‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Episode 3 Recap: Strong Island

“The Elf has arrived.” Tar-Míriel, Queen Regent of the island kingdom of Númenor, ascends a tower to speak to her father the king, forced from his throne and into exile within his own city. She utters these portentous words in order to tell him of the coming of Galadriel, a legendary High Elf whose arrival on their mythical island they apparently anticipated.

Do we get to see her father the king, this mysterious figure, still loyal to the Elves even after his entire kingdom has moved on? No, we do not! The show cuts away without revealing him to us. Cliffhanger! What, aren’t you excited?

“Bring him to Adar.” So says an orc captain to his minions as they prepare to execute the Elf soldier Arondir after his unsuccessful attempt to escape from their slave labor camp. That attempt saw both of his Elf companions — also captured by the orcs — and several humans and orcs slain, as well as the release of a warg that’s equal parts menacing and cute. Anyway, Adar is the leader of these orcs, an entity they speak of in reverent, even worshipful tones, despite the fact that he has a name of Elvish origin.

Do we get to see Adar, this mysterious figure, ruler of the orcs and planner of their secret mission to clear out the Southlands of its inhabitants in order to prepare for the second coming of Sauron? No, we do not! The show cuts away without revealing him to us. Cliffhanger! What, aren’t you excited?

I hate to say it, oh I hate to say it, but this propensity to gin up artificial cliffhangers by simply stopping the action before something important gets revealed has already become a default tic of the Rings of Power writers’ room. You may recall this technique getting deployed in Episode 2, not once, not twice, not thrice, but four separate times. Three episodes in and it’s already becoming what timed ultimatums (“you have 30 minutes/48 hours/six months to do Impossible Task X”) were to Ozark: a crutch used to help the limping drama move along in a way that simulates excitement rather than providing it outright.

Which is too bad, because overall, this episode improves on its predecessors. For one thing, it tightens up the story, leaving Elrond, Gil-galad, Celebrimbor, the Durins, Bronwyn, and Theo out of things in order to focus squarely on Arondir the Elf, Nori the Harfoot, and Galadriel and Halbrand the shipwrecked companions.

We’ll start with Nori, whose storyline is, so far, a standalone affair. While her people hold a festival to celebrate their coming migration, she’s still concerned with helping her friend the Meteor Man, aka the Stranger (Daniel Weyman), find the constellation of stars he’s looking for. She discovers this in a pilfered star chart possessed by village scholar and chieftain Sadoc Burrows, but the Meteor Man accidentally lights it on fire, stumbles around, and gets discovered by the entire village.

But the response is a collective shrug. Nori and her family, including her injured father, are not left behind as they’d feared. The Meteor Man even tags along, helping them move their cart and thus preventing them from falling behind. All is well for Nori, who is perhaps the flattest of the show’s new characters. (Once you’ve seen the journeys of reluctant halfling heroes Bilbo and Frodo, a character who’s thirsting for adventure comes across as hopelessly YA, you know what I mean?)

Arondir’s plight winds up pretty tightly tied to that of Galadriel and Halbrand. The Elf scout has been kidnapped by orcs (duh), who are using him and a host of other captured slaves to dig a massive underground tunnel. The orcs, who are vulnerable to the sun — one of the few points of lore where The Rings of Power hews closer to Tolkien’s material than Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies did — employ skull helmets, heavy garments, and a series of tarps to protect themselves from the hated light. In this, Arondir and his buddies see their chance of escape, which they attempt at high noon; they fail pretty miserably in the end, in one of the more blandly, even comically (there’s a tug of war!) staged combat scenes you’re likely to see on TV this year.

And over in Galadriel and Halbrand’s storyline, we find out what those orcs are actually up to. Brought to the kingdom of Númenor by a ship’s captain named Elendil — one of the most momentous figures in the entire history of Middle-earth, if you know your shit — they find a culture hostile to outsiders, particularly to Elves, one-time allies from whom the kingdom has grown estranged. The Queen Regent Tar-Míriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) and her advisor Pharazôn (Trystan Gravelle) order the newcomers to stay under guard, orders both of them promptly defy. Halbrand tries to become a swordsmith, gets rejected, tries to pickpocket some dude’s guild badge which would enable him to become a swordsmith after all, gets jumped, beats the living shit out of his attackers, and gets arrested by soldiers. 

Galadriel, meanwhile, befriends Elendil (Lloyd Owen), the sailor who rescued them. Together they ride off to the Hall of Law, where she discovers that the mysterious sigil she’s associated with Sauron is not a sigil at all, but a map of the Southlands where he intends to make his new base of operations — the very same Southlands from which Arondir, Bronwyn and Theo, and Halbrand all hail. And she learns that Halbrand is no commoner, but a king, now on the run after the fall of his realm to the orcs. She proposes an alliance that would redeem both their bloodlines. (His family lost the Great War; her family started it, kinda.)

And oh yeah, we get to know Elendil and his kids Isildur (Maxim Baldry) and Eärien (Ema Horvath), the former an apprentice sailor who yearns to explore, the latter his non-canonical sister who at episode’s end is accepted into a builder’s guild or something to that effect. (I’m reasonably sure we don’t see their brother Anarion, though I might have just missed him.)

All in all, it’s not a terrible episode! The orcs, all of them pale as milk from existing in the underground darkness all their lives, are fun enemies. Númenor looks sufficiently impressive to blow the mind of Halbrand, himself a king of humans but with nowhere near the gods-given power and prowess of these island-dwellers. Lloyd Owen’s Elendil is one of the very few characters so far who look like you might have pictured them from the books, equal parts rugged sailor and innately noble future savior of humanity.

But all the problems of the first two episodes linger. Most importantly, it’s very, very hard to get invested in the fates of the characters invented for the show, nearly all of whom feel like characters you might have played in a D&D campaign in high school — boilerplate rogues and halflings, scoundrels and adventure-seekers, stern Elvish warriors with no other discernible characteristics. I found myself literally gasping with relief when Elendil’s identity was revealed, simply because I know his character’s journey is more complicated and compelling than anything else the show has cooked up so far.

I’m trying, as hard as I can, not to let my lifetime of Tolkien readership to affect my judgment of the show, which is its own thing in a very different medium with different structures, strengths, and requirements. But it’s hard! It’s hard because I know how complex and tragic this material can be, and I’m seeing so little of that complexity and tragedy; in its place are a bunch of gritty tough guys and wide-eyed wonder-seekers I don’t recognize, whether their origins are canonical or not. Aside from some really cheesy seafaring sequences everything still looks solid and expensive, but it feels like some vital part of the storytelling and character-building budget was cut. Short of a magic ring, I’m not sure how the show digs itself out of that hole.

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.