This episode had some fairly interesting stuff. The whole action part was fairly entertaining, despite some stunts that Mongolian raiders could pull off, but not sure about someone in full plate armour, and despite the unnecessarily-long-ugly-stabbing-Orc-in-the-eye and switching of daylights.
Obligatory slow motion even felt right about two times. Otherwise there were quite a few boringly predictable scenes ("now someone is going to stab the Orc from the back to save the protagonist") and a couple of ridiculous ones (turn the key to start the flood... to start the mountain... okay).
On the other hand what I fairly liked was the entire Halbaradsson-Galadriel-Adar triangle (also their chase). As in the previous episode, the Galadriel-Harbingerman dialogue felt like it makes sense in spirit, if not in canon: it reflects some aspects of Galadriel that generally are true. At the same time Adar and everything about the Uruks was very interesting in terms of uniqueness. If the show has brought anything new, then it was this angle. Definitely something I did not expect. I hope it will continue to somehow be addressed. As Elrond says in FotR: "For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so." This is very much in the spirit of that. (And I recall here on the 'Downs some thread about the irredeemability/redeemability of Orcs, and I think this could serve as a nice illustration for one side of it.)
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Originally Posted by Thinlómien
Adar was certainly the best thing in this episode - or to be honest, in the whole series. He's an interesting character and an interesting concept, and Joseph Mawle is doing a great job portraying him. I hope he didn't die. He made me root for the orcs, which was well done. Galadriel, when positioned against him, seems like a concerningly genocidal elf supremacist on the other hand. He had a point about her being corrupted by darkness.
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Basically this. I was really surprised, because it is both very Tolkien and very un-Tolkien (in the sense that Orcs are usually the evil cannon fodder). It is a new approach also because it steps out of the shadow of the previous adaptations and the default setup. I dig it (no pun intended).
I am not personally sure however about Galadriel being portrayed as the horrible racist, but I assume - or I am pretty certain, because it is inevitable - that the show is going somewhere with this and that she will change her mind at some point. (In fact, it is pretty good for character development, if we consider e.g. Galadriel's canonical fluency in Dwarvish, that she is somehow very welcoming of other races, so perhaps here we are going to witness an explanation how it became thus - perhaps some big eye-opening [ahem, again, no pun intended] experience.)
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Originally Posted by Lalwendë
Reading Tolkien, I never once felt the urge to go and look up scientific information of any kind but after this episode I spent a good couple of hours looking up Vulcanology (I used to work with someone with a doctorate in this but thought she maybe wouldn't appreciate me hassling her about it, you know...). Nobody can face out either pyroclastic flow *or* pyroclastic surge (more likely with a water-meets-magma eruption - it has a proper name, and we saw an example of this with the recent big eruption in Iceland).
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Thank you. That was my major question at the end of this episode.
Anyway the entire thing with the sword being The Key did not make any sense. I will now ignore the whole "we are looking for a sword. It is somewhere here. It is under the floorboards and thus we will never find it!" The whole system
- so who made it? Morgoth? For what? To "start up" Orodruin - for what? And if he made it, why did he not already do it? And why did he hide the key? Or if whoever hid or lost the key, why did they put it just in the area, not too far, but not too near to Orodruin itself either?
- the entire mechanism seems ridiculous. Okay, if such a thing is geologically possible, fine, but does that mean it will keep flowing like that forever, or else Orodruin would stop? Interesting that, say, the Gondorians did not just bar the river after conquering Mordor later, in order to stop the thing? (Or is that what Gandalf and co. mean when they say that Orodruin starts again in the Third Age after Sauron's previous absence?)
- what did Adar want to do with the key anyway? What good is it to him? When I saw Mr. Evil Butterbur turning the key and unleashing the river, I thought it would create Lake Núrnen that, you know, Adar could use to make a foundation of his future Uruk Paradise State, starting with farming.
Most of all, ad The Key Plot (see my comment to ep. 5), it would have been so much better had we been told more about the sword before. Before we had no idea why it was so important and this aftermath did not make it make much sense in retrospect.
Not bad, but nothing super-amazing either. Certainly about 200% better than the previous episode, but an average okay-but-not-special TV series episode with some ridiculous stuff and a couple of better scenes thrown in.