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Slowly but surely catching up... thank goodness the plot threads are colliding! I'm very happy to have Galadriel + Numenor + Southlands all in one place now, makes keeping track of them much easier.
It was interesting to compare Galadriel and Arondir's fighting styles. Galadriel continues to use 'be where the enemy isn't' as her primary tool - witness that bizarre falling-off-a-horse maneuver she used twice(!). Arondir, meanwhile, is, uh... rubbish in close combat, and just got beaten up until Bronwyn saved him. But he has a solid 'use the architecture as a weapon' theme that Galadriel doesn't use (she just charges).
A few more "Commander"s thrown at Galadriel this time. I think it is actually the only military title even vaguely applied to her - is it in UT that it says she "looked upon the dwarves with the eye of a commander"? It's also the primary translation for Quenya "cáno", so it's definitely the most appropriate rank, but still feels very weird.
One big issue was the repetitiveness of the Southland fight. No less than three times, they celebrated their victory only to find that Oh No! it's not over yet. That's a pacing problem.
I would also have preferred to see the battles. The biggest offender was the whole 'gasp, my hand is wet' sequence. I... assume we were supposed to be seeing that the blood was red rather than black? But a) it was dark and everything looked black, and b) it was firelit so any red looked like reflection. Very badly played.
I did comment to my wife that there was nothing actually proving that Galadriel and Bronwyn were in the same timeframe. It would have been hilarious if the Numenoreans had shown up and discovered the remains of a battle a thousand years earlier. ^_^ Alas.
I've been assuming the tower and village are somewhere around Minas Morgul. That means the Numenoreans sailed up Anduin to future Osgiliath, from which they could probably see the smoke/fire rising over the village. It would be, what, ten, twenty miles to the village then? That's reasonable. But the Orodruin sequence makes it clear that the geography is tower - village - Orc camp - volcano, so I guess the village has to be on the Mordor side. Is there a pass behind Minas Morgul? They obviously didn't take Cirith Ungol, but I've never been clear whether there's a main access route to go with the Spider-infested cave.
Um, what else... disappointed that Adar isn't a named canon character, but proto-Orc (sorry, Uruk) is pretty interesting. I feel like the writers assumed an emotional investment in individual Southlanders that we never had - oh no, Treadmill or whatever, we literally didn't know thee! I wonder if they chopped some stuff out - a scene giving us a reason to care about Fake Barliman and Treadmill, and maybe introducing the Promised King stuff as something other than Galadriel's weird obsession.
Favourite moment was Arondir breaking a hammer on the hell-forged sword. I was convinced he was about to declare a quest to take it to a volcano and set out to kidnap a couple of Harfeet to drag along. ^_^ Weirdest moment was Bronwyn suddenly spouting what I'm sure was Sam's narration in Mordor about light the Dark can't touch. It's nice that they tried, but it didn't fit, and didn't deserve the lampshade they hung on it.
Oh, and my wife the nurse was just as appalled by Bronwyn's "treatment" as everyone else. "But WHY are they cauterising it? She'll just have internal bleeding!"
hS
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