This entire episode is the siege of Eregion, which could have been awesome. However, thanks to inept writers, totally unable to create any kind of tension or fun action, it becomes an hour-long bore, instead of something exciting. To be fair, stuff happens, and both elves and orcs (a few horses) get their throats cut. Yet, it’s made boring since the flow of battle is hard to follow, and has horrible cinematic direction.
Waking up
Celebrimbor finally wakes up from his fake magically induced happy safe-place, and discovers that he has been betrayed. He comes to realize that the noble elf there to help him has been Sauron all along. He decides to forge the rings, and I would say he does it under some duress. Still, at this point, there is no reason to trust Sauron when he promises that his city will be spared. Perhaps a self-sacrifice would be in order instead? Oh well. Like I suspected last time, the mithril Sauron gave Celebrimbor was not in fact metal at all. It was Sauron’s own blood. Now, this makes sense in a way, to explain how he maintains control of the rings. But it does not explain how this was made into the rings in the first place. Did he forge black slime into solid rings? Does it have the same properties as metal? It sure didn’t look like that.
All this comes with a hilarious scene when Celebrimbor escapes his tower of dreams. First off, all rocks thrown by siege equipment into the city seem to home in on him. It’s to add dramatic effect, I would guess, but when lengthy dialogue is required it’s all peace and quiet again on the outside. Suddenly people can stand and talk in the middle of the siege undisturbed, with people dying and buildings exploding around them. It’s an extremely odd contrast to what is supposed to go on: a massive, bloody and desperate battle! Also, it looks ridiculous. Anyway, he makes it to the walls, and exclaims that Sauron is Sauron, the actual lord of evil, but the soldiers and Mirdania there don’t believe him. A seed of doubt was planted earlier, and now it has blossomed. This leads to Celebrimbor acting out in frustration, and in his rage he accidentally pushes Mirdania off the walls (with the help of Sauron). She lands brutally on the hard ground, and you can tell she is seriously injured. Then an orc steps up to her and decides to cut her head off unceremoniously. While somewhat gruesome, I couldn’t help but laugh. It felt and looked like a Monty Python sketch.
Cavalry of bad
Here comes Elron to save the day, with a relatively large cavalry force. It starts with Elron making a huge mistake by announcing himself with a damn horn. This leads to the orcs having time to regroup themselves and face the direction of the attack. Everyone knows from Total War: MEDIEVAL II that hitting an unknowing army in the back is the best way to crush morale, but I guess Elron doesn’t have a Steam account. Elron and his horsemen start the attack. Things are looking promising regardless, but then suddenly the orcs cart forward a cage with a certain elf captured inside. Elron loses faith and the attack is called off, since we can’t risk Galadriel now, can we? And being the farce that Rings of Power is, the show continues into the absurd.
Instead of battle, the orcs with its weird elf-orc leader are holding a parley inside the orc camp with Elron. The elf-orc Adar is not without rules and a fair game mentality, but why not just take the opportunity to stab Elron in the back here? Adar goes on about his children, how much he cares about his little ugly orclings, and that they should team up to defeat Sauron. Elon promptly says no, but asks Adar for a private moment with Galadriel to say his final goodbyes, since refusing this alliance deemed her to death. Adar, the stupid son of a bitch says yes to this request, which leads to Elron passing an item to Galadriel for her to use to unlock her chains. Not before an awkward kiss between the two, though… What?
It’s so bad. When leaving the camp, Elron and his officer talk about their plans in the middle of all the orcs. They do it in elvish, but how can they be sure nobody knows that language? Anyway, the battle continues with Elron being sure that Durin with his dwarf army will show up to help (they don’t). Something Elron asked Durin earlier in the episode. Want to know how Elron uses his cavalry? It’s not by charging the enemy repeatedly to break them at least. We see them stand in place and fight orcs one to one, on horseback in a forest. This of course ends in a disaster and from here on out, the battle/siege is just a total mess. It’s hard to understand where the actual battle lines are, since units teleport from the near the wall, to the back of the lines, and so forth. It’s also overly retarded when it comes to the dramatic. Like when a female Asian (lol) elf gets shot by 10 arrows, with all the shots coming from different directions, yet still manages somehow to get off one last fire-arrow to blow up a catapult. Alrighty then.
Troll rage
At one point during the battle, Adar releases a single troll to break the elves. One of Adar’s orc lieutenants tells him that the troll will kill orcs too, since apparently it has not been trained not to snack on friendlies. However, Adar does not care, so I have to question how much he truly cares about these supposed “children” in the first place. The troll destroys a few units, but in standard Rings of Power fashion the tension is all drained in about 10 seconds, as they don’t understand the concept of it, or power levels between units overall. It dies incredibly fast, which just makes the battle come off as even more lame than I thought were possible. In the midst of all this, the show comes with a positive, though. While this one on one fight is strange, considering the elf in question drops his weapons and draws his bow when getting in melee range, it’s still somewhat satisfying. You see, the black elf Arondir faces off with Adar, but loses that encounter and gets stabbed by him. We don’t see him die, yet it looks like a deep, serious wound. We can only hope, because it’s time for the show to cut the bad characters loose.
That’s basically it. The 9 rings escape the castle, however, we know they end up in the hands of men eventually. Sauron is pissed off. Galadriel makes it out alive, of course, while it looks bad for Elron and his elf friends, the king included. We know that Elron survives, and that he will probably be saved by Durin in the next episode. Durin is just running late, I’m guessing. The big plus of this episode was Mirdania falling to her death, and Arondir getting shanked. The show is once again pretty darn terrible, yet, it’s hard to look away thanks to its large budget car wreck syndrome. I will say this again: they will never ever be able to create sympathy for the orcs, it does not matter how many times they show the sad orc. Just stop.
Thanks for reading.
/Thomas
Tom's Gaming Vault 