Season 2, Episode 6: ‘Where Is He?’
By the end of this week’s episode of “The Rings of Power,” Adar’s Orc army is fully besieging Eregion, beginning a battle that will play out in the next episode. But before the show shifts into military mode for a while, the show’s creators, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay (along with this episode’s credited writer, Justin Doble, and director, Sanaa Hamri), reset the stage across Middle-earth and far away in Numenor, to make sure we know exactly where all the players are, as Season 2 enters its endgame.
The result is an unusually busy hour for this series. Every major character makes an appearance, in scenes that run a bit shorter than usual. This is a welcome change of pace from last week’s sometimes interminable conversations, which kept circling topics long after they had been exhausted. Granted, some of this episode’s segments — like most anything involving the Durin family or Annatar — do hit familiar beats, dredging up those old arguments for another round. But there is some forward progress here, even if everyone is now racing headlong into various bloody melees.
Here are five takeaways and observations from Episode 6:
The Valar decides
In a startling turnaround, the Numenor sequences in this episode are responsible for one of the most thrilling moments of the season — although, typical of the Numenorians, we have to get a few speeches out of the way first.
The matter before the island’s leadership is whether Elendil will apologize for the crime of sedition, bend the knee to Pharazon and be spared a death sentence. When he refuses to comply fully, Miriel comes to her loyal subject’s aid, claiming an ancient legal right to face the judgment of the Valar in his place. This requires Miriel to wade into the surrounding seas and wait for an enormous underwater beast — “the sea worm” — to swim up to her, at which point this slimy thing will either swallow her up or deem her worthy.
The buildup to the big plunge takes a while. But the payoff is sublime, in a terrifying sequence of the sea worm yanking Miriel into the deep, staring her down, surrounding her with giant tendrils and then letting her live. The assembled crowd — with the exception of the new king’s partisans — erupts into jubilant shouts, dubbing her “queen of the sea.” Pharazon tries to recover from this setback by scrambling into his chambers to consult the palantir.
What does he see? A dark, fiery future. And a face familiar to us: Sauron’s.
Going batty
I don’t want to dwell too much on what goes down in Khazad-dum this week, because frankly the dwarf story line has fallen into a deep, deep rut. The underground sets remain amazing, and the performances by the actors — some of them sporting thick beards, no less — remain impressive. But the plot is going nowhere new. King Durin III is still being driven mad with greed by his ring and making decisions that endanger his people, while Prince Durin IV keeps arguing with Disa about how they should handle the situation. There are some strong emotional underpinnings to the father-son relationship; but those bonds have been well-established and don’t need as much screen time as they get.
Anyway, this week the king denies Annatar’s request for more mithril because he is waiting for the elves to be imperiled by war and desperate enough to pay more. Also, Disa physically blocks one of the locations where the king wants to dig and then uses her stone-singing powers to unleash a bunch of bats. So that’s pretty cool.
Should they stay or should they go?
We are now through almost two full seasons of “Rings of Power” and the story lines involving halflings and wizards have yet to connect up cleanly to the rest of the plot. Perhaps they never will, given that in J.R.R. Tolkien’s original narrative, the “one ring to rule them all” does not end up in the hands of the stoor named Sméagol (and then the hobbit named Bilbo) until well after the events this series intends to cover. But I’m still happy that Nori and Poppy and the Stranger are here, because their adventures bring a different energy to the show, adding brightness and humor to an often stiflingly dark drama.
This week, the story of the harfoots and their absent friend does a fine job of evoking “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” — even if it doesn’t have a lot to do with Sauron. Gundabel sounds like one of the future residents of the Shire as she tells the nomadic Nori and Poppy why the stoors don’t move. It’s because their ancestors built the place where her kind have been born, married and buried for centuries. To leave that behind would be to abandon a part of themselves. Still, as the harfoots prove, a wandering spirit is part of the halfling legacy, too. Bilbo and Frodo will someday carry that instinct forward.
As for the Stranger, while it has yet to be established whether or not he is Gandalf, the choice he faces this week — to go find his friends or stick around Tom Bombadil’s home to learn more about wielding magic — does seem like the kind of the thing the hobbit-loving Gandalf would wrestle with. (It also seems like something that would trouble Luke Skywalker. But I digress.) Tom frames the decision as a question of whether the Stranger will choose his “destiny.” But is the decision ever in doubt? Protecting Middle-earth means protecting harfoots and stoors. This is what good wizards do.
Won’t someone please think of the orc children?
One of Season 1’s most memorable scenes occurred after the Numenoreans rode in to rescue the overwhelmed Southlanders from Adar’s orc army (temporarily, as it turned out). As Galadriel interrogated the captured Adar, the orc-father told her his origin story, saying he was one of the elves transformed by the dark lord Morgoth into a “son of the dark.” He also spoke up for his people, insisting to a skeptical (and disturbingly hateful) Galadriel that orcs have names and hearts.
There is an echo of that scene this week as Adar feasts with his prisoner Galadriel and tries to commiserate about the many ways they have both been swayed by Sauron’s vivid, persuasive temptations. Sauron promised Galadriel an army to carry out her crusades against the world’s imperfections. Adar was promised “children” to forge a society that can be passed down to future generations (stoor-style).
The dynamic between these two remains fascinating, both for the way it humanizes the orcs (so to speak) and for how it exposes some of the deep-rooted bigotry of the elves. Much as before, Galadriel does not respond well to Adar’s vision of a thriving orc culture. She practically hisses when she says the word “orc.” When he warns, “The fate of your city rests on your ability to put aside your pride, if you can,” she brushes that thought aside and instead accuses him of tricking her into revealing the location of her ring. She also blames Adar for a strategic blunder, bringing multiple legions of orc soldiers to Sauron, who needs an army like Adar’s.
Galadriel is right that Adar is more interested in vanquishing Sauron than in helping the elves. And she may be right that Adar has made a tactical error. But also, on some level, she needs all of this to be true in order to confirm her own biases.
Sauron’s sinister smoke screen
From the moment Sauron returned to Eregion and transformed into Annatar, he has been playing mind games. He has manipulated Celebrimbor into lying to his king about forging the dwarf rings; and then he has used those lies to guilt Celebrimbor into making nine more rings, for men. All the while, behind the forger’s back, he has spread suspicion among the other elves — and especially to Mirdania (Amelia Kenworthy), who is deeply concerned about her lord.
Those seeds of doubt begin to sprout this week. It’s becoming obvious to everyone in Celebrimbor’s general vicinity that he is unstable. He is burning through mithril while failing over and over at the forge. He is snapping at his assistants and struggling to remember Mirdania’s name. He seems paranoid, complaining that his creasing hammer keeps disappearing and reappearing.
Of course, we know that Annatar is responsible for Celebrimbor’s breakdown, although we don’t see the extent of his deception until this episode’s end. It is one thing for Annatar to blow smoke up Celebrimbor’s skirt, telling him history will record his rings as “the most precious creations” of the age. (I mean … in a way, he’s not wrong.) It is another thing altogether for the evil one to take charge of Eregion and tell its residents not to alert their master about the corpse that appears outside the gates with “Where Is He?” carved into his torso.
And yet the most dramatic example of Sauron’s dark power comes when Annatar is talking with Celebrimbor outside, on a seemingly sunny day. When their conversation ends, we discover that the pleasant surroundings are an illusion, spun by Sauron, who has shed his own dark blood to cast his spell. The truth is that the skies are black with storms and smoke, as the orcs have begun their attack. And if Celebrimbor does not wake up from his daze in time, Eregion will fall.
The post ‘The Rings of Power’ Season 2, Episode 6 Recap: Go Fish appeared first on New York Times.
