<i>The Rings of Power</i> Finally Pulls Out the Stops in &#8220;Halls of Stone&#8221;

Recap

“Halls of Stone” opens in Khazad-dûm, as King Durin puts on one of the seven dwarf rings. He shows his men where to dig, and light is restored to the kingdom. The dwarves rejoice, but the stone singers look apprehensive. In Eregion, Celebrimbor gives a speech to elven and dwarven smiths about dwarves and elves working together. He and Delve Master Narvi (Kevin Eldon) reveal the Doors of Durin, and discuss the future friendship between dwarves and elves. Annatar (the name Sauron has chosen in elven form) tries to convince Celebrimbor to make rings for men. Citing men’s corruptible nature, Celebrimbor refuses. Annatar declares that he will forge them himself.

In Númenor, Pharazôn expresses discontent that men do not have the immortality of elves. His son Kemen (Trystan Gravelle) urges him to focus on creating the Númenor he has dreamed of. Míriel tells Elendil that she believes Pharazôn’s rule is a new path for Númenor that will prevent the destruction she saw in the palantír. Elendil learns that any of the Sea Guards deemed loyal to the Queen have been dismissed from service. Eärien urges Elendil to be loyal to their new king, but Elendil turns in his sword. Gil-Galad reads Celebrimbor’s letter claiming to have shut down the forge. His ring gives him a vision of destruction.

Disa expresses her misgivings to Durin IV regarding the use of the ring. Later, she discovers a strange, lake-filled cave. When she sings to the rocks, a terrifying sound replies to her. Durin III shows signs of greed, and also of paranoia around his ring. Durin IV comes to warn him of the evil Disa heard under the mines, but the King claims that, with his ring, he can see everything, and that there is no danger. While working on a ring, Celebrimbor’s protegé, Mirdania (Amelia Kenworthy) experiences a vision of a tall creature with skin of flames. She believes the creature has been among them. Annatar comforts her.

Durin IV arrives and tells Celebrimbor how his father has changed. Celebrimbor insists that there isn’t anything wrong with the dwarven rings. Durin challenges him regarding Annatar. Annatar tells Mirdania that making the rings has left Celebrimbor vulnerable to the shadow. He claims to be trying to help Celebrimbor heal, then flirts with her. A funeral ceremony in an ancient shrine at Númenor is interrupted by soldiers who shut the shrine down. Elendil is goaded into punching Kemen, then Kemen and Valandil (Alex Tarrant) fight. Valandil is called off by Elendil, and then stabbed from behind by Kemen. Elendil is arrested for starting a riot.

Annatar suggests to Celebrimbor that the lie he told to Gil-Galad infected his spirit, and therefore the forging of the seven rings. He suggests that Celebrimbor must either go confess to Gil-galad, or that they must forge the nine even more perfectly, to atone for their mistakes with the seven. Durin IV confronts his father about the corruption of the ring. The king returns to him the title of prince. Prince Durin promises Disa that he will never wear one of the rings. Celebrimbor tells his smiths that they must atone for their mistakes, creating the nine to balance all the rings, drawing strength from the nine and redeeming the seven.

In Lindon, Elrond arrives to tell Gil-Galad that Galadriel was right, and that Adar’s army is not in Mordor, but marching on Eregion. Gil-Galad is more worried about Sauron, and declares that the elven army cannot fight both Adar and Sauron. Galadriel arrives as a prisoner in the orc camp. Adar tells her that he has brought her as a potential ally, because they have a common enemy.

Commentary

It is difficult to understate the genuine pleasure, not to mention surprise, I felt while  watching this week’s episode. Right from the very opening image, as the mountain faded into the shape of Durin III’s new ring, I was caught by the visual storytelling in a way that I mostly haven’t been so far in the the series—although there have been some great visuals here and there, particularly in Khazad-dûm. I was caught, too, by the low, thrumming musical cue that played as King Durin walked through his home and found the pathways to dig the new light shafts, which opened up into a powerful orchestral moment. Like the visuals and landscapes, the soundtrack of Rings of Power has mostly just felt like a safe imitation of the music from Jackson’s films, so while it hasn’t exactly offended, it hasn’t inspired either. This piece of music was perhaps the first time I was fully conscious of the soundtrack as adding to the feeling of what was happening, and I felt myself stirred by it in the same way the dwarves were by the return of the sun to their home, and by their king’s powerful speech. I had a similar experience with the soundtrack during the transition after Durin IV is restored to his princehood.

I suppose it isn’t completely surprising that this episode is so much better than the others, given that it is very dwarf-heavy. Everything that the show has done with the dwarves has been consistently good, despite how much it has faltered nearly everywhere else. As I’ve said in previous reviews, this is partly because there is less in the source material to draw on, which pushes the writers creatively. But even outside of that, I have noticed that the plotlines, character development, and themes around the events in Khazad-dûm and the interpersonal struggle of the royal family have so far been consistently well-executed.

In season one, the central conflict between King Durin and his son is around Durin IV’s desire to help his friend by donating mithril to create the rings that will halt the fading of the elves. As we were reminded last week, the King’s initial response was to deny his son, partly because of the danger of mining mithril, but also because—as Durin IV recalled in last week’s episode—the King saw danger in seeking to oppose the natural ending of something by meddling with too-great power. The viewer, however, was much more likely to be sympathetic to, and allied with, Durin IV and Elrond and their beautiful romantic love than they were with the stubborn old king.

Since then, father and son have struggled to understand each other, each thinking that the other is being too stubborn to see reason, while Disa—wisest and most beautiful of dwarves—recognized that both Durins are equally stubborn and equally quick-tempered, and urged both, at different times, to apologize and try to understand the other. But then, the disaster of the collapsing sun shafts presented a problem far outside their interpersonal conflict, one that neither father or son could afford to be stubborn about, and one that Disa’s skill as a stone singer could not remedy. The question of providing mithril to Celebrimbor was no longer about saving the fading elves, but about finding salvation for their own people. Disa herself was the one to push Durin IV to present Celebrimbor’s offer to his father.

And now, in this episode, we see how much of King Durin’s initial prediction about the rings has come to pass, as he himself becomes a ring-bearer. Where once he refused to let the prince mine for mithril because it was too dangerous, now we see him rejecting his own decreed safeguards around mining, as he hungers for more and more wealth. When Durin IV confronts him about how the ring is affecting him, Durin III responds by praising his son’s desire to ally with the elves because it led to the creation of the dwarven rings, and returns his son’s title for the very same reason he took it in the first place. Their roles have reversed, and although with hindsight one can see exactly what steps led to this situation, it does not follow that Durin IV, or his father, or Disa, should have known where this path would end.

Even Disa only begins to question the use of the ring after she sees it in action. She was completely on Durin IV’s side regarding Elrond and the mithril, and she pushed for Durin IV to present Celebrimbor’s offer to the King even when Durin himself was reluctant to trust it. But having witnessed it, she recognizes the cheat that the ring is, and the dangers inherent in it, and she continues to trust her own understanding of the stone, even though stone singing failed her after the initial collapse of the sun shafts.

The relationship between these three, the push and pull, the right and the wrong, has been really well set-up and it comes to fruition beautifully in episode five. The same cannot be said for Numenor or for Celebrimbor and Annatar, which is a particular shame because both of these plotlines are very good within the episode itself.

The conflict in Númenor is almost impossible to understand, given what the show has actually told us. One of the weakest aspects of Rings of Power is the show’s inability to give clear introductions, either to individual characters or to the countries and lands in which the story is set. Someone with knowledge of The Silmarillion might be able to pick out little bits of dialogue and mentions of the old ways of Númenor and how the country was founded, but I don’t imagine that anyone with little knowledge of Tolkien’s work would realize that the fundamental rift between Pharazôn’s followers and those loyal to Míriel is that the latter are loyal to older ways, elvish ways, while Pharazôn and his people reject these with various levels of prejudice. I honestly can’t remember if it’s ever explained in season one where the island of Númenor came from and what distinguishes these men from the men of the continent, but whatever aspect of that history that was brought to the show wasn’t used consistently.

It is only now, in the fifth episode of the second season, that Pharazôn’s jealousy of the elves’ immortality is raised, and frankly, this should have been in his introduction, the very first scene in which we meet him. Given how little the show gives Míriel to do (honestly, Addai-Robinson deserves so much better), Rings of Power could have introduced us to Númenor itself with this scene; it tells us not only who Pharazôn is and who Kemen is, but it tells us what Númenor is, and setting us down in the middle of this conflict would have given us very clear, and very powerful stakes. Elendil’s internal struggle—between his loyalty to Míriel and his instinctual understanding that this is a bad path for Númenor, his desire to protect his men and the figures and the sanctity of Númenor’s religion and history—would also make a good introduction to his character, as would the scene in which he turns in his sword and we see the loyalty of his men.

It isn’t as though Rings of Power isn’t trying to seed these moments. Eärien’s interruption of Míriel’s coronation with the reveal of the the palantir is about this fear and distrust of elvish things—she even tells the people that the elf-stone is their true Queen, and this is enough to sway many of the listeners against Míriel. But even as someone who knows something of The Silmarillion, this scene was the first time that the division in Númenor made sense to me as anything other than Pharazôn being a basic trope, a power-hungry man who has great status but still wants to usurp the woman who stands above him.

Celebrimbor’s journey is similarly powerful in episode five and similarly terribly executed everywhere else, and if anything in the entire series needs to be perfectly handled, it’s him. The show is called Rings of Power, after all, and until now, most of Celebrimbor’s actions and desires have been sort of messily stated but never really defined in a way that is simple and powerful enough to clearly understand. He has talked a lot about his desire as an artist to make something truly great, his obsession with his work, and his refusal to be told no, by Gil-Galad or anyone else, but again, the show has failed to stand still and just show us who he is. Until this episode, anyway.

Edwards was really a powerhouse in episode five. He played Celebrimbor’s internal conflict beautifully, from the way he shut Durin IV’s concerns down but could not shake them, the way he noticed Annatar’s manipulation of people but never considered what dangers that trait might hide, to his pain at the “realization” that his deception was the cause of the flaws in the dwarven rings. Celebrimbor has shown hubris and single-mindedness before, but this the moment, when he realizes that the dwarven rings might be corrupted and Annatar presents him with the choice of either going to Gil-Galad and confessing, or forging ahead (if you’ll forgive the pun) and creating the nine rings in an attempt to redeem the mistakes made with the seven.

He is almost a different person when he speaks to his smiths afterwards, cruelly trying to make his underlings share the blame for the corruption of the dwarven rings, rather than admit that (as far as he believes) he is the only one to have caused the problem. We can see that this moment is the moment he truly fails—he will never find his way out from under Sauron’s manipulation now, and the lingering shot of his grief and shaking hands cements the moment in a profound, and heartbreaking way.

Even Sauron was intriguing this week. Both the script and Vickers’ performance have been pretty underwhelming, but we’re privy to Sauron’s full guile and manipulation in this episode. Since adopting his elf-guise, Sauron—or rather, Annatar—has had a lot of lingering reaction shots in which nothing at all happens, and his face has been pretty blank. But when he was challenged by Celebrimbor about whether or not he had altered the dwarven rings, you could actually see him thinking, trying to decide how to play this, and when he suggests that Celebrimbor is to blame, it’s clear that he has just come up with this part of the plan. His manipulation of Mirdania is also clearly a new strategy, one that he only has to develop because of the vision she experienced while wearing the ring, and because Celebrimbor has begun to become suspicious and to push back against some of Annatar’s desires.

Given the backstory that season two has presented us with, we should see that this is something of a desperate gamble for Sauron, that he has been making up his plans on the fly since being murdered by Adar and the orcs. But he should also feel dangerous, manipulative, and in control even when you thought he wasn’t. That has rarely been accomplished by the script, and it robbed the last few scenes between him and Galdriel of the effect they would otherwise have had.

My impression is that Rings of Power is attempting to show how Sauron manipulates people not only through their worst impulses but also through their best. He uses Galadriel’s fears of Sauron’s rise to push her to do exactly as he wants, but he also uses her love, and her desire to connect with others. Celebrimbor is ambitious, but he also cares for people and genuinely wants his creations to save the elves and to improve the lives of the dwarves. Even the dwarves themselves, though they don’t interact with him very much directly, are led towards disaster by love, by desire to help their friends, by desire to protect their people. Again, this theme isn’t executed well, but it is there, and in episode five it suddenly becomes more clear and more effective than I think it has been anywhere else in either season.

Despite the fact that the foundation on which it is built leaves a lot to be desired, I really appreciated this episode for what it was, and I found it very moving. I admit that I teared up more than once, and I am particularly invested in Elendil now and Eärien too. I hope the show will give their journey its due, and if next week’s episode were to bring this improved scripting to the character of the Stranger, I would be very pleased indeed. Also, more Narvi please!

Favorite quote:

Next week!