celebrimbor

September 28, 2024

Doomed to Die Review

Christine Kelley amazon, celebrimbor, middle-earth, sauron, the rings of power 0

maybe not. But also, what the fuck?

To Payne & McKay’s credit, they’re finding new ways to fuck this up. Instead of mangling a version of the show that wasn’t working anyway, they’re juxtaposing the best parts of The Rings of Power with… weirdly mean-spirited fridgings? Elrond/Galadriel incest? The A-plots of about five different episodes? There was a good 40% of this episode that worked, and the rest of it felt like a P&M script.

Celebrimbor is the part that works. Annatar keeping Celebrimbor in a time prison, where he forges rings as Eregion burns, is glorious, taking one of Tolkien’s most dramatic stories and injecting it with fresh human emotion. The scene where Sauron tells Celebrimbor about being tortured by Morgoth is the single best bit of writing of this show’s two seasons (Charlie Vickers starts coming to life when he gets to be a sneering villain). And Celebrimbor having to lose a part of his body to save his soul forms a nice parallel with Frodo and Maedhros. That part of the episode is genuinely phenomenal and tragic, everything you’d want from a filmed Silmarillion.

The rest of the episode is… so, what the fuck? We’re dealing with some George R. R. Martin-style plotting, where we’re constantly groping for new bits of plot. Tonally, we’re doing some weird stuff, and putting dramatic emphasis on bizarre things (the horse? the lady elf archer getting shot to death?). Galadriel continues to be The Rings of Power‘s Thirteenth Doctor, getting lectured at while breathlessly intoning words of motivation to men in despair. It’s not that Tolkien was innocent of making women the support systems of men, but like, Éowyn and the Witch-king this ain’t.

There’s not a whole lot to say here. It’s Part 1 of the finale. Part 2 is the episode where we get to have opinions. But in the meantime, we’re stuck waiting around to see just how badly P&M will fuck this up. …

September 20, 2024

Where Is He? Review

Christine Kelley amazon, celebrimbor, eregion, middle-earth, sauron, the rings of power 0

Like not-Gandalf in “Where Is He?”, The Rings of Power faces a crossroads. Pre-season finales have a tricky part to play. They need to set the stage for the ending, synopsizing the season to date and making an argument for how it should end. By that standard, “Where Is He?” is a shining success that capitalizes on all the most compelling parts of The Rings of Power‘s second season.

Perversely, this makes me even more concerned about the finale. We haven’t seen a Payne & McKay script since Season 1’s final episode, which was… I think they revealed Galadriel’s squeeze was Sauron? Maybe Celebrimbor forged the Three Rings? They’ve gained some competence since then. Season 2 has proved they know how to staff a writers’ room. The season’s good episodes exist because P&M allowed them to. To deny their role in the better episodes of this season would be as disingenuous as saying that Seinfeld only worked because of Larry David. Do I trust these guys to land a season finale? After last time, basically no, but for the first time, I’m actively hoping — perhaps futilely — they don’t fail instead of surrendering to the seemingly inevitable.

Not that “Where Is He?” is a masterpiece. Galadriel’s role in the episode (and most of the season) is to get lectured at by Adar and other male characters. She gets leered at for the entire episode, making few decisions except spilling her guts to Adar and unwittingly helping him to besiege Eregion. The fascist dweebs whining about diversity should be assuaged by this move, which outdoes Tolkien on the reactionary front.

The series’ usual faults are present. Charlie Vickers remains positively ligneous as Annatar, even as the scripts handle his character pretty well. The not-Gandalf and Harfoot subplots lack any momentum (The Rings of Power‘s pacing has only improved since Season 1 by dint of things actually happening this season). The Stoors evoke (probably on purpose) the quasi-Aboriginal children from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome in a racially uncomfortable way. And not-Gandalf getting the Dagobah treatment from Tom Bombadil is a downright grating piece of Hero’s Journey-ism that contributes nothing to the season’s saga of complicity, guilt, and sundered families (I yelled at my TV when I heard Tom Bombadil say “many that live deserve death”).

But once again, these flaws are mostly frustrating because the meat of the episode is so solid. Sanaa Hamri is TROP‘s best director to date, creating drama with her shot choices that aren’t there in the script. An aerial shot of Númenor that directly parallels the island with Minas Tirith is downright jaw-dropping, as is the night-to-day rotating shot of Sauron in Eregion. Hamri even draws out some tension in the not-Gandalf/Bombadil scenes with a slightly unnerving low angle. And the Jaws homage on the shores of Númenor rivals anything Peter Jackson ever shot.

The rest of the episode is fairly excellent. Celebrimbor takes an Othello-like turn as his Iago Annatar coerces him into creating the H-Rings, torn apart by guilt and gaslighting.…