LotR: Rings of Power 1.03
Sep. 12th, 2022 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThese last few days, I was extremely busy, and will soon be extremely busy again, but currently I’m crossing the Atlantic for a short work related stay, and thus I had the chance to catch up on the third Rings of Power episode.
Numenor: looks gorgeous. You can see how much I’d forgotten or never learned by the fact I wasn’t sure whether the fallout between elves and Numenorians was Tolkien-derived or not - the only thing I recalled about Numenor was that the humans there were extremely long lived, hence Aragorn, a descendant, being long lived as well, and that Elrond’s twin brother Elros, the one who chose their human heritagem, was King there. And that’s it. Hence, again, no opinion on how this plot thread compares to its origins. Purely on its own terms, I like it, Elendil especially, for the great voice and the matter-of-fact yet diplomatic way he navigates between the Queen Regent and Galadriel. Him as a less than perfect father towards his children makes him three dimensional, and young Isildur as a cheerful bundle of energy makes him feel refreshingly undoomed, as opposed to having his canonical ending being heavy-handedly foreshadowed.
Current guess due to utter lack of other Numenor knowledge than the above: maybe the not yet named and not really shown King whom the Queen Regent is talking to at the end of the episode, referred to her as “father” and according to Elendil as opposed to everyone else “loyal to the Elves” is a really ancient Elros, thus underlining the tragic gulf between human and elf in terms of life expecatations even for Numenorians? (If Elros is already dead since a millennium, feel free to ignore me.)
Harfoots: (Harfeet?): Imo they’re doing excellent world building with them. Last episode everyone’s concern at the idea that Nori`s father might be wounded serious enough not to be able to join the “migration” due to his accident made it clear what was confirmed in this episode: that the nomodic proto-Hobbits might be a tightly knit community, but at the price of leaving anyone behind who could slow them down. That this always on the move society will end up in the other extreme, a society so settled that any travel outside the Shire idea will be regarded as daft/excentric/suspicious, makes sense to me. You can see the parallelsI/contrasts also in the way the ceremony for those left behind is staged, because it’s filmed like Bilbo’s birthday speech, until you realize what exactly they’re talking about, why Poppy has tears in her eyes and doesn’t have a (present) family of her own.
Meanwhile, Nori’s kindness, compassion and insistence on helping the mysterious stranger despite him being a suspicous not-Harfoot who can’t yet communicate well resulting in said Stranger, whom I believe to be Gandalf more than ever, helping her and her family and saving them when it’s their turn to be left behind strikes me as a lovely variation of the “mercy and pity saves the day in its unintended consequences” theme in LotR with Bilbo, Frodo and Gollum. And of course if it IS Gandalf, then his first word (other than Nori’s name) being “friend” is just lovely.
Arondir and the other imprisoned elves: never mind the failed escape attempt, the most brutal scene to me was when Arondir in order to save his fellow prisoners was made to axe a tree, and he touched the tree and murmured to it first. You could see it hurt his soul. (Mind you, given that the Elves do use bows made of wood, I assume SOMEONE must be okay with the occasional tree being sacrificed.)
Embarrassingly late, it dawned on me that the “Southlands” where Arondir and friends are currently held captive, the Orcs are massacring trees and searching for something, and “Ardar” has at last shown up (though pointedly not yet seen in detail) is probably not-yet-Mordor. At which point I also thought that if Haldbrand is the long lost King of the Southlands, he might end up as one of the Nine, and that’s one main reason for his storyline with Galadriel - to make him into someone the audience cares about, so that when he ends up as a Nazgul (maybe even the Witch King?), it’s tragic.
Numenor: looks gorgeous. You can see how much I’d forgotten or never learned by the fact I wasn’t sure whether the fallout between elves and Numenorians was Tolkien-derived or not - the only thing I recalled about Numenor was that the humans there were extremely long lived, hence Aragorn, a descendant, being long lived as well, and that Elrond’s twin brother Elros, the one who chose their human heritagem, was King there. And that’s it. Hence, again, no opinion on how this plot thread compares to its origins. Purely on its own terms, I like it, Elendil especially, for the great voice and the matter-of-fact yet diplomatic way he navigates between the Queen Regent and Galadriel. Him as a less than perfect father towards his children makes him three dimensional, and young Isildur as a cheerful bundle of energy makes him feel refreshingly undoomed, as opposed to having his canonical ending being heavy-handedly foreshadowed.
Current guess due to utter lack of other Numenor knowledge than the above: maybe the not yet named and not really shown King whom the Queen Regent is talking to at the end of the episode, referred to her as “father” and according to Elendil as opposed to everyone else “loyal to the Elves” is a really ancient Elros, thus underlining the tragic gulf between human and elf in terms of life expecatations even for Numenorians? (If Elros is already dead since a millennium, feel free to ignore me.)
Harfoots: (Harfeet?): Imo they’re doing excellent world building with them. Last episode everyone’s concern at the idea that Nori`s father might be wounded serious enough not to be able to join the “migration” due to his accident made it clear what was confirmed in this episode: that the nomodic proto-Hobbits might be a tightly knit community, but at the price of leaving anyone behind who could slow them down. That this always on the move society will end up in the other extreme, a society so settled that any travel outside the Shire idea will be regarded as daft/excentric/suspicious, makes sense to me. You can see the parallelsI/contrasts also in the way the ceremony for those left behind is staged, because it’s filmed like Bilbo’s birthday speech, until you realize what exactly they’re talking about, why Poppy has tears in her eyes and doesn’t have a (present) family of her own.
Meanwhile, Nori’s kindness, compassion and insistence on helping the mysterious stranger despite him being a suspicous not-Harfoot who can’t yet communicate well resulting in said Stranger, whom I believe to be Gandalf more than ever, helping her and her family and saving them when it’s their turn to be left behind strikes me as a lovely variation of the “mercy and pity saves the day in its unintended consequences” theme in LotR with Bilbo, Frodo and Gollum. And of course if it IS Gandalf, then his first word (other than Nori’s name) being “friend” is just lovely.
Arondir and the other imprisoned elves: never mind the failed escape attempt, the most brutal scene to me was when Arondir in order to save his fellow prisoners was made to axe a tree, and he touched the tree and murmured to it first. You could see it hurt his soul. (Mind you, given that the Elves do use bows made of wood, I assume SOMEONE must be okay with the occasional tree being sacrificed.)
Embarrassingly late, it dawned on me that the “Southlands” where Arondir and friends are currently held captive, the Orcs are massacring trees and searching for something, and “Ardar” has at last shown up (though pointedly not yet seen in detail) is probably not-yet-Mordor. At which point I also thought that if Haldbrand is the long lost King of the Southlands, he might end up as one of the Nine, and that’s one main reason for his storyline with Galadriel - to make him into someone the audience cares about, so that when he ends up as a Nazgul (maybe even the Witch King?), it’s tragic.
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Date: 2022-09-14 01:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-09-14 03:02 pm (UTC)