The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Episode List
The world’s most expensive fan fic (50 million per episode without any “real” stars is truly insane), with the “blessing” of Tolkien’s prole, whatever the fuck that means.
I bet Bezos loves the concept of some dude inheriting inalienable rights to some artwork he had literally no part in creating, all hinging on his surname.
The cast seems talented. The girl from Saint Maud is Galadriel, the elf high king is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Lenny Henry is playing a kind of Strumpf leader. I could have sworn Elendil is the voice actor from Shadow of Mordor, but it’s not. Isildur is the kid from Mr. Bean’s Holidays, WTF!
Legal issues prevent any legacy cameos apparently, which can only be for the best.
Why do the leading Harfoots have Scottish accents?
Why the fuck does a streaming show has “previous” mini-trailers? What’s the position in the lore regarding Shadow of Mordor?
S01
A Shadow of the Past
Galadriel narrates some back story. This happens after Morgoth and Sauron have been apparently defeated. After decades mopping up the remaining orcs, Middle Earth seems non-evil. Galadriel has swore an oath to her dead brother, so she needs to go further, to make absolutely sure Sauron is gone.
She sees his sigil somewhere in the North, but the high king is not having none of that, he ropes in Elrond to push her to accept going into the afterlife in Valinor. After holding to the last moment, she jumps into the water and stays back in the land of the living.
As the elf High King is disbanding the outposts, since the evil is no more, one of those frontier elves is getting horny for a human healer. You already know the drill, she already has a kid, the father left, I’m guessing she was too independent for her. The whole village has very ingrained anti-elf bigotry, but the elves also think that area was very pro-Morgoth.
One of the local drunk kids nearly starts a bar fight with the elf, but his stoicism prevails. As he is about to declare his love to the witch doctor, some dude brings a cow with a massive belly that oozes black goo from its udders, so they investigate and find a neighbouring town razed by unknown forces.
Oh, and that witch doctor’s kid found a piece of Sauron’s sword, in a human barn. Not beating the Argentina allegations, I see.
Good thing Galadriel did not leave, some meteor with a stranger drops in a field, and the one who finds is a curious and inquisitive hobbit, I mean, harfoot. Her tribe goes all in on the tall poppy syndrome, she must conform to the max, don’t stray from the dotted line, stay in your lane. Picking massive blackberries just outside the reservation it’s a big transgression for those hillbillies.
Celebrimbor shows up, so you know there will be elvish fuckery, goddamn it.
Adrift
Galadriel is almost eaten by a Kraken. She finds some castaways, and they are all very anti-elven racists. Except one dude, the one that is not eaten. After quarrelling with the dude that rescued her, he says orcs destroyed his home! She was right al along, vindication!
The raft catches a storm and she goes overboard, but the human saves her. But why? Anyway, they are picked up by corsairs.
The halfling is feeding the wizard, but he can barely speak. He is almost dying, it seems, he can only spell some constellation in fireflies for them to find, before keeling over. Is that Gandalf, I’m pretty sure he is a wizard!
The frontier elf found the tunnel where the town was razed from. No bodies were left behind, this is weird, he will investigate. He finds teeth embedded in the dirt, crawls faster and gets captured by some creature with long fingers and nails.
The witch doctor goes back to warn the other town, but they subtly call her an elf-fucker, so they don’t care. Until an orc comes from underground and attacks her home and she beheads him, that’s when the villagers run away to the elf watchtower. Her son accidentally feeds the sword fragment with blood, and it regenerates!
Elrond is summoned by Celebrimbor to build massive forge, and stat. He suggests asking dwarves for help, since he knows a prince, but it has been 20 years, and that guy is pissed. Alas, the dwarf wife mends their relationship with food, they talk about the elfseed the dwarf planted, so maybe they can help.
The dwarf is just a prince, his dad doesn’t trust the knife-ears, they are hiding something Pulp Fiction-shaped, with white light instead.
Adar
Númenor, that’s an even more middle eastern Venice. Seafaring, no kneeling, the palace is like Hagia Sofia.
Galadriel is an elf, so she is even more hated in here than in Middle Earth. These humans were elf allies in the last war, but now they are off the leash, like America I guess. The captain that picked her up is some crypto elf lover, he bring her to a library where they read Sauron’s plan. The “sigil” is a map of the Southlands, and the plan in Black Speech is probably “One Ring to rule them all” etc.
The captain’s son in Isildur, the dude that will defeat Sauron, cut off his finger and take the One Ring to himself!
The human dude really wants to stay back and start a new life (like Jack Ward, the Sparrow), working on metal. But the guilds are powerful, he needs their mark to be able to get a job. He tries stealing one of those, but gets into a nasty fight with the drunken smiths.
Alas, he’s just a Strider-a-like: he is the descent of the human that united the Southern tribes, allied with Morgoth, and lost the war. He doesn’t want to join the Nazis again.
The frontier elf was captured by the slaver vampire orcs, they can’t be exposed to sunlight. He is reunited with his fellow elf co-workers, so they conspire to run away. It’s not easy, they are digging a large trench, running off into no man’s land is just like World War 1, a pointless way to die.
His boss tried and fails to escape, while he restrains a freaking Warg! That earns him an audience with the leader, the dude with an Elvish name. That guy is closer to Jack Ward, a renegade dark elf.
The halfling is still trying to save the wizard. He gets the star charts from the elder, but the wizard fuck up. His father is lame from a previous accident, they will surely die. Unless the Wizard helps them…
The Great Wave
Galadriel is jailed for sedition now, she keeps refusing diplomacy out of spite, or some elvish tendency to consider human priorities as trifles. As she is being deported, she escapes and reaches the actual King’s quarters, and he is a bumbling fool. The regent is no evil vizier. They even have a palantír showing Númenor being destroyed after an elf shows up in the city.
With some help of the elf-lover captain, and the softening of the queen, she gets passage to Middle Earth, and an army to unite the Southern Tribes around. The Strider will surely be part of the party.
Elrond managed to gets the dwarves to work for them building the big forge. But Celebrimbor demands he spy just a little more. After some risky business, he finds exactly what they are hiding: a whole vein filled with mithril, that mineral that leads to Frodo being saved in Moria! Many dwarves were sacrificed to get him that underwear.
The orc leader is a renegade elf they call “Father”. But why‽ The frontier elf is set loose, with a message: submit or die. The witch doctor’s kid tries to loot the village before the orcs can, but cannot salvage anything, even with the hilt, but the frontier elf saves them both (the mother came to the rescue, they are all saved by the rising sun.
The “Argentinian” shopkeeper is goading the kid into using Mordor’s power more and more. Maybe the stranger being helper by the halflings is Sauron…
Partings
Númenor prepares for war, but Strider just wants to makes his swords in peace. He’s got the skill, but his weakness is not his technique. Isuldur is being cockblocked by his father, that’s certainly an harsh but fair education. He is too much of an entitled brat to learn in any other way.
Isildur’s sister is honey trapping the idiot failson of an important royal adviser to stop the war. But that dude is way ahead of them, he’s playing 3D chess, removing the Queen from the board so he can promote himself in the end. Sacrificing five hundred warriors is acceptable.
The mission is in peril now, from sabotage by that honey trapped noble, or Strider being broody enough to not seize the moment and be the Pahlavi to that raid. Strider raises to the occasion nonetheless, they give him a nice battle horse.
The frontier elf and the witch doctor cannot convince the base Nazis are evil. They are on the edge of the empire, what have the Romans ever did for them? The witch doctor and her son are very much pessimistic, they will be overrun and killed, they don’t have the strength. Maybe they are Nazis in soul, maybe they are intrinsically evil?
Gandalf has a kind of amnesiac PTSD, he can barely speak. They are treating him well, now he saved the halflings with magic, he is attuned to his powers, but not yet drunk with it. He’s sipping the booze, though.
The elves want the mithril since they are dying, whatever this means. Elrond is conflicted whether to betray the dwarves for infinite money. But the dwarf is kinda dumb, he’s willing to partake on their most precious asset out of racial spite. The elven king is doubly subverting, manipulating Elrond the master manipulator into building The One Ring.
Udûn
Stop the presses, now things are heating up. You can’t thwart stage one.
Numénor took their sweet time but they finally left with the fleet to intervene in the Southland politics. They lead a raiding party to install a new leader of a motley crew of farmhand bumsnots.
The frontier elf and the witch doctor trick the orc army to invade the tower which they rig to blow, then escape to the village. There, they setup a choke point to avoid being completely surrounded by Nazis. The first Nazi wave were the human familiars, not the bulk of the Wermacht. Soon, they are overrun, the witch doctor is wounded, and the boy trades her life for the Sauronian hilt.
As the orcs are getting away, they are hit by the Númenorian cavalry like a ton of bricks. They have no cataphract, this is the the charge of the light brigade territory. The orcs are routed and the village is not slaughtered. The southern king is acclaimed for the first time. Just do this hundreds more times in each podunk hamlet and he will be king in no time.
Galadriel, the scourge of orcs, fights valliantly, and captures the escaped commander, the dark elf. The twisted elves were the first orcs, they prefer the Uruk nomenclature. She promises to cut down his head and shit down his neck, and nearly murders a prisoner in cold blood. Strider and her have a strong restraining effect on one another.
Alas, it was a ruse! The hilt had been evacuated hours before. The Sauron hilt is like a key, something that unlocks things.
The Argentinian Nazi innkeeper triggers the big flooding of the massive trench they had been digging. All that water floods Mount Doom, and it erupts, covering large parts of the Southlands in pyroclastic flow.
The Eye
Mordor it is, there is no longer any Southlands. The Dark Elf even survived the torture, and he’s the new acclaimed lord of Mordor, at least by his underling Uruk. They can walk around during the day now, the volcano was a cure for vampirism.
Most of the main characters survive, but are injured pretty bad. The big one is Strider, putative king of the South, his land is a bunch of ashes now. He has some kind of funky injury that needs elven medicine to fix.
Isildur was lost when saving some people from a burning building. His father gets absolutely furious with the entire enterprise. The Numénor queen is blinded by the pyroclastic flow, she uses a red kerchief to be absolutely metal. Her resolve remains.
The witch doctor and the frontier elf with wait for her kid and migrate, like a big happy family. The kid was given Galadriel’s sword and he keeps it! Galadriel talked about her brother a lot, but she had an husband that died in the war as well? As the kid said, Galadriel dancing seems unthinkable.
For the halflings, it’s one step forward, two steps backwards. They reach their spring break spot, it was hit by some volcanic thing. Gandalf tries and fails to heal the whole area, and pisses off toward civilisation. The hobbits are surprised the next day by a bounty of food, but then the wizard hunters show up and burn it all down. A party forms to warn Gandalf about the dudes looking for him: the main halfling kid and her friend, his own mother, and the tribe leader. This is no Fellowship of the Ring.
Alloyed
My god, the red herrings in this could sustain Gollum for his entire life. Gandalf is really Gandalf, not Sauron as the wizard hunters made him believe.
Good thing the party reaches him, he was about to be kidnapped and made into a dark magician. So that’s why Gandalf is constantly slumming it with the little people, even though he is a posh Etonian (came from the literal stars).
The main harfoot girl leaves his tribe to go on a quest of discovery with a mysterious fully grown adult. The Epstein parallels are too on the nose, but the tribe doesn’t even get riches for helping the aristo, they just do it.
Now that I’m really thinking about it, harfoots are the race of Tom Bombadil? That name is truly great, but there’s barely anything in all the films everywhere.
The Numénor queen regent arrives at home, blind, just as her father dies. On his death bed, he pulls a Biden and rants towards the closest living soul in a delusional creaky voice, leading Isildur’s sister to the palantír! She was already honey trapping some aristo idiot without the power of seeing stones, she will rise to the top soon enough. Isildur himself is still MIA, but we all know he lives, somewhere, maybe captured by orcs or something.
The worst is reserved for Galadriel. She saves the Strider dude, but gets her spidey-sense going when they see him and Celebrimbor (the Oppenheimer of the Second Age) being friendly. She sends a minion dig into archives, and finds out the self-fulfilling prophecy they spoke of in the beginning was correct, “Strider” is just Sauron all along! His trickery had been hidden for a long while, but his powers are not dormant like Gandalf, he was in the driver’s seat all along.
Sauron offers Galadriel to be her queen, but she’s too anarchist to accept power in a centralised manner.
He escapes just as Celembrimbor is forging three rings for the Elven lords, something they do as the behest of Sauron! Of course elvish fuckery can always be counted upon.
Sauron arrives at Mordor, but there’s already that dark elf there, will he share power?
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.