Episode 2: Adrift
This episode is a bit better, mostly because it kind of gets away from the “generic epic fantasy” of the first episode and into some things that are actually sort of clever.
We’ll start with the Galadriel storyline. Still inexplicably wearing the shift that she had on onboard the ship to Valinor (all that thing is doing is weighing her down), she stumbles across and boards a raft inhabited by the survivors of a shipwreck. This ends up serving as an introduction both to the reception she’s likely to get in Numenor, as the humans do not react well to her being an Elf, and to Halbrand. At any rate, the humans decide to pitch her off the raft just as the sea monster that wrecked their ship shows up, Galadriel jumps off, the raft gets wrecked behind her, and then Halbrand shows up to pick her up on the part of the raft with the mast and the supplies, as he disconnected it from the rest of the raft just before the monster got to it.
Honestly, this is actually really effective foreshadowing that Halbrand is actually a very bad guy, but thinking that way requires you to believe that the showrunners actually “get” Tolkien. Just leaving people to their fate to save your own skin is a no-no in Middle-Earth in a way that it isn’t in most works, even if you save someone else in the process. However, in the light of episode one and the marketing campaign, this comes off as Halbrand being a generic epic fantasy charismatic anti-hero.
They then go through a conversation in which they both discuss their angsty and tragic pasts, followed by a massive storm, and Halbrand saves Galadriel’s life, a sequence that in the generic epic fantasy this kind of looks like would signal another Forbidden Romance Between Elf and Human. At the end they are picked up by a ship of Numenor captained by Elendil, which is when we really get the sense of how compressed the timeline is going to be on this show.
Meanwhile, among the Harfoots, Nori and her friend move WAKIG from where the meteor hit to a spot where they can hide him. After some light comedy, centered around the travails of two small people trying to move one big one and their attempts to feed him, WAKIG ends up using some fireflies to show them a constellation, after which said fireflies die. Once again, this is generic YA fantasy stuff—it’s sort of de rigeur in this sort of story to introduce some doubt as to whether helping the stranger is actually a good idea by having them do something that unintentionally causes a problem. Then, just to add to the drama, Nori’s father, Largo, breaks his ankle, when the migration to new ground is only a few days away. At which point, the show undermines some upcoming scenes by having the Brandyfoot family worry that this will result in them being left behind, since Largo isn’t going to be able to pull their cart. Then, Nori and Poppy go and steal a star chart showing the previously mentioned constellation from the wagon it’s kept in in a well-done but still cliché comedic scene as Poppy tries to keep the head Harfoot, named Sadoc, from noticing that Nori is messing about inside.
Then, in the Southlands storyline, having gone to the nearest village, Bronwyn and Arondir discover that the village has been utterly wrecked, quite recently, and all of the inhabitants have vanished. They then go to the village and investigate, and discover that apparently someone or something tunnelled up from below. So, instead of doing the sensible thing and having both of them go back, Arondir hops down into the tunnel to investigate, where he is promptly captured, while Bronwyn goes back to the village, and tells the story. Of course, everyone reacts in disbelief, led by the tavern-keeper, Waldreg, until she returns to her house and ends up killing an orc who came up from a tunnel dug underneath the house in what is actually a relatively tense scene, and returns to the tavern with its head. One can be forgiven at this point for wondering how fast this tunneling is going, since it’s apparently a fair walk from Bronwyn’s village to the ruined one and no one seems to have noticed that the other village just vanished before Bronwyn and Arondir went there. In fairness, I should note that the tunnelling is actually foreshadowed in the first episode, when someone mentions earth tremors. So kudos there.
Finally, in the Elrond storyline, Elrond is sent to Celebrimbor, who shows him design plans for a new and more powerful forge. Elrond then convinces him that they need dwarvish help, and so they go to Khazad-dum, aka Moria, where they meet a rather more chilly reception than Elrond expects. At which point he invokes a rite that involves a stone-breaking contest between him and a dwarf—in this case, Elrond’s friend Durin. (As a side note, whoever came up with the design for the dwarf guard armor needed a talking to, because while it’s meant to be intimidating they kind of look like walking bells and I can’t take that seriously.) In a twist that will surprise anyone familiar with fantasy tropes, Elrond actually <i>fails the challenge</i> and is banished from Dwarf lands. He then proceeds to do something unexpected and ask Durin to escort him out, at which point he takes the opportunity to act like a grown adult and ask what Durin’s problem is, at which point Durin acts like a grown adult and explains what the problem is—namely, that Elrond went no-contact for twenty years, which might not be long for an Elf but is a really long time for anyone else—and Elrond apologizes and asks if he can meet Durin’s family. Durin acquiesces, and by the end of the episode, thanks to some serious prodding from Durin’s wife Dysa, their friendship is restored and Durin is relaying Elrond’s request to his father.
All in all, this episode is a bit better than the first one, largely because of the greater focus on the Elrond storyline, which is honestly the cleverest section of the show and the section that kept me from just writing the show off as a generic fantasy epic. While the Galadriel storyline will turn out to be a subversion of what it appears to be, the episode seems to play the tropes painfully straight, with not even a hint of anything else. Meanwhile, the Southlands storyline plays its tropes painfully straight as well, with its hero getting himself captured doing something heroic and stupid, while its heroine is disbelieved by the men around her until she kills an orc and brings its head in. (Though later we will find out that her most vocal opponent had his own reasons for denying that there was a problem.)
However, with the Harfoot storyline, you see one of the big problems the show is going to have. Not does it plays it tropes painfully straight as well, it also does something that will be a recurring problem for this show, that of undermining long-term goals for the sake of immediate drama. I’ll discuss this in more depth in talking about the next episode, but the Brandyfoots’ worries in this episode don’t really make sense for the vibe we’re supposed to get for the Harfoots in the next one. And the thing is, you can still have some dramatic tension. Show all the Harfoots planning on how they’re going to make sure the Brandyfoots are going to be able to keep up with the march, with everyone taking terms helping Mama Brandyfoot pull the cart, and Nori’s friend reminding her that if anyone finds out about them helping WAKIG that it’s going to cause everyone’s willingness to help to evaporate like morning dew. Now THAT’s dramatic tension right there, especially if you couple it with Nori already being somewhat reluctant to help WAKIG instead of being enthused about it. And if you do that, you have an opportunity for Nori to do a call forward to the next episode by having her say something like “If I don’t go off-trail he walks alone,” when Poppy asks her why she’s doing all this, which sounds way better than her actual line, which is “there’s head-sense and heart-sense,” which is so gloriously cliched that it’s not even funny.
In other words, this episode kept me watching the show, but I was still not really impressed by it.
Episode Three: Adar
This episode marks a plateau in show quality.
We’ll start with Arondir’s part of the Southlands storyline. Having been taken prisoner by the orcs, he is assigned to dig a trench that they are building, where he finds the missing villagers and the rest of the Elven watchers. No explanation is given for how they ended up getting captured as well, which is unfortunate, because that could have brought in some dramatic tension, like “hey, we got captured looking for you. Thanks a lot.” Then there’s a moment where the Orcs want them to fell a tree that’s in the way, the Elves refuse, the Orcs kill one of them for it, and then Arondir chops it down to avoid more people getting killed while apologizing to it—which, honestly, seems like a very Elvish thing to do.
Anyway, the Elves come up with a plan to escape. When the sun is highest and the orcs are at their weakest, they’ll take out the immediate guards, then break their chains and run away. But not together. No. Instead, each will run as his chain is broken, which means that they will be running one at a time, which means climbing out of the trench and crossing a good space of open ground before they reach concealment and cover, with plenty of time for the orcs to kill each of them. If you think this sounds like a terrible plan that no one with the level of experience that these Elves supposedly have would come up with, you’re right. All of them are killed except for Arondir, who is taken to see the leader of the orcs, Adar.
Now for Galadriel and Halbrand. Elendil brings them back to Numenor, where they meet with Tar-Miriel, the Queen Regent ruling in her unofficially deposed father’s stead. Galadriel is not welcomed due to the fact that she is an Elf, and proceeds to go on an angry rant that in another show would result in her getting what she wanted, but in a departure from cliché she does not. Instead, she goes with Elendil to the local House of Lore, and after a bizarre sequence featuring her riding a horse in slow motion that I think is supposed to tell us that she is still capable of finding joy in the simple things and that she has not been totally consumed by her desire for revenge but is just really awkward, finds a map of Middle-Earth, overlays the mark of Sauron on it, and discovers that it matches the mountains borders of the Southlands. If you think that this sounds like a really weird way to signal people that is extremely heavily reliant on things like having an accurately-drawn map to begin with, which is not a guarantee, you are correct.
Meanwhile, Halbrand engages in the kind of activity that in another show would be a sign that he is a lovable rogue protagonist but here is foreshadowing that he is not a good guy. In this case, he wants to do some blacksmith work, but can’t because he’s not part of the guild, so he stands some blacksmiths some drinks and takes a guild badge off one of them in the merriment. In other words, your standard Morally Ambiguous Rogue with a Heart of Gold plan. Then, in a departure from cliché, he gets discovered by the guildsmen, gets into a fight with them, and is apprehended by the city watch and thrown into jail.
Finally, we come to the Harfoot storyline. To begin with, the way the show depicts the Harfoot culture in this episode is fantastic. “Nobody goes off-trail, nobody walks alone” sums up the risk-averse, security in exchange for conformity nature of the Harfoots very succinctly, referring to dying as “falling behind” and commemorating the dead with “We will wait for them” is a very definite nod to their nomadic nature, and de-caravaning as punishment for jeopardizing the safety of the group is very good. However, how the story plays out is a cliché storm, as WAKIG, having been given the star map by Nori, goes into the camp trying to find light to read by, accidentally sets the map on fire, and then stumbles into the ceremony and calls Nori out by name. This, of course, results in everybody freaking out, de-caravaning is threatened, but instead Sadoc sticks the Brandyfoots in the back, thereby greatly increasing their chances of literally and figuratively falling behind. There is then the obligatory moment when Nori doubts herself and her mother affirms her choices, and then at the end of the episode, as expected, WAKIG shows up to help them pull their cart.
This is just a very uneven episode, with several good points but also several bad points—and even the good points aren’t as good as they could be. The Harfoot ethos and the tension we should be feeling when the Brandyfoots are faced with possibly being thrown out because of Nori aiding WAKIG are both undermined by the fact that in the previous episode they were worried about just being left behind because Largo broke his foot and no one even brought up the possibility of the others helping them. Had the last episode shown the Harfoots rallying around the Brandyfoots when the dad breaks his foot, the scene where WAKIG reveals himself and everyone kind of turns their backs on them would have had a lot more emotional punch, especially if Nori was already helping reluctantly. As matters stand, the audience is kind of left wondering if they would have actually lost anything if they had been exiled. The Numenor storyline is showing more and more signs of deviating from generic epic fantasy, and in good and realistic ways, but the “mark of Sauron=what the Southlands look like on a map if you turn it just so” is the kind of “clever” idea that Hollywood writers love and is not used in the real world because it’s so easy to botch, a problem that will crop up later in the show, and in much worse ways. Meanwhile, the Arondir storyline has some good worldbuilding moments, but once again we have supposedly capable and competent people being stupid because the plot demands it, another problem we will see later in the show.
All in all, it’s not an episode that moved my opinion on the show much.
The Soapbox Guild 