Ents. Orcs. Elves. Barrow-wights. Wizards, good and evil. Two different kinds of proto-hobbit. A Galadriel battle sequence. A Watcher in the Water. Tom freaking Bombadil. “Pulling out all the stops” is a perfectly valid, even noble, approach for any series belonging to a genre that shows us the spectacular — fantasy, horror, and science fiction foremost among them. About the only problem I have with the cornucopia of Tolkienian pleasures that is this week’s Rings of Power episode is that co-creators and co-writers J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay didn’t try this approach sooner.
The show’s newfound affinity for horror-movie sequences is one of its great strengths this season, and with the aid of director Glenise Mullins, Payne and McKay lean into the scary stuff hard. Adar and his orcs, now marching through the forest north to sack the Elf kingdom of Eregion and kill Sauron in the process, remain a consistent high point from a design perspective; those guys are deeply unpleasant to look at, and totally convincing as a species of demented killers. (Side note: Orcs should join vampires, ghosts, aliens, werewolves, zombies, kaiju, and slashers as a default kind of monster you can have in your horror movie. Tell me a horde of orcs rampaging through a small town wouldn’t be scary as hell.)
But there are older and fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world, as a wise man once said (or will eventually say, I suppose). These include the worm-like monstrosity that sucks Isildur and Arondir down into a pit of quickmud, in a crowd-pleasing adventure sequence that smartly recalls similar moments in both Star Wars: A New Hope and The Princess Bride. In this sequence, Estrid comes through for her ostensible captors, who are wise to her connection to Adar’s wild men and are using her to find their base. Actors Nia Towle and Maxim Baldry have very believable, organic, warm, unmistakably sexual chemistry here, to the point where when her betrothed finally shows up, it’s a real disappointment to see this budding romance stymied.
Arondir, Isildur, and Estrid aren’t the only people who encounter trouble on the road. Nori and Poppy find themselves the prisoners of a colony of Stoors — a separate branch of the “halfling” family, from which the Harfoots diverged long ago when one of them felt wanderlust. But both their leader, Gundable “The Gund” Earthauler (Tanya Moodie), and the nerdy guy who brings them to the village, Merimac (Gavi Singh Chera), mean well. Neither gives up their guests when the Dark Wizard’s skull-masked minions come looking for them; we’ll see how that works out next week, I guess.
To the north, the strike team assembled by Elrond to relay the all-important “Don’t trust Sauron” message to the Elf inventor Lord Celebrimbor runs into their own little patch of hell. Ignoring the warning provided by Galadriel’s Ring of Power, Elrond marches the group through the ancient gravesite called the Barrow-downs, where the Sauron-revived spirits of evil Men arise to attack them. Elrond thwarts the ambush when he recalls that such spirits can only be destroyed by the weapons with which they were buried, but not before they use cool Hellraiser-style chains to drag at least one Elf to his death.
The real threat comes from Adar’s orcs, whom our group encounter when their paths nearly cross. Once their location is given away, Galadriel offers to take on all the orcs herself, allowing Elrond and the rest of the company to flee…with her Ring of Power in Elrond’s hands. She subsequently launches what is by far the show’s best Elf Attack to date, a genuinely fun superhero/Matrix/Kill Bill rampage. This is undoubtedly beneath the dignity of the character. It’s also undoubtedly rad. It may not save her from being captured by Adar, but still, rad.
And not everyone our heroes meet on their journeys this week is out to get them. Arondir, Isildur, and Estrid eventually encounter an Ent and (this shocked the Tolkien fan in me) one of the elusive Entwives. If you wanna talk about heavy-hitting voice actors, masterful thespians Jim Broadbent and Olivia Williams voice the two talking trees, named Snaggleroot and Winterbloom respectively. They instantly lend these well-designed guardians of the wood both gravitas and pathos, just by virtue of being really, really, ridiculously good actors. Though they initially distrust our heroes, Arondir gentles them; Snaggleroot’s resulting speech about the nature of peace — he describes it as a dawn after a night’s storm, the time when the birds awaken — is some of the loveliest and most effective writing the show has yet produced. The pair lead our trio to the missing teen Theo, and all is right with the world, for the time being anyway.
But as far as benevolence goes, you can’t beat the one, the only, the merry Tom Bombadil. Played by Rory Kinnear, this mysterious entity — he refers to himself as “Eldest,” meaning older than literally everything; I’m not up on the latest Tolkien scholarship, but back in the day the prevailing wisdom was that he is the spirit incarnation of the entire world itself — rescues the Stranger from his wanderings, frees him from a hungry tree, and tells him the nature of his mission. Unlike old Tom, the Stranger is here to wield power, against both the Dark Wizard and Sauron, lest the two of them link up and set all of Middle-earth to burn.
I gotta tell ya: Making the conscious decision to mostly ignore what I know from Tolkien’s source material and just go with the flow on this thing has paid dividends. Without fretting about the chronology, you can simply get into Daniel Weyman’s enormously endearing performance as this unnamed wizard — acting so empathetic and compelling, in fact, that at this point I’d be disappointed if he wasn’t Gandalf. I love this guy and I want to see him thrive. Is that so wrong?
And while I quibble with the show’s casting of the Elves — not on the usual dumbass racist grounds but on the grounds that literally all of them should be freakishly attractive — I remain an enormous fan of what Morfydd Clark is doing with Galadriel. I’m starting to see the vision now, see how this Galadriel eventually becomes the intimidatingly calm presence portrayed by Cate Blanchett in the movies. If you’ve been through what Galadriel’s been through, and you suddenly receive a magic ring the only power of which is to help and to heal, I think your personality would undergo a pretty major change too.
So you can add the Arondir/Isildur/Theo material to the pile of full salvaged storylines, I think. The only chink in the show’s underbelly at this point is the Númenor storyline, which this episode skips over along with the Dwarf stuff. But there’s every reason to be confident that a show that transformed itself as thoroughly as this one has can redeem even its weakest work. As for this episode? Thrills, chills, the sparks of passion, and a who’s who of fun Tolkien characters and creatures. That’s an hour well spent.
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.
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