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Movies & TV The Rings of Power

Dark Plans Are Revealed in The Rings of Power’s “New Life”

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Published on September 30, 2022

Image: Amazon Prime Video
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power - 106, Cynthia Addai-Robinson (Queen Regent Míriel), Ismael Cruz Córdova (Arondir), Charlie Vickers (Halbrand)
Image: Amazon Prime Video

This week in episode six of The Rings of Power, Arondir and Bronwyn fight back against the orcs, and we learn the truth about Adar and what the evil blade is for. Also, the Númenóreans spend a lot of time in transit. Which is fine, Mordor wasn’t built in a day…

 

Recap

Adar plants some seeds in the ground before addressing his troops, telling them that for the first time they go into battle not as unnamed slaves but as brothers and sisters. They march on Ostirith but find the fortress abandoned. Arondir appears and uses a flaming arrow to destroy the rope and iron framework that holds the tower together. As the orcs try to flee, Arondir leaps outside the fortress and slides a bar over the door, trapping them. In the village, Bronwyn and her people cheer as they watch the tower fall.

Just before dawn, Isildur goes up on deck where he finds Galadriel. She asks his rank, and when he admits that he is only a stablesweep, she tells him not to despise labor that keeps him humble. Isildur answers that he did not join the expedition to be humbled, and tells her that the place they left isn’t the real Númenor, if that ever even existed. Galadriel tells him that it did, and it still does as long as it lives on in his heart. Dawn breaks, and Isildur sees the lands of Middle-earth in the distance.

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Arondir finds that he cannot destroy the evil blade. He tells Bronwyn that he must hide it, and even she cannot know where it is. The villagers prepare their home for battle, and Arondir tells Bronwyn that elves have a tradition of planting seeds beforehand, and promising to plant the rest in her garden, as a family. They kiss.

The orc army arrives in the night. Arondir is knocked from a rooftop by a huge orc and nearly killed, but Bronwyn saves him. The villagers defeat the orcs, though the victory is clouded by discovering that some of the people they were fighting were their former neighbors, the ones who left to serve the orc leader.

Suddenly a hail of arrows comes at them from the trees. Bronwyn is hit as the villagers retreat inside the tavern, where Arondir and Theo struggle to save her life, removing the arrow and cauterizing the wound. Adar arrives in the village as the orcs break into the tavern. He demands that Arondir give up the evil blade and threatens to kill Bronwyn. Theo reveals that he saw where the blade was hidden and produces it from under a flagstone. As dawn rises, they hear the thunder of approaching horses. Adar tells Waldreg that he has a task for him.

The villagers fight off their captors as the Númenórean riders arrive and begin slaughtering the orcs. Watching from a hilltop with the reserves, Míriel gives Isildur permission to join the fighting. As he rides in, Isildur sees his father nearly killed by an orc, but he is saved by Halbrand. Adar attempts to flee on horseback, and Galadriel chases him down with the help of Halbrand. Halbrand tries to kill Adar “for what he did,” but Galadriel restrains him.

Later, she interrogates Adar as to the whereabouts of Sauron. She has realized that Adar is one of the elves taken by Morgoth and corrupted. He tells her that, after Morgoth’s defeat, Sauron “devoted himself to healing” and uniting Middle Earth. He also sought to craft a power, but the exact making of it eluded him. Adar claims that he didn’t want to sacrifice any more of his children for Sauron’s aspirations and killed Sauron himself.

Galadriel tells him that she doesn’t believe him, and that his kind was a mistake, made in mockery. She vows that she will wipe every last one of them off the earth, and that she will save him for last so that he can witness it. Adar observes that he is not the only elf who has been transformed by darkness. Halbrand arrives in time to stop Galadriel from murdering him. Later, she thanks him for restraining her. She tells him to be free of whatever Adar did to him, and whatever Halbrand himself did. Halbrand admits that he never believed he could be, until today as he fought at her side. She admits that she felt the same thing.

Míriel commends Bronwyn for her leadership, then introduces Halbrand. Bronwyn asks if he is the king they have been waiting for. Halbrand hesitates, then says yes. The villagers celebrate. Theo admits to Arondir that he feels the loss of the blade, that having it made him feel powerful. Arondir gives him the bundle containing the blade and tells Theo to rid himself of it once and for all by giving the blade to the Númenóreans to toss into the sea. But when Theo unwraps the bundle there is only a random hatchet inside.

Isildur struggles with his horse, and Elendil tells him that when their horses ride into battle, they form an unbreakable bond with their rider. He admits that he learned this from Isildur’s mother, and agrees to teach his son what she taught him.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power - 106, Lloyd Owen (Elendil), Maxim Baldry (Isildur)
Image: Amazon Prime Video

In the fortress of Ostirith, Waldreg activates the blade with his own blood and then thrusts it into a keyhole. Turning it releases the dam, and water rushes over the landscape.

The released water pours into the tunnels the orcs made and flows into a dormant volcano, causing it to erupt, spewing fire and spitting balls of molten rock into the village. The villagers and Númenóreans panic and try to run as the orc prisoners start fighting them. As a wave of black smoke and fire approaches, Galadriel stands and stares into the maelstrom. It consumes her, and the now-empty building where Adar was imprisoned.

 

Commentary

Aaaannd of course Númenor arrives five minutes too late. If y’all could have made your minds up earlier instead of having the same dilemma five times, this whole thing could have been avoided.

I don’t know how to feel about this episode. There are parts I really like. It’s also strange that once again we have a week with no Harfoots, and also that there’s no Elrond and company. I’m still flummoxed by how weird and clumsy the pacing of the show is. Thematically, the threads of the different characters are all drawing towards what seems to be a common point, but because of the pacing, those threads are easily lost and forgotten between episodes. Sometimes even within a single episode. There are also a lot of moments that feel important, but they either aren’t set up well or aren’t given their full due in execution.

For example, there is the exchange between Galadriel and Isildur. Though the dialogue is a little clunky, I like this moment, especially the way it foreshadowed both the end of the episode as well as Isildur’s eventual fall. Galadriel tells him that humility has saved entire kingdoms, while pride has threatened to bring them to ruin. Isildur’s pride is at least part of what leads him to keep the One Ring, while his descendant Aragorn’s humility leads him to realize that only Frodo can finish the task of carrying it to Mordor to be destroyed. Later, as Galadriel stares into the oncoming fires of what will soon be known as Mordor, one wonders if she isn’t seeing her own pride as partly responsible for this defeat.

However, this exchange also gives us the first clue to Isildur’s discontent, and I really wish the moment had been given more weight and clarity. He tells Galadriel that he wants to escape Númenor because it isn’t the real Númenor—whatever that means. Yes, we know that Númenor has turned away from its fellowship with the elves, and possibly from following the path the Valar want. This makes Númenor diminished compared to the greatness of its past, at least in the eyes of people like Elendil and Galadriel, but there isn’t much in the show to give the viewer a concrete understanding of what Galadriel and Isildur seem to take for granted, the idea that there can be a “real” Númenor in his heart, but that the one that actually exists isn’t “real.” It’s poetic, but it’s not really helpful.

Most of Isildur’s character has built upon the fact that he acts irresponsibly for reasons his friends and family can’t understand. If this is the answer, it needed far more than a single comment that even a viewer who’s familiar with the Silmarillion struggles to make sense of.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power - 106, Morfydd Clark (Galadriel)
Image: Amazon Prime Video

For that matter, it hasn’t been explained what it means when Isildur says he wants to go west. West to the libraries that Elendil took Galadriel to? West to Valinor? As someone who has read some (but not all) of the Silmarillion, I thought this might be a reference to Tol Eressëa, an island of elves that is near, but not quite in, Valinor. But even that’s just conjecture. All we have been told within the show itself is that Valinor is to the west, and that a while back Elrond’s dad sailed there on an important mission to talk to the Valar. It’s just frustrating that none of Isildur’s stakes seem to mean anything.

I was similarly frustrated by Arondir’s confession that he wants to be with Bronwyn. I’ve loved the relationship between them, and the show has given a lot of little moments for the actors to explore their chemistry together. But we also know that romances between elves and humans are a big deal—Arondir is even warned about it by his friend in the first episode. We see that he is resisting this connection to Bronwyn, at least a little. And while we can assume it is for this reason, we don’t actually know what he thinks or how he feels about this pseudo-forbidden romance.

All the unspoken work that the show does is great, such as Arondir’s care and attention with Theo, and his respect for Bronwyn’s leadership. And the beginning of the scene, before he professes his desire to be with her, is really beautiful. The way she instinctively understands why the elves have a tradition of planting seeds before battle shows that she understands him, and when he shares with her the belief that one of the Valar watches over those who tend growing things, he is being intimate and vulnerable with her. The scene really would have been perfect if it had ended there, but the addition of the declaration of love felt clumsy and rushed, as though the writers felt it had to be there in order to up the stakes during the battle.

As always, all of Arondir’s fight scenes and stunts are top notch, and I can see the show drawing a visual line between his style and Legolas’, which is neat since they are both Silvan elves. Similarly, I really like the design of the Númenórean armor. It’s too bad that the costumers clearly weren’t given enough time and budget to really make the armor look real (scalemail just drawn onto sweaters, anyone?) but there are great elements and details in the design that foreshadow the armor of both Gondor and Rohan.

We get some really cool horse work from Galadriel, which I loved, but still not a lot of fighting—even her chase with Adar ends with Halbrand doing the actual catching, spear to the hand, etc. I still feel like they aren’t giving Galadriel the weight she deserves, not in her action scenes, and not in her dialogue. She’s supposed to be one of the original elves, born in Valinor itself, and yet she and Arondir could be the same age, for all the show gives us. The writers just don’t seem to know how to give her that presence.

(An aside: I do appreciate that the moment of Halbrand tripping the horse was so visceral that the show made sure to give us an extra shot so we could see that Adar’s stolen mount was alright. Thanks, The Rings of Power, from all the horse lovers in your audience.)

They do get closer to something really powerful in Galadriel’s scene with Adar, but unfortunately her character is kind of overshadowed by the Uruk’s. Perhaps because he is allowed to speak simply, rather than in the Tolkien-esque speech the writers are trying (and largely failing) to emulate. Or maybe it’s because his story is being written in more detail than hers. I for one, feel like I know him a sight better than I know her, which is a problem on several fronts: Firstly because she is a main character, arguably the main character. But secondly, because what the script is doing with Adar’s story is actually kind of alarming.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power - 106, Joseph Mawle (Adar)
Image: Amazon Prime Video)

I can see where the idea came from. We as a society have begun moving away from high fantasy’s trope of “evil races,” or species as it might be better put. The idea of stock villains who are sentient and human-like but also inherently evil isn’t something that sits well with us anymore, nor should it. And the story about Morgoth making the first orcs by torturing and corrupting elves alluded to in Tolkien’s writings—it’s a tragic idea. Unfortunately, this isn’t a whole new fictional world where the writers have the freedom to take their ideas to any conclusion that they want… because we know how the story ends.

Of course, I don’t know what the writers intend to do with the themes and story of Adar, so there may be elements to come that will affect my opinion of what we see in this episode. Acknowledging the history of the orcs seems relevant, and Adar’s seeming awareness and pain over what he has lost in being changed is very poignant, especially when contrasted in the other ways other elves have been changed by the war against Morgoth. He is not wrong to compare himself and Galadriel.

However, I don’t know where they can take this empathy for Adar and his “children,” given the fact that Morgoth and Sauron are Evil capital E. The story of Sauron ultimately ends in his fall and the destruction of the entirety of the orcs and Uruk-hai. If we are to argue that this species is deserving of the same respect, rights, and empathy that the “good” races are, then their ultimate annihilation must be viewed as a tragedy. Again, in another context I would really like this argument. The story you could tell with it is very interesting. But I’m not sure how it can be given its due within the constraints of the larger canon, unless the show plans to break them rather drastically. The Rings of Power has made some significant changes to book canon already, but this would be to an entirely different degree.

Adar is given several marks of othering in his confrontation with Galadriel. One is the way he corrects Galadriel’s use of terminology towards him. “We prefer uruk.”  There is also the way in which he argues to Galadriel that orcs are people with rights—I was particularly struck by “We are creations of the One, Master of the Secret Fire, the same as you. As worthy of the breath of life, and just as worthy of a home.” The whole speech has a very Shylock in The Merchant of Venice quality to it. But although that quote from Shylock is a powerful one, in the play it doesn’t avail him of very much. He is still judged as a bad person, by both his fellow characters and the narrative. And so might the rest of The Rings of Power judge Adar and the orcs—as “twisted and ruined forms of life” that should be destroyed. Either because they deserve it, or as a mercy killing, to get rid of “mistakes” that should never have existed.

I am alarmed that some viewers might take to this interpretation; I think it would be easy for a certain type of person to see similarities between Galadriel’s opinion of Adar and their own prejudices against marginalized people in our world, especially since Adar uses some of the same language that othered groups have used to defend themselves in real life.

However, I am now desperately curious to know how much of Adar’s story about wanting to free the orcs from Sauron is true. Obviously Sauron isn’t dead, but it is conceivable that Adar might have tried to kill him, or even believed that he had succeeded. Or perhaps he lied about killing Sauron, but the rest was true. We know from his speech to the orcs at the beginning of the episode that he does have feelings about them being used as disposable slaves by Sauron, so at least the part about him not wanting to sacrifice any more orcs to Sauron’s attempts to craft the new power certainly is. And it’s a neat idea to think that Adar is creating this land for the orcs, not for his master.

The relationship between Halbrand and Galadriel is starting to grow on me, also. I want more development for her, but I do like the way the theme of their shared pain has come together, and the bittersweetness of the fact that they both found peace only when riding into battle together. I was glad to see them share that moment, but also saddened by this reminder that for all they are both aware of their foibles and trying not to let their pain rule them, battle should not be a place where anyone finds serenity or a sense of self.

Finally, and I apologize for this weird deep cut, my spouse has recently started showing me Star Trek: Voyager for the first time, and watching this scene between Galadriel and Halbrand reminded me very much of a scene between Janeway and Chakotay. In attempting to express what Janeway means to him, Chakotay makes up a story about a warrior (himself) who was always angry, until one day he met a female warrior (Janeway) from another tribe. Following this incredible woman, he found peace dedicating himself to her. Something about the way Galadriel and Halbrand’s scene was played, the tonality of Halbrand’s voice, and even their positions in frame, reminded me very much of that moment I had just watched between Chakotay and Janeway. The stillness between Halbrand and Galadriel as he speaks, the acknowledgment of “I felt it too,” that seems almost wrenched from Galadriel’s lips, was really moving, and I felt the connection between them in a way I hadn’t in any of their other scenes together. It was really nice.

 

Other thoughts:

  • I weirdly loved the symbolism of the episode beginning with Arondir dropping the watchtower on Adar and his orcs and ending with Adar using the tower to drop an entire volcano on Arondir and the villagers. I am also highly amused that I spent all this time thinking that the sword was a key in some kind of metaphorical or metaphysical sense, but it was in fact just a normal key—albeit blood-powered and imbued with the essence of darkness or whatever.
  • I noticed that Adar tells the orcs that they are brothers and sisters, and thought I spotted a few possibly female orcs in the fray. Not sure how I feel about that, but there it is. I did like how many female villagers fought in the battle, and especially the lady archer on the roof.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power - 106, Nazanin Boniadi (Bronwyn), Ismael Cruz Córdova (Arondir)
Image: Amazon Prime Video
  • Why on Middle-earth would Arondir hide the super important evil blade inside the tavern, the one place where they all intended to end up if the battle went poorly? Why not bury it under a tree somewhere, or throw it down the well? It’s not like the orcs or Adar are able to sense the thing. You’d at least buy yourself some time and maybe an opportunity to escape if they had to walk out into the middle of the forest first in order to dig it up.
  • A lot of the speeches in the show really fall flat, especially compared to some of the beautiful words The Lord of the Rings films had to work with, but I did really like Theo and Bronwyn’s little catechism:

“In the end, the shadow is but a small and passing thing. There is light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. Find the light and the shadow will not find you.”

 

Sylas K Barret really ought to try a full read of the Silmarilion again, but… it’s a lot. I love it. But it’s a lot.

About the Author

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Sylas K Barrett

Author

Sylas K Barrett is a queer writer and creative based in Brooklyn. A fan of nature, character work, and long flowery descriptions, Sylas has been heading up Reading the Wheel of Time since 2018. You can (occasionally) find him on social media on Bluesky (@thatsyguy.bsky.social) and Instagram (@thatsyguy)
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