**Spoiler Warning** Rings of Power S1E6 - "Udûn"

[Lalwendë]

I didn't watch this one until yesterday morning. I'm less enthused by it than I was, and to be honest real life in the UK is like a particularly absorbing grimdark fantasy right now so I've been occupied with that dystopian story. Though I was definitely lined up to watch House of the Dragon on Monday night at 9pm - that show is really hitting the marks - and have watched that episode three times, it was so good.

Anyway...it was packed full of action and there was a lot I really enjoyed in it, but I'm finding myself getting infuriated about logic holes in the plot so let's get that out of the way.

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). They'd both likely burn you to a crisp, if you weren't asphyxiated. You have next to no chance of survival, and if you do, you are going to be very badly burnt with lung damage.

It didn't end up in the next episode with it all being a dream that Galadriel had in the shower. At least Dallas writers had that. They need to sharpen this kind of stuff up. We can deal with dragons, magic etc but we *know* how cataclysmic volcanic eruptions work, we have them in the real world.

I really enjoyed the angle of where Adar came from and what he was trying to do, that has legs. I liked how he tricked them by sending in their former neighbours in the Orc armour. And I liked the interrogation scene with Galadriel. This has potential.

I also enjoyed the scenes with Elendil and Isildur, as they developed the father-son relationship, and the 'horse lore' part was great too.

And I watched the next episode soon afterwards, which I found better, in my Netflix-addled, instant gratification needing mind.

[Huinesoron]

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

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by Hui

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.

That would have been both hilarious and actually a great twist. Not to mention that this way they could have done the Second Age as a longer and more sensible timeline than whatever they are trying to cram now.

[Thinlómien]

Certainly better than episode 5, but still not the greatest... the logistics and logics were rather confusing (why was it day where the Númeoreans were charging and night inside the tavern??), and I also am not a fan of Galadriel/Halbrand sexual tension (or their dynamic in general with her pressing him to be a king). Also the battle scene was nothing special, and Arondir and Galadriel's battle moves (in the whole series) are getting rather ridiculous, as is the excessive use of slow motion.

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.

I was confused about why the alfirin seeds needed to be stuck into the wound before the cauterising. Seems a little unhygienic and counterproductive to me, but I guess it is Elven magic. And I'm not even starting about the geological plot twist in the end because I can't pretend I understand how volcanos work, but I would think it's not like this...

Originally Posted by Form

Isildur, that apple was not finished enough to waste throwing to the sea.

Not to mention that he let the horse bite from it first, then took a bite himself??

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

might just finish the season for the purpose of being able to discuss it here. If not for the social aspect of discussing it, I wouldn't be watching any further. Heck, I probably wouldn't even have watched this episode.

This pretty much summarises my feelings about the whole show. I would like it to be better but it just isn't. It has been particularly striking how bad the witing is after catching up with it after only having watched House of the Dragon and Andor recently... both are so much better written. (Actually, so is even The Walking Dead season 11 even though season 11 of anything can't be good in general...)

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

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.)

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.

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.)

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).

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.

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Thinlómien

And I'm not even starting about the geological plot twist in the end because I can't pretend I understand how volcanos work, but I would think it's not like this...

Not that this redeems the scene in any way, but I have walked in a hot volcano field, about three miles away from the volcano cone, which was not erupting with fizzy fireworks. There were gurgling mud pots and the air was hot and we didn't stand in one place too long as the heat penetrated the soles of our shoes but it is possible to be that close to a volcano. Folks close to Mount St. Helen when it erupted, however, did tend to die even when farther away.

This pretty much summarises my feelings about the whole show. I would like it to be better but it just isn't. It has been particularly striking how bad the witing is after catching up with it after only having watched House of the Dragon and Andor recently... both are so much better written.

I agree about Andor, very much (to me, who has not seen Rogue and generally who does not like much SW after the original three). Andor seems believable as a depiction of the Empire prior to A New Hope even though its tone is much different. Not that my thoughts have much to do with RoP, except that it is possible to create a prequel that bears some relationship to what follows while being different. Then again, with Andor I am not constantly recalling known characters. That I think is part of the proble with RoP.