Rings of Power has always, by and large, been a slow-paced show. At least intentionally so some of the time, wanting you to luxuriate in the dollar spend of the fully armed and operational fire power of a Jeff Bezos-backed streaming media empire with its lavish visuals and rich sets. Otherwise, it’s just the circumstance of the show’s set-up; with so many separate plotlines all spread across Middle-earth, it takes time to catch up with each. That means when the show breaks that pace, it’s notable. And sometimes it works—a short sharp shock that reminds you what’s really at stake. And sometimes… it’s just kind of a weird reminder about the very nature of this whole adaptive endeavor.
After last week caught us up on the Elven, Harfoot, and Southlands storylines (turns out, everyone’s pretty miserable), this week “Halls of Stone” catches us up with Rings of Power‘s remaining spinning plates in Eregion, Khazad-dûm, and Númenor. Turns out, everyone’s still pretty miserable!
But if last week’s episode was a slow burn to wallow in that misery—as evil rises up through Middle-earth’s very flora and fauna—this week’s is one of a more immediate action: things are suddenly going very wrong, very quickly, and no one can stop the wheels that either Sauron or the general rot in the air have begun to turn. At least in one of our storylines, down with the dwarves, things start out okay in relative comparison. After seeing his underground realm thrust into total darkness by groundquakes in the premiere, King Durin embraces Celebrimbor’s gift of seven rings for him and his fellow Dwarf-Lords, and almost immediately puts it to work (and Disa out of her song-divining job, it seems) locating the precise locations his son and fellow miners need to carve out to restore light to Khazad-dûm again. Yay!
No. Not yay. In fact, the direct opposite of yay. Just as quickly as we see light come to Khazad-dûm again, we immediately start to see Durin ensorcelled by his ring. It’s all very Lord of the Rings-y, because the show knows that’s kind of exactly what you want: you know these rings are bad, even if the characters don’t, so you want to see their countenance fall, you want to see them grasp and panic when they can’t find their precious jewelery, you want to see them become obsessive, and snap at people, and turn inward. That is what you get, and it is definitely disturbing to watch unfold—especially with the underlying tragedy that Durin the younger and his father had only just begun to repair their fractured relationship after the events of season one. His great fear for his father’s sudden turn in disposition brings all these complicated emotions to the surface, and Owain Arthur is impeccable as a son watching his father slip away right in front of him.
But the turn is so fast—King Durin puts on the ring, immediately goes light-shaft-sensing, and just as immediately starts getting his best Bilbo-in-Fellowship impression going—that while an uptick in immediate dire consequences is a kick up the rear Rings of Power needed to get this season into high gear, there is this inescapable feeling of suddenness that doesn’t sit right. There’s no real time to sit with Durin’s descent, because he has to start bad the second he sees a ring, get worse, and then the problem has to expound sevenfold when he starts planning to delve deeper (greedily, even, because of course we get a shout out to that famous Tolkien turn of phrase) into Khazad-dûm’s depths and send the remaining rings out to the other six Dwarf-Lords. There’s no time for any kind of moral quandary or debate over their use; Rings of Power gets right to the point that most of its audience knows, but in the process, does a disservice to the characters along the way.
It’s a similar case in both of the episode’s other plotlines. Let’s start with the most ring-adjacent one in Eregion, where all is rapidly not becoming well for besties Annatar and Celebrimbor in the Forge. No sooner than the smiths and the Dwarves are celebrating renewed relationships with the creation of the Doors of Durin (yes, the “speak ‘Friend’ and enter” ones) are Annatar and Celebrimbor at each other’s throats over the former’s plans to create nine more rings, this time for the leaders of humanity. There’s at least some interesting follow-up to uglier parts of Celebrimbor’s character here to make Sauron’s manipulation of him sink its hooks in: even when he’s meant to be celebrating alliance with the Dwarves, he’s making casually racist jokes about their thirst for gems right in front of them, and when Annatar offers up the potential to craft one final set of rings of power, Celebrimbor haughtily dismisses humanity too weak and easily swayed to be worthy of his ability. Celebrimbor’s downfall is not quite as sharp as King Durin’s, because we already get to see the elements of his character that Sauron plies, but even then, there’s a similar haste in the Eregion plot here that ironically weakens the stakes at play.
If people can immediately tell something’s wrong with the rings, necessitating Annatar going a bit gaslight gatekeep girlboss (and even Galadriel, when he compares young forgesmith Mirdania to Halbrand’s former potential-paramour, as he wraps her around his fingers) to try and split the smiths away from their increasingly distressed leader, it makes Sauron’s master plans feel a little less calculated and a little more slapdash. Even if the elements are there for him to exploit in characters like Celebrimbor, that they begin to break so immediately feels less like masterful manipulation and more like the dictation of the script. We know these Rings are bad, the show does too, we all know how this has to go—so while we’re getting there, we’re getting there in a way that feels a little too breakneck, and in a way that feels like too sudden a pivot from the slower pace of the season’s first half. The twist here doesn’t feel like a shock, like Mount Doom’s explosion did in season one, but flipping from one extreme to another.
It’s even weirder in the Númenor plot, because even there they don’t really have the excuse of Literally Evil Magic Rings to make everyone suddenly decide to up their turbo-asshole levels. Pharazôn was just made king over Míriel (that eagle mandate really went a long way), but he’s already becoming a despot, casting out the seaguard who were on Míriel’s expedition, and sending his sniveling son Kemen to crack down on memorial services for the Númenoreans lost in battle for the Southlands. We’ve known the doomed future of the island nation as part of the text for a while, at least, through Míriel’s visions in the palantir—the very thing that lost her her support—but again, none of this feels particularly well built up, and like things have to go from 0 to 50 because we haven’t watched someone get stabbed lately (RIP to Valandil, just to make Elendil’s misery even more palpable), and the show suddenly remembered that the audience really likes it when things start happening.
The stuff on Númenor feels a bit more of a long game than Sauron’s speedrun of his Eregion era (his Era-gion?), because all this will at least pay off down the line when Sauron makes his way over there and begins his manipulations anew, but in the moment, the escalation feels severe less because of any particular tension driving it—Pharazôn got what he wanted, Míriel is seemingly at least accepting that she now has to play a long game to avoid the future shown to her in the palantir, Elendil still has a long way to go before he becomes the future king of Númenor’s survivors—and more like an escalation to match the vibe shift in the rest of Rings of Power‘s storylines.
Part of this, of course, is because Rings of Power has (rightfully even) chosen to condense what was hundreds and thousands of years in Tolkien’s envisioning of the Second Age down to what is, ultimately, the lifespan of your average Númenorean. When characters like Elendil and Isildur are already in the show, you by that nature have to lay out the road for them to be marching to the base of Mount Doom by the time Rings of Power is nearing its end. Master plans that take centuries, corruption that lingers and festers, it can’t brew over an extended period of time, the impact has to be immediate. I’m not saying that the show needed to show the passage of eons for this to have any impact—it’s slow enough, at its worst—but it’s hard to feel like the stakes here are really all that dire if everything goes bad at the drop of a hat or the greatest magical artifacts Middle-earth has ever seen are made in what feels like hours and days, rather than with particular effort.
That’s ultimately the problem the series faces as it begins barreling towards the conclusion we know is coming this season. This episode even ends with a tease of that, as Elrond dashes back to Lindon to find that it’s too late to redirect Gil-Galad’s forces from Mordor to Eregion, and the captured Galadriel finds herself face-to-face with Adar (and his offer of a tenuous alliance) as they stand on the outer rims of the Elven kingdom, ready for the war to truly begin. If it can’t find a middle-ground to actually develop its characters, the impact of the spectacle to come is going to be blunted, because we’re waxing and waning between too little happening and too much all of a sudden. To borrow another Tolkienism, just as this episode did, it’s the proverbial butter scraped over too much bread: there’s moments here of something satisfying to chew on, but they’re cast aside too quickly, too much feast after so much famine, that you don’t really get time to swallow.
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