Thanks for starting this,
Form! We finally got round to watching Episode 2 about six hours after you put this up.
And it was
so much better. Partly that's the lack of the immensely irritating sailing to Valinor, but mostly I think Episode 1 suffered a lot from being an extended prologue. All of its stories consisted of 'here's some wandering around, and look! One scene suggesting the actual plot at the end'. Episode 2 takes those plots up and pushes them forward at exciting speed, and I actually have no (new) complaints.
I do have comments though.
Finrod - only in the 'previously on', but I happened to pause on his deathbed and noticed that he has what appear to be claw marks on his arm. Given the rest of the episode, these
could be Orc claws, but I choose to believe it's the mark of his fight with the werewolf. You can't prove it's not. -_-
The Stranger - is deliberately ambiguous. They clearly want us to see Gandalf in him - his face, and his speaking firefly (a fantastic line from Nori) - but equally he
killed the fireflies, suggesting something more sinister. The subtitles give his first words as "Mana úrë?" which would be straight Quenya for "what heat/fire?"; but it could also have been mána/manna, "blessed", the whole coming very close to meaning "Secret Fire".
Formhas jokingly suggested he could be the Man in the Moon, but I have my own crackpot theory: could he be
Earendil? He fell from the sky and seems to want to get back there, and Earendil floating through the sky in a boat is in LotR, so they definitely have the rights. It would be extremely bizarre, but...
Harfeet - are adorable, no notes. I watched the LotR stage play many years ago, the pre-show part of which was hobbits running around the auditorium catching fireflies; I like to think the lanterns were a deliberate reference.
Halbrand - is from the Southlands, which (based on the Dunlendings) makes him distant kin to the Haladin, which makes his name actually appropriate. It's essentially a mix of Haldir and Brandir; the Haladin even have form for triple-consonant clusters, -nth-.
Given how separate he was from the rest of his raft crew, I almost wonder whether he was supposed to be a slave, and the rest of the Numenoreans. I don't think there was enough evidence to support that, though the fact that there are corsairs way out in Numenorean waters is puzzling.
Interesting that the 'lifting her hair' scene wasn't even Halbrand! It wasn't a Sudden Realisation that she was an elf, but just a "ha! You can't hide it." If they're Southlanders, Episode 1 established why they don't like elves: the elves are essentially acting as guards on a vast open-air prison, though whether that's in Mordor or Gondor is still unclear.
Galadriel - was apparently indeed planning to swim all the way home. I guess when you realise you shouldn't be going to heaven after all, you don't have many alternatives?
Eregion - or Ost-in-Edhil rather, is on the river? I guess that makes sense from the maps (and the fact that it has heavy industry!); I've been misled by the movies' glimpse of it on a hilltop. It looked very pretty, and I think we may have mistaken it for Numenor a few times in the trailers.
Elrond - likes to save up his conversations until the last second. It's pretty clear Gil-Galad sent him with Celebrimbor specifically so he could get Khazad-Dum involved, but they didn't discuss that until they reached Ost-in-Edhil, and they apparently didn't discuss why they were going to Moria until they reached its (pre-West Gate!) doors. That's slightly clumsy, but the actual events make sense. I enjoyed the squabble between Elrond and Durin!
There was a shot in one of the trailers that felt like they were playing off Legolas and Gimli for Elrond and Durin, and I think that's definitely the case. In an alternate LotR where Legolas was sent as messenger to the Lonely Mountain, you can imagine them having this kind of friendship.
A few replies to Form:
- "ground shake" - Shakespeare used "earthquake" and "shake" in Romeo and Juliet.
- why--HOW--does Elrond have history with Durin? - I actually don't think this needs explaining! He's a herald, he visited Khazad-Dum as an ambassador sometime in the last hundred years, and struck up a friendship. We're coming into a world already in motion, not everything needs to be laid out for us.
- is that a mallorn - I've been assuming mallorn, but the 'no likeness of Laurelin' comment isn't in LotR as far as I know, so it could be that.
- that "a" on the end of her name - if the dwarves' names are still Norse, then at least a few goddesses have -a names. Freyja is probably the biggest.
And a quick comment on dwarves... my view, from the Appendices and the family trees, is that the dwarven path through life is
incredibly ritualised. They have their first child at almost exactly 100 years, and 2-3 more at exactly 5-year gaps. Tolkien goes so far as to say you can spot a daughter by finding brothers 10 years apart in the records. The glimpse we had of the boys looked maybe 10 or younger, so yes, Elrond has managed to miss the most significant part of Durin's life: his courtship, marriage, and the birth of all his children.
And a dwarf
would have known that. They clearly hung out long enough that Elrond should know his age, so he would have known the 5 years or so in which he would get married (if he was going to). He would have known that there would be children immediately afterwards, and roughly how many. To dwarvish eyes, Elrond seems to have deliberately skipped over all the personal parts of Durin's life, and then swanned in in his frilly tunic to ask for a helping hand. I'm not surprised he didn't want to talk to him! I think he only caved in when it became obvious that Elrond
didn't actually know what he'd done.
hS