Episode Eight, “Shadow and Flame,” opens with Durin IV going to confront his father. The King refuses to listen to his son’s pleas to take off the ring. He breaks through into a great cavern of mithril, but the Balrog appears, and Durin takes off the ring. Naming his son as King Durin, Durin III attacks the balrog, and the shock of the conflict causes the hole in the wall to close. In Rhûn, the Stranger finds the Stoor’s home. The Dark Wizard is there, greeting him as a brother and offering the Stranger the opportunity to become Sauron’s successor alongside himself, but the Stranger refuses him. The Dark Wizard uses magic to tear down the Stoor’s homes and leaves, but the Stranger discovers the ability to stop the rocks from falling, giving the Poppy, Nori, and the Stoors time to get to safety.
In Númenor, Pharazôn declares that Míriel was only able to survive the trial because she is allied with Sauron. Those faithful to her are also labeled as dangerous traitors and a purge begins. Míriel refuses to escape with Elendil. She gives him the sword Narsil, and tells him to use it to claim his destiny. Adar’s army invades Eregion. Orcs find Galadriel leading a group of elves to safety, and she offers herself and the Nine Rings in exchange for the survivors being released. In the tower, Sauron tortures Celebrimbor for the location of the rings. Celebrimbor prophecies that the Rings of Power will destroy Sauron, and that One alone will prove his utter ruin. Infuriated, Sauron impales him on a spear.
In Pelargir, Estrid tells Isildur that she doesn’t love her betrothed, and they kiss. He asks her to come to Númenor with him. But when Kemen arrives with Númenor soldiers, he refuses Estrid passage to Númenor, and tells Isildur that Pharazôn is now king, while Elendil is wanted for treason. He starts giving orders to the villagers, refusing to bring the aid Númenor promised unless the villagers provide timber for “the King’s armada.” Galadriel is brought before Adar, who reveals his possession of Nenya and the fact that his elvish appearance is restored while he wears the ring. He returns it to Galadriel and promises that once Sauron is dead he will recall his children to Mordor and never make war on Middle-earth again. He asks that the rings be used to heal the rift between elf and Uruk. Grugzûk is brought in, apparently wounded by Sauron. As Adar kneels beside him, the orc stabs him. The rest of the orcs descend upon him, and Sauron picks up Morgoth’s crown. The orcs cheer for him.
Galadriel and Sauron fight, with Sauron taking different guises, mocking her with her pain and her mistakes. She resists him until he stabs her with Morgoth’s crown, telling her that he would have made her the Queen of Middle-earth. He takes the Nine Rings from her. Sauron uses hypnotic power to force Galadriel to take off her ring and hand it to him. At the last moment she closes her hand and flings herself off the cliff. In his anger, Sauron slays Grugzûk. The dwarf army, led by Narvi, arrives to fight off the orcs, rescuing the captives, including Gil-Galad, Elrond, and Arondir. Gil-Galad and Arondir find Galadriel, still alive, and the king observes that the wounds are infected with evil, drawing Galadriel’s spirit into the shadow realm. He tries to use his ring to heal her but it doesn’t work. Finding Nenya, Elrond declares that together, they can save her.
In Rhûn, Nori grieves for the loss and damage to the Stoors’ home, and Poppy tells her that sometimes things that are broken can’t be fixed. Over a montage showing all the main characters from the show and the losses they are currently experiencing, she explains that sometimes, all you can do is try to build something new. The Stoors leave their home to become nomads. Poppy and Merimac say goodbye to the Stranger, leaving with them. Meridoc and Gundabel call the stranger “Grand Elf.” Nori says goodbye to him last, leaving to walk her own path. The Stranger finds his staff in the rubble and returns to Bombadil’s house, having realized that he was meant to choose friendship over power. He has found his staff, and his name; Gandalf. They sit and sing Bombadil’s song together.
Narvi reports to Durin IV that the other dwarf kingdoms are asking for the rings they paid for, and that Durin’s brother is gaining support for the succession over Durin himself. Galadriel wakes in a peaceful place, and Elrond tells her that they have created a sanctuary protected by the elven rings. Gil-Galad declares that they must decide whether to attack Sauron or to withdraw and prepare their defenses. Galadriel tells them of Celebrimbor’s words to her, that it is not strength that overcomes darkness, but light. The four stand together, and Gil-Galad draws his sword as the rest of the elves cheer.
There were moments in this episode I really enjoyed, but although the latter half of the show has been much stronger than the first, somehow the finale manages to encapsulate everything that the show is failing at in one episode. Again we see the prequel problem, which I talked about previously, but even worse than before; this episode seems to want to show us the origin of everything, and reference every important moment in the books or movies. A overwrought origin for Gandalf’s name, the Dark Wizard asking Gandalf to join him in becoming the new Sauron, presenting Narsil to Aragorn’s heroic ancestor and encouraging him to go find his destiny without her, the healing of a wound exactly like the one Frodo sustains on Weathertop (and in exactly the same way), Sauron’s use of hypnotic power over the bearer of a ring, Sauron wanting to make all of Middle-earth bow down to Galadriel as a Queen, echoing almost exactly the words Galadriel says to Frodo when he offers her the One Ring in Fellowship, a second film season speech given by a Samwise-like character over a dramatic montage of heroes and suffering—the list goes on. And once again, we are left feeling that The Rings of Power doesn’t know how to stand on its own, but must continually borrow imagery and symbolism from Jackson’s films in order to give any emotional resonance to the story it is telling.
This is not entirely true, of course—the last conversation between Durin IV and his father was very moving, and beautifully acted, as we have come to expect from Mullan and Arthur. The story Durin IV tells about the arm wrestling is the highlight of the scene, and it’s a great addition to their story because it perfectly encapsulates both what is beautiful and what is wrong with their relationship as father and son. Durin IV came out of that childhood experience with an awe and respect for his father’s strength, but he also believed he was being toyed with, that his father was only letting him feel for a moment as though he might be able to win, with the intention of taking that feeling away a moment later. Durin III has said a few times throughout the series that Durin IV lacks the strength or the confidence to lead, and this revelation leaves the viewer wondering what might have been different for the prince if he’d always known that he really was exhibiting strength, and that his father recognized it. The greatest tragedy of the king’s death is that he was only able to share this truth with his son as he stepped away from him forever. And now Durin faces the daunting task of cleaning up the mess his father made without ever being made to feel that his father truly believed in him.
I could wish that Durin’s decision to remove the ring had been presented a little better, however, and that it was made clear that Durin III realized that the ring had deliberately betrayed him, and that is why he took it off. The subtext is there—when Durin and Disa warned him of this danger earlier in the season, he insisted that Disa’s ability to hear the stone was less accurate than his ring’s ability to see everything in the mountain—but his rejection of his son’s plea to remove the ring came just moments before, and then he’s like “oh, big fiery monster, better take off this ring, face it, and die” and it doesn’t quite play as effectively as it might.
But we do seem to have answered the eternal debate of whether or not Balrogs can fly, or at least, if this one can, as it clearly was trying to climb the cavern walls to reach the dwarves, and only managed it when there was enough rubble to stand on. So there’s that!
I will also give some credit to the scene of healing Galadriel, despite how much it rips off The Fellowship of the Ring, because Elrond’s choice to wield Nenya was very emotionally effective—there has been a deep rift in the friendship between Elrond and Galdriel because of the rings and Elrond’s mistrust of them, but in this moment, he chooses his friend over his belief that they should not use the Three. This moment will be even more powerful if Elrond still struggles with his decision to accept the use of the rings in the next season, though it may be the writers’ intention to have him fully committed now that he has used Nenya both to save Galadriel as well as to fortify the elves’ resting place—which one assumes will become Rivendell.
Less effective was the scene in which Elrond begs the orcs not to burn the collection of scrolls and knowledge looted from Celebrimbor’s library. Book burning, with its obvious references to Nazi Germany, is often used in cinema to make the thematic connection that Good values knowledge and learning, while Evil restricts or destroys it. It may also be that the scene was intended to show that Sauron is drifting away from his own stated values—he spent a lot of time in both this episode and last weeks episode telling Celebrimbor how much he values the knowledge the elf smith shared with him, how he’s not like Morgoth and doesn’t want to destroy everything, and yet here is the army he is claiming as his own doing just that. But Elrond’s speech to the orcs is just terrible, and it makes the whole scene very heavy-handed; the moment would have been much more effective if the elves had watched in grieved silence, or perhaps if the scrolls were shown burning as part of the montage during Poppy’s speech.
The entirety of what was done with Gandalf and Poppy and Nori in this season was just pointless. The entire story could have been done in a single episode, and it doesn’t fit tonally with anything else that’s happening throughout the season, other than by connecting the Stoors’ lost home to the losses sustained by the elves of Eregion and by the men of the south. But worse than this is the fact that Nori’s role in the narrative has been reduced from what she was in season one, a character whose good heart, stubbornness, and curiosity helped shaped the Stranger into little more than a pawn, bait in the test that Gandalf must face to prove that he will not be like Sauron or the Dark Wizard. Having the entire encounter be a single episode would have lessened this feeling, at least, since it would feel like a small part of their story, rather than an entire arc carrying equal weight to that of season one.
Tellingly, this same problem also exists with Míriel’s character. She spends an entire season telling Elendil to follow her lead and help her, goes to the trial for him, and then all it comes to in the end is her giving him a special sword and sending him out to find his destiny elsewhere, leaving her to, presumably, perish in Númenor’s fall. The strife in Númenor is his story, not hers.
I really wanted to like Poppy’s speech. Sam’s speech at the end of The Two Towers was an addition to the films that didn’t exist in the books series of The Lord of the Rings, and yet somehow perfectly encapsulated the best part of Tolkien’s message and also fit very powerfully with the way many people felt about the world we lived in back in the early aughts. With Poppy’s speech we have a different message for a different time, earlier in the world of Middle-earth, and later in ours, and it almost works. But Richards was clearly directed to pace the speech out in slow half sentences, with long pauses, so that the words could be fitted to the montage, and it loses its effectiveness as a result. And indeed, the very awareness I had of the fact that they were trying to recreate that moment from The Two Towers pushed me out of it, especially because the show tried the same thing last week with Celebrimbor’s speech about light, not strength, being the thing that overcomes darkness.
But even worse than the pacing of the speech is the inclusion of Sauron in the montage, as he stands with Fëanor’s hammer in his hand. Throughout this season I have questioned whether the show intends the audience to have some kind of empathy for Sauron, and connecting his “loss” of Celebrimbor and of Nenya seems to confirm that it does, and it really robs the entire montage, by placing the architect of all the loss and pain sustained in this season on a level with those who fought him. It is one thing to suggest that Sauron is a complicated being, not just a one-dimensional Evil, but in this moment he almost seemed to be presented as an anti-hero, or a fallen hero, and the dissonance of the moment was really jarring.
The scene between Sauron and Celebrimbor was much more effective, and it was actually a perfect moment to include the reference to future events, as much as the show gets it wrong elsewhere. The idea that Sauron has enslaved himself to the rings as much as anyone else foreshadows the way he will tie his own being into the One, thereby creating the loophole that will eventually destroy him. Celebrimbor seems to see Sauron clearly, in this moment, while Sauron experiences both anger and grief. I have continually praised Edwards’s performance, and must do so again here, as he grounds the entire scene. After being frustrated with the character’s journey for much of the season, the last few episodes made me love him, and I was proud of him at his death.
I saw Adar’s death coming a mile away, and although the parallel between his murder and his killing of Sauron was powerful, the character never really recovered from the fact that Joseph Mawle had more presence in the role than Hazeldine does. The show also didn’t really bother to develop the character much in season two, though he is at his best when paired with Galadriel. With the idea that Nenya restores something to him that was lost, the fact that it is a physical restoration, returning Adar to the image of an elf, rather than the “ugly” uruk, ruins the message. The equating of goodness with beauty and evil with physical ugliness is, of course, built into Tolkien’s work, but this was a moment where the show could actually have improved the narrative—especially given how it is attempting to humanize Sauron and present antagonists like Sauron and Adar as beings with whom we should empathize.
Adar’s love for the orcs has been his defining characteristic since his introduction in season one, and his tragic downfall is that his fear and hatred of Sauron drives him to lose the loyalty of the very beings he is trying to protect, leading not only to his own death, but also to the very enslavement by Sauron he was trying to protect the orcs from. If the dialogue had made it clear that he was rejecting the restoration to elfhood because he chooses the orcs, chooses his life as an Uruk for the love of his children, the whole thing could have worked, but since he was about to be murdered anyway, one wonders why we had this little detour at all.
Another thing that could have worked but didn’t was Galadriel sharing Celebrimbor’s last word to her with the other elves. That should have been a nice callback at the end of the episode, but it’s so unclear what Galadriel means, and what everyone takes away from her words. It was very unclear if she was arguing for a pause in the fighting to rest and shore up their defenses—i.e., turning to light, not strength—or if she was saying that because light exists there is still hope and that they should keep fighting. Gil-Galad drawing his sword and presenting it while everyone cheered and raised their fists seemed to suggest the latter, but I really didn’t know how to read it.
Honestly, as much as I disliked Gandalf’s arc and how Tom Bombadil was used in the show, their moment together by the fire, singing Bombadil’s song, might have been a better way to end the season, especially if the message is that light still exists to fight the darkness. Though I will ask: how could anyone put the lyrics of that song into the script and then not make sure that Bombadil’s jacket is bright blue.
And finally, I know I have complained about the show not seeding anything ahead of time, but are you telling me that Durin has had a brother this whole time? How did this never come up before, especially when Durin was briefly disinherited? Is this a secret brother? Is it some kind of dwarf in the iron mask situation? I need to know more right now, but I’ll suppose I will have to wait until season three.
