Rings of Power: Make the Pain Stop!!!
It will be decades before we discover how The Rings of Power was really made. Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. MacKay and Payne are nothing but lightening rods at this point, everyone who’s leaking says that is their only function, they have no power at all over the production, they are there to take the blame. Which makes it very difficult to tell who is in charge, assuming it’s anyone at all. A couple of years ago I said that the Rings of Power was the result of a process dedicated to failure. This second season is fundamentally different because it is the result of a process committed to failure.
The series is unsalvageable, everyone involved knows it. You don’t have an exodus of on-camera talent unless they are trying to avoid the taint of association. The Tolkien fans are long gone. Even Hollywood has been forced swallow the bitter pill that the Woke audience they want doesn’t exist. By no possible measure is The Rings of Power a success yet they have to keep doing this. The makers are now going with the minimum risk of remaking Jackson’s Lord of the Rings without knowing how to do that. Whatever financial sleight of hand that was used to finance this has clearly locked Amazon into a multi-season commitment.
Every episode of this show is bad, no getting around that, but one of them had to be the worst. This one was it. They will have to build a high mountain indeed to top this heap of shit. This is the stupidest, most incompetent episode of the entire series so far. This wasn’t just cringe, it was butt-hole cringe.
The Legendarium. The Cinematography. The Spacial Awareness. The Basic Physics. The Narrative comprehension. The Avoiding gross demi-incest stuff. This one got every single thing wrong.
Except the title. That was picture perfect.
“Doomed to Die.”
It’s starting with the final casting forging of the Nine Rings for Mortal Men. This whole thing is completely out of order, just mentioning that. Celebrimbor is trapped within an illusion of Sauron. He thinks everything is just fine and supercool while the city is under siege. Sauron gives Celebrimbor some encouraging words and then goes out to brief the audience on the state of things, which on the whole sucks. The city will fall without outside support. They have to tell the audience that because showing them is beyond them. Non-Canonical Little Blonde Elf Chick is grateful Sauron for taking command while Celebrimbor is obviously delusional. Sauron promises her appropriate “rewards.” Which means this is her last episode. Cool.
Next we check in on Moria-to-be. Durin IV is about to depose Durin III when Elrond shows up, out flipping damn nowhere, and begs him to help lift the siege at Eregion.
Once again we have a character just teleporting to wherever the story needs him to go to make the next thing happen. Plot Contrivance Teleportation is alas quite limited in some ways, if they could have used it to get to Eregion before the sixteen rings had been forged then this season would have been so mercifully short. Anyway Durin IV swears he will be there.
Okay, the chess board is now set. Since this was supposed to be mostly battle scenes, and given how bad those were last season, I was not expecting an improvement.
In this alone, I was not disappointed.
In the first season of ROP, the general lack of understanding of the cinematic basics from this production company made itself painfully evident. Especially when it came to battle scenes. In a nutshell, the battles played like an episode of Xena the Warrior Princess. You would have a few hero characters defeating an entire army using a bunch of acrobatics and smooth-brain sword tricks. This would go on for an unspecified amount of time until some critical event happened to end the “battle.” Xena had a couple of excuses for doing it this way. One, the audience was a bunch of dumbass little kids and two, the show didn’t have much of a budget. Neither of those is supposed to apply here.
A battle scene needs to be a mini-story in its own right, with an introduction, an escalation of events and then a climax. The really sad part is that they had an excellent example to follow in the battle of Helm’s Deep and doing so was just beyond them. They were trying but once again the only thing they could do was repurpose iconic scenes.
Helm’s Deep was a superb cinematic battle. The reason is simple enough, the average human could understand what was going on. You can make arguments against the design of the fortress from a military perspective, but its first function and primary objective was to be narrative structure that allowed the audience to easily follow the progress of the battle, which it did beautifully.
CG wasn’t up to the task twenty-five years, so Jackson had WETA build a model.
That was a good start right there because those always look better than CG especially if WETA is making it. The model was designed to demonstrate what the stakes are to the audience. There is an outer current wall, an inner curtain wall, and finally a keep at the center. People watching the movie were able to clearly understand the stakes and follow the progression of the battle. Each set back for the defenders was obvious to even the most unmilitary of minds. When the outer curtain wall fell they had to fall back behind the thicker inner curtain. Théoden’s forces now had shorter interior lines and the Orcs were lengthened plus they had to go through the choke point. They can hold out here longer. But then the inner curtain wall was finally breached and the defenders had to fall back to the inner keep. Finally, out of time and out of hope they make a last heroic charge, just as Gandalf arrives with reinforcements to save the day.
The first problem for Amazon’s production is that they didn’t use a model in the first season.
CG is a little too adjustable. Whoever made Eregion in the first season was only interested in presenting an oh so pretty, pretty elf city. There was no thought whatsoever given to the day that Eregion would need to have a battle fought around it. It was purely built around Tumblr aesthetics. It fails as a military structure and as a story telling device.* It is defensible on neither battle nor artistic grounds.
Consequently, the entire first model was scrapped. Not just the city but the geography as well.
Do you remember how I castigated the show for the idiocy of having the Southlanders abandon a perfectly good castle to move back to their indefensible town? This season they came up with something even dumber.
Hydraulic warfare is nothing new. Normally you break a dam and let the water flood something. But this show came up with a uniquely stupid variant. Adar’s orc army is on the far side of a river and are firing their gigantic trebuchets at the (now) walled city of Eregion. Adar being the smartest character in the show (tragically this is quite true) has come up with a cunning plan. After throwing boulders at the city walls and not doing any real damage that I can see. Adar orders the trebuchets to target the mountain in back of Eregion.
This knocks a huge chunk (I can’t believe I’m writing this) of the mountain off and fucking dams the river!
First, those mountains are about five miles away, trebuchets don’t have anywhere near that kind of range. Second but a lot more important, this wouldn’t freaking work with modern explosive artillery let alone boulders.
I suppose having forced an audience to swallow that football sized pill, there isn’t much point mentioning that this “dam” would break pretty quickly unless the water had somewhere else it could go because that’s how hydraulic energy works. Unless you are in an Amazon production anyway, which luckily for Adar he is. It does whatever he wants. From meekly accepting an unstable loose materials dam as an impermeable barrier to setting off a super volcano, water can do anything if you are Adar the Dark Elf!
Those aren’t the only laws of physics that are suspended for his benefit. The river drains in under a minute. It would take a lot longer than that because the river bed is instantly bone-ass dry. That’s the part that drove me nuts. That riverbed would be silt, sand, and mud. It would take weeks to dry.
It’s actually easier to fight on water than to try dragging multi-ton siege equipment across a field of deep mud. There’s no way to do it without it getting hopelessly bogged down to the axles, and then battered to splinters by counter batteries. The orcs themselves would be slogging through the muck, slipping and falling at a speed that is just perfect for archery practice. And when you reach the other side of the former-river you are at the bottom of a riverbed with a wall in front of you. Why there are still walls when Adar has trebuchets that blast a mountain shall remain a mystery.
However, the orcs cross the riverbed with no trouble at all and are instantly battering away at the walls of Eregion.
But now it’s time to repurpose the Charge of the Rohirrim. Elrond arrives with an Elven cavalry… uh… horde, I can’t tell how many elves he brought. I can’t tell how many orcs there are come to that. There are no big overhead shots that show massed formations because those take time and attention and this show was made by women this year who just want ship characters constantly (put a gigantic pin in that one we are swinging around back to it).
Elrond looks around, High King Gil-Galad gives him a wave, (which means they forgot to include him and spliced him in during reshoots), and he orders the charge. The orcs are looking unusually smug and confident, someone is going to do something really clever.
Just before the elves reach the line, Adar pulls a blanket off of the cage that Galadriel is being held in. Elrond shits himself and orders a halt, mere feet before they reach the orc lines. In the silliest nod to their own continuity possible somebody at the last second remembered that Amazon Orcs burn in sunlight so their half of the battlefield was comically shaded.
Galadriel should have been screaming, “ATTACK! YOU COWARDS, I ORDER YOU TO ATTACK!” Nope the one time it would have made sense for her to be badass and she damsels it.
So now, Elrond Half-Elven has a sitdown with Adar, which is something orcs do all the time. He demands Galadriel’s ring. Elrond finally does something right, lies and says he didn’t bring it.
The writers of the show make it clear they are much more interested in Adar than any of Tolkien’s characters. Adar wants the ring so he can destroy Sauron. He also asserts that Eregion is now in Shadow as are all the elves within, including Celebrimbor.
For some reason he mentions that Elrond has the aspect of “Melian of the Valar.” This theoretically tells us that Adar wasn’t in the first crop of Elves to be snatched up by Morgoth because none of them would have ever known Melian. However, Melian was NOT Valar, she was Ainu like Gandalf, Saruman, and Sauron himself come to that. She was also the mother of Elrond’s great grandmother Luthien. Anyway, if Adar knew her then he was in Valinor.
As if this show bothers with something that clever (the Dark Herald tries to reassure himself). However, there have been hints that Adar is in fact Celeborn, Galadriel’s missing husband. Please no. This episode was hard enough.
Okay, I’ve avoided this part long enough. Having reached no compromise and with Galadriel condemned to death, Elrond asks if he can say goodbye to her. Adar shrugs.
Then Elrond, Half-Elven (husband of Celebrían) kisses his MOTHER-IN-LAW GALADRIEL FULL ON THE MOUTH!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!
I can’t unsee that. Ever. It’s going to be at the back of my mind from now on. Fuck this show and Amazon!!!!
The war starts back up. Galadriel uses a broach to pick her lock and run for it. I think the implication is that Elrond slipped it to her when he was grossing out the orcs by Frenching Arwen’s grandma.
Inside Eregion the writers have started repurposing scenes from other franchises. Celebrimbor realizes he’s in an illusion when he sees the mouse repeating its actions just like the cat did in The Matrix. Sauron fesses up and says Yeah, you’ve been my prison bitch.
Celebrimbor runs outside and tries to tell everyone that The Bringer of Gifts is Sauron. Sauron makes Celebrimbor throw the Non-Canonical Blonde Elf over the wall in what is undoubtedly the funniest scene in this series. Sauron has the master Elf Smith chained.
Durin III is about to launch his relief expedition but then has to give that all up to try and stop his father from releasing the Balrog. He didn’t need a whole army for that, just send them off to Eregion with someone else in command. Hell, send your wife, Dissa to command it. This is that kind of show anyway. But there will be no Dwarven rescue because drama.
A troll who had received a ludicrous amount of build up as a total badass gets killed by Elrond before it can do anything.
Elfagorn shows up, helps Galadriel and then loses a fight with Adar. It looked bad but he wasn’t dead in his final shot.
Celebrimbor is locked in his workshop trying to get free of his chains. He spots a metal cutter. I figure he’s going to use it to cut his chains. He uses it to cut off his own thumb so he can slip the manacle off. Then he runs into Galadriel and gives her the Nine Rings for Mortal Men.
Elrond gets knocked over so Adar can steal Galadriel’s ring, Nenya. Credits roll.
This. Is. A. Travesty.
Fanfic is nowhere near this bad. No one in the history of the Middle Earth fandom has shipped Elrond with Galadriel. Or had any of the forces of darkness touch Nenya, Galadriel’s ring. Hell, Sauron never knew where it was. This season they just gave up and did whatever because Amazon thought it had a couldn’t miss franchise and put itself in a position where it can’t cancel it. I’m just hoping that it won’t take them two years between seasons from now on because I don’t want to still be dragging this flaming shitpile in 2030.
*It also fails as a civilian structure because the whole point of building on a river is shipping. There’s no docks at all, or for that matter roads leading in and out. The first Eregion was mostly a temple dedicated to an Elven religion built around smelling the ambrosia of their own farts.
