Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power - Amazon. Season 2 starts on 29th August.

Every time I see or hear Isildur I shout to myself ISILDURRRR, YOU MUST DESTROY IT

Samuel_1 wrote:So who on earth are those 3 women in white?

No idea. They look like cult members, but have actual powers so can't be human. I'm guessing they (or at least the main one) are Maiar (Gandalf/Sauron type beings) corrupted by Sauron/Morgoth.

It feels weird that the penultimate episode of the series was quieter than the one before it. I really like this show but the pacing is weird.

Captain Kinopio wrote:Every time I see or hear Isildur I shout to myself ISILDURRRR, YOU MUST DESTROY IT

Yes!

Moggy wrote:Fantastic episode last Friday. There were minor annoyances the dagger/key thing was bloody daft, but overall it was amazing.

I am really hoping that we haven't met Sauron yet. I don't like the idea of him being Halbrand or the Stranger.

Wild speculation: I don't think they would do this, but I've seen a few people suggesting Sauron has taken the form of Gil-galad (the real Gil-galad being captured), and that's why he's acting so weird and coming up with bullshit about mithril. I don't love that idea, but it's better than the elves actually needing mithril to survive.

Gil-galad would work given presumably it was his idea for Celebrimbor to build his massive forge. And would explain why their magic tree is getting corrupted. And why he tried to deport Galadriel to Valinor.

And yet Halbrand is also on his way to the big forge. And he's a blacksmith. And he's been proclaimed the King of Mordor. And he absolutely hates the guy who claims to have killed Sauron.

I don't mind who ends up being Sauron as long as it's someone who's featured already. Just having pointy helmet man walk on at the end to make some rings would be a letdown.

Memento Mori wrote:It feels weird that the penultimate episode of the series was quieter than the one before it. I really like this show but the pacing is weird.

Captain Kinopio wrote:Every time I see or hear Isildur I shout to myself ISILDURRRR, YOU MUST DESTROY IT

Yes!

Moggy wrote:Fantastic episode last Friday. There were minor annoyances the dagger/key thing was bloody daft, but overall it was amazing.

I am really hoping that we haven't met Sauron yet. I don't like the idea of him being Halbrand or the Stranger.

Wild speculation: I don't think they would do this, but I've seen a few people suggesting Sauron has taken the form of Gil-galad (the real Gil-galad being captured), and that's why he's acting so weird and coming up with bullshit about mithril. I don't love that idea, but it's better than the elves actually needing mithril to survive.

Gil-galad would work given presumably it was his idea for Celebrimbor to build his massive forge. And would explain why their magic tree is getting corrupted. And why he tried to deport Galadriel to Valinor.

And yet Halbrand is also on his way to the big forge. And he's a blacksmith. And he's been proclaimed the King of Mordor. And he absolutely hates the guy who claims to have killed Sauron.

I don't mind who ends up being Sauron as long as it's someone who's featured already. Just having pointy helmet man walk on at the end to make some rings would be a letdown.

Unfortunately the mithril thing is now pretty much confirmed.

Halbrand is the obvious Sauron. I really hope it isn't though.

Moggy wrote:Halbrand is the obvious Sauron. I really hope it isn't though.

I suspect he'll get one of the rings and end up as one of the ringwraiths.

I've been, for the most part, enjoying this show and this might seem nit-picky, but that "text" transformation was really, really clunky. Not only in that it treats the audience like idiots but that it introduces a stylistic choice that at this point just seems jarring.

Van Foster wrote:I've been, for the most part, enjoying this show and this might seem nit-picky, but that "text" transformation was really, really clunky. Not only in that it treats the audience like idiots but that it introduces a stylistic choice that at this point just seems jarring.

Oh god this. I laughed quite a bit at it.

I also laughed. It was not a good choice

I think they would have got away with it if they'd just panned around the landscape and had "MORDOR" come up on screen, but the visual effect was so bad and yes, honestly the idea behind it was kind of insulting.

Thought it was a banger episode besides that though.

Was there anybody that didn't know it was Mordor before Mount Doom erupted? To then explain it after another entire episode was insulting the intelligence of the audience.

Im not sure about that. You’re all a bunch of dorks.

It’s perfectly reasonable for someone not to have known that was the creation of Mordor. Probably could have been revealed better in dialogue, but it was hardly insults the audience.

There aren't any non-dorks watching this series.

The camera pans down into the depths of the mountain and flames erupt around a waking creature

"THE BALROG IS SLEEPING" appears on screen, then burns away and is replaced by "THE BALROG HAS WOKEN UP"

OrangeRKN wrote:The camera pans down into the depths of the mountain and flames erupt around a waking creature

"THE BALROG IS SLEEPING" appears on screen, then burns away and is replaced by "THE BALROG HAS WOKEN UP"

Next season they should double down and have Metroid Prime style scan logs come up whenever a new creature or place is introduced

I'm struggling to understand the scale of things a bit. The Southlands seem to be one village, the force needed from Numenor seemed to fit on a few coaches. Is that it? It all seems very small.

Red wrote:I'm struggling to understand the scale of things a bit. The Southlands seem to be one village, the force needed from Numenor seemed to fit on a few coaches. Is that it? It all seems very small.

Amazon have spent the equivalent of a country's GDP on this, but yeah it does feel small.

I assume that the Southlands is more than one village, it's probably made up of lots of small villages, we have just focused on one. I guess for budget reasons.

The Numenor army is a bit daft, they seemed to fit a lot of people and horses on three small ships. After they landed, sometimes it looked like a large force, sometimes quite small.

I think it's just because the Numenor forces.

I got the impression from the first couple of episodes that the rest of the Southlands were already falling or being wiped out.

But surely they would check that or go to see what was going on elsewhere, it's not like the village would have great insight into what was going on - there's no talk of e.g. banding together the stragglers across the realm and rebuilding. It just makes it seem like only that one place matters.

It's not a big problem, it just seems very... small.

Red wrote:I think it's just because the Numenor forces

go straight to that village and then after sorting it out they immediately leave again (obviously there are some push factors here!), which gives the impression that's the only village that matters in the whole place. And no one from elsewhere within the Southlands comes to help or shows any interest, and they never mention anyone else either.

.

Galadriel found a map in Numenor which directly pointed to that area didn't she? The geography matched the mark she'd found in Sauron's abandoned outpost or something.

Cuttooth wrote:I got the impression from the first couple of episodes that the rest of the Southlands were already falling or being wiped out.

Yeah they showed an already destroyed village earlier in the season. The orcs had built tunnels underneath.