Episode Eight: “Alloyed”
The final episode of the show, and the reason why I intend to watch the second season. Instead of offering a summary, I’ll get on with it.
We’ll start with the Harfoots and WAKIG. While the quartet is searching for WAKIG, the three women find him, capture him, and tell him that they are from Rhun, far to the East, and intend to perform a ritual that will restore his memories and power to him, as he is Sauron. Shortly afterwards, the Harfoots find them and attempt to rescue someone who they think is WAKIG, who turns out to be the very androgynous woman in a magical disguise. After a fight, during which Sadoc is mortally wounded, the women manage to complete their ritual, restoring WAKIG’s memories.
However, they discover that he is actually an Istari, not Sauron, and in the ensuing magical duel the women are banished after their true forms, akin to the Nazgul from the LOTR movies, are revealed. Sadoc then dies, and the others return to the Harfoots. The main body continues their migration, while Nori goes off with WAKIG to Rhun.
Meanwhile, in Numenor, the king dies in the presence of Elendil’s daughter, who is sketching him for a tomb design, and when the expedition arrives after some character interaction between Tar-Miriel and Elendil regarding her blindness, it is to the sight of the port draped in black for mourning.
Meanwhile, in one of those moments that really makes one question how chronologically aligned the various storylines of the show are, Galadriel brings Halbrand to Eregion (on horses that should be either dead or on their last legs, considering the length of the journey), where his wounds are healed and he starts talking to Celebrimbor about the forging of the rings, and then starts helping him with it, though apparently his advice might actually be bad (I know nothing of smithing, so I can’t say one way or the other). While he does this, Galadriel’s two brain cells finally rub together and she has someone delve into the records to find out about the kings of the Southlands, whereupon she discovers that the last one died quite some time ago.
We then get to one of my favorite scenes in the show. Galadriel goes to confront Halbrand, who drags her into a dreamscape resembling the raft where they met, and reveals to her that he is, in fact, Sauron, and that everything he said to her was, partially, reverse psychology to get her to push him to become king of the Southlands, and claims to only want to try and fix what Morgoth has broken, at which point we get this exchange:
Sauron: Together, we can save this Middle-earth.
Galadriel: Save? Or rule?
Sauron: I see no difference.
Galadriel: (pulls her dagger on him) And that is why I will never be at your side.
Fantastic. Tolkien wouldn’t have written the dialogue that way, but the ideas expressed in that exchange are pure Tolkien, and that moment is what finally pushed me over the edge to “Yes, I am going to watch season two.”
Sauron, of course, does not take this refusal well, and after threatening Galadriel with what will probably happen to her if she exposes him drops her in the river, where she is found by Elrond before she drowns, and Elrond reads the documents Galadriel found and realizes that Halbrand is not who he thought he was. They return to Celebrimbor at the forge, where with some rather dodgy smithing (supposedly, I know little of such matters) the three Elven rings are forged, using Elrond’s mithril and Galadriel’s brother’s dagger.
All in all, while this episode does have some issues, they mostly have to do with the fact that all of the events chronicled in the show should not be happening at the same time. The Harfoot storyline is still cliché-ridden, but is getting a little better. The forging of the Rings may be dodgy on the actual forging process, but the actions of the characters make sense, and we get some hints that the show’s creators might have read something else that mentions Numenor when we get this line from Celebrimbor, who’s quoting two villains: “We are on the cusp of crafting a new kind of power. Not of strength, but of spirit. Not of the flesh, but over flesh. This is a power of the Unseen World.” Shades of the NICE in That Hideous Strength, there. Also, the Numenorean storyline looks like it might actually get interesting, and it will be interesting to see what happens with Elendil and his family.
In summary, this was probably the best episode of the series, and is the reason why I’ll at least try to watch the second season when it comes out.
Conclusion
Before I watched the show, I was anticipating writing a review that could be summarized as “This show is well-crafted and executed, but they don’t get Tolkien and it doesn’t even look like they tried.” Instead, it looks like the showrunners have at least tried to understand Tolkien and his themes, even if they don’t quite get it, but it is blindingly obvious that they are extremely new to their job and don’t really get what they’re doing.
To begin with, the marketing campaign. I mentioned at the beginning that I wasn’t sure if the marketing campaign, which basically sold the show as “generic epic fantasy that adheres to DEI checkboxes,” was due to misaimed marketing or was influenced by the showrunners. Based on some of the lengths they went to to conceal the plot twist that Halbrand is actually Sauron until the final episode, I begin to wonder if said marketing campaign wasn’t part of the obfuscation. If so, it was a very bad idea—I suspect, but I can’t prove, that a lot of people bailed after the first two or three episodes who wouldn’t have if the trailers had made the show look like the Tolkienian tragedy it actually is. (And the thing is, we do know that a lot of people bailed; supposedly, only 37% of domestic viewers made it through the whole thing, while 45% of overseas viewers did. Either way, that fewer than 50% of viewers made it through the entire show indicates that the issue is not with a minority of internet haters.)
Then there’s the Harfoot storyline. To begin with, it’s a cliché storm: about the only things I didn’t see coming were Sadoc dying and Nori going off with WAKIG, and the character archetypes are straight out of central casting. Then, as mentioned previously, between episodes two and three it demonstrates the writers’ tendencies to undermine long-term emotional impact and dramatic tension for short-term dramatic tension. The only really good thing about it is that despite the characters all being depressingly archetypical, I really do like them, and I kind of want to see what happens with WAKIG and Nori in Rhun.
Then there’s the Southlander storyline. I’m not going to go over my specific gripes about it again in detail, but I will summarize them: this storyline really undermines the whole show, because things constantly keep happening for no good in-world reason; rather, they happen because the writers think they have to happen in order for there to be plot advancement. Galadriel being hit by a pyroclastic flow was a cheap attempt at a cliffhanger that failed because absolutely no one believed they were going to kill her off, and made it very obvious that characters are going to live and die based purely on writer fiat. Which is technically always true of course, but you’re supposed to keep it hidden.
The Numenor storyline is very okay—I actually like how Elendil, Tar-Miriel, and Ar-Pharazon are handled here, and there’s a lot of surprisingly realistic outcomes—but the Isildur subplot adds nothing to the show except some “dramatic tension”, and I have no idea why it was included.
Then we have the Elrond and Durin, best bros forever, storyline. While them constantly talking about their friendship would get very wearing if they took up more of the show, watching two smart and capable guys trying to balance friendship, personal ambition, and their duties to their people is just kind of fun, tempered by the fact that you know it’s going to lead to ruin, fire, and death when they unearth the Balrog, which keeps the “broad-minded, forward-thinking Durin rebelling against his reactionary, stick-in-the-mud father” subplot from seeing like a cliché storm comparable to the Harfoot storyline, and when Sauron forges the one Ring, which is going to cause big problems for the three Elven rings. This is one of the better parts of the show all the way through, despite the apparently very dodgy smithing they’re doing—and the fact I’m including that here brings us back to the writers’ issues—it wouldn’t have killed them to do at least some research into how metalcraft actually works.
Finally, we get to the Galadriel storyline, and this summarizes the show perfectly, for both good and bad reasons. At the start, she is presented as a generic epic fantasy heroine—bullied as a child by her less-thoughtful peers, she is driven to fight and root out evil, only to be undermined by those less dedicated than she is, and then heroically turns aside from eternal bliss to return to fight evil again and comes across a man cast from his throne who is reluctant to do it again. By the end, however, it has become very obvious that in many ways her actions have strengthened and enabled the very thing she wanted to fight, and that her story is a tragic one, in the old sense, where the protagonist’s actions lead to their downfall. However, it also has a scene that also encapsulates the show’s ultimate flaw: in episode four, when Elendil and Galadriel are riding out to the archive to look for a map, and Galadriel puts her horse into a gallop for the sheer joy of riding really fast, and we’re supposed to see it as a kind of “look, Galadriel IS still capable of feeling happiness” scene, but then it shifts to slow-mo and it kind of looks like there’s something very, very, wrong with her. Great idea, but the execution is…lacking, and it’s really obvious that they either didn’t watch the footage or didn’t show it to anyone else.
And that summation is why I can’t say “don’t watch this show” or “I unreservedly recommend this show.” The showrunners get a lot of stuff right, particularly the themes, and there’s a lot of parts that are really enjoyable, but sometimes they get things so very wrong in such obvious and easily correctable ways that it becomes almost physically painful to watch, kind of like watching the Star Wars prequels. And so going into season two, I hope they fix the stupid rather than doubling down on it. Because if they double down, I will jump ship. But I will be watching season two. Why? Because so far, it looks like the only people whose plans aren’t going to end up making things worse are the people who don’t have these big grandiose plans to save the world or whatever—rather, they just want to do what’s right. And that, right there, indicates that the showrunners are at least trying to understand Tolkien, and that, unlike good writing, is a spirit that cannot be learned. I’m willing to chance it.
The Soapbox Guild 