Review: Rings of Power Season 2, Episode 3…Humanizing Evil (Spoilers).

Continuing with this series, the only good thing I have to say about episode three is that Galadriel isn’t in it. Other than that, everything else is flaming garbage right out of the gate. Just from watching the third episode, I can totally understand why the very few people who tuned in Season 2 are now dropping like flies until I’m fairly confident that it’s only the YouTubers, die-hard Rings of Power fans, and a few miscellaneous people who are actually watching it.

#1: Stuff I Missed From Episode 2

Unfortunately, in last week’s post, I missed some points, so let’s talk about that real quick.

First of all, Narvi. Where was he in Season 1? He built the Doors of Moria with Celebrimbor’s help so why isn’t he more involved in the plot since they were one of the few friendships between elves and dwarves? So far, the only role he ever plays is to try to fix the light shortage in Kazhad-Dum and that’s it.

Secondly, the background during Annatar’s introduction scene looks cheap for an Amazon production. It honestly reminded me of the CGI backdrop for the gods in Fall Out Boy’s “Centuries” music video with how bad but interestingly try hard it was.

Okay…with that out of the way, back to episode three.

#2: Mordor and Stolen Scenes

For a show that says it’s supposed to cover the entire Second Age, it sure is content to just pick things up in the same week that Season 1 ended in. This is a problem I’ll touch on soon, but it’s something that the showrunners should’ve thought about before they decided to write the script.

The episode opens up with Isildur’s horse galloping off towards Mordor to go find him, which was directly stolen from the scene in Two Towers where Aragorn’s horse, Brego, does the same thing. After that, the horse walks into what’s left of the Southlander’s village (which somehow hasn’t been completely covered in pyroclastic flow from the first season) where he is approached by some orcs who are supposedly intimidating, but just look like they’ve been living off of soy milk in their parents’ basement for their entire lives. From there, he turns into the equine version of John Wick, beats up the orcs and runs into the woods where the remaining orcs dare not go because it’s “the Black Forest” now.

The reason why it’s the Black Forest? Because Shelob and her brood moved in there after the volcanic explosion that would’ve destroyed absolutely everything and killed everyone, and this leads to even more stolen scenes, but this time, Amazon didn’t just steal from LOTR. No, no, no. They are also stealing from The Hobbit trilogy now when Isildur (who is revealed to be alive but is just stuck in a spider web) is attacked by a relatively tiny version of Shelob and the camera angles look almost identical to some of the Mirkwood scenes in The Hobbit. Maybe this is just a coincidence, but given the showrunner’s track record, I don’t think so.

At this point, I’m not even going to try to explain what’s wrong with this from a lore perspective. Amazon has botched things so badly that trying to even explain anything from that scene would cause unnecessary confusion for everyone.

Then, after Isildur escapes Shelob’s lair, he rides into an area where he sees a pool of water and decides to try and drink from it. While this would generally be regarded as a terrible idea since 1). It’s stagnant and you can see little floaties on it and 2). it most definitely has poisons and ash in it from the explosion, the scene gets worse because Isildur sees a dead Numenorian in the water, something that was, once again, stolen from the Peter Jackson films.

I’m envying the dead Numenorian already, but let’s keep going.

#3: Guess Who’s Coming to Second Breakfast

Don Lemonlas (Arondir) and Theo are back in this episode.

Do you remember them? I don’t blame you if you don’t.

Bronwen (Little House on the Patriarchy, the florist we didn’t like), is also dead because the orc arrow she got shot with back in Season 1 killed her with plot convenience because the actress who played her decided to leave the show.

Are you sad? Does this pull at your heartstrings or are you also as apathetic to it as everyone else seems to be?

Additionally, Theo should now be considered to be magic because he managed to totally heal Isildur with some stitches (more on that below).

#4: Isildur’s Girlfriend

This being Rings of Power, we need to ship everyone with as many random, non-canonical people as possible and Isildur is now being shipped with some random girl named Estrid.

How do they meet? Do they have some sort of connection with each other from the past? Will this be an enemies-to-lovers trope?

Nope. Instead, Amazon goes the most Tolkienian way possible at writing a meet cute and that is: She sees him rummaging around in the wagon above her and stabs him in the thigh with a large knife and judging from where she hits him, he’s been hit in an area somewhere around the femoral artery. Usually, someone would bleed out from that and die, but through the magic of plot convenience, he manages to survive because she loosely tied a strip of cloth around his thigh, which is supposed to be a makeshift tourniquet. And as though that wasn’t enough, he’s still able to walk, ride a horse, and fight with that leg, even though if it were an actual tourniquet, his leg would be dead in a few hours due to lack of blood circulation (if he even survived having his artery cut open in the first place).

Then we get the big reveal towards the end of the episode that she’s one of Adar’s escaped slaves as she burns the mark off her neck, because the showrunners think we’re too dense to have figured that out already.

#5: Humanizing the Orcs

For some reason, not only are the orcs white in ROP, but they also have families and are sentimental creatures who worry about the safety of their wives and children.

No, I’m not kidding. This is an actual plot thread. In one scene, we see an orc following Adar asking if they’ll be safe since Sauron’s back and after Adar replies, the camera turns to show him (the orc) with his wife and child (talk about a face only a mother could love…uegh.)

The problem with this is that orcs, while humanoid in how they’re built, are not humans. They are the corrupted forms of elves and men created by Morgoth in the first age, void of any will except their master’s, bred to kill. They don’t feel affection for anyone. They are meant to be killers. The fact that Amazon is still trying to ignore this and make them sympathetic characters is disgusting and ridiculous on so many levels.

On the bright side, Amazon has bridged the gap in inequality between the sexes. Women can be evil too! Don’t you feel represented?

#6: Numenor

There’s not much that I can say about the Numenor plot line anymore. All I’ll say is the eagles were only present on Meneltarma (the mountain in the center of Numenor that was sacred to Eru) and I’m pretty sure that they were no longer in Numenor during the years before its fall. Nowhere have I seen that they ever attended Miriel’s coronation. However, an eagle shaped cloud did float over Numenor before it fell, so, if I want to be generous, maybe this was supposed to be like that.

#7: Why Does Everything Still Look Cheap

This is a problem I’ve touched on before but everything looks cheap and try hard. Annatar, though he looks more like Annatar from the books, looks like he’s wearing a bathrobe size 100XL over something that someone made out of some bedsheets lying around and what is Celebrimbor’s ring-making contraption? It looks large and completely impractical. Even though the original LOTR movies had a lower budget, they still made the elves’ costumes look expensive, beautiful, and practical. You could tell that whoever was working on the costumes had spent years doing it, researching, designing, and crafting the costumes to really bring the audience into Tolkien’s world. For example, it took several weeks to make Galadriel’s dress out of heavily embroidered white silk and Swarovski beads to give it a regal appearance fitting for her character. Furthermore, Aragorn’s outfit consisted of a linen shirt, a leather jerkin, a long coat, and a fingerless glove. It’s dull brown and green color scheme was meant to help him blend in with his surroundings. Viggo Mortensen even added to it by suggesting that Aragorn carry a whetstone. The fact that Amazon had a billion dollars and still couldn’t make any of the outfits look like they hadn’t been made in less than a few hours is ridiculous and just goes to show how little they care.

#2: So. Many. Jump Cuts.

I’ve talked about this before, but one of the problems with Rings of Power is that they constantly use and-then story telling. Things just happen because the plot needs it to happen and there’s not a lot of cohesion to what’s going on. If they do try to connect things, they might use the video game map of Middle Earth to do so (which, yes, they’re still doing that in a show that’s supposed to be serious). You just jump from one plot line to the next and this is especially bad in this season.

While I can’t remember whether or not this was a thing in Season 1, in this season Amazon uses jump cut after unrelated jump cut to tell us what’s going on everywhere else to the point where it’s just jarring and unpleasant to watch. It really highlights how ridiculous and unrelated everything else in this show is because not only are they trying to pack in 3000 years’ worth of history into five seasons (which is like stuffing a blue whale into your Mini Cooper), but they’re also trying to shove in as many “subversive”, original plot lines as they can to send a message.

Until next time,

M.J.