‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Episode 2 Recap: Dwarf Lords

One of the most fun things to do while watching The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is to play Spot the Accent. The Elves? Queen’s English. The humans? Rural/northern accents. The Harfoots? Irish. The Dwarves? Scottish, by god. Each race corresponds neatly to one of our culturally Ango-Saxon Scots-Irish Gaelic forebears. I dunno — it kind of makes you feel at home, yeah?

Once again in this episode, we take a trip around the horn, following various disconnected characters as each of them further The Rings of Power’s far-flung adventures. First and foremost as always is Galadriel, who is literally swimming home from heaven to earth. She comes across a group of shipwrecked humans, from whom she carefully hides her pointy elven ears. But she’s soon found out, and when a “wyrm” (a draconic sea serpent, basically) shows up to finish what it started when it first destroyed their ship, all bets are off. Cast off from the wreckage, she and a cocky human named Halbard (Charlie Vickers) are the sole survivors of the monstrous encounter; they wind up being discovered by an unseen sailor of unknown provenance.

Galadriel’s buddy Elrond, meanwhile, is introduced by his king Gil-galad to Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards), a formidable craftsman from the Elven realm of Eregion. Celebrimbor is basically the Michelangelo of Elves, and he bears the weight of history with him, having on hand the hammer of Fëanor, the Elf who crafted the magical jewels called the Silmarils that caused the Great War with the original Dark Lord Morgoth in the first place. He has grand plans to build something more influential and lasting than mere art and artifacts, but he needs to construct a custom-built tower and forge to do it. That will require manpower that Gil-galad is not willing to give him.

This gives Elrond the idea to contact his old friend Prince Durin (Owain Arthur), a lord of the Dwarves of the underground kingdom called Khazad-dûm — the Mines of Moria, for you Lord of the Rings oldheads. The Mines at this stage in history are gorgeous, well-lit, and full of lush greenery (and living Dwarves, instead of skeletons and orcs). The only problem is that the prince is furious that Elrond hasn’t come calling for twenty years, during which time Durin got married and had two kids. This timespan is the blink of an eye for an Elf, but for a Dwarf, well, it matters, dammit. And Prince Durin forces Elrond to go through an entire test of strength before he’s willing to entertain the offer.

But entertain it he does, largely at the behest of his wife, Princess Disa (Sophia Nomvete). (Here I will note my 11-year-old daughter’s outrage that Dwarf women and children are not depicted as having beards, which she feels are an evolutionary adaptation designed to help the Dwarves filter out harmful particles while mining. I find it difficult to disagree!)

After Elrond leaves, though, the prince meets with his father, King Durin (Peter Mullan, veteran of everything from Westworld to Ozark to The Underground Railroad). The king is highly suspicious that an Elf-lord would show up a the doorstep of their kingdom right after they’ve found…some mysterious artifact in a treasure chest that the show does not deign to show us just yet. Oh well.

Meanwhile, the Elf-scout Arondir and his human love interest Bronwyn discover a human village that has been completely devastated, but with no corpses left behind; every inhabitant seems to have been pulled down into a tunnel dug by unknown hands. Arondir explores the tunnel and gets grabbed up by himself by unknown hands, Aliens-style, while Bronwyn races back to her village and kills an orc who’s emerged out of a similar tunnel to threaten her son Theo. With this evidence that orcs are at work — echoed by Halbard’s claim to Galadriel that his home was wiped out by these servants of the dark, despite Gil-galad’s belief that they’re all long gone — Bronwyn convinces her people to flee.

Finally, there’s our Harfoot heroine Nori Brandyfoot, who tries to figure out a way to communicate with the mysterious man who fell from the sky in the premiere. Utilizing the fireflies that fuel the Harfoots’ lanterns, he conjures up a constellation of stars for which he must search, and the exploratory Nori is determined to help him find it. (My personal theory is that this mystery man is one of the two so-called “Blue Wizards” that recent Tolkien scholarship has determined as having traveled to Middle-earth during the Second Age to guard the East against Sauron’s dominion, but, as they say, y’all ain’t ready for that conversation.)

Oh, and there’s a genuinely funny bit of physical comedy when the cart that Nori and her friend Poppy use to transport the mystery man rolls downhill while they’re not paying attention. Humor matters in a show like this!

The biggest problem with this episode is evident if you compare it to, like, any other episode of good television. For the most part, stories in prestige TV are driven by character interaction. People encounter one another, have conversations or arguments or fights, emerge on the other side either changed or redoubled in their determination not to change, and the plot proceeds from there. (This is how House of the Dragon works, to cite an obvious point of comparison for this show.)

In this episode, though, written by Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul veteran Gennifer Hutchison of all people, way too many of the scene transitions that propel the narrative are these kind of cheap cliffhangers, in which the action is cut off just before or just after something interesting happens. Arondir gets got by some goblins? Cut! Durin père and Durin fils open a treasure box with a secret MacGuffin inside? Cut! Theo’s blood gets drawn into his obviously evil Sauronic artifact? Cut! Galadriel and Halbard get rescued by the silhouette of an off-camera sailor? Cut! 

You could get away with one or even two of these pseudo-suspenseful edits, I guess. But a whole suite of them? It’s not storytelling — it’s a cheat code, the easiest possible way to drive people from one moment (or episode) of the story to the next. I’m surprised it made it out of the writers’ room this way.

Still, we’re in Middle-earth, you know? Galadriel is Galadriel, if a slightly less goddess-like version thereof. Elrond is Elrond, if a more down-to-earth version. The Durins are the Durins, even if they’re just heavily bearded and prosthetically-nosed Scotsmen. There’s kind of a dragon. There’s kind of a wizard. There’s an orc in a cool skull helmet. 

In other words, if you’re a Tolkien guy — which I most definitely am — there’s enough Tolkien stuff going on around here to keep you invested for a third episode. At this early juncture, I have my doubts that this this show will become the world-bestriding zeitgeist colossus that either Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy or George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon have been … But that’s okay! Sometimes a pleasant stay in a familiar place is exactly what you’re looking for, no more and no less. Let’s just hope the pleasant pros outweigh the cons, because the ratio is already becoming a bit worrying.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.