We’ll start with the plain truth: Calling this episode of The Rings of Power “The Eye” is a bait and switch. Oh sure, it begins with an eye opening alright — but it’s an eye, not the Eye, as in “of Sauron,” as in “the bad guy who creates the titular rings,” as in “the character whose secret presence the show has been teasing all season long.” It’s just Galadriel, waking up after being knocked flat and buried in ash by the explosion of the volcano soon to be known as Mount Doom. If it’s Sauron you’re seeking, seek elsewhere, friends.
Now, maybe getting misled here is on us, not the show. That certainly seems to be the show’s argument! While wandering through the wasteland with her only companion, the young human named Theo, Galadriel chides the kid against dwelling on the unknown. “What cannot be known hollows the mind,” she says. “Fill it not with guesswork.”
You hear that, viewers? Stop trying to figure out which character is Sauron, or who Halbrand is, or who Adar is, or what Adar is, or who the Stranger is, or who those three evil people in white are, or what that magic Sauronic artifact does, or what’s inside Durin’s secret box, or any of the many, many, many, many “mysteries” the show has provided us with in lieu of a consistently engaging, character-based plot. Live in the now!
I’ll give The Rings of Power this: Writing the show as it’s been written and including that line chastising people for trying to puzzle out its many unknowns takes some serious chutzpah.
Be that as it may, this hour-plus episode is a big one, and also a bleak one, easily the darkest installment yet. It opens, no pun intended, with that shot of ash-covered Galadriel opening her eyes and discovering a red-orange hellscape of smoke and flame, created by the volcanic eruption that ended the previous episode. A horse, its back aflame, races past to drive home the horror.
It takes a while, but eventually we discover that all of the main characters, even the non-canonical ones the show could afford to kill off to raise the stakes, have survived. Theo heads off with Galadriel, as mentioned. Isildur gets caught in a building collapse while helping to rescue some townsfolk. (The show treats his fate as uncertain for some reason, as if we don’t watch him defeat Sauron and seize the One Ring in The Fellowship of the Ring’s first five minutes.)
That same building collapse blinds Tar-Míriel, the Númenorean Queen. Elendil, upset that his son is missing and presumed dead, helps lead her to the camp where the survivors gather. That’s where everyone — including Bronwyn and Arondir, who’ve also survived, and Halbrand, who’s alive but badly wounded — but Isildur winds up in the end.
Tar-Míriel sails back to Númenor in order to muster a full-scale invasion of Middle-earth to defeat the orcs, with Elendil — who rues getting involved with Galadriel at all — in tow. Galadriel rides off with Halbrand to seek the Elvish medicine that can save him. Bronwyn plans to relocate her people to an old Númenorean colony. Theo, giftes with Galadriel’s sword, rallies the people’s spirits.
But the Elves and humans aren’t the only people affected by the volcano’s explosion. Far away, the Harfoot caravan discovers that the apple grove they’d been headed for has been burned by a stray “fire-rock.” Harfoot leader Sadoc Burrows enlists the Stranger, who appears devastated to discover the devastation, to use his magic to revive a tree, but a branch falls and nearly cleans the clock of a little kid. After that Burrows basically banishes the Stranger, though he gives him the star chart he needs and directions to the nearest human settlement.
Of course, had they simply waited a few hours, they’d have seen that the Stranger’s magic worked over all, and then some, reviving the entire grove. But the celebration is interrupted by that weird white trio. Twice confronted by plucky Harfoot Nori Brandyfoot, their ringleader uses magic to torch the grove and all the Harfoot wagons before disappearing. After that, Nori, her mom, her friend Poppy, and ol’ Sadoc decide to track down the Stranger, regretting his expulsion and needing his help.
Meanwhile, Elrond and Prince Durin IV try and fail to convince King Durin III to grant the Elves their request for mithril, the apparently magical metal that the show has decided the Elves now require to stay alive as a species. Even after the prince and his wife Disa defy the king’s orders on their friend’s behalf and discover an entire motherlode of mithril that could likely be safely mined, the King refuses, and has Elrond thrown in prison and Durin Jr. disinherited.
A fiery speech from Disa insisting that one day the kingdom will be theirs to rule as they see fit indicates the King may not get the last word on this one, though. On the other hand, when King Durin tosses the magical tree leaf Elrond had brought with him down the mithril shaft, it falls (presumably) thousands and thousands of feet and promptly catches fire, thanks to the nearby presence of the Balrog from Fellowship. Uh oh!
Finally, we catch up with Adar, triumphantly oozing his way through the wasteland. Not the Southlands, he insists, not anymore. “What should we call it instead, Lord Father?” asks his loyal minion Waldreg. In a bit of unintentional comedy — just in case no one knew what the land around the giant evil volcano in Middle-earth is called — a superimposed title morphs from “THE SOUTHLANDS” to “MORDOR.” Dun dun dunnnnn!
This episode is not without its strengths. The vista of destruction caused by Orodruin’s explosion is impressively total and impressively depressing; it must be horrible to have lived there happily and then look around and see that you’re now a resident of hell on earth — or, if you’re the likes of Galadriel or Tar-Míriel, to look around and realize you failed to stop it.
The acting is the high point of the rest of the episode, though. The teary-eyed, brotherly closeness with which actors Owain Arthur and Robert Aramayo imbue Durin IV and Elrond’s relationship is surprisingly touching; the argument between Durin père and fils that follows is convincingly intense. (Speaking from a nerdy perspective, I appreciate how Elrond refers to himself as “Half-elven” and explains the insights this gives him into the Elvish race.)
Daniel Weyman is excellent as the Stranger, conveying the being’s sadness, loneliness, and confusion with body language, the look on his face, and no intelligible words. Joseph Mawle remains seductively menacing as Adar; as a friend of mine put it on Twitter, there’s something “Brando as Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now” in his portrayal of an old soldier gone quietly berserk. Even Lloyd Owen does his best conveying Elendil’s grief over the “death” of Isildur, despite the fact that a large portion of the audience knows it’s nonsense.
Which, honestly, is the episode’s biggest problem. Over and over again, it presents as fact stuff which anyone who’s read J.R.R. Tolkien’s books or seen Peter Jackson’s six blockbuster Tolkien films knows is nonsense, making changes that have to be changed back if the future events we all take for granted.
We know Isildur lives; how else could the Ring get from Sauron to Gollum to Bilbo to Frodo? Why attempt to inflate the human cost of the explosion with this character when you could have fake-killed Bronwyn or Theo or Arondir or anyone else who doesn’t play a major role in the whole history of Middle-earth?
We know Galadriel’s husband, Celeborn, is not dead, as she tells Theo (though the show leaves itself a little wiggle room by simply saying she never saw him again after he headed off to battle); not only do the two of them rule Lothlórien together, as seen in Fellowship, but they also have a daughter who goes on to be Elrond’s wife and Arwen’s mom. Why bother pretending he’s dead? Is it in order to leave open the possibility of a romance angle with Halbrand? After all the work the show has done to make her into a standard fantasy hardass, she has to have a standard fantasy star-crossed love interest too?
We know the Balrog doesn’t emerge from hibernation and hiding for thousands more years, because the Dwarf kingdom of Khazad-dûm, aka Moria, exists well into the Third Age and becomes a major plot point in the history of the Dwarves that feeds into both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Why imply otherwise?
I’m fond of saying that when it comes to adapting a work of art from one medium to another, “change” is value neutral. The mere fact that something is different in the TV or movie version than it was in the book is not an artistically or aesthetically meaningful thing in and of itself; what matters is whether the change improves the adaptation or weakens it. In all the cases outlined above, I cannot for the life of me figure out how altering these basic facts of the agreed-upon timeline of Tolkien’s Middle-earth improves anything. They make the story less coherent, they substitute bait-and-switch character disappearances and deaths for actual meaningful developments, they flummox hardcore Tolkien nerds like me while, I suspect, adding nothing of particular interest to newbies and casuals.
Disa’s fire, Durin and Elrond’s friendship, the Stranger’s isolation, Elendil’s quiet dignity: This is where The Rings of Power’s power lies, not in turning Galadriel into a badass or pretending Isildur is dead or acting like we in the audience have no idea what and where Mordor is. (And btw, if you must treat the Mordor reveal as a reveal, why not have Adar proclaim the new name and then end the episode, instead of using that goofy “THE SOUTHLANDS/MORDOR” text to do it?) None of this is a dealbreaker of course; plenty of shows have rebounded from weak first seasons to achieve goodness, even greatness. It’s just hard to imagine a show with this kind of money behind it, these resources, the attention of the Eye of Bezos Himself, being granted the room to grow and breathe and change. I fear that what you see is what you get, no matter which eye you’re looking through.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.