Episode 6 (Spoilers)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[Dave_LF]

I almost said this after E5, but they are 100% trying to recreate Helm's Deep at Ostirith, seemingly up to and including the surprise cavalry reinforcements at the last minute. That's on top of recreating Aragorn in Halbrand, recreating Faramir riding to Osgiliath with Isildur in Númenor, and recreating Bilbo's speech with Sadoc. One or two things like that and you can call it homage. This many barely halfway through season one and it's just... derivative.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

That's on top of recreating Aragorn in Halbrand

Hidden text.

But if the spoiler is right, what a twist on that that would be!

[Dave_LF]

Hidden text.

Derivative with a twist is still derivative

But seriously, I more and more wish they'd been able to just do their own thing and ignore the existence of the PJ films. Not because I hate the PJ films, but because artists tend to be at their best when they're only lightly fettered to history.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Hidden text.

Yeah, but derivative doesn't necessarily mean bad. Particularly since the show is undoubtedly going to go into different spaces over the course of the next five seasons.

[Dave_LF]

Here's hoping!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I feel pretty confident of it, just based on the nature of the story arc that they will be telling.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Also, RoP has something that the LOTR films did not have, at Helms Deep or anywhere else -- the badassedness of Arondir. I remember reading an interview with Ismael Cruz Cordova in which he mentioned that he was able to utilize his training in capoeira in the filming of the show, and that is evident even in this short clip. By comparison, the antics of Legolas in both sets of films are put in their place.

[Eldy]

Yeah, in terms of ninja-like Elvish feats, Arondir > Legolas any day.

I hope future seasons of ROP will rely less on callbacks to the PJ films, as the writers hopefully become more confident in the show having its own identity.

[narya]

I wonder why I keep watching this show. This episode, there were what seemed like 10 minutes of decent, Tolkienesque dialogue, interspersed with what seemed like 3 hours of senseless, graphic violence. And I know too much geology to be less than incredulous about what happened at the end. But hey, it's fantasy, so maybe people survive pyroclastic flows in Middle Earth.

[Alatar]

I actually really liked this episode. Now that we've established that its total fan fiction I'm happy to go along for the ride. Also, nice bait and switch on the "Helm's Deep but totally not" at the last minute. I do love that it has never once felt like Game of Thrones. Its very much its own thing. And that final scene, however improbable, was properly Epic.

[Smaug's voice]

The battle scenes had some really weird editing so the overall effect didn't land as impressively to me. And the Orodruin explosion had some choppy visual effects. But I enjoyed the episode.
A lot of fan-fiction. And Galadriel continues to stray further and further away from canon. But this is the only episode after 4 that has felt cohesive and focused (thanks to the merging storylines).

I like the level of violence in the show. It's not really gratuitous like GoT. But it's more brutal than LotR (with lots of civillian deaths). The Silmarillion is very gory in some parts so I think this matches the tone there.


On the other hand, Halbrand made some huge gains in the "Guess who's Sauron" leaderboards this week.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Well, that was interesting.

[Eldy]

I enjoyed this more than the previous episode. Realizing last week that I couldn't take the show seriously anymore makes it easier to enjoy as popcorn entertainment. There are still plenty of criticisms to be made, including the incessant LOTR callbacks that, as in the Hobbit films, take me out of the story, but eh.

I have mixed feelings about them making Adar an Orc Rights Activist. On the one hand, the personhood of Orcs is an ongoing hobby horse of mine. On the other hand, ROP has pretty consistently characterized them as brutal, inhuman monsters so far, which will make it easier for people to dismiss Adar's arguments as the self-serving motivations of an unambiguous villain. Not to say I want Orcs to be all sunshine and roses, but even now, it would be surprising if ROP truly takes seriously the idea that Orcs are of equal moral worth as Elves and Humans, as opposed to a middle ground that condemns the excesses of Galadriel's vengeance fixation without agreeing with Adar. On the other hand, the fact that the Númenóreans and Southlanders took Orkish prisoners instead of slaughtering everyone they could their hands on is a pretty significant difference from what we've seen in prior Middle-earth works, so maybe I'm being too pessimistic!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

There was a lot that I really liked in that episode (and some that I hated). The invocation of Yavanna was lovely.

[Eldy]

RE: Orcs, "Yistaan" on TORn reasonably points out that despite the prisoner-taking scene, ROP still has yet to match The Return of the King (1980) in acknowledging Orkish personhood and the possibility of redemption.

There was a lot that I really liked in that episode (and some that I hated). The invocation of Yavanna was lovely.

Arondir and Bronwyn's conversation was one of my favorite scenes in this episode.

[Eldy]

A friend of mine shared this analysis of the dam/volcano scene on Discord, and it made me giggle.

Okay, so something I think is not good, is the reveal of what the hilt was doing. My understanding is that the writers intend the plot to be like this, re the hilt:

- There was a dam that was either creating a reservoir, or simply limiting the flow of a river
- This dam was made in the time of Morgoth's rule over the land, for the use of the Southlander humans who served him
- The control mechanism for this dam was also a tower, that was repurposed by the elves later as a military outpost
- Adar realized that a flood of water could be used to create a volcano eruption that would create permanent overcast in the Southlands
- Adar's orcs built canals and tunnels to connect the volcano to the base of the dam
- They needed control of the tower to open the floodgates to launch the volcano
- The handle / key to open the floodgates of what is nominally a piece of civil engineering is an evil sword that drinks blood

It seems to me that the dam and such was not created with the intent of being used to launch the volcano, but was a normal civil engineering project, and this normal civil engineering project was only controllable by this evil sword that can only be used to open or close the floodgates after drinking lots of blood, and also this sword was hidden away for some reason rather than like, left where it could be useful, by the dam.

In fact, all of this plan sounds reasonable to me other than the fact that the dam needs a key to operate, and that key is an evil blood-drinking sword. However, this reveal of what the deal was with the evil sword is like, imo not great

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I now think that Adar is Sauron.

[Eldy]

After this episode, I would rather Sauron be Halbrand than Adar (but not as much as I'd prefer him to be a yet-unseen character).

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Interesting that they were able to use the origin story for the Orcs that is in the Silmarillion. I don't believe there is anything like that in LotR.

For all the crazy fan-fic, there was a lot in this episode that felt very Tolkienesque to me.

Where is Stranger Wings? I'd really be interested in hearing his take on all this.