brown Lands: all of that was so, so good. I hope that even the show’s critics can find moments like that to enjoy. While we’re making predictions, let’s throw in here, too, that I think the Harfoots will, when they reach the Grove, make contact with the Entwives – maybe as creatures well known to them, or maybe a new encounter – since I think the Entwives live out here somewhere. Got to get predictions in before these final episodes, after all!
Spoilery thoughts about Episode 6, which is fresher and therefore less carefully absorbed into my thinking….I am not stoked about the Halbrand/Galadriel dynamic, but folks, let’s face it, this is the same impulse that can (for many of us) make it a little unwelcome to hear about your grandmother dating some fella before she ended up with your grandpa. Like, I want to hear about her happy life with Celeborn. And I don’t think for a minute that the showrunners are going to leave him OUT of the five season series. So what’s wrong with us seeing her, for the first time in a long while, discover that there’s something better in life than going solo on your vengeance quest? Whatever happens with Halbrand, clearly it’s not gonna end well, and her joy in finding Celeborn will be one of the outcomes of that experience. So I think I need to chill out about the human/elf pairing here (though I have to say, it’s already here in Arondir and Bronwyn – just a little overcrowded if you ask me, showrunners), while hoping they don’t make TOO big a deal out of it.
I am glad that all those tunnels finally made sense – I wish I could say that a blood sword that’s hidden at Waldreg’s house being the key to a sluice gate made sense, but, uh, it doesn’t really. Then again, this is a fantasy world where a Ring can awaken your desire for dominion over others while making you invisible, and where a bottle full of water that’s reflected the light of a gem carried in a flying boat can terrify a spider-like creature the size of a doubledecker bus, so again, I should probably cool it on how “silly” I think the sword-key is. The rest of that sequence was very much not silly – the realization of how the orcs (“Uruk” is what Adar wishes I would call them, more on that in a moment) have painstakingly prepared for a dark world that they can finally call home, the shock wave that’s going to basically destroy forever the homes of however many people have lived here for centuries, the hellish vision of a mountain being forcibly converted to a volcano that is turned up to 11….wow. Geologists online seem pretty clear that pouring that volume of water into that kind of a lava chamber could plausibly create this scenario, which is fun to know (though again, I think a fantasy world could get away with it regardless). I’m just struck by how much everything will be struck like dominos here – where will the Southlanders go? How will Pharazon respond to the news that the lands he expected to exploit for colonial trade value are now a blighted wasteland? Will Numenor see this threat as a continuing issue for them to resolve, or a problem to run away from? Will this cloud be visible to the Harfoots, or even to Eregion, and if so, how will characters in either place respond? Episode Six ends in the way you might end the whole first season….but it’s not over yet. So I’m very curious what finale will try to top the moment of that cloud of ash and smoke enveloping Galadriel.
Okay, one last set of comments, then – Adar and Galadriel. I’ve seen a bunch of folks online fretting over this – much of it boiling down to the idea that it’s a problem for The Lord of the Rings if this show presents orcs as people, with souls, since that makes much of the events of the novel/films problematic at best, maybe even evil at worst, with the mindless slaying of SO many orcs that Legolas and Gimli turn it into a game, and Aragorn intends to eradicate the species once he’s king. To which I say, hey, good people, this is actually a problem for The Lord of the Rings already. You know who thought so? John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. In a letter late in life, he referred to the orcs as “naturally bad” and then added “I nearly wrote 'irredeemably bad'; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making — necessary to their actual existence — even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God's and ultimately good.” By “God” here, he means Iluvatar – the God of Arda, the planet in question. Anyway, this is a thing he wrestled with – that by his own conception, the fact that orcs draw breath, think, move, and act, means that their existence is a part of the music of the Ainur, and therefore it’s got to be true on some level that they’re a part of the universe’s larger meaning. He did look back at LOTR and find it hard to rationally explain why orcs can be treated as generic “baddies” – especially since this is a work that takes mercy for the wicked seriously when it comes to such a wide range of people as Boromir, Smeagol, and Saruman. So to me this series is doing exactly the right thing – Galadriel may sound harsh, but she’s only saying plainly what Aragorn and Legolas and Gimli functionally say by their choices and actions throughout LOTR. And Adar may sound sympathetic, but let’s face it, he’s defending the right of these creatures to have a home inside a barn belonging to people whose homes he intends to destroy and steal – his “Uruks” murdered them in slow, cold blood as methodical torture to extract the location of the sword key. So I think it’s clear that the moral question here is in fact really thorny – and it should be! We should be troubled both by the existence of beings who find it so easy to do evil, and by how easy it is for good people to treat that evil as an excuse for incredible violence. I have no idea how they’re going to walk these lines – nor do I know how I would feel to see an Uruk given real identity and pathos and agency, on the level that we saw with Smeagol/Gollum, for instance. But I do know that it’s disingenuous of us – really, it’s being bad readers and bad filmgoers of us – to act as though there wasn’t any problem with orcs until Episode 6 came along. Episode 6 just held up a mirror – to Galadriel and to us. If we don’t like what we see there, then it’s incumbent upon us to change it. And, on a related note, Adar is a GREAT villain, who I really hope we see more of – he’s smart, he’s articulate, he’s relentless, and he can duel with emotions as skillfully as with a blade, if not more so. His advocacy for “his children” is a reckoning that Middle-earth as a fictional landscape has had coming for a long time, and I really look forward to the dialogue real Tolkien fans can have in his wake, over what it means to “be a person” in Middle-earth (or what it means to be “redeemable” for that matter).