A Narrative Investigation of Gollum

two quick things to get out of the way first number one this is not a joke I'm a big Lord of the Rings fan and ever since this game was announced back in 2019 I've been morbidly fascinated by it number two it's an atrocious game that should not have been released in its current state let alone for $60 with features like the lore compendium and the sindarin voiceovers only being included in the precious Edition for an additional $10 so while I don't want this to be yet another video that just makes fun of this ridiculous game I do think that criticism is deserved and that de delic entertainment waved the right to the benefit of the doubt by pricing this game and its extra features the way that they did I want to take a somewhat serious look at what Gollum story ended up being and in what I hope is a more interesting examination what I think it was trying to be to my dismay this was not a good bad that you might expect from a Hallmark Christmas movie unfortunately Gollum does not come back to his hometown and bump into his old flame from High School who is now a widow with a precocious child that latches onto Gollum as a surate father there's no baking competition no obtuse and chased flirting nobody walking around an idyllic town with cute scarves and generic coffee cups instead we have a bloated and miserable first and second act that make the final one seem almost tolerable by comparison I think in the most generous reading of the game we would say that Gollum is trying to examine the miserable cycles of its titular character act one establishes his wretchedness and sees him suffer in prison but doesn't really set up that much in the way of the plot or gollum's character in act two we see a classic Gollum cycle play out before our eyes as Gollum once again sacrifices a friend in his pursuit of the ring in the Final Act it's gollum's choices that will free or Doom a similar soul but no matter what happens he's still too closely bound to the ring to ever be free himself it has tragic elements obviously but it's not structured like like a tragedy nor does it seem to lean too heavily on our awareness of gollum's ultimate fate instead it's structured like a modern action Story featuring the world's dullest anti-hero right down to the light related McGuffin and apocalypse halting climax it's very weird so let's take a look at a game that has nothing interesting to say about Gollum and misunderstands significant parts of the world he plagues I'm going to be including most of the story details so that you'll have a similar amount of the information that I do so if you have your own theories or make connection to the game or the broader lore that I missed let me know I'm guessing and hoping most of you haven't played this so my recap to analysis ratio is skewed much more heavily towards the recap side than I usually prefer that's a balance I think about a lot in my other videos but not only is Gollum just nuts but there's also not a lot to analyze until we get towards the end I still find it compelling in the car crash kind of way and I'm hoping at least a few of you do too and with that that let our wretched Odyssey begin sios only Beyond this point sios and or people who have started other games meals or sleep routines and are too lazy to find something else I appreciate you [Music] too before we jump into the start of the game I think we have to acknowledge how controversial it is that this game exists at all when this game was announced a lot of people were understandably skeptical it's a video game starring Gollum that's obviously weird but I want to briefly defend its existence before I vivisect its execution I think any idea if executed with creativity and vision can give rise to a compelling story I remember rolling my eyes at the existence of the Andor TV show like Gollum we knew his fate like Gollum we knew where we'd have to leave things at the end of this story for the next journey to keep going but unlike Gollum Andor gets creative and explores the new dimension of its world and it gives us some of the best Star Wars we've ever gotten albeit on a small scale so I'm not inherently opposed to a Gollum game though I am a bit perplexed by this one there are some four or five minute company funded making of clips that are posted on various YouTube channels and in one one of the game's writers says before we started with the with the writing process we did of course a lot of research we read the books we watched the movies and read token's notes that he left about the story and about his writing process and his letters and all we could get our hands on basically he later mentions working with the tolken expert and what's interesting to me is that if they really did all this research they certainly would have come across this passage from one of token's letters part of the attraction of The Lord of the Rings is I think due to the glimpses of a large history in the background an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island or seeing the towers of a distant City gleaming in a sunlet Mist to go there is to destroy the magic unless new unattainable Vistas are again revealed and then I'm jumping ahead a bit in his letter there are of course quite a lot of links between the hoppit and the Lord of the Rings that are not clearly set out they were mostly written or sketched out but cut out to lighten the boat such as Gandalf's exploratory Journeys his relations with Aragorn and Gondor all the movements of Gollum until he took refuge in Moria and so on and that's from letter 247 if anyone's curious so here is tolken himself explaining his hesitance around the needless filling of gaps literally calls it destroying the magic quote unless new unattainable Vistas are again revealed a few lines later he specifically cites the untold journey of Gollum as something he removed to lighten the boat if they really did their research this would have been one of the first things they found I'm not kidding when I say that it took me about 2 minutes to find this after I decided to go looking for tolken references to Gollum across his preserved letters so the folks at dellic stumbled across this and decided that gollum's story needed to be told anyway perhaps their expansion of gollum's Journey would reveal some new unattainable Vistas perhaps they would leave their mark on one of the most ambitious and influential fantasy epics in existence tolken thought that this was a story that was more interesting if left Untold deall thought otherwise so what was their grand idea what stroke of narrative genius warranted ignoring the wishes and advice of the universe's Creator and Justified the creation of this game I don't know because after spending over 12 hours playing it I have no idea what Gollum is doing what little it does attempt was done better and more efficiently within the pages of The Lord of the Rings Gollum doesn't just confirm token's worst fears and destroy the magic it's so dull that it tries to take your will to live with it and will frequently crash to join you down in the emotional reubel in that video I referenced earlier they call this a narrative driven game they tout their Studio's history of narrative games and uh I suppose we can call it a narrative driven game because the only other thing that drives you to play Gollum is masochism and I don't think you want to put that on the box art Gollum is split into 10 chapters I believe they do this to try to mimic the structure of The Lord of the Rings novels which are split into two parts of around 10 chapters each half of them have exactly 10 chapters the short shortest has nine the longest 12 I say this is to mimic the novels because nothing in the story warrants this being split into 10 chapters as you'll probably be able to tell as we slog through them chapter 1 lasts about 15 minutes chapter 2 and three would be improved if they were a fraction as long and slapped together chapter 6 is basically just Shop's layer I really do think that they were trying to hit that 10 chapter Mark and I have a horrible Theory as to why I think this was originally supposed to be a part one and that a Gollum part two would show us gollum's adventures in Moria and tracking the fellowship that could also explain why so many of the other subplots in this game go unexplored or unresolved we do have confirmation that dellic cancelled another Lord of the Rings game that was in development I don't think it was a direct golum sequel though According to some polygon reporting the internal code name was It's Magic and was going to tell quote a story from a character's perspective that has never been told before so were there playing for a more traditional gollem sequel in addition to that game I don't know and thankfully it seems like they won't make any more of these so I guess we'll never know Gollum drops us in on articular character in a prison cell in merkwood with Gollum mumbling a riddle to himself while staring at some flowers he scratched into the wall without me eyes are marbles no Darkness they see faces look garbled no flurry they feel no breath no cheer death not to fear time is not spent loses has no sent at nothing you can Marvel without me smeagle knows it's not lies nor roses and this is one of the through lines of this game that I actually think is pretty creative in Chapter 2 of fellowship at the ring when Gandalf is filling froto in on the ring start history he describes smiggle's discovery of the Ring like this on a time they took a boat and went down to the gladen fields where there were great beds of Iris and flowering Reeds there Smigel got out and went nosing about the banks but deagle sat in the boat and fished and we know the rest though Gollum will address it as well but I actually like that they've pulled this once insignificant detail about this bed of Iris flowers and turned it into a symbol of sme's Innocence this was the last moment of normaly in his life this was the last last time he was ever untainted by the Ring's darkness and his own evil deed it's understandable that this idilic flower would haunt the corners of his mind this bright spot from his last normal day the elf king tells Gandalf that they believed Gollum was in Mordor and as Gandalf begins his interrogation we flash back to 312 of the third age in the mountains of kirth unle I don't think the Canon timeline of The Lord of the Rings gives us a firm year of gollum's capture and Mordor in appendix B in Return of the King the only information we have is that between 39 and 307 quote at some point during these years Gollum himself ventured into Mordor and was captured by Sauron in 307 the timeline says that quote Gollum is released from Mordor he is taken by Aragorn in The Dead marshes and brought to thrand in merkwood he then escapes when merkwood is attacked by Orcs in June of 38 and we know that he escapes to Moria where he will later encounter the fellowship in January of 39 so the first part of that Journey this unknown time in Mordor was left open to their interpretation something that they mention in these making of videos so we had to fill in the gaps and uh really try to interpret those notes and integrate them into our story and make sure that we are in line with what talking vote but still at our own version and that's a creative challenge obviously that's about 8 years of Gollum being around Mordor that are unaccounted for so they've chosen for him to be captured in 32 and then for him to be immediately thrown into the slave pits which means Gollum will have to be there for years which means we'll eventually be treated to one of the most absurd time jumps I've ever experienced in a video game the first challenge players must overcome is attempting to coax a stable frame rate out of the game my PC is fine I bought it years ago mostly to play Mountain blade Banner lord it's not fancy but it's similarish in power to current gen consoles and can run run what should theoretically be more demanding games at 60 plus frames and I had to turn everything down to low including tragically gollum's hair physics simulation and even then it was struggling to run so a few minutes into the first mission I had to lower the game's resolution down to 1080 and despite those efforts 30 FPS felt like a rare luxury so apologies for the visuals this isn't the graphical Feast you were expecting from the game but it's the best I could do we're given a climbing tutorial as works his way through the storm back to his cave inside the cave there are more drawings carved into the rocks and I think this is an original concept from dellic I can't find any references to drawings and Golem Slayer in The Hobbit but I like their inclusion because we're experiencing a smeagle that's ever so slightly beginning to recover from possessing the ring the flowers in his cell the sketches of an old home their effective external symbols of the Meagle half gaining slightly more control in this cave that's balanced out by the bones and an promptu Shrine to Shob which feels like the external manifestations of the gollum half the dark bird from The Game's opening cinematic is watching Gollum in the cave and when Gollum notices he tries to hunt it down a decidedly UNM Chase ensues and it ends with Gollum high up in the mountains gazing out over moror Gollum then sees a very distinctive looking bug and starts to follow it he finds a small patch of white flowers in a rare Mordor Sunbeam and briefly stops a struck and confused when the beetle returns to land on his hand this prompts the first Gollum smeagle debate whether to kill the beetle but I want to talk about two things first the beetle is very distinctive looking and unlike the dirty black bird seems more benevolent the way that the camera tracks it is kind of unusual too and I wonder if this is supposed to be one of Gandalf's Messengers which I believe is a movie only creation its curved distinctive shell is very reminiscent of this game's version of Gandalf and even with with the fuzzy timeline this would still be around the time Gandalf and Aragorn are trying to track down Gollum to learn more about Bill B's ring at multiple points Gollum the game tries to show how Mordor and the elves and Men of the West all appear to be equally a threat to Gollum even though we the player obviously have a preference and I wonder if this is supposed to be a part of that he's pursued by spies from every faction this is also a game and I suppose a universe that's obsessed with dualities capital G good and capital e evil smeagle and Gollum Sauron bird and possible Gandalf bug and then white flowers and a Dark Tower I can't say for sure what these flowers are but they do look like they could be white iris flowers and we've already been primed to kind of look at those as a symbol of smeel and sme's innocence or Lost Innocence I guess later in the game when smeel encounters iris flowers with a new friend they prompt a moment of almost Revelation but there in that moment I think they're Orange iris flowers which is a little strange since the white ones are given this lengthy moment here but it's far from the weirdest decision this game makes with the flower and the beetle covered we get to our first smeele Gollum debate these moments look weird and they're just so frustrating and uncompelling in pretty much every way in every situation you able to choose which side you want you can easily win every argument there is no tension no fear of what the other half might want because it's so easy for the player to overrule it we have total control over the actions of smigo Gollum and in giving us that it removes us from sme's tormented State entirely if you're going to make a game about this character I feel like this was the least interesting interpretation of the gollum spingle dichotomy one could go with it comes off like such an easy symbiotic relationship here and down the line smeel just hangs out and does his thing and when he's challenged by something or needs some extra motivation JS in and takes over for a bit looks like a frog don't listen my love smel is not so much haunted by Gollum as he is protected by him it's not necessarily inaccurate there's a reading of gollum's character that would work like this I just think it's the least interesting one in a game that desperately needs more interesting elements smeel won the debate so the beetle got to live long enough to see smigle flee into a nearby Min shaft to escape a patrolling nasgul actually kind of like how this nasgul hunt handles from a gameplay perspective Gollum can run around the mine trying to find a way out but he starts to notice more and more Nas creeping forward from pretty much every direction it's the only time in the game when I think creeping dread is intended and achieved and my luck eventually ran out when I was testing whether or not I could throw a rock at the nasol so Gollum is captured and the next scene flashes between his two interrogations one from the nasol in the past and one from Gandalf in the present some of the direction in cut scenes is actually pretty good but it's funny because actual cutcenes usually last like 7 or 8 seconds so they don't usually last long enough to be appreciated they're also weirdly obsessed with these heroic shots of Gollum performing these Action Hero Dives and I'll Point some of those out as we go but here the quick jump from Gandalf's pointing staff to the naso's pointed blade is thoughtfully done we can see how Gollum is viewing these two events as similar experiences even though to the player's mind we think of Gandalf as good guy and this interrogation as the good one I also found it strange that it was Gollum that was telling smeel tell them precious and then it's smeagle that gives up Bilbo's name in the Shire wouldn't the gollum half be trying to get out of there as fast as possible and also be hoping to follow sauron's servants in their search for the ring it's presumably the gollum half that brings them to Mordor for this reason so gollum's determined to silence and sme's panicked breaking just feels misaligned but before chapter 2 begins we get a loading screen and something baffling this game does is that it puts important story information in the small loading screen text so here we have after being questioned by the dark lord himself Gollum was thrown into the slave pits underneath the Dark Tower oh Gollum was questioned by the dark lord himself yeah I definitely wouldn't want to show that we just saw the nazou talking to him we didn't even see the Mouth of Sauron who comes up later in this game let alone some version of Z on himself this is just a weird and jarring way to start the second chapter but start the second chapter we regrettably do as gum is cast into the slave pits of M War Gollum goes to sleep and the next day his life as a slave begins he's assigned to work with beasts and on the way down Smigel says but we told him Smigel will find it we swears so here we're referencing that conversation that we only just learned about from the loading screen there seems to have been some kind of deal or understanding reached between Sauron and Gollum about his survival but it can't have been Aid me in the search for the ring and I'll let you live otherwise why would Gollum spend years in Mordor doing menial labor it might be indifference maybe Sauron doesn't care about Gollum and just figured he'd enslave him for as long as he could or maybe this is a kind of test and he figures that if Gollum is going to be worth anything in a search for the ring the first hurdle he'll have to overcome is escaping Mordor we don't know and the game does does seem to care after this characters will meet later will question why Gollum was spared by the Dark Lord but the game never resolves that mystery speaking of mysteries the game doesn't care about resolving gollum's fellow prisoners will mockingly refer to the frail man as king and later in this chapter he tells Gollum that he was a king of men somewhere I didn't pay more for the terrible lore compendium so I looked him up on one of the fandom wikies and there's no indication that I've missed some conversation or clue we just know he was once a great King at some point he was taken and in a few years he'll die here hey I didn't catch your name smeagle smeagle you're going to die down here Smigel my advice make your death count you have to get the Borox back into their pin that's the most important line in this First Act for obvious reasons and whatever small gravity it had was eradicated by that early trigger about the menial task ahead of us you're going to die down here smeel my advice make your death count there's the obvious dramatic irony smeel of course is going to die in Mordor and his death will count more than any other but this idea of one's death mattering kind of becomes the I don't want to say heart of this first act because as we'll go on to show it's a heartless mess but I think that's what it's trying to do these doomed men and Orcs all they have left is their death and rather than let that Foster despair this forgotten King is urging them to make it count to try to give their death a purpose smeel works with the frail man to trap the beasts before he's moved to a shift in the minds his mission in the minds is just grabbing the tags of dead slaves which in another context might be shocking like oh my goodness they value this piece of metal more than the bodies of the Fallen workers but this is Mordor so obviously they do that that's kind of all we were expecting and if this is just supposed to be an authentic glimpse into gollum's miserable experience as a prisoner they don't actually commit to that either because these tedious missions are so short and we don't have time skips during the day Gollum tames Beasts for 5 minutes retrieves tags for about 10 or 15 minutes and then returns to his cell so it's in this awkward Middle Ground where yes these jobs are horrible and boring and make for a terrible video game and they're theoretically making us live through gollum's wretched Life as a prisoner to bring us closer to him and his desire to escape but also these horrible jobs take about 15 minutes a day and then he's back to his cell because they don't bother to make it appear as though more time is passing and I don't want to sound like an obsequious boot licker but 15 minutes of work for bread and lodging is you know not as horrendous and vile a situation as I think the Mordor slave pits is supposed to be before gollum's first day ends we see a line of prisoners being either sent back to their cells or put in a cage and sent up to the tower a fellow prisoner says that they send the weak ones up there that we don't yet know why I want to show you the conversation that happened in the Cell at the end of the second night because there's a few weird things in here take daron's corner at the window he doesn't need it anymore why do they call it King this one is it a king yes is it here we go that boring story again seph the sand flood King blah blah blah stupid name for Stupid King the be beautiful white cities he barely rules his own bones he's a useless Millstone chain to my foot neck what did you say never mind they tell Gollum to take the sick man's corner at the window but one it's not a corner and two we already spent a night at the window last night when he was dropped in here so this dialogue that implies this is gollum's first night combined with the janky info dump about saurons and Iration and the loading screen makes me think that everything we've just played was not originally supposed to be part of the game there's also the comment about how the frail man has chained to the orc's neck not his foot but as you can see there's no chains in here that observation isn't really relevant it's just some classic Gollum Jank the writing in Gollum isn't great obviously but it's also unsupported by the gameplay and visuals in this moment and others down the line characters referencing things that aren't there or that just make no sense the narrative is the main thing that I'm focusing on but Gollum is obviously a failure at pretty much every level in that making of video I showed earlier one of the b-roll shots is just one of the writers tapping on Keys before we cut to a shot of a blank Word document well okay that's unfortunate but mistakes happen not the best Optics from a visual perspective but what can you do oh maybe don't embarrass the guy again by showing us that his prop notes on Lord of the Rings is just writing in huge letters synopsis lotr by jrrt and then like two illegible words on a medium-sized note card some internal or external video team came in to make these presumably their job is to make the developers look good build excitement for the game but at multiple points there are these stag shots that make the people who worked really hard on this game look ridiculous if you're making these videos you're supposed to be sweating the details it's either incompetence from the video team or a Galaxy brained scheme to try to pin gollum's failure on a few bungling devs rather than an entire company and publisher that supported this idea from conception to release that's important to note for me because of how much of this critique is negative this team worked really hard on this and they weren't set up for Success at all because yes you can still work hard on projects that should probably have never been made in the first place exhibit a the budget for golum was reported to be about 15.9 million which is according to people who know things about game develop element because I don't nowhere close to what you need for a AAA game which is how Gollum was being marketed there's also reporting out there that trailers were released without the dev team's knowledge which could explain the insane quality gap in the German publication game 2 reported that dellic had a culture of poor pay crunching and a toxic work environment with an anonymous source saying there was an atmosphere of fear a lot of that reporting was backed up by IGN whose article I'll link in the description so we'll get back to Gollum and it's really just going to get worse from here until we reach merkwood but it's very obvious that this incompetent mess is not the end product that anybody wanted someone decided to still release it when they did and release it for $60 so it deserves most of the criticism it gets but I do feel bad for the team behind this cursed game as Gollum settles in he surveys the Tower and the gate out of the black pits that beautiful gate lead straight out of L Bor they say there it is opening to the shime of a bell a gunning invitation who lives in the tower the master of the black pits a sorcerer but the Orcs just call him candleman candle man maybe they think it's him whose light burns in the tower alas there is only one way into the Tower of light the one that our sick friend Daron took today the frail man explains that the sick prisoner had been obsessed with finding plans for the tower and Promises to show Gollum where he would need to go to find them that becomes gollum's next Quest but after this section I started to wonder whether or not Gollum was purposefully trying to emulate The Count of Monte Christo I know this is ridiculous I told you sickos only I tried to warn you the wise old prisoner taking the new kid under their wing is a fairly well-known Trope but in this case the similarities are interesting enough that I think it warrants a direct comparison I'm going to talk about the first halfish of that book so if it's on your holiday reading list and you don't want it spoiled just jump ahead about 30 seconds smeagle like Edmund Dantes and I can't believe I just started a sentence with those words is wrongfully imprisoned the prison is notoriously inescapable the only way out appears to be death both smeagle and Dante encounter a wise old man with whom they conspir to escape I don't know if we're supposed to see the frail King as a mentor figure for showing smeel how to tame beasts work in the mindes giving him life lessons on death but to some extent both smeel and Dante learn broader lessons from their wise fellow prisoner smeagle has a dual identity before prison Dante creates one after escaping both are seeking escape to get revenge and recover the life that they believe was stolen from them I thought especially with how frail we see this old man that we were possibly being set up for a similar Escape in which smeel takes the place of the old man somehow after he dies and escapes through the Tower of light while his Escape does ultimately end up using the tower it doesn't really involve the frail King at all after this point Sorry I realized while editing this that I don't really have a satisfying conclusion for this part normally when I'm referencing another text it's for a more concrete reason then these two things are weirdly similar here there's not really another reason to be honest because I just don't think Gollum is trying to tell a story with similar motifs but that's also because I don't really understand what story Gollum is telling at all so there's some weird similarities it's possibly and probably irrelevant but since we're doing this stupid video anyway I might as well mention it it's also okay this isn't relevant but I figured this out and now you must be cursed with it too the king's name seut is also an anagram for the word fetus you didn't want or need to know that I'm just trying to turn over every narrative Stone and see if we can find cool bugs under them you've lost your mind you've lost your goddamn mind Charlie the next day Gollum is sent to the mines to set off some charges on the way down we hear from the frail King that they used to have the dwarves do this but with all of them dead they send the most starved slaves labeled dirt eaters which is an okay attempt at World building there are a lot of moments like this where Gollum is showing you how much the writers cared and took this world seriously and that's part of what I find so compelling about this game it's not a passionless mess if you look you can find moments of care and craft but they're just so easily overshadowed by the massive structural issues and the ceaseless mediocrity of its gameplay and optimization what's that I smell incom speaking of this orc Gollum reports to him after his work in the mines and he says and now he wants bread for crawling through some dirt take it then nobody shall call Kush unjust I'm sorry what this orcish mind Foreman is concerned about being labeled unjust where in tolan's entire legendarium does an orc ever talk like that Justice is not exactly a concept with which they trouble themselves immediately after that weird conversation literally we just Fade to Black and open on a different scene the Old King tells Gollum a secret remember the dwarves I mentioned earlier one of them told me something once those buildings up there above the bridge see he had to build them dangerous work but after a while he knew where the guards watched he'd steal red stones and hide them in a cave near the bridge just one stone each day so the guards wouldn't notice why why do you think what happened well one day he slipped and fell Gollum says it's not a very nice story and I guess this is another part of this axe give your death meaning through line the dwarf attempted an act of rebellion but his death was still meaningless he fell and now he's been forgotten by almost everyone but this frail old man after this the cruel orc gollum's other cellmate tries to take his bread and we get this iconic scene that many of you will recognize from the review discourse I thought it would be funny to threaten him and it went about as well as you'd expect perhaps Oak would sleep more quiet if we was his friend is that a threat are you threatening [Music] me then we hit a loading screen before text appears on a black screen informing us that days have passed Gollum is apparently hoping to find the maps that the frail man mentioned back on a second night and the man promises to show him a way to get into the Hall of gr to find them about 45 minutes of horrible platforming later Goa makes it up to the tower and looks at the plans which okay we don't know this yet but everything in red the big bird the water and the carton driver on the bridge are essentially all the elements that will be necessary for gollum's escape but why are they already highlighted in this weird cartoony Style on a map that's not intended for highlighting Escape Routes it's another possible oversight in a game with countless of them and it's partly why I was so confused while playing this it's hard to tell what's a piece of the larger puzzle and what's just bad design at this point one of my main theories was that Sauron had put Gollum down here to test him and that if Gollum could Escape the prison then he was worthy enough to officially join the nascal in their hunt for the ring so I thought this could have been placed there on purpose but the further into the story we get the less I think that could conceivably be the case I think it's just a weird oversight Gollum takes the map in an action they don't even bother to animate and on the way back to his cell he's caught by Orcs as punishment he's sent down to collect slave tags from the fiery Lakes After he finds the tags we get this um moment of Cinema [Music] s [Music] remember your promise remember drink drink get up and drink get up and drink you're parched so obviously gollum's awkward fainting looks absurd but I actually think the fade from the Sauron dream or flashback to the wakeup call from the frail King is a nice wrinkle we don't know if that was Gollum remembering a conversation with Sauron or just having nightmare influenced by the frail King trying to wake him while I like that moment better as a dream we do know that smeel did have some conversation with Sauron during which he promised he'd try to recover the ring which again if that was the case why smeel here if Sauron thinks Gollum is useful in any way and since he made Gollum promise him he'd help find the ring we have to assume he does why is he risking gollum's Demise by subjecting him to endless torment in the pits of Despair I can only assume we're supposed to think this is a test this is why why I don't think I'll label this video a narrative critique because I just I don't know what I'd be critiquing for these first two parts to be honest the majority of our time and energy is much more focused on determining what is happening and why rather than asking ourselves how or why it's effective with Gollum awake the frail King makes his pitch fight or keep eating Dart it's your choice but we are going freaking Bridge just listen just climb up up as high as you can there's a storage room with many barrels one of them should have a black mark up to the creaking Bridge he's nothing but Skin and Bones he can't do it he can you can do this you know the drill take a stone put it in the barrel run get up let's show those Vermin who I am so I think the cave we in now is the one that the frail man was talking about earlier the one where the rebellious dwarf was hiding redstone to use against the Orcs I don't know that for sure and it's weird that the game doesn't draw your attention to that idea more explicitly because it would have made this moment more impactful through our efforts we're giving his small rebellion and his unceremonious death meaning after the climb Gollum plants the stones and we transition into a cinematic that made me audibly scoff when I first saw it no run a dark bird similar to the one that we saw in the introduction sees this happen and flies away presumably to notify his Masters I thought we were then going to play through an attempted escape sequence we're frequently told and shown how sneaky an acrobatic Gollum is so even though he's been detected did surely he's going to attempt to escape in the chaos uh no we're not even going to show his capture instead the game Fades to Black and we open on a scene the next morning with a line of prisoners being interrogated Gollum is questioned by a woman and has the chance to blame either the frail man or the cruel orc the one who stole our bread the frail man is the gollum option and the smeagle option is to blame the cruel orc smeal's instinct is to protect his friend and gollum's is to be honest since it's the simplest way to say his own skin I blamed the cruel orc he stole our bread not very nice the woman tries to send Gollum and the cruel orc up together no she promised to let smigle live no I promised you'd be free wow chilling villain work his fiery demise is deferred when an orc lets her know that Gollum is on the list of creatures not to be touched back in the cell the frail man is suspicious about why Gollum was spared but not before he points out that the only way to escape the tower is swimming through water which again a little count of money kisto but it appears they won't even let you into the execution chamber which makes me wonder why sn's not a Squealer and yet here he is alive and robbed me of my most glorious end this reaction irritated me so much that I let the gollem half win and I blackmailed the king his bread for our silence this moment is the reason I kept circling back to the make your death count exchange because from this conversation here it appears the king is furious we've deprived him of his martyrdom and that's a really interesting conflict but not when Gollum is on the other half or 2/3 of the conversation because my sweet King fetus you want a most glorious end you want opportunities for martyrdom close your eyes and point at something you have access to a cave of explosive Stones you had every opportunity to speak up and proudly claim credit when Gollum was being interrogated you could probably push any number of Orcs off of a ledge or into the magma I think this is supposed to be a complex moment the wrinkle in the make your death count Arc but it just Falls so flat because the king comes across as more of a coward than a freedom fighter unjustly deprived of a glorious end but of course Gollum can't have that conversation because he's just incapable of that level of cognition or rhetoric which again yes makes him an insane protagonist for a game in general but especially for a game that wants to tell a story that's trying to be this complex if this game had to exist I don't know why inside but Gollum or Gollum in the dark Forest wasn't the elevator pitch I'm so curious who at De delic or their publisher heard okay so the first half is like a prison simulation in Mordor and the First Act we're going to have this weird moral through line that Gollum won't even understand or engage with and in the second act Gollum is going to be this hardened prisoner who knows all the ropes before escaping and wait this is where it gets really good he's captured Again by Aragorn but don't worry we'll skip that whole bit and now he's a prisoner in merkwood and then when he escapes and is free to wander Middle Earth again game over brother if you pitched that idea at 99% of game studios they'd probably ask you to pee in a cup Your Love Of the halflings Leaf has clearly slowed your mind after this conversation with the moping King we get more important information in the loading screen Gollum had been spared why the question was Haunting him but not only him don't we know why Gollum has been spared hasn't he referenced a promise made to Sauron multiple times we can probably put our red yarn away I have a hunch I know who was behind this the next morning gollum's back to work and goes down to the plaza to get his marching orders see it's simple math tell your father we will double our efforts long story short you need to Triple your efforts I think this is supposed to be funny and it probably would have been were it not for the strange and awkward pause right in the middle of it it's like the old joke The Secret of good comedy is time Gollum is ushered into the gondola to be sent down to the breeding pits and one long black loading screen later a chapter title card indicates that chapter 3 is now begun entitled the breeder so named I'm guessing because Gollum will end this chapter by tinkering with eggs to breed his own bird because yeah that's the thing that happens in this game after a few minutes of work in the breeding hits Gollum ends the day back in his cell where he continues to plan his Escape into the tower into the sewers to the carts hide in a crate and off we goes Tower sewer carts and off through the gate the tunnel leads out of the tower yes so I have heard but even if you somehow made it to the carts the drivers always check their deliveries and when they find you it's over what you need is a cut driver one who is in on your plan one you can trust is he a c driver no I have no desire to Die For You The Escape requiring driver is going to motivate gollum's actions for most of our second act but we're close to finally wrapping up our first act so I want to keep moving even though again one could write the world's pettiest dissertation on what seput the sand King is or isn't willing to die for Gollum is summoned up to the candl man's Chambers and this is where this entire game gets even weirder forcing Gollum into a convoluted prison escape isn't enough we're going to up the narrative anti with some courtly Intrigue from here on out there's going to be some political tensions between the Mouth of Sauron and the candleman and the Mouth of Sauron is like suggesting that he marryed the candl man's daughter who is the cruel woman that makes occasional appearances down in the pits of Despair you're probably thinking why I don't have an answer for you my working theory is that this was their new Vistas that they would reveal by by telling Gollum story here this is their repost to tolken see we may have destroyed the magic a bit but look at this creative new story we're hinting at but not really telling we're just like you thy daughter has a lovely profile it reminds me of a sponge a sponge soaking everything up without question or resistance why does the mouth of saon sound like Dennis Reynolds silence okay he said a woman's mouth is not for the exiting of words but to the entrance of a man's dick also if you're curious like I was nowhere in either the Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit can I find any reference to sponges I don't think they exist in this universe yet but then again they're the ones who did all the research so maybe we're just supposed to understand that mordor's cleaning technology vastly exceeds that of Hobbits men or elves Gollum also finds the bird that spied his act of sabotage and it's possible that this is the bird from back in the opening clearly in the candleman service believe it or not I think this is supposed to be foreshadowing for something that happens in act three when he's finally summoned Gollum first sees the candle man standing in front of an altar of some kind well-used candles surrounding a minimalist white Contour of a woman when we overheard the conversation earlier the mouth of saon referred to the candl man's wife using the past tense so it's likely this is in her honor I actually like this detail though I wish the staging and Direction were subtler here in this land of fire and death the candleman is so named because of his dedication to his wife's m and there's something sympathetic and interesting about that and I wish we explored his character more but we don't this is pretty much it you must have many questions our Lord hates questions questions three ways to silence them everything about this exchange is weird from the bizarrely tender way he's grabbing gollum's head to the terribly clunky way he starts this interrogation oh you probably have questions right well you Sauron hates questions now let me ask you some questions then there's just the Aesthetics of the transition from decent looking albeit weird cutscene to the raw visuals of Gollum which G he asks Gollum why he's on the list why he can't be executed Gollum doesn't tell him here because apparently Gollum still doesn't know even though he references the promise he made to Sauron in his Gollum smeagle debate about who to blame for the sabotage I guess Gollum could be lying but why wouldn't the gollum half of him be excited to tell one of sauron's subordinates that he has some connection with the dark lord after that it's bird breeding time which while I was playing I thought was just as absurd as it sounded but going over my footage now I think this is supposed to be part of the candl man's elaborate plot to figure out what's going on with Gollum when it's time for Gollum to make his Escape he has to go up through this room here so in the last 10 minutes the candleman has shown Gollum where he keeps important Keys had him breed a bird that can theoretically help him obtain them at some point down the line and in that action has shown him the Very Room he'll need to Traverse in order to start his Escape in Earnest so from an analysis standpoint is that just terrible pacing and nothing more or is this a Galaxy brain scheme by the candle man set up Gollum to Escape Track him learn more maybe get the ring before sor does and then what avenge his dead wife handed in to get a higher score on his quarterly review than the Mouth of Sauron we just don't know and I don't think we ever find out and that's how we end the First Act with Gollum being taken under the candl man's wing and some Intrigue of foot in the palace that Gollum the character doesn't understand or care about and Gollum the game will never really address again the majority of this First Act is just repetitive simplistic platforming that will make you want to launch Gollum into the fires rather than add another piece of wood with a giant white line painted across it not only are these confusing stories told poorly they're just out of place in a game about a tormented halfling whose only real skill is climbing stuff and talking himself into surviving for another miserable day and even then I would be less critical if the game demonstrated a commitment to these bad stories but it doesn't even though they had years of fictional time to resolve or progress them in interesting ways that's right years that insane time Jump I referenced earlier here it is in all its wretched Glory years had passed and Gollum had risen high in the candl man's favor feared now and avoided by the other slaves in true Gollum fashion we first learn about this shocking time Jump in a loading screen gollum's desire to disrupt narrative tradition clearly doesn't stop a telling a ridiculous story with an even more absurd protagonist they're also inverting the show don't tell rule almost every time we're forced to endure a ludicrously long loading screen remember that Gollum wasn't necessarily held by Sauron all those years we just know when he escaped they chose to have him captured years before his Escape having Gollum in the slave pits all these years was a deliberate creative choice on their part the question I can't answer is why neither the player nor Gollum get any extra insight into Mordor or the candle man we certainly don't learn anything about our protagonist during that time because when we come back to him now he's clearly still fixated on escaping the only thing this time Jump serves is that it lets them age up the bird Gollum bread but that can't be the only reason right smeagle may have been willing to cower in subserviant for years but Gollum whose existence is built around possessing the ring we're supposed to believe he just twiddled his gnarly thumbs for years working away in the Beast pens or the breeding pits a well beh DED slave a new prisoner is introduced to gum cell who the prisoners refer to as grash neeg means lamb the new ones that's what we calls them down here a carriage driver the last part of gollum's plan is literally thrown into his cell nobody cares but add this to the list of evidence that the candleman wanted Gollum to escape Gollum teaches grash how to put beasts in the pen before he summoned up to see the candl man as we arrive the candleman is in the midst of a conversation with the Mouth of Sauron that implies that they've set some sort of trap that is yet to be sprung The Black Queen my favorite spider for months she waits in her Den for some unlucky prey just Waits perfectly still and then you don't appreciate my allegory the virtue of patience yes so much to learn from nature however when the Trap has been set for years and still no prey in sight we know who starts to doubt that virtue don't we the Lord has nothing to worry about that is what I wish to hear I shall leave thee to it immediately after this the candl man asks Gollum about the name baggin so are we supposed to understand that the Trap these two are referring to is Gollum escaping the slave pits that would explain the weird sequence at the end of act one but they're also both acknowledging the fact that Sauron seems to want this to happen sooner rather than later and again why if Sauron wants to set Gollum loose and either have him as part of the formal hunt for the ring or Secret follow him he could do that at any point why does Gollum first have to jump through these elaborate Hoots these aren't even skills he would need to be useful in the hunt for the ring either make a friend to run the carriage tame a bird to grab a key like really Sauron is plan a supposed to be have Gollum Escape secretly follow him to the Shire then watch him use his bird to steal the ring from Bilbo or Frodo is that really plan a for the dark lord is it is it even plan B the kendle man asks about baggin and you can be honest or you can lie changes the sketch he has done of Bill Bo later in the game then he has Gollum practice with his bird and there's more foreshadowing about the bird's Allegiance it did it it does what we says yes they do not care who we are what we have done unconditional loyalty I'm not kidding when I say that I think the most clean line of narrative track deel lays in this entire game is this Arc of the bird's loyalty it's still weird and messy like everything else in this game but it's present in all three acts and has a clearly defined start and end point which almost nothing else does the candleman tries to explain that the elves are the real threat to both himself and Gollum and it's probably just easier if you hear it for yourself you know the elves and their cunning they want to fill our Middle Earth with Starlight and when they do they will know all we have done all we have done he seems to be using this threat of exposure as a way to bring them closer together Gollum obviously has a dark secret and the candl man sort of does the game strongly implies that he betrayed his people and his King and in double- checking some of the stuff on the wikis it says that he was forced to execute his wife that's not something I found in my playthrough but also you know this game is horrible and I'm not going to play it again to find out more information so I'll take the wiki word for it so okay both of them have a Darkness they'd rather keep hidden but this idea of elves flooding the land with Starlight and learning all our secrets is completely inconsistent with my understanding of middle Earth's elves I could be wrong if you know your tolken and know what he's referring to let me know but it's my understanding that most of the remaining elves in Middle Earth are already thinking about their departure into the West at this point in the novels froto is hearing stories about the elves traveling to the grey Havens the elves of merkwood might not be sailing into the west but I also don't think there's anything in the lore about them wanting to fill Middle Earth with Starlight or to discover the secrets of weird men from what I can tell they're just trying to live as peacefully as possible in their Woods the candleman asks scum about the treasure bbo took from him which again it's been years so very strange that they haven't had that conversation before but his inquiry is interrupted by a summons from the mouth of Saron it seems like this is part of a larger scheme by the Mouth of Sauron and the candl man's daughter as once the candleman leaves his daughter starts to search his Chambers presumably looking for information about Bilbo or the ring she discovers the name Shire and the name of an orc who might know more and what ensues is a thein Chase sequence as Gollum tries to find and kill this orc before the cruel woman can talk to him during the hunt Gollum says they must never find baggings what happened to the promise he made saaron about finding the precious what happened to the gollum that immediately gave Bilbo's name away to Sauron and the nasgul when being tortured why this sudden desire to protect this information about the Shire and also the nasgul have already been dispatched to search for it at this point they've been searching for years this is supposed to be a tense Race Against Time but from gollum's perspective the stakes are nonexist assistant who cares if this subaction of the Mouth of Sauron and the cruel woman finds this information they're not going to be more efficient than the nasg who've had a six-year Head Start if and when the Shire and baggin are discovered the ring will be returned to sauron's clutches one way or another so Gollum kills the possible informant and returns to his cell only to find that after all these years the frail King is finally dead he wanted to make it count his death but it didn't didn't count for nothing in the end despite the execution I think there is an interesting and sophisticated story about how this kind of dehumanizing slavery can rob you of everything your freedom your legacy your hope all ground to dust by the Casual evil of Mordor that even his opportunity for martyrdom to die a meaningful death was taken from him is brutal and morbid but like we discussed earlier they don't tell that story well enough it seems like the king did have multiple opportunities to die on his feet not to mention the years that have now elapsed off screen so it's supposed to be a touching end to a subtle and ambitious subplot but it's just completely unearned chapter 4 ends with Gollum and his new cellmate taking a moment of silence for the Fallen King but now after all these years Gollum finally has the pieces he needs to make his Escape it's time for a prison break half a decade in the making chapter 5 is called the traitor by the end of it that label could apply to gollum's friend Gollum himself for leaving the candleman or even gollum's bird guards enter and take gollum's friend grash away for questioning though Gollum correctly assumes they're going to execute him he needs grash to drive the C so even though he's scared he decides today has to be the day if you're on team this is candl man's master plan it is very suspicious timing that this execution which Spurs Gollum into action happens right after we overhear a conversation about the Trap taking too long but I also don't know what their plan was for Gollum after he escaped and I've played the whole game so the door still open for this all just being clunky pacing on the way way up to the candl man's office Gollum goes over the plan first steal he to the bird Tower second up up the bird Tower to the execution chamber where we wait for who the crash name and then through the train into the bridge as a player I appreciated this because at this point I was very confused about what the plan was supposed to be it also helps build some momentum for this Escape because the taking of grash EG doesn't really feel as momentous as I think it's supposed to Gollum distracts the candleman by sending his daughter into speak with him as he works to free his bird we overhear the two having what is probably their most honest conversation in years as Gollum escapes the kleman even asks her to stay saying that they don't spend as much time together anymore if you care at all which I don't know that I did it's a Bittersweet moment because Gollum knows that this whole time the kendl man's daughter has been scheming with the Mouth of Sauron and working against her father this new found tenderness from him is years too late Golem's Escape begins which means about 90 minutes of platforming and bad puzzles he climbs through the bird Tower and we get this hilarious action shot somebody really loved these Gollum Dives and then Gollum arrives at the tower of light finding grash ne's cage just in time to set it loose and send the two of them tumbling down into the sewers more puzzles ensue lots of grash neck whining that I shant bore you with and then golum finally crawls into a crate ready to be whisked away to the other side of the bridge but of course there's a catch because nothing in this game can go smoothly and an orc notices gollum's cage and thinks it's a body that's supposed to be sent down to the catacombs for inspection why the Orcs have catacombs is beyond me but Gollum escapes them which involves a strange amount of spiders before reuniting with grash neeg out by the carts Gren is nervous about hiding smeel again and asks that smeel find another way out of the to Tower so there's a slight change of plan smeel believes they'll just meet back up outside the tower and Escape together and that this is only a temporary separation when smeagle does Escape the Tower he sees scash neeg look up see him and then choose to drive away by himself out of the slave pits and into Freedom abandoning his friend good ide Drive Gollum and smeel are united in their feelings of betrayal and hatred and they seee as they descend the tower I know it sounds like I'm talking a lot about this Escape but this is about 2 hours of gameplay that I've condensed down to about half a page Gollum still escapes by jumping on top of a cart that's already departing and then navigating these uh thrilling obstacles to reach the other side undetected with Gollum finally out of the slave pits we cut briefly back to the merkwood interrogation with gendal losing patience before he flashed back to Gollum again he's returned to his old cave and he's making a new drawing on the wall a giant ring his bird returns having found something and Gollum climbs out of the cave to see what it is as it happens we're hearing the present day conversation between Gollum and Gandalf about the moment deagle found the ring and smeel killed him for it this takes on additional meaning because gollum's bird leads him up to a vantage point where he sees grash his old friend wandering the mountains after his escape the presentation of this moment leads us to compare these two doomed friendships but before we address that there's another detail that irked me when talking to Gollum about his friendship with deagle Gandalf says he was your only friend deagle the only one who talked to you though he did not like you much nobody did and the reason I dislike this moment is because it lessens the tragedy of smeal's corruption if he was vile and disliked before possessing the ring it cheapens his fall afterwards this is also just one of the many times this game ignores or overwrites the original text smeel is described like like this there was among them a family of high repute for it was large and wealthier than most and it was ruled by a grandmother of the folk Stern and wise and old lore such as they had the most inquisitive and curious minded of that family was called smeagle he was interested in Roots and Beginnings he dived into deep pools he burrowed under trees and growing plants he tunneled into green mounds and he ceased to look up at the hilltops or the leaves on the trees or the flowers opening in the air his head and eyes were downward so he's inquisitive is curious minded these are descriptions with positive connotations when he kills deagle and gets his hands on the ring we can start to see those once positive traits be warped by the Ring's dark power he was very pleased with his Discovery and he concealed it and he used it to find out secrets and he put his knowledge to Crooked and malicious uses he became sharp eyed and Keen eared for all that was hurtful the ring had given him power according to his stature it is not to be wondered at that he became very unpopular and was shunned when visible by all his relations so he's no longer inquisitive and curious minded he's now sharp eyed and Keen eared for all that was hurtful we can explicitly see that he became very unpopular obviously implying that a pre- ring smeagle was accepted in a way that the post ring smle was not it's certainly not a huge moment in this game but it's just another one of the many ways I think dellic doesn't seem to understand this world or characters the way that you'd expect them to given that they set out to make such a weird Niche title so go meets up with grash eg and sees him as his opportunity to make it through shelob's cave alive this meet up in the mountains and escape from Sheil Lo's lirer is an entire chapter of the game and the choice at the end is whether to warn grash neeg about sheilo or just let her eat him she kills him either way but the smeagle choice forgives grash and tries to save him and the gollum Choice obviously doesn't we also found out back in act one that grash means lamb it's what they call the new prisoners so this is Gollum using the closest thing he has to a friend as a SA superficial lamb I guess that's sad but nobody's really expecting anything else from Gollum and he'll try to do the same thing to froto in a year or so this is yet another moment in the untold story of Gollum that's just a dress rehearsal for a story that was already told and told much better in the pages of The Lord of the Rings I think tolken understood the limitations of this character his struggle is interesting but his struggle can't really sustain a 10 to 12h hour Standalone narrative gollum's torment is so singular his bending towards even too fixed tolken called this his persistent wickedness here in letter 181 Gollum was pitiable but he ended in persistent wickedness and the fact that this worked good was no credit to him his marvelous courage and endurance as great as froto and Sam's or greater being devoted to evil was portentous but not honorable I am afraid whatever our beliefs we have to face the fact that there are persons who yield to Temptation reject their chance of nobility or salvation and appear to be damnable Gollum didn't need to be an engaging protagonist in The Lord of the Rings he could just be Gollum an interesting side character who fails to overcome his temptation at essentially every pivotal moment in his life in this game however they obviously need him to be more and he just he can't be that without it starting to feel farsal Gollum is just so poorly cut out to be the protagonist of anything but especially at this time in his life this is a universe that adors its Scrappy non-traditional Heroes but even the lovably lowly Hobbits have agency to make choices have room to grow as their stories progress Gollum however doesn't at least not in this two of the four most important moments of his life have already happened the killing of deal and the losing of the Ring I would say that his near repentance in the novels that will cover later and his role in the Ring's destruction would be the two pivotal moments that are yet to come so he's almost required to be static in this story and that's not something you want from a protagonist especially if your side characters are just as dull so there's essentially no tragic Arc available to him and there's no classic tragedy here either the tragedy has occurred this Split Second decision to kill his friend for the mysterious ring has cursed him to this long and miserable existence I'm not saying this would make a better game but if we played through sme's life before he killed deagle you could turn this into more of a tragedy we could see why he would be compelled in the moment to do such a horrible thing here in Gollum we just have moments where he loses friends because he's never able to overcome his desire to recover the ring but that's all still connected back to that cord tragic moment that we don't experience in the game even his suffering is uncompelling because of the way dellic decided to handle the gollum smeagle split there isn't really a moment where smeagle just confronts all of the horrible things he's done in his life like we sometimes see from other tragic characters because he's never alone Gollum is always there to justify to assuage to distract and that's fine that's partially why the golemite exists but that's the other thing that drives me crazy this game doesn't seem interested and what I think is one of the the more compelling Mysteries left to explore with Gollum which is how real is that smeele Gollum split are we really seen to unconnected personalities to streams of Consciousness inside of one freaky little body or is the gleum identity just the mask he hides behind when threatened or thinking about the ring how do those answers change how smeel views himself I don't believe the novels give us a firm answer so deela could have actually done some exploring here but instead from that first smeel goem debate and all the subsequent dialogue they essentially treat these characters as two separate entities that happen to be sharing the same body and don't bother to interrogate further so smeel never has a moment of accountability or reflection or even pause really which makes it hard to connect with him as a tragic protagonist when I was reading up on tragic structure and tragic protagonists for this video obviously there's a lot of stuff about your more Aristotelian tragic Heroes edus MC Beth AEL and this isn't super column related but Tolen knew his way around that kind of hero not only did he study and Translate the tragic finished tale of colvo but he essentially adapts and incorporates it into his legendarium with the story of Turin it's another moment where I find myself incredulous that this is the story they went with even if you wanted to tell a darker middlee story about a lesser known character especially if you wanted to try and tell a tragic story there were so many other options dellic clearly didn't have a compelling Gollum story to tell at least not one that's recognizable in the final product so if you want to make something dark and weird why not find his story that can actually support that Vision I let Shob eat grash neeg and with his screams in the background we Fade to Black returning to merkwood as Gandalf's interrogation reaches a critical moment that's when you murdered him right there by the river in the flower beds you killed your friend we're clearly supposed to be connecting deal and grash neck to see these individuals as victims of gollum's selfishness and cruelty but grash is just so disloyal and burdensome through throughout the gameplay of the escapee that as players you really do feel a sense of relief when he's gone it doesn't feel like a tragedy at all when Gandalf leaves the cell we get an exchange that's part lampshading but mostly an expression of narrative crisis what did he say too much about to depending on how you look at it this is either the last scene of our second act or the first scene of our third act if you're 2/3 of the way through your story and the wisest character in it is like wow that was a boring waste of time that's a sign you need to rework your entire story because if your story was exhausting for Gandalf to hear just imagine how dull it is to play so on that wildly self-aware note our second act ends gollum's escape from Mordor was successful but it's clear that some kind of trap had been set by the candle man in the Mouth of Sauron despite its flaws the second act feels tighter than the first and the biggest BG issue for me is the time Jump Gollum didn't have to spend years in the slave pits so why did they make his capture as early as they did it can't just be for the bird growing up right my hunch is that originally the king the candle man grash neeg and gollum's Escape was all supposed to be act one and act two was going to be Gollum escaping the mountains of kth ungal and wandering through the dead marshes before he is caught by Aragorn with occasional Cuts back to Mordor where the candleman in the Mouth of Sauron would be scheming act three would probably play out the way it does now things would just make a bit more sense because as of now Golems captured by Aragorn is covered in a loading screen which I suppose could have been a deliberate choice but given the insane mess of this game's First Act I think it's more likely that this iconic moment was originally going to be in the game but was removed for budgetary reasons to adapt they had to Pat out the Mordor section to fill two ax instead of one in the novel Aragorn describes their Journey like this and then by Fortune I came suddenly on what I sought the marks of soft feet beside a muddy pool but now the trail was fresh and Swift and it led not to Mordor but away Along the skirts of the Dead marshes I followed it and then I had him lurking by a stagnant mirr peering into the water as a dark Eve fell I caught him Gollum he was covered with green slime he will never love me I fear for he bit me and I was not gentle nothing more did I ever get from his mouth than the marks of his teeth I deemed it the worst part of all my journey the road back watching him day and night making him walk before me with a halter on his neck gagged until he was tamed by the lack of drink and food driving him ever towards merkwood so in Dell's defense a book accurate depiction of that Journey doesn't give Gollum a lot of wiggle room for platforming and Antics and talking with the future king of Gondor but this was a 50-day journey with one of the franchise's most iconic characters if they're willing to have Gollum play in the slave pits for years bungle smeagle backstory give the elves a weird domineering motive talk about sponges then I'd be surprised if this wasn't something they also felt like they could change if necessary saying Hey what if AR Gorn and smeagle have to occasionally work together to Traverse the dangerous lands of middlee is less of a narrative stretch then Gollum becomes the veteran of the slave pits for years stealing glass bottles to trade for bread and intimidating the new kid don't get me wrong this game still probably wouldn't justify its own existence even if it did have the sequence with Aragorn in the middle but we might have addressed that too much about too little problem the game obviously knows it has but now we're through the worst of it because gollum's adventures in merkwood are more visually Pleasant if not more exciting from a gameplay perspective the story though it gets even [Music] weirder after the dull plot and color palet of Mordor gollum's adventures in merkwood feel like a breath of fresh air we've moved from Total incompetence to staunch inadequacy both the player and Gollum will find merkwood more pleasant than Mordor but to be fair both the player and Gollum would still rather be somewhere else Gandalf asks that the elves LED Gollum out to Rome as part of his treatment when they do he hears the pleas of his fellow prisoner and elf named Mel I just want to leave the king won't see you not today not tomorrow not in aund years she's one of the more interesting characters of this third act in some way she's the Elvin smeel ostracized obsessed and growing more so by the day as a result of her isolation this third Act is built around her character and this mystery of her imprisonment and by the end it's enough that if you really squint you can see what they were probably trying to do that's about as complimentary as I can get in this game oh wait no there's this too he's not going to eat that is he will you move anytime oh no he ate it I like this it's a little funny as Gollum searches the grounds for ways to escape you can come across some of the ruined barrels from Bilbo and the dwarves when they made their fed Escape there's also a moment later in the act when Gollum climbs a tower and you can see the Lonely Mountain and Lake Town off in the distance gollum's unplanned solo Escape attempt goes about as well as you'd expect didn't try to run he just went for a swim and got lost see that shifting wall of mist in the distance above the last line of trees we call it the Ring of haze Haze a haze so dense You Can't See Five Paces ahead tricking your mind like a twisted willful mirror until you're utterly lost and sooner or later no matter how hard you try or how far far you walk all paths will lead you back to us so there's a new Force that's stopping his Escape but before he slinks back to his cell his bird from the slave pits calls out to him and his Elven guards just don't notice or care bird bird must find help elves have caught us terrible Spirits bird must find someone someone fast go go we don't see it yet but this bird will fly back to the candl man and Mordor and is the reason the Orcs attack merkwood it's an interesting way to make Gollum complicit in that attack but what I don't understand is whose help Gollum thinks this bird is going to get if he meant it to go to Mordor then that's Gollum thinking that he's better off in the clutches of the candle man than the elves of merkwood which is absurd even from what we've seen already there's no indication from Gollum that he just means to escape in the chaos of battle this just feels like like a bit of a plot hole and one of the weirdest moments in this game and that's saying a lot a SP there's the other reading where Gollum thinks the bird is going to get some other kind of help but he returns instead to the candle man his true master that was hinted at a few times back in act two but if that's what they were going for it would have been better just to have the bird spy golum from a distant branch and report back to the candl man the guards tell smeel that the elf who tamed the haze was the king's nephew gwendel also known as the master of riddles but he's vanished and presumed dead smeel is curious and they tell him to go ask Mel about it you know if you have two dangerous mentally unstable prisoners it's always a great idea to set him up to conspire together what could go wrong there A+ guard work after Mel rebuffs him Gollum talks to the Cook to learn more about her she was part of gendell's circle the riddle master our most brilliant mind he and his Scholars tried to protect our realm with spells but the merkwood devoured them all Mel was the only one who returned blinded and confused but alive whatever Darkness touched her she did not know or would not tell when Gollum mentions gwendel to Mel including the fact that he's heard elves discussing rumors of his reemergence he finally gets her attention she offers to guide him through the haze and out of merkwood if he helps her find out more about gwendel I think this is supposed to be another parallel to gollum's character like Gollum she was imprisoned and like Gollum it's the thought of recovering her most important relationship that motivates her Escape hardly shattering I know but I do think that they're doing this very deliberately freeing Mel requires finding a lost Bell and I'm not exaggerating when I say that this takes about 2 hours for various tedious reasons this section contains one of my favorite moments of the game smeagle Leap of Faith Off The alen Towers precious be careful don't break a leg part of finding the Bell requires going into the riddle Master's old room and finding a magic spell that will let Gollum breathe underwater to sneak into the king's bedroom to find the magic bell and we can blissfully skip most of that but one thing I want to note is that this is what the riddle Master's bed looks like this is upsetting for many reasons obviously very strange that this wise Elven riddle master would sleep in a sty four poster bed but also there's a minimum of 10 pillows on this bed this is one of the more powerful wood elves in merkwood and he's hoarding pillows like he's Joanna gains Gollum grabs the Bell from the king's Chambers but things take a turn when the king and Gandalf enter arguing about the ring the king tries to get information from Gandalf about it and even offers to hide it here in merkwood but Gandalf Cuts him down to size the king kicks him out in retaliation and implies ominously that he's going to talk to Gollum himself to learn more about the treasure fair not we will take good care of your prisoner so the elves are sent to retrieve Gollum for further questioning but with a magic bell in hand he's able to free Mel and the two make their escape as they flee they cement their bond nice memories I'd have to go back a long time for that smigle too very long time they escape into the forest ending chapter 7 and for the first time all game we leave smiggle's point of view and cut back to Mordor gollum's bird has returned and reported to the candleman the Mouth of Sauron is worried what Gandalf might learn from Gollum the gray beggar might suspect something join mok's men in dol gulur free the creature bring it back kill it if need be this is a death sentence only if one dies I'm hoping that's a consequence of poor localization because yikes that last line there after that scene we see the candleman looking at the picture of the old King he was staring at earlier I think the man he betrayed he shoots a crossbow bolt into the king's side and walks away this is one of the subplots that I don't really understand maybe it's explained a bit more in the lore compendium that I ref refused to pay more money for we know that he betrayed his people the wik tell me that he was forced by Saron to kill his wife but the mouth of Saron references him still needing Redemption and it seems to be related to this Old King he betrayed here it's not necessarily A Bad Thing to leave questions unanswered that's something tolken writes a lot about in his letters but this doesn't feel like a narrative Vista it feels like slap Dash work to give your antagonist some artificial gravitas and dimensionality whether this lack of information is a consequence of poor storytelling or a deliberate choice to evoke certain elements of token's world it really doesn't work for me at all we come back to smeagle and Mel navigating merkwood slowly and carefully making their way to the haze leading Mel into filthy Woods very selflessly yes this Woods section introduces magic bugs that can make characters tell the truth I wish that was a joke apparently you can get around it by eating some lyan but the game thinks this idea is so clever it brings it back again in a later chapter back in merkwood I'm not sure they realized how Universe breaking this would be if these bugs existed especially in merkwood wouldn't Gandalf have used them to talk to Gollum might Saron have tracked and used them to get information from Gandalf there are a lot of times in the novels when the plot relies on characters keeping secrets or being deceitful apparently they're lucky everyone just forgot about magic truth bugs they plan to spend the night in an abandoned Tower gollum's bird swings by and after everyone tucks into bed they're attacked by mysterious purple balls the objective says to escape the creatures so these are creatures apparently I don't know what's happening here and I am not brave enough to Google Gollum purple balls to try to learn more that way our heroes Escape Gollum through his agility and Mel through the guiding Whispers of the riddle master that she claims to hear they press forward to a Grove where the ritual occurred and and Gollum solves a puzzle so that Mel can recreate it to temporarily break the spell here you can also finish an earlier game of riddles with Mel and we get this bit here which did make me smile what what has it got in its pocketses what do I have in my pocket s that's not a riddle no it's not e it biking is cheated Vindication this game has its moments Mel's tired after the ceremony and takes a moment to rest asking smle to describe the area to her wait you mentioned flowers you didn't picture those irises the entire Glade used to be overgrown with them they must be in full bloom now yellow ones yes but not very nice all withered not many irishes time is not spent Iris Iris has no sense toos riddle we remembers I remember he solved the riddle from the opening and in doing so he becomes more smigle than he's ever been in this game we even get that haunting I remember he tries to suggest the two travel together looking out for each other that maybe they should just forget about the riddle master Mel won't give up though and smeel starts to have flashbacks about the day he killed deagle there was IR is everywhere yellow ones like here and there like digle and looked up into the sky no no no wake up we didn't do it it wasn't us we did nothing nothing you are mad he tried to steal it tried to get away with our fresh us Mel must believe us she believes us yes but Mel is gone this moment is very interesting to me because I think this is the closest we get to Gollum ever being healed it's not the warmth of the elves that does it it's the friendship and acceptance of a fellow Outcast someone seeing him as more than a monster that combined with the irises seems to reawaken a part of him that's been dormant for decades when Mel reacts to This Moment by saying you are mad it vanishes and Gollum reemerges to defend his actions I think this moment is very similar to one of tolan's favorite gollem moments that he mentions a few times in his letters in letter 96 to his son Christopher in 1945 he writes for myself I was probably most moved by Sam's disquisition on the Seamless Web of story and by the scene when froto goes to sleep on his breast and the tragedy of Gollum who at that moment came within a hair of repentance but for for one rough word from Sam 10 years later in a letter to a publisher letter 165 he's still citing that one moment as a personal favorite I am most stirred by the sound of the horses of the rohira at cockro and most grieved by gollum's failure just to repent when interrupted by Sam this seems to me really like the real world in which the instruments of just retribution are seldom themselves just or holy and the good are often stumbling blocks I think the moment he's referring to is this one on the stairs of kirth Uncle Gollum looked at them a strange expression passed over his lean hungry face The Gleam faded from his eyes and they went dim and gray old and tired a spasm of pain seemed to twist him and he turned away peering back towards the pass shaking his head as if engaged in some interior debate then he came back and slowly putting out a trembling hand very cautiously he touched Frodo's knee but almost the touch was a Caress for a fleeting moment could one of the sleepers have seen him they would have thought that they beheld an old weary Hobbit shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time Beyond friends and kin and the fields and streams of Youth an old starved pitiable thing Sam wakes up and confronts him and afterwards we see an immediate change in Gollum Gollum withdrew himself and a green glint flickered under his heavy Lids almost spider-like he looked now crouched back on his bent limbs with his protruding eyes the fleeting moment had passed Beyond recall I think de delic was trying to create another one of these moments where it feels like Against All Odds hope and Redemption is Within Reach only to have it fade away for quote good to be a stumbling block to go back to the language tolken used in his letter of course Mel is disturbed by this I think she's a virtuous character trying to follow her heart but she doesn't have the boundless pity and patience needed to help smeel finally break through here this is a complicated moment to pull off from from the irises that have been a through line all game to Mel's pity and acceptance being similar enough to what smeel would go on to find in Frodo and while it's messy I think it's ultimately effective we do feel a tragic sense of what might have been even though we knew all along smeel was doomed but with that said that's a story that's already been told I would say better certainly more efficiently in the pages of The Lord of the Rings so while this moment is in my opinion at least the most interesting and effective moment of the game it's just a rehash of a story and a character beat that already exists in the cannon smeel tries to find Mel in the Mist but he just gets lost wandering in the Purple Haze growing increasingly despondent when he finds himself back in the clearing he's not alone this can't be the other side no it's not the Elven guards have caught up with him and their King wants to know more about the ring gollum's penultimate chapter is very strange after Escaping The Palace wandering merkwood with Mel and a moment of near Redemption we move on to party planning smeel is helping the elves plan their upcoming party for most of this chapter smeagle can help yes I can find strange lights gollum's role in this chapter is notably minimal for this chapter it's pretty much all smeel the truth bugs come back though smeel knows how to trick them he uses them on his Elven guards who reveal that the in the candl Master's bedroom was magical in some way so smeel is off to investigate we can gloss over most of this smeel hears the voices of both Mel and the riddle master and learns that the riddle master was trapped in the king's old summer residence trying to control the source of the haze and Mel is trying to find him to learn more about the old King's abandoned Summer Palace smeel attends the midsummer party the elves are throwing he's at the top of the great tree when his bird descends to greet him and smeel sees Orcs attacking the forest in the novels when Legas is relaying this moment at the Council of Elon he says it was that very night of summer yet moonless and starless that Orcs came on us at unawares we drove them off after some time they were many and fierce but they came from over the mountains and they were unused to the woods when the battle was over we found that Gollum was gone and his guards were slain or taken it then seemed plain to us that the attack had been made for his rescue and that he knew of it beforehand how that was contrived we cannot guess but Gollum is cunning and the spies of the enemy are many smeel does use this moment to escape and he did accidentally bring the enemy to merkwood by asking his bird to get help that's why that moment baffles me so much because when the Orcs show up here Gollum is scared of them he's upset that they're here and yet where else would his bird possibly fly to go get help so in a way we're getting some new context for this moment from the novels but it's difficult to enjoy because it's just very shoddily constructed this moment also causes Gollum to reawaken as it were and become much more prominent smeel can either save his elf friends when he can or let the Orcs Kill Them All I tried to save as many as I could which included helping what of Golem's guards kill the Beast Master from the slave pits why he's here when there's no beasts I can't say Gollum escapes and we get what's hopefully our last bit of important story content conveyed via loading screen Gollum wants to find the riddle master smeagle just wants to find Mel why does Gollum want to find the riddle master if his bird can apparently guide Mel and the Orcs through the haze I don't know does Gollum think that the riddem who found powerful magic in the haze and immediately used it to protect his home would help him find powerful magic in the ring and not immediately use it to protect his home I don't know that either Gollum finds the old Summer Palace sneaks through the ruins and finds Mel surrounded by the candl man and his Orcs before he can attempt a rescue he falls down down and is surrounded we knows how to open the gate go on then help her open the gate and you both live oh so the candleman needs information from our heroes that they don't want to divulge damn seems like he could uh use some truth bugs right now if he was going to get caught anyway it would have been nice to have it happen in a cutscene before Gollum subjects you to 15 to 20 minutes of the same tedious sneaking you've been doing all game but hey with gameplay this good I guess you just can't pass up a chance for a final rigorous stealth Gauntlet this is so boring and forever taking Mel knows the door is Magic though so when she and Gollum open it it blinds the baddies and they slip inside the door shutting behind them the reaction from the candl man devious servant of Sauron is lacking to say the least Mel and gwendel reunite inside the palace gwendle says that the only way to keep the candl man from getting the source of a haze whatever that means is to destroy it destroying the haze requires closing two towers gwendle takes the left Tower and Gollum takes the right as he climbs Gollum and smigle debate what's next Smigel wants Mel to Journey with him and resents the riddle master for coming between them Gollum just wants to escape and find the ring there's an interesting moment where you can try to renounce the precious as smeagle and then we see how quickly gum manipulates the conversation never precious only ever made us lonely and how long until the dark lord finds us a how long After he finds our ring we must find it find it before he does and hide it forever never use it and never never kill for the precious ever again this battle inside smeel his Reckoning with his loneliness and his Newfound desire for Mel's company is setting up one of the most contrived moral dilemmas I've seen in a game in a long time Gollum closed his Tower but the riddle master hasn't done his part when Gollum goes to investigate he finds the Master the powerful magic wielding elf collapsed on the ground because I tried to take the stairs on stairs exactly so it's up to Gollum to close the second tower which he does when he returns to the wounded riddem oh no an orcish crossbowman has just appeared in the room the riddle master who mere moments ago levitated half a dozen separate slabs of stone to form stairs for Gollum is clearly power powerless and will be killed unless Gollum intervenes obviously ridiculous the gollum side wants to intervene and kill the orc and the smeagle side wants to let him die so he can theoretically keep traveling with Mel to have a friend again gollum's argument is essentially that smeal's friends all suffer like grash like the frail man like deagle smeel says that the precious Camp protect them anymore so they need someone who can I think for a while I struggled with this moment because it felt odd to me that dellic was giving the morally Superior choice to Gollum and the more evil one to smeagle but when I think about it more I think it works well for the character smeagle is cowardly and conniving he killed his old friend to become a ring bearer there was always that selfishness and evil inside of him it's not isolated to Gollum and then the gollum side knows that doing this is going to ensure that Mel stays with gwendel and smeel will be forced to keep traveling alone so while this powerful elf shouldn't be in this situation at all I think the two sides of this argument work for me in the abstract so in my playthrough Gollum saved the riddle master if you let the riddle master die Gollum takes the ring hanging around his neck and things get a little weird after the fight with a candle man Mel quickly ascertains that smeagle played a part in gendell's death and leaves his company possibly to die by herself back in the ruins here the riddle master is still alive and Gollum returns to the main chamber to find the candle man doing vague boring acts of evil on the source of the [Music] haze no oh no so Gollum tells Mel to stay there and hide while he destroys the source he climbs the circling platforms and somehow musters the strength of a Greek god to impale the source with a giant metal bar that just so happens to hang directly in front of it there's a lot of things about this game that I don't understand and this climax is pretty high up on the list this is not a game that needed this bombastic cinematic climax there's also some confused shouting about the candle man summoning saon through the haze which makes this climax horribly similar to that Justice League movie Gollum has spent 12 hours straining credulity but here I think it finally breaks but there's still the candle man that needs to be dealt with I don't think we can call this a boss fight Gollum just creeps through the rebel to get close enough to strike he thinks he has when his bird swoops in and alerts the candle man to gollum's presence oh no Gollum is about to die no don't worry now the bird is gollum's friend again despite betraying his location to the Orcs leading them through the haze and literally betraying Gollum again three seconds ago the bird attacks the candle man distracting him long enough for Gollum to come in and choke his lights out oh wait I forgot to mention this whole time the game has been building up the candle man's evil catchphrase right before he kills someone and it's um creative I guess where does the Sun go up where does the Sun go up what do I care we are WS we don't need the sun to show us the way you where does the Sun go up I don't even know what to do with that frankly so yes the candleman is dead and the day is saved the game tries to make it sound like gollum's actions have done a great service for the elves after he's done smooching Mel the riddle master says the elves of merkwood can no longer hide Wars upon us and no Haze will protect us now you may have awakened us just in time it's funny that it's framed like wow smeel you woke the sleeping giant this might just save the realm the same realm whose legendary champion just lost a fight to a staircase and we don't really hear about any of the Deeds of the merkwood elves in The Lord of the Rings except for legalis throughout my drafts of this I kept coming back to this moment because it feels close to Lord of the Rings climax I think it's trying to emulate the Bittersweet tone of fellowships or two towers' ending Fellowship ends with Boromir trying to take the ring from Frodo Frodo realizing he has to do this alone and setting off to do just that before Sam chases him down this is that moment though the literal end of the novel is a few pages later Frodo Rose to his feet a great weariness was on him but his will was firm and his heart lighter he spoke aloud to himself I will do now what I must he said this at least is plain the evil of the ring is already at work even in the company and the ring must leave them before it does more harm I will go alone some I cannot trust and those I can trust are too dear to me poor old Sam and Mary and Pippen Strider too his heart yearns for minth and he will be needed there now Boromir has fallen into evil I will go alone at once in the novels borre sacrifice doesn't happen until the first chapter of Two Towers though for what it's worth I like Peter Jackson shifting that moment to Fellowship but the fellowship book ends with one of the strongest most virtuous men in Middle Earth finally succumbing to the ring but it's that moment of darkness that leads Frodo to having this moment of clarity and courage and who knows if things didn't happen with the timing that they did if Frodo hadn't left by the time saramont urai arrived we could be looking at a much darker ending so it's far from happy at the time Gandalf is presumed dead Boromir waivers and froto and Sam head off to continue their dangerous Quest alone but there's a hope there with Frodo's determination and Sam's love and loyalty The Two Towers ends on a similar note froto is captured by Orcs after being attacked by she lob but Sam thought he was dead so there's that little Ray of Hope the book ends with the line froto was alive but taken by the enemy so this moment if gollum's self-serving quest to escape the elves and return to his hunt for the ring has inadvertently brought about this sliver of hope that feels consistent with the Bittersweet endings of the first two books yes merkwood was attacked and there were many casualties and smeel flirted with Redemption but faltered but the candle Man is dead the Beast Master is dead the haze will never be used by Sauron or other dark Forces and now the merkwood elves are according to this one Lin so we just have to take their word for it awake and we know that gollum's failure to recover here means that he'll later be in the right place at the right time to destroy the ring and save all of Middle Earth so originally when I wrote this essay for Gollum I had that staircase joke and I moved on but the more I thought about it the more I think they were deliberately trying to evoke a certain tolini and Dan ma where our heroes are still standing but it doesn't exactly feel like Victory and if that's what they were going for I think we can't call it a total failure if this was a story that was expecting another chapter it kind of does feel Tolen adjacent so let's touch on the closing moments I promise we're almost done finally free after all these years Gollum heads off into the Wilderness into the mountains sweet one and under the mountains and then into the sh you won't have to make this journey alone however his bird is back and in the final choice of the game we get this I guess technically the bird does betray him since I'm not sure he meant for it to go fetch the Orcs And the final showdown kind of implies that the bird was supposed to be loyal to the candleman before changing its mind at the last minute so the goem choice would be to punish the bird for its betrayal and continue to travel alone smeagle just wants to forgive it Gollum is locked in the cycle of misery he's possessed the ring for too long and now he seems to poison everything he touches I think act one is establishing that Baseline and introducing new characters act two is letting that cycle play out with a grash neeg relationship and act three gives Gollum the chance to recognize that cycle and break it as much as he can and to give Mel his counter part A happily ever after that he knows he'll never have himself so yes we could look at this moment of forgiveness with the bird and see that as Smigel trying to break the cycle and extend Grace to others but because they also did so much work setting up Mel as almost the Elven Gollum touched by Darkness isolated fixated on one thing by Saving gwendle and putting her happiness above his he's already broken that cycle but that was Gollum acting with ulterior motives whereas I guess this is smeel with nothing to lose it's a moment that clearly thinks it has some gravitas but like so much of this game everything leading up to it is too muddled to let us see things well enough to make a judgment we don't know if Gollum thinks this bird betrayed him when he said go get help and the bird went to the only place he could possibly think of if Gollum doesn't think the bird bringing the Orcs is betrayal his killing it here is just arbitrary cruelty which isn't necessarily out of character but it'd be nice to know that that's what's happen happening here and not just an act of Revenge I spared the bird it survived the runtime of Gollum and as far as I'm concerned that's punishment enough there's something foul about that bird where foul the closing scene is Gollum creeping through Moria when he gets to two great Stone doors he can't open them as he keeps pushing the camera moves into the dark Rock before we transition to an exterior shot of the doors of Duran firmly shut he's trapped in Moria which is right where he needs to be for his first appearance in The Fellowship of the Ring this detail about the door isn't just fan service either one of the appendices in Return of the King speculates that he probably got stuck behind this door all trace of Gollum is lost it is thought that at this time being hunted by both the elves and Sauron servants he took refuge in Moria but when he had at last discovered the way to the west gate he could not get out so what on Middle Earth is this game doing when I was going over my notes for the first time I thought I could have an nice little button about how by protecting gendell and ensuring Mel doesn't become more like him he's giving her up and accepting his loneliness which will Doom him but there's some tragic elements there of course if he lets gwendle die to try to keep Mel close she quickly discovers this treachery and banishes him actively either way he's alone but one feels like tragedy and the other a bit like justice but of course he doesn't protect gwendle out of nobility he doesn't do it to save Mel Gollum does it to ensure that the precious is all they have so especially if you don't want to consider Gollum as a part one and just want to consider it as a finished product on its own terms it's weirdly a rejection of a typical narrative satisfaction that unites a lot of these plot lines seph the sand flood King wants one last gasp of Glory to die on his feet he doesn't get it he dies of starvation in a cell if you want martyrdom bravery to see a spark of hope in an Endless Sea of dark you're not going to get it the candleman wants Redemption he wants his daughter to love him and understand why he's made the choices he has he wants his sacrifices to have been for something and none of that's resolved he gets choked out by a 45lb schizoid and dies alone you want revenge Redemption power you're not going to get it and if you want nobility if you want Gollum or smeel to have recovered to finally put someone else's happiness above their own selfish desires you're not going to get it there really is isn't a poetic button to put on the game but it's hard to tell if it's deliberately crafted to reject these satisfying arcs and endings and that subversion emerges as a unifying Motif or whether that's a consequence of the messy and mostly terrible plot because the Lord of the Rings has a relatively happy ending there is room for that story to be told tolken coined the term U catastrophe a sudden turn of good and he thought it was part of what made fairy story so special but not everyone gets that unexpected Joy and relief in The Lord of the Rings depending how you view the events in Mount Doom the U catastrophe is or occurs as a result of gollum's death U catastrophe is somewhat by definition for the heroes so a story that stared at that Concept in a reflective way could be really interesting a fairy story with that metatextual twist here are all these characters who will suffer or die in the margins while Heroes get remembered nobody cares about gwendle who harnessed powerful dangerous magic to keep his home safe when he goes missing they ride him off as dead immediately legless will become the hero of merkwood nobody cares about Mel who lost her sight in The Taming of the haze and was thrown into the dungeon where she might have stayed for decades had it not been for gollum's intervention and of course nobody really cares about Gollum who was abandoned by Mel the moment he needed her most gollum's rapidly approaching death will prompt a sigh of relief from our heroes who with the exception of Frodo quickly move on to continue their lives if it was doing it on purpose and it cut out like 60 to 80% of the awful side stuff and horrible gameplay sections spent about a month or so on bug fixes actually probably takes longer I don't know maybe tweak a line or two from this big guy it reminds me of a sponge only if one dies and then shipped the game for $20 instead of 60 or 70 we might actually have something weird and experimental and worth talking about there's also my two Golems Theory that I alluded to at the start of the video that this was meant to be a part one because of how much it went out of its way to mirror the approximately 10 chapters per part of tolan's novels but much like the queen of mystery Agatha Christie I've been withholding a key piece of evidence until my grand reveal here at the end in the game's final Act Gollum and Mel acquire the ability to speak through water there doesn't appear to be a distance limit either in fact we get a scene in chapter 9 where he can talk to her from the Elven Palace while she's beyond the haze and Mur wood Mel is the most important original character this game introduces and survives no matter what the player does so gum part two could have featured Gollum wandering Moria thinking he's alone before finding a way to communicate with her the back half of Fellowship when he's following the company they're almost always right next to the andn river so he's always by the water in the two towers there'd be the dead marshes The Forbidden pool miscellaneous Mountain Puddles the possibilities are theoretically endless maybe the tragedy they were setting up was that smiggle's near redemption in the pages of The Lord of the Rings that we referenced was still spurred by Mel that all this time they'd kept up an unorthodox friendship that she pushed him to fight back against his lesser demons meanwhile we'd have those cuts back to Mordor the Mouth of Sauron and the candl man's daughter plotting to get their revenge or maybe the non- goolm sequel would have continue this General story The Two Towers and the Return of the King are split this way with the first book in each one covering the story of the non- Ring bearing fellowship and the second books covering the continuing journeys of Frodo and Sam so telling a unified story that picks up these threads even if Gollum isn't a POV character would be consistent with the way tolkin told stories in this universe before does this hypothetical Gollum 2 sound like a decent game not particularly would it do anything to redeem this mess not really but I think it answers too many of our obvious questions to not at least mention fortunately for all of us one Golem is all we have and it's more than any of us want and more than most of us deserve there's not a lot of nice things to say about Gollum little to redeem it except that you know it might have been started with good intentions I guess we could say it really makes you feel like Gollum except no I can't even end on that overdone joke because it really doesn't it's miserable and boring but you don't feel wretched you don't feel corrupted you don't feel torn dangerous undeserving of acceptance and Unworthy of pity's kindly touch in its current form Gollum is just bloated and Bland Without Really reaching for anything which for me is kind of the worst thing that art can be and I say in its current form because I feel like there is a story under all of this that might have been fine were it more tightly focused my first draft of this was significantly more negative because I had recently subjected myself to 12 hours of Gollum and every wrathful keystroke brought me closer to delicious Revenge to dunking on this horrible game that I bought and played because I thought it would make for a funny 45 minute video before I geared up for ac2 but the more time I just spent thinking about gollum's story The more unfair it felt to hold it up as historically bad if someone cut out all of the awful gameplay sections and we just looked at the story it's bad but it's not significantly worse than I don't know half the recent stories we've gotten from what is literally the largest Media company in the world or we could even compare it to the other recent Lord of the Rings property that came out that most of you probably forgot about Amazon's billion dooll Albatross whose impact on the Zeitgeist seemed mostly limited to confused conversations about how expensive it was for such a middling end product so yes Gollum is dull and unimaginative and doesn't really seem like it has a story to tell that's a lot of things these days but between the performance and the pricing nobody's going to forgive it anytime soon Gollum doesn't deserve our forgiveness but perhaps it at least deserves some measure of pity it's done yes Mr bro it's over now

Channel: Duke of Whales

Views: 147,399

Keywords: Gollum, Lord of the Rings

Id: cKHfDbHow7I

Length: 110min 16sec (6616 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2023