Rings of Power - Bad Lore, Worse Writing

growing up relatively poor meant watching your more affluent friends go to Fantastical far-flung places for their family holidays well you got to go to the discount equivalent Disneyland Paris well we can't afford that but Blackpool Tower is pretty neat right and hey at least there aren't any French people around lest you think I was about to compare rings of power to a coupon holiday no actually I had a lot of fun on those discount trips much more fun than I had when I eventually went to Disneyland itself there's an honesty in the character the cheap holidays Gordy big budget tourist Mega magnets though well they're always at least a little bit soulless sure they've got the production value the costumes are great the rides look impressive but there is a desperation behind that Mickey Mouse costume the kind of desperation that leads to well wearing a Mickey Mouse costume and prostituting yourself for Children's Entertainment for legal reasons no other link between Disney and prostituting children will here be drawn rings of power is a Disneyland production glitzy glamorous ingloriously expensive almost entirely meaningless you see more characters than you would in a cheaper production but far fewer real people far less personality its entertainment as distraction not entertainment as Foundation educational edification for all the money spent on it there is far more richness to be found in a second-hand copy of The Fellowship of the Ring you can pick up for a couple of quid from uh well Amazon inevitably but back to Disneyland we go for episode 3 of rings of power the only thing I have left to say to round off this introduction is thanks to those of you who have responded to the Call to Arms at the close of that previous video I've had a few of you email and a few get in touch via Twitter apologies to those I've not got around to responding to yet I'll have a little bit more to say about this and specifically addressing where we go next at the close of this video but I guess that means we can get right on with the show don't worry no longer tortuous analogies comparing Jeff Bezos to Satan in this one and I'll try and spread the law stuff out a little bit more evenly too though there will be some law where the show is referencing or borrowing from it or otherwise egregiously wiping [ __ ] all over it the main thrust of this video and this series of videos going forward is to critique the show's writing because though the common argument deployed by rings of power Defenders is that people who cite law breaks are just angry nerds and the show is actually good if you forget the fact that it's claiming to be an adaptation the reality is that the show is just as bad on its own terms as it is as an adaptation it's not just the law that it's defiling it's the most basic standards of writing people who claim the show is good on its own terms are so tasteless they should test themselves for kovit immediately or else check their medical records to see if they've been lobotomized we left episode 2 in about 50 000 places at once Don Lemon has been nagged by some tunnel goblins his beard and her kid with the evil sword and his hatred for Flaws have gone off to find refuge in the elves Watchtower Steve not Gandalf has just genocided some fireflies in a bit to persuade Brandy to raid Lenny Henry's library of Starbucks young Ned Stark has just presented his case at Kaza Doom leaving Harry and Megan to try and persuade King Charles to show the elves what's inside Marcellus Wallace's briefcase and help them with their construction projects Keller brimbor having walked for several days or teleported instantly to get to kazak Doom has presumably walked or teleported back from whence he came and mighty morphed power elf along with probably evil hunk have survived the attack of katulu's gay fish and been discovered floating adrift by a passing glob of semen is that it have I missed anything I know the episode hasn't started yet but I'm obliged to point out already that we have a massive problem with the narrative here as I said in the previous video rings of power has presented us with a super abundance of people but a severe deficit of characters all spread so far apart in geography and screen time that a none of them with the arguable exceptions of Brandy and Prince Harry have actually developed anything approaching a personality as B lacking that personality it's not being possible to invest more than a dime in any of them and see what passes for the plot of this show has already been largely killed off by a thousand Snippets of loosely connected subplot with the effect being that it feels tedious for large stretches and still manages to feel rushed in its important bits it feels thin like butter spread over too much bread where I tasked with rewriting those first two episodes I'd have introduced maybe half of these characters in episode 1 and spent a good deal more time with each of them establishing enough of their personalities and stories and relevance to the world Elders to make them both memorable and intriguing and then left them entirely for episode 2 there to take the same approach with the remaining cast I'd also not have made Mighty morphid power elf the show's lead of frigid overpowered cold and uninteresting [ __ ] and I might perhaps have given her something vaguely resembling a character in fact I'd probably not have made her the lead to begin with after all she can't die even this Show's writers wouldn't dick about with the law to that extent he's also far too old at this point in history for her character and personality to be as immature as it's presented as being and hell if we're doing extensive rewrites I'd not have tried to condense thousands of years of history from the darkening of falanor to the full of numenor into the first season a creative decision that more or less guarantees we are incapable of inhabiting any one place or forming any attachments to it before it is unceremoniously drowned by the Sea there is so much story you could have packed into that time span even if you are just making [ __ ] up but as I was so often obliged to point out in the last video writing is hard but on with episode 3. we kick off with Don Lemon as a slave having been captured in the deep dark tunnels while hunting for his journalistic reputation in the previous episode you'll recall that in that episode Don Lemon was used to commit the Show's first injection of modern race politics when angry young white guy asked when black people I mean elves but now they've really meant black people we're going to stop clinging onto the past blaming white men's ancestors for historic wrongs and threatening the return of Donald Trump I mean the true king to liberate Whitey from the tyranny of the minorities I mean elves I don't intend to go back over why that kind of blunt political allegory is such a massive betrayal of Tolkien and of his works if you're interested to see the previous video but the inevitable problem is that once a show has committed this sin you end up expecting it to do so again and again and again you go looking for allegories sometimes you find them where they do not exist sometimes you find them where they do placing our first elf of color do we have an official acronym for that by the way is it too late to suggest efoc L [ __ ] anyway placing our first L [ __ ] chains automatically raises some big red flags though this will come across as artfully subtle compared to what we get later but we'll come to that presently for now there is some more mundane stupidity to address and in fact there's quite a lot of mundane stupidity to address in the first place the elves have been enslaved by a Mob Of Orcs And here there is a selection of questions and problems firstly that they should have captured Don Lemon is explicable he made the mistake of going spelunking in search of his reputation in that last episode but how did they come to capture so many other elves including those from the Watchtower Don Lemon was stationed in the elves are the predominant military force in this region they have watched towers for a reason did the Orcs tunnel ride up from under the tower and filter them in the night given Don Lemon a nameless wench just stumbled across the burned out Village in the last episode and so the Orcs tunnel why didn't the elves in the tower or a nearby Tower spot this buildup of evil have we just forgotten the elves are incredibly farsighted because that would be inconvenient to the plot I very much fear we have in the second place given the Orcs have already apparently dug an extensive tunnel network of their own why are they here forcing the elves to dig an extension for them in the third place why the [ __ ] are they forcing the elves to build an extension in broad daylight while the rest of the tunnel network was firmly and sensibly underground the Orcs have been digging tunnels because they hate the sunlight we'll come back to that in a moment as well but they have a large group of prisoners the prisoners are in the sunlight that's where they're working the Orcs have to cower under their tents while the elves work as prisons go this is hardly [ __ ] colditz your guards can't actually approach you without suffering great pain and inconvenience there are a lot of you you're armed with tools shovels axes and such the elves are incredibly Nimble and light-footed as we will also see later they have everything they need to escape an ample opportunity to escape and the Orcs are uniquely incapable of stopping that escape why given they cannot go out in the sunlight would not the Orcs have kept the elves locked up during the day and force them to dig at night and that's granting the Orcs needed the elf to dig for them in the first place which the last episode seemed to suggest that they didn't this entire setup is completely [ __ ] ridiculous but it needs to happen I guess because the plot demands it be so so the episode has begun on a massive great contrivance not a promising start no worries though I'm sure it will get much worse than this and given the next shot sees Mighty morphid power elf waking up aboard the ship from the last episode I think it's safe to say it is already worse hunk is already up and gives her some food which she doesn't have time to eat because they're interrupted and brought up on Deck to meet [Music] [Applause] these are men of numenor the island Kingdom created in the law by levala as a reward for men's exploits something else I'm sure we'll come back to for now though and though it might seem improbable to do it at this juncture I want to touch on the race question that I teased in the previous video but that I didn't have time to go into then because the existence of numenor and the numenoreans invite you to look through a window into a world where people could handle these things sensibly I said in that previous video that Meghan Markle uh I mean diesel the Dwarven princess played by Sophia Nom vetsi one of those actually proved to be one of the better more personable and more characterful of the show's Creations I know a few others who are at least pleasantly surprised by her as well but the show has a problem with race and it has a problem with place and the interrelationship between the two I apologize for breaking so quickly from the plot of the show but I do think this bit is important to Address given so much has been said about it the plot after all has to take place somewhere and in creating believable worlds it's important to understand what somewhere actually is because the vast majority of modern script writers and showrunners come from an incredibly small Clique of people and they all live in big cities they don't really have a conception of what differentiates places in their peoples their idea of diversity is what they see all around them a vast Multicultural sea of humanity everyone from anywhere mixing everywhere they look to the extent they travel abroad they will usually travel to tourist hot spots and other big cities rather than to anywhere truly representative of that host nation so-called citizens of the world actually know very little about the world because everywhere they go resembles the international City and the international city has throughout history being defined against the character of the rest of the country in which it's placed this is one of the many reasons revolting English peasants frequently took their pitchforks to London and rightly so this kind of hyper diversity is what these writers know but it is not to reclaim one of the words they've stolen representative even in their own Western countries and certainly elsewhere and less developed parts of the world what marks a place out is amongst other things its relative homogeneity I have a houseboat in London but I spend rather more time these days back in the village I grew up in amongst its handful of defining features is the fact that the population is almost without exception white and aging but that's another matter it's one of the things that separates this Village from London that separated in unstated and unremarkable but quite definite ways that you would notice were it not so it's what gives these places discreet characters this isn't to say that one is better or worse than the other but it is to say that they are profoundly different and the makeup of their peoples and so the makeup of their cultures marks them as such my Village is not an isolated case or rather its isolation is General this is what defines rural areas in large part and and rural areas make up the bulk of the country the kind of racial and color mixing you see in London and other big cities in the UK and the US is simply not operative on the same scale in the majority of either Nation even within big cities ethnic groups tend to Cluster together immigrants from one country moving clusters and immigrate largely to the same regions of their new homes this is always an everywhere being the case cities are seldom representative of national patents they are always outliers in terms of their population mix but even within cities you see ethnic groups clustering gold is green in London for example is disproportionately Jewish Tower Hamlet is disproportionately Bangladeshi in the U.S Minneapolis has an outside Sudanese population which is largely responsible for the continued and regretful existence of ilhanoma and so it goes I mention all this because villagers towns and City districts all have distinctive character that tells you where you are and that marks those places out from their neighbors racial or ethnic conglomeration is one significant part of that Game of Thrones which was an incredibly diverse show understood this point to a lesser extent because it was restricted by its narrative Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films did as well part of the reason these worlds felt so well realized on screen is that you had immediate visual Clues provided by the population separating Dawn from Winterfell in the first instance and the Shire from Bree in the second for example but this is now a rare approach rings of power like wheel of time before it has taken another and less effective one this is partly because the writers have no real experience of those places in the real world that should serve as inspiration for their Creations in the fictional world but it's also because the point of diversity and representation is we've come to understand that today is not to reflect the real diversity of the real world as they claim it is but rather a select group of people's ideals of what diversity should be the irony of those saying that fantasy should resemble the real world is that their fantasy depictions much less resemble the real world than the older iterations they criticize for their perceived whiteness amongst other reasons the Jackson film's clear delineation of a homogenism isolated Shire and the suavi definitely foreign band of easterlings is a much closer approximation of the real world's divides than rings of powers's attempts to claim the most isolated group if not Hobbits should have a racial mix akin to Chicago again the differences between true diversity which must include accurate group formation and a small group of people's idealized and politicized idea of the point and desirability of a different type of diversity these two facts combine to explain why people have become so pissed off with the Peddlers of this latter approach and wary whenever they see minority actors cast in certain roles it is not as Amazon would like you to believe that there is a toxic group of fans that just hates diversity wherever they see it no it [ __ ] isn't a useful counter example here would be called as Valerian in House of the Dragon his casting did raise some eyebrows it wasn't helped when he gave to my knowledge the only interview of the white people can't stand to see black people in fantasy type people looked at that casting remembered what has been pushed on them by activists for far too long and how they've been slandered by those same activists and the studios they back weighed the casting decision against what they knew of the world the show was set in and concluded preemptively that this was likely to be another example of pushing diversity at the expense of realism and adherence to the law but House of the Dragon has gone on to become very popular and those complaints have all but disappeared there isn't much of an argument anymore about the pushing of race and diversity in-house of the Dragon because the show was written well enough to make that casting fit its world it's explicable in universe and it's not being used as propaganda out Universe cordless Valerian has come to seem a natural enough part of a well-written story and as ever and always arcanes deserved success is proof that the audience would adore an incredibly diverse cast if that cast fits the world it's set in if it's well realized and if it's not used to push political points I've not seen it yet but I gather cyberpunk Edge Runners is seeing a similar effect I raised the issue now because rings of power had an opportunity to do exactly the same thing it's a vast world of many regions populated by many peoples bigger even than out of Game of Thrones or House of the dragon by verge of the type of story the show is trying to tell we have or we should have ample opportunity to explore these different regions in peoples there's a way to achieve realistic representation that Accords with the known laws of both universes ours and the shows and the arrival of the numenoreans is an example of how the show almost took this simple and popular approach but then ditched it in favor of the other less believable and less popular one the numenoreans are an island people in the lore at any rate they are drawn from those men who stood against morgoth given the island by lavada as reward for their struggles you would expect to see a degree of diversity at its Inception but that also happened a very long time ago indeed the men who stood against morgoth but not all the men of Middle Earth from all places in Middle Earth where men might be found they were drawn from specific regions the men of the Southlands for example largely sided with morgoth the show had an opportunity to represent the kind of group denominated diversity you would expect to see given that history for example you could have cast a whole host of Hispanic actors by geography rather than specific nation and ethnicity to populate numenor you would then have represented if you insist on doing that a whole sway that the real world in your fictional one clearly delineating the men of numenor from the men of the Southlands like Hal brand which after all will go on to become Mordor Mordor is bordered by places like khand and harad described in the law as being swathi with dark hair and eyes dark skin generally dark is still in farharad given how much of rings of power is focused in this region and how many of its key characters on screen hail from there including several main characters you could have cast Black and North African actors to play them the Harford Spike contrast and especially the elves and dwarves have closer analogues in the peoples of Northern and Northwestern Europe taking this approach you'd have accomplished everything you could possibly they want to achieve if you are minded toward believable and story relevant diversity large numbers of the principal cast portrayed by actors of different backgrounds including underrepresented groups like North Africans and Hispanics a true range of diverse peoples given prominent roles and a world that is automatically more genuinely unnaturally varied in its diversity than the pick and mix approach much modern media takes which seems to think there's really no genuine demographic difference between an isolated tribe of not Hobbits the numenoreans the elves the dwarves and the men of the Southlands instead in the ship's crew of numenor which is our first introduction to them what we get is pretty much the typical city-minded Smorgasbord of backgrounds and though not fatally it nonetheless makes numenor itself much less contained much less clearly delineated from any other group of peoples and much more Loosely defined conceptually this problem much more significantly undermines the depiction of the not Hobbits of course and then to a lesser extent the dwarves and the elves as well bear in mind what we know of the non-hobbits and later the actual Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings they are a small highly insular population that deliberately shirks contact with the wider World they fear distrust and are overwhelmed by The Wider world what they absolutely do not do as a matter of habit and culture is mixed with the wider world this is what gives the Shire its definition this is what makes it an entity in its own right and also one that's familiar to the great proportion of the audience that is visited or that lives in similarly isolated and homogenous places given character and color by an autonous population if you decide by contrast to give the Shire the demography of Islington that effect is entirely lost and the world becomes that much less believable as a result we can make similar points in similar ways with the elves and actually create opportunities for even more diversity not less the elves are after all not one people they begin as such in the cell Meridian at the point of their creation when they are one people the quandy But as time goes on they split apart culturally and geographically and so it's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to say ethnically as well early in the cell Meridian the elves are summoned to valinor but not all of them go this is what's known as the sundering of the elves when you get the emergence of distinct groups the noldor the Solari the Vanya and then those that remain behind in Middle Earth further split some of the taleri becoming the nandor for example and some the sindhar as they spread out over Middle Earth and form their own kingdoms and cultures at the point rings of power is seemingly sad centuries if not Millennia have passed since all of this happened this then gives the show the opportunity to do natural diversity even more of it more diversity which I wouldn't be opposed to and I don't think many fans would be either you'd still find some people complaining that the elves were described as being fair universally but you'd greatly diminish the force and validity of that criticism if you made the rest of the diversity part of the World building have black elves if you really think you need to but then all elves of their region and faction should be black because like but to a lesser extent than the not Hobbits the elves are not big mixers they don't breed rapidly they don't cross communities all that readily yep the existence of black elves might still have irked purists but again quartus valerian's reception and the quick dying of opposition to him proves that even law-minded fans are prepared to forgive and forget this kind of thing if the World building is honest apolitical non-allegorical sensible consistent and faithful to the fundamentals of its source material that said if you were to take the approach I've just set out you wouldn't need to have black elves because you could have cast a number of your main characters from the Southlands as black or dark-skinned anyway that too would get around the very thorny question of cultural appropriation that arises when you see traditionally White characters from traditionally white cultures recast as other races in ways that would not be accepted the day where it to happen as it once did the other way around it's simply a myth to say as some on both sides of the argument have attempted to say the tolkien's world was always and uniformly white it wasn't the existence of the easterlings refutes that notion it was vast and embracing in its scope but it was also written with a mind to realism its peoples were naturally formed and naturally placed and not Blended to the point where there is no difference between them anyway I think the approach I've just set out would be called a compromise this is I would argue a principled objection not to diversity per se but to the manner and purpose of diversity as we are seeing it in rings of power the question isn't can black people exist in Middle Earth of course they can the question is accepting that they can in what Manner do you include them and where in what money do you include any race and where how do you blend diversity and realism should representation be realistic or defined by the idealism of activist writers against that realism I've just given you my answer I think it's fairly well supported but the overarching point to bear in mind is that it should be possible to ask these questions and make these arguments and look at least for compromised Solutions without branding half your audience or the other half of the fandom bigots and racists because they don't conform to your political and ideological idea of capital D diversity you're welcome to refute my suggestion if you want to argue with me in the comments if you like I welcome it but otherwise I don't see the problem with having these conversations these conversations are good and proper they are integral to World building and all these best conversations are integral to story these are not simply political matters they are artistic matters as well Quest of autistic Integrity are indeed at stake but now instead and coming back to the show as it's presented to us in our first glimpse of the uh semen on the numenorian ship we get the full Smorgasbord of modern Metropolitan Life and so well there goes Part of Your World building there goes your natural diversity we've gotta take those boxes and if you don't like these boxes being ticked you are probably a racist ain't modern fandom wonderful anyway we're introduced to probably the show's only reliable actor here playing ocean man otherwise known as alendil father of isildur we will see asilda himself shortly as well though it's worth pointing out here that were the show Faithfully adapting even that material that it has the rights to alendel and asildo shouldn't actually be around for another I don't know 2 000 years or so or at least for a couple of seasons of the show alendel isn't born until after the forging of the Rings by Kelly brimborough memory serves and he hasn't forged them yet olendiel the seal door don't have large parts to play until the fall of numenor under sauron's corrupting influence which happened centuries after the forging of the Rings now I don't mention all this just to point out the contradictions with the law the first video established that the show isn't set in the universe talking created we don't need to go into too much detail to emphasize that point to game I was lucky enough to be on efap just recently and the approach they take is to try and restrict themselves to plot and the show on its own terms rather than critiquing it because it was done better elsewhere and I agree with that approach but paradoxically that's why it's occasionally necessary to cite further lore contradictions sometimes the show is borrowing lore events that are contingent on preceding events but the show is scrapped or been unable to use which we'll encounter often across these videos in other places it's squeezing the law together in unnecessary and unwise ways and this makes reference to the law from time to time useful and exposing problems that Ali sui generis nature of rings of power this condensing is one one such example rings of power is supposed to run for what I think it's five seasons it has time to build toward momentous events and it needs a stock of momentous events that drop across this five season round but rather than be patient rather than spread the things out it seems to be rushing to several conclusions at once sauron's return the forging of the Rings the numenorian invasion of Middle Earth the fall of numenor sauron's eventual Triumph not only does cramming these things in deprived subsequent seasons of brilliant material they might otherwise have had more time to use it means a that each event is diminished by its proximity to the others B that they are further diminished by how quickly we are leading up to them and C we're never actually given any time to invest in the people and places in question because the show despite being boring and empty for large portions of each episode still cannot allow us the time to come to know them to understand them or to feel anything about them at all anyway as I say ocean man is perhaps the only the reliable actor in the show but the dialogue is as unreliable or as reliably [ __ ] as ever he begins by telling Mighty morphid power elf and hunk that he won't answer their questions but that he'll take them to his superiors who will he then proceeds to half answer two questions in quick succession so I'm glad to see we've already begun looking at consistency as the enemy more seriously and this will become apparent later this gives us the firmest hint we've really received yet as to precisely when in time this part of the show is set we are in mid to late stage numenor meaning things are about to go very badly wrong for the world albeit they will also go very badly wrong for the show because of the way it's discarded the setup as we will shortly see ocean man has Mighty morphod power elves dagger which she wants back but for now we get our first glimpse of numenor on screen and well let's be balanced there is good and there is bad of the bad there are technical challenges with both scenes set against Green screened backdrops Because unless you have the set that can mimic the subtle natural movements of the boat on the water it increases The Uncanny Valley effect of the green screen I've spent much of the last few years of my life living on boats and let me tell you even the big ones move about small bonds move about more of course for reasons of physics but even the big ones move however subtly it might seem when however your green screening a backdrop in your set is static things don't quite look right everything is too still the bowel line doesn't move at all in relation to the backdrop meaning the entire ship which is supposed to be bubbling about at least a little bit well it just feels too still it's a subtler form of the moving car back projection problem in old movies you know where the car itself is actually static but the guy holding the wheel moves it as though he were steering and the windows are actually footage of moving scenery it jars because the little things don't add up the guy moving the wheel isn't doing so according with what we see through the window he might be turning left on a straight road or he's driving straight on a tight Bend something my mum actually does in real life quite often hence the number of cars and pedestrians she's written off this has the same jarring quality to it the bowel line against the passing Cliffs is absolutely still it looks like scenery sliding past the set not a boat floating past scenery the other problem is really double edged numenor in the law is spectacular it's powerful Advanced Rich Beyond dreams massive in size and in scale there is an invitation for the show to do what it really wants to do which is to impress you with its visuals and it is impressive wherever it isn't uncanny I mentioned one problem with CGI megascapes in the previous video but the other is a problem of contrast if you've gone to the time and effort of making intimate practical sets the difference in texture tone and lighting between those in their CGI Vistas and establishing shots is stuck and not in a good way in The Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson got around this problem by intelligently blending practical and computer-generated effects an awful lot of the backdrops weren't actually CGI they were painted often Scale Models would be built either completely or displaying the relevant part of the building intended for the shot the backdrop would then be painted the remainder of the building would be filled in digitally and they did this with a number of the shots of orthank the tower at eisenguard for example and this blend Smooths out the differences that would otherwise be starkly apparent between the Practical and digital shards rings of power hasn't been anything like so intelligent it quite often pairs entirely practical sets the top deck of the ship for example with entirely digital Vistas following immediately and that actually invites us to notice the differences rather than encouraging us to overlook them when enough time has passed since the last practical shot that you can forget about the difference the digital Panorama of numenor does convey its size and its Grandeur albeit to really enjoy it you kind of have to pretend you're watching a video game cut scene because the lighting and the textures just aren't anything like as photorealistic at all the approach to numenor then is kind of impressive but you are frequently distracted not least by a statue of one of the precursor guys from Prometheus and otherwise by quick jumps between shots that are so different in nature that you might as well be watching entirely separate Productions which after a fashion you are since the numero approach is a big set piece and big set pieces are successful or otherwise based on a number of different technical elements I guess now would be a good time as well to mention the score again I said in the last video that bear McCreery had at times managed to capture the overall orchestral composition and so the general sound of Howard Shaw's soundtrack but that the soundtrack itself was seldom noticeable and just not integral to the show as Shaw's work was for the Lord of the Rings now I quite like Batman McCreary he's been a superb television composer he's honed his talent working to strict budgets and that's forced him to be very creative see the soundtrack to Battlestar Galactica where the budget was so small he had to make do with a few drums and a dooduck he's been getting bigger projects since and I believe he's been learning on the John Williams recently and you can hear that creeping into his score for this show largely because of the way he deploys his um uh his horn I mean his horns French horns obviously Williams has a very pronounced fondness for the horn and utilizes them in ways Howard sure doesn't meaning mccreary's occasional deployment of them in rings of power soundtrack does sometimes sound albeit not for more than a few seconds at a time slightly John Williams here what marks Williams and Shore out for most other composers however is their use of the light Motif the light Motif is an idea popularized by Wagner for his ring cycle but you can trace it back to monteverdi and other earlier composers as well in short it's a musical phrase or tune that accompanies a character a place or a mood and the best and most memorable soundtracks are those with the best and most memorable deployments of the light Motif most film composers have a very basic understanding of it that really amounts to little more than a character tune that guy's on screen so that track plays what makes for brilliant operatic and film composition is a more subtle and flexible understanding yes characters and places have themes but the motif should shift and fluctuate depending on the mood on the meaning of a scene and in a sense based on what the world itself thinks of the characters in any given time The Lord of the Rings is a Sublime example of the light Motif done right it's what makes it soundtrack so memorable the basic tune of Shaw's Motif for Rohan Gondor eisengard and the Shire might be simple the core of any good light Motif tends to be because it's the tune that we remember but the deployment of it is complex and nuanced for example when we first encounter ederas in Rohan it's at a civilizational low Point Theoden is possessed by a serum and corrupted by grima the nation itself is fraying as we see visually represented by the torn flag that greets Aragorn Legolas Gandalf and gimry on their arrival there but it's also represented by the score the Rohan Motif plays for the first time but it's weak it's thin and tremulous but it's designed to convey weakness fragility and sadness the theme itself doesn't shift across either of the two films in which it features the two towers and Return of the King but the variations on it are starkly different bigger grander and more fulsome instrumentation greets theodens Revival after Gandalf breaks saruman's spell a somber foreboding Noble yet tense variation plays when the rahirim arrived to meet sauron's armies on the palanal fields in Return of the King this is the same tune it's the same Motif it's what makes it instantly recognizable but it's being deployed in vastly different ways to produce and to portray vastly different emotions the feebleness of Theoden under saruman's influence its Revival as he regains his former strength its evocation of noble sacrifice at The Perennial fields and the same holds true with every one of the many motifs Shaw deploys across the Lord of the Rings soundtrack by contrast their McCreery hasn't really managed to sum it up even the basics of the light Motif across the two episodes we've had so far this is one of the larger and understated reasons we're having such trouble identifying the various places we see Shaw identifies Rohan in its many moods McCreery hasn't been able to identify Lindon or the Southlands or forwardway Mighty morphid power elf kind of has her own Motif there's a hint of one at least but it's not pronounced and it isn't memorable in part because he hasn't scored it correctly the instrumentation doesn't make the thing noticeable and in part because he doesn't seem to have conceptualized the character in his notation there's simply nothing of Mighty Morphin Power elf in what he's trying to convey musically though this might be because there isn't any character in her to convey I mentioned it here though because numenor is the first pronounced Motif that really stands out in the show [Music] we hear it on our arrival here and we'll hear it on our departure from it later and it's it's a start the soundtrack generally improves over the course of these three episodes which is positive the theme itself is I would argue a little bit too long for its function the numeral Motif is actually not particularly sure like in its instrumentation it does owe something to John Williams himself but it also Trails off in a way that his motives wouldn't it doesn't repeat often enough to stick in the mind it's a little bit too convoluted to be completely memorable though I think the opening is strong it's something McCrary will need to do more of not only for the sake of his own soundtrack but for the world he is tasked with depicting it's not just the tune we remember when we hear the Imperial March it's a character it's not just a score we feel for in The Lord of the Rings it's the people and places and ideas to which that score is attached I think McCreary does have this in him or perhaps will with more practice and training it might be the rings of powers just come too soon for him and he's certainly not being helped by the absence of strong themes characters and ideas to give expression to but that's enough with the boring music stuff so we'll go back to the plot ocean man Mighty morphod power elf and hunk arrive at the Docks and mighty morpher Power elf does some essential but retroactive World building she explains to hunk that the numenorians are not men like him because they sided with the elves against morgoth while his people sided with morgoth against the elves ah okay here angry young white guy from the previous video is instructive this is unnecessary dialogue in Universe hunk should already know all of this they are his direct ancestors the argument might well be well it was a long time ago he didn't live through it maybe his people have just forgotten all about it and yeah forgetting Vital Information is the norm in this show the elves forgot about [ __ ] Sauron after all which would be forgivable were the show not condensing the timeline because thousands of years should have elapsed between morgoth's defeat and the present day and yet angry young white guy from episode 1 hadn't forgotten about any of this he brings it up in his argument with Don Lemon it's quite common knowledge apparently except where the show remembers that it isn't and he's younger and further removed from these events than hunkies if angry young white teen knows it hunk should know it too so mighty morph of power elf should have no need to explain any of it there is another problem with this exchange that's going to become more pronounced as time goes on and that's the placing of information this show tends to fill in details retroactively for example in episode 1 we learned that morgoth killed the Trees of light even though he didn't and the elves went to war with him and that's pretty much it it's not until episode 2 that the show decides to explain the existence of the silmarils and more goth's fondness for them and that's vital contextual information if the preceding episodes events are to make any sense because that's the cause of the fight in the first place but then rings of power still managed not to actually tie these two things together or hasn't done so yet and then it's not until episode 3 that we hear the first mention of the Valor Mighty morphod power elf is filling in information the show left out of its own setup we were in valinor at the opening scenes of episode one God damn it there was a whole voice over intended to set the scene and describe pivotal events in the past but not once until the third episode have we heard anything about the Valor and yet without the Valor none of what happens until this point actually makes any sense it would be like giving a lecture about the Crusades and describing in a couple of sentences how Jerusalem was conquered but not telling anybody about who the Crusaders were why they were crusading what religions they adhered to or even mentioning the existence of God compare rings of power's opening monologue with that of fellowship at the ring and the difference is once again Stark collateral in Fellowship fills us in on the history that makes sense of our present Condition it's short it's perfunctory it doesn't drag or introduce unnecessary detail but it covers all the most relevant information by contrast brings a Powers opening monologue with short was perfunctory but gave us next to nothing of the why of events in fact it skipped over the most important events and the show is now filling Us in retrospectively in forced Exposition but whereas galadriel's monologue in Fellowship also shows us the important events rings of power is just telling us in Exposition during scene Transitions and that's a much less effective form of Storytelling not least because it begs many more questions than it answers and throws in fragments of law with massive consequences and connotations that the show can't explore or explain to us properly you can repair some of this damage retroactively and the show is attempting to do that here but the order of events the way in which we glean essential information is backwards we see the consequences and then a couple of episodes later if we're lucky a character will have a couple of lines mentioning fragments of the causes of those same consequences I made an unkind Jenga Tower joke in the previous video but the nicer version I'll deploy here is that it's like trying to play Jenga by starting with the top layer and that is not how the game [ __ ] works we were also left with a number of questions not all of which the show intends for example if the Valar noun do exist in this universe what role are they going to play because they're integral to the fault of numero which this show will presumably go on to depict but if they're made so integral well then we have to ask why they did nothing in the run-up that the war mentioned in the first episode if you've read the silmarillion you'll know of course but most people won't have read that and even if they have the show is discarded so much of it that it's not actually that rely but as a guide anymore save perhaps for a few key elements the fall of numenor being one of them if though the Valor are going to be invoked in the eventual destruction of numenor they are being given an incredible amount of power and agency but the only way we can square that with their earlier absence from proceedings is just to kind of forget about them in that moment just kind of forget again I really don't think it would have been hard to fix this you could have actually just added a couple of lines to the opening monologue to explain that the guards The Valor refused to help the elves in their fight against morgoth and so the elves rebelled against them and went off to fight that sets us up with the existence of gods who could have helped and so who do have agency in the world meaning that any subsequent mentions and invocations and potential actions build on established knowledge and answers questions posed at the top of the program you could even have used it to at least hint at those passages of law the show presumably won't and or can't use directly such as the kinslaying merely reference it as some some kind of tragedy some kind of rebellion or betrayal of the gods that occurred and that tarnishes the elves non-specifically giving the impression of grave deeds and consequences without needing to really explain what they were specifically the story is then built from its foundations rather than the writers hastily trying to fill those foundations in on the spur of the moment but as it is the clunky Exposition continues and hunk is being reduced to the useful questioner role his entire input in this exchange is to facilitate Mighty morphid power elf's Exposition since when did men like me build kingdoms such as this these men are not like you men stood with the elves as a reward the Valar granted them this island changed much since then divided sector not eventually sorrow what happened Newman order began to turn away our ships why we may be about to find out since when do men like me build kingdoms such as this do I detect a note of envy what happened why okay let's just try and add two and two together and see how the show came up with five Mighty morphid power elf Begins by saying numenor is very different now than it used to be because it turns away Elvis ships so if that's the case how could she be sorry that it's changed how can she even know that it really has changed she hasn't been here because the ships are turned away the Turning Away of the ships is the only information we are given about the profound chain she somehow knows the island has undergone but when asked why that happened she confesses she doesn't know so so no you don't know that it's profoundly changed in sorrow making ways do you you just know that you don't know anything except that you are not allowed in that should create curiosity in Mighty morphid power elf perhaps fear or at least foreboding it shouldn't create deep sadness because she's been precluded from knowing what she would need to know to feel sad in the first place I think the show is trying to fast forward its development of numenor's character but it fails because it's jumping to City conclusions having jumped to City conclusions it doesn't feel the need to actually build the character of the place you could have accomplished the desired effect with weary caution on Mighty morphod power elf's part A belief that something is wrong the nature of which she does not know that indeed is her conclusion in this exchange that could become sadness once she finds out the reason for the change and what the change represents and what it entails again it could be accomplished with a small change to just a couple of her lines it wouldn't require that we rewrite her character or her reactions because uh well I mean she would know both of those need redoing but not because of this scene they just need redoing because she doesn't really have either of those to begin with she just moves through the world as though every day is her time of the month he might almost say there is a tempest in her again recourse to the law might have been helpful we can deduce from this information that we are in mid to late stage numador numenor and the elves were indeed once close allies but they didn't begin to really fall out until the first war against Sauron where numenor sent a massive Force to repel him after the establishment of Mordor and his forces there they beat him and they capture him and they bring him into numenor which then allows him to corrupt the mind of the king which then leads to numenor's downfall there has as far as we know be no such War at this point in the show's history numenor under sauron's influence became vast and Powerful but it also became war-like and tyrannical the numenorians had already settled occasionally along the coast of Middle Earth but they now did so on mass and became militaristic and dictatorial leading to ruptures with the elves whom they oppressed the reason the numenoreans settled in Middle Earth is that they were forbidden by the Valar from traveling so far west that they could no longer see their own Island because if they did they might come across valenor and the undying lands and unlike the elves who were blessed with eternal life the man were doomed to Die the elves told them this was a blessing they didn't believe them things got uh things got complicated God got angry but we might get to that later but if any of that were the case in this show why would the ship have been in place to rescue Mighty morphid power elephant hunk in the previous episode they were so far west they couldn't at that time see their own Islands so they would already have broken the uh broken the injunction Within they and God would have killed them more pertinently though and more relevantly for later setup we've got absolutely no indication that the numenoreans have settled in Middle Earth at this point in the show's continuity in fact we're led to believe that they barely ever visited so we're in this weird historical limbo we aren't given any setup we're just plunked into the middle or the endpoint of numenor's story but we know nothing about numenor itself or its relationship with the world and in fact as we'll shortly see it doesn't really have one this is a problem the show has with borrowing selectively from the law because it's borrowing events that are contingent upon things that they have discarded meaning they have to fill in substantial World building gaps to make the thing make sense but they haven't made any serious attempt to do that yet and what city attempts they have made just reveal their deficiencies as writers Mighty morphod power elf and Sarah I mean howl Brands lose track of ocean man during their conversation but he pops back up and tells them they don't want to get lost in this city without an escort except that right behind them you can see the regards they're right there the two who accompanied them from the dark they do have an escort he's he's literally behind you open your eyes this uh this puts me in mind of a minor British labor party Member of Parliament whose name is David Lammy he once gave an interview to camera complaining that he hadn't seen a policeman all day while a policeman was standing right behind him um if if it feels like neighborhood policing has vanished it's not around you we haven't seen a police while I've been here and I've been here for a little while now very funny very embarrassing glad to see the uh the writers of this show are living up to some high standards here punk then takes a look at a nearby blacksmith and gives us an enigmatic expression this will almost certainly become very relevant not only later in this episode but for the Sauron question the show thinks it's keeping us on tender hooks to answer so we will come back to that presently we then enter the city hall or the palace where ocean man is told that the queen regent is just too busy to deal with them at the moment there are three principal players we are about to be introduced to on our Whistle Stop tour of numenor the queen regent herself tar Muriel who is daughter of the king tar palantir here decrepit in bedridden and R farazan there are actually several versions of their story pen by Tolkien himself and it's not really clear that the show is going to use any of them it is going to make its own one up I wonder how those changes will pan out I wonder if they'll live up to the same astonishingly low standard as every other change has been made so far the general thrust of tolkien's account has our farazone usurping tar Muriel after tarpalanti's death by forcing her to marry him thereby taking her title as ruler it is arthurism who decides to embark on the Expedition against Sauron and he brings Sauron back as his prisoner only then for Sauron to complete his corruption that already existed in the hearts of many numenoreans anyway the man having settled in Middle Earth became jealous of the elf's immortality and they thought that death that they had to suffer was a curse and despite the elves attempting to tell them the oluvata and the gods had given them death as a kind of reward the men refused to believe them and it was this fear this longing this loathing this jeality that Sauron plays off when arthurism brings him back to numenor and he corrupts off Arizona he corrupts the men of numenor he turns them against the Valor he turns them to worship morgoth and this part of the cell Meridian includes blood sacrifices and all that kind of lovely stuff eventually he incites arthurism to invade valinor itself and that prompts manweh the head of the Valor to beseech eluvita who is God himself for Aid and so God breaks the world he makes the earth round for the first time it is hitherto been flat he curves it he turns it into a sphere the sphere we now know today which changes so much of the geography of floods numenor entirely it buries our Pharisee under a mountain until he is released at Armageddon and much of Middle Earth is also damaged by this immense flood including Lindon which we saw in the previous episode the kingdom of gilgallad now I mention all of this because I'm inviting you to recall what I said earlier about the problems the show is inviting by crunching so much history together it isn't as though they needed to do that there is plenty of the history of numenor it could have explored even with its limited rights its limited access to the law the fact it is voluntarily condensing its timeline means it is equally voluntarily foregoing fantastic stories that it could have told and even if you don't trust that the writers could have told fantastic stories it's also doing away with the amount of time that could have at least allowed them to tell fantastic stories instead we're rushing through thousands of years worth of history and what we get at the end is a hot mess in the palace audience chamber once it is known that Mighty morphid power elf is indeed an elf the queen regent decides she's not busy after all it might seem more for power elf introduces herself to Queenie with her typically offensive lack of charm and Grace while the show has decided to turn hunk into Brawn from Game of Thrones meaning he plays off her ornate and elaborate titles with some simple and irreverent quirky humor Galadriel of the noldor daughter of the Golden House of finarvin commander of the northern armies of High King gilgalat Albert this is sugar son of Dolph Chieftain of the stern crows timid son of timid ruler of the burned men this Fair Maid is Chella daughter of Czech leader of the black ears and here we have bronze son of you wouldn't know it well I'm pretty sure even his facial expressions of bronze everything about him in this scene is bran it's almost like the writers and even the cast really want to do a Game of Thrones and uh I know I said I'd be spreading this stuff out but I'm I'm hurting in my laws oh Mighty Morphin Power elf is about as offensive and [ __ ] as she can possibly be in demanding passage back to Middle Earth I have no idea why they've decided to portray her in this way it's not characterful it's just incredibly off-putting she demands essentially a ship to take them back to Middle Earth but a man with a great big bushy beard are farazan who in this telling is chancellor of numenor well he tells her that it's been centuries since the ship of numenor was allowed to make that trip never mind on behalf of an elf but but no no no again numenorians settled in Middle Earth at least according to tolkien's account of course it's about established that we're not going by his account but if they're going to tell us something like this you'd think they might try and explain why that is well they will get there and we will get there too and just just wait for it it's it's a truly special thing they took our jobs because Mighty morphic power elf has about as much understanding of decency and human interaction as Jimmy Savile drunk in a morgue and of course it isn't true except in the sense that the numenoreans bailed the elves out in fighting both morgoth and Sauron or I I guess just mogoth in this show they haven't fought Sauron yet I don't know I don't think the show does either I don't think it cares we also don't have a reason for the new Orient hatred of the elves as mentioned in the lore there are two broad factions among the numenorians there are the faithful who is the name might suggest are faithful to the elves but principally to The Valor and then there are the King's Men Who gradually come to resent both this is because they fear death as I've mentioned and they resent the Valor have foisted it upon them while denying them access to the buying lands is this fear that Sauron plays off when he arrives it's the reason he so easily corrupts them the king at this time is tar palantir and tar palantir is one of the faithful but he's an exception proving the norm because the King's Men are the predominant force and they have been for some time we are going to get mentions of both these factions in this episode but because unlike in the law the show has it that the numenorians have seemingly confined themselves to their Island already rather than colonizing Middle Earth or mixing with the elves or interacting with any other races at all we've not got a history of interaction with the elves that can explain their hostile attitude here we don't have the history of either faction or their reasons for being we don't know or understand and we're not told the history of the faithful or the King's Men or are they reasons for existing all their reasons for opposing each other is one of those weird instances where the show is relying on foreknowledge of the law that it is otherwise distorted or discarded meaning that it's impregnable to normies and not even a good guide to Tolkien fans the show is going to have to invent a reason you'd think or at least to work in some variant of that one found in the law and if past experiences any guide they are going to do it tactlessly and tastelessly and it will seem forced and shallow and horrible speaking of forced and shallow and horrible the dialogue the dialogue as so often in the show it is [ __ ] abysmal Mighty morphod power elf and Queenie have an argument in which for no very good reason Mighty morphic power elf threatens to kill someone to get off the island then if luckily the price of Passage I will pay it but one way or another I will depart I welcome you to try I have no need of your welcome I guess idioms aren't a thing where she comes from because that was quite clearly a figure of speech but then again having heard the elves similes before washing away the last remnants of our enemy like a spring rain over the bones of a spoiled [ __ ] I guess maybe it's just too subtle and she didn't pick up on it but now Queenie doesn't understand idioms either because she tells Mighty muffin power elf and you are quickly wearing out yours Gods what the [ __ ] is going on what is the reason for this instant mutually assured [ __ ] destruction this is all so rushed and contrived why have they decided to have Mighty Morphin Power elf assume the ultimate form of frigid cow permanently there's no reason for us to sympathize with her she is flatly unlikable I said all this in my last video there has been absolutely no improvement but it's such a bizarre decision having been born in valinor in the first age Mighty morphid power elf is thousands of years old at this point she's a lot older than young Ned is even and yet in the short time we spent with him he shown himself to be more developed and reasoned and mature than her one of the reasons for not liking that they chose her as a protagonist is precisely that for her to really go on an arc and grow the show has to pretend like she hasn't already had Millennia on which to go on an arc and grow here she is the oldest spoiled teenage bratty drama queen ever devised with the possible exception of Taylor Lorenz and you just know that somehow without any self-reflection or betterment her being queen [ __ ] will somehow allow her to brute force her way through the plot hell if people wind up liking her for it we're gonna have no choice but to call her a Mary Sue brunt I mean Sauron I mean hunk plays the Diplomat and asks permission to stay which is immediately granted them for three days by big bushy beard albeit on condition that Mighty Morphin Power elf doesn't leave the palace grounds so she says she won't be a prisoner and he makes some quip about kneecapping stallions and seek to imprison the mighty commander of the northern Army and the extras were obviously told to laugh at this but I didn't it didn't make any sense and it wasn't funny bird permission is granted in any case and the show needs to move on so it has Mighty morphod power elf just accept the offer and despite having just threatened to kill someone or even everyone to get what she wants punk goes up to Ocean man as the meeting disperses everyone has simply stopped paying attention to them because well we're about to see why and he hugs ocean man to thank him for saving them on the raft while he's hugging ocean man he steals Mighty Morphin Power elves dagger back now I am no magician but um how where does where does he hide it he doesn't have any sleeves he can't have concealed it in his tunic without moving his hands there's no Gap I could detect where off screen he might have been able to do this ocean man is looking at him the whole time and you'd think an experienced Warrior such as he might have guarded his weapons a little more closely then there is a weird nonsensical exchange between Mighty morphod power elf and hunk where Mighty Morphin Power elf nags him about saving the people of the Kingdom we learned he was thrown out of in the last episode but he just wants to stay here now because there's opportunity and peace Great Character motivations here much consistency it just reminds us how spectacularly rushed and contrived this entire setup as being she jumps off a cliff uh oops scripting error but hey don't we just wish she jumps off a ship thousands of miles from Shore she just happens to swim by a raft that just happens to have hunkerboard they just happen to escape gutudu's gay fish and immediately set about having an argument that just happens to contain all the information she needs to know where to go to find some Orcs and kill them um please remember this it becomes very relevant later and he just happens to have on him the symbol that proves that he's exactly the person she needs to know to get her there uh I guess his desire to stay makes sense if he's Sauron oh I have as I think I mentioned at this point spent an ungodly number of hours discussing these episodes over at efap and there's been some disagreement as to how to interpret hunk's stated desire for peace not only in this scene but in some subsequent scenes as well I think this Brew was amongst those who believed that what the show's writers are going to attempt to do is to essentially have Galadriel Force Sauron to turn evil again in other words his desire to stay and to find peace is genuine and it will be her fault that he turns evil again in the course of the discussion that became worryingly plausible I am still I am still sticking to my theory that he is subtly manipulating her to take him back there at the head of an army to give him what he wants there will be some dialogue at the end of this episode which Ike maintained supports this point but having fleshed this out with the EVAP guys I I'm not as sure as I would really really want to be the show is not going to try and tell us that Sauron was actually good genuinely a good guy in this scene are they actually going to try and make Sauron like an anti-hero or a tragic character or someone who could be good if he wanted to because that just breaks so much stuff but I guess we'll find out as hunk and mighty morphod power elf leave the room big bushy beard has a chat with Queenie about Mighty Morphin Power elf they're both nervous that she's here and their cautious of giving her too much Freedom or indeed help of any kind big bushy beard deploys one of the show's less tortured metaphors when he says that launch can start with one stone now it might not be the best example with Rich to raise this point but since it has occurred to me now I will it is acceptable it is even understandable if one or two characters have a fondness for idioms for metaphors for similes the problem rings of power has is that anyone and everyone is liable to come out with this kind of thing albeit with a much more painful and convoluted example irrespective of their place age background and natural speech patterns and the problem with that is that it means the writers are shining through their characters dwarves should not share speech patterns with new minorian nobility elves should not share speech patterns with not Hobbits when all your characters speak in the same way or use the same overtly ornate devices it is you as the writer who is speaking through them and it is obvious to the audience that that is what happens when the characters are so shallowly written that you can see the writer beneath their skin that is not a good thing big bushybeard then explains to Queenie who elendil is I mean shouldn't she know he seems like a pretty important General in her Army but [ __ ] it he also explains that Lendl has a son in the Navy which is our excuse to cut away to the ocean where we are introduced to a seal door sailor twink and his band of semen they're training for the the right to graduate to become full proper full-blooded full-bodied semen but sailor twink gets distracted by an island West numenor which we'll learn later as some significance to his family and somebody almost dies but it's fine nobody even tells him off we just get a weird captain talking bollocks about the sea I'd call him Mako tsunami but I'm not sure there are enough Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged fans in my audience at least the ocean will never leave me right ocean why don't you ever answer me ocean [ __ ] it though I can't think of a better name for him do actions have no consequences in this Navy sailor twing just almost got somebody killed because he was daydreaming no one not him not the rest of the crew was upbraided for that everything just moves on as though a massive breach of protocol routine health and safety and discipline had not just occurred I wonder if that will be relevant later too Mako tsunami is full of boilerplate oceanic wisdom there is no harsher Master than the sea it's all he says in response to one of his semen going flying through the air for no very good reason and then once they're unsure the best the best one from being potential the sea is always right [Music] right how how the [ __ ] you delivered that with a straight face I don't know what what does it mean how could anybody write that down look at it on a page hear it in rehearsals hear it on set and not think you know what no that's shite I'm gonna have to do that again although this guy seems to know sailor twinks Seaman friends have some strained banter and then because we don't have enough characters in this show already a horse turns up with sailor twink's sister in tow and the horse is a better actor than she is she is another invention of this show so no doubt she'll go on to be very useful and worthwhile addition to this already bloated cast we then cut back to some more backfilled Exposition as Queenie gives ocean man a lesson on numenorian history and philosophy the white tree which yes is the ancestor of the one we see in ministereth the Valor and the faithful then she has to clumsily tide into the show's dialogue to keep up the pretense that it is not just doing another of its many Exposition dumps now is this the most significant or damning of issues no but once again it is very lazy writing and it's much less engrossing for it and as I said in the last video frequent laziness is indicative it portends much greater writing cock-ups to come this episode is going to go on to give us a prophecy of the downfall of numenor which is the reason for this Exposition it's only been placed here because the writers belatedly realized that they needed to actually clearly audience in on something of what happens this is such CW level writing I think I've used this example in other videos but there is a Batwoman episode where she needs to take an incredible shot so the show how however many episodes or even seasons in by that point decides to tell us in the same episode that she's a crack shot [ __ ] showing the audience don't bother building that up never mind arranging it so that when the moment comes we can see it as an extension of the knowledge we already have about them nah it needs to happen today we didn't realize that until this point so I guess we better come up with some rapid fire exposition to just you know cram it in there so it makes sense when you see it in a few minutes time a billion dollars folks a billion dollars went into this show Queenie quizzes ocean man on the origin of his name elandel and what that means elf friend according to one translation which conveniently allows her to interrogate him on whether he truly is an elf friend an inform us then that elves have been unwelcome in numenor since the time of her grandfather's great-grandfather um well except that her father is in the law and I think has already been established in this show to be fond of the elves uh is this a contradiction I don't know that it is necessarily a contradiction because the show just hasn't done enough relevant World building to contradict anything yet but married with what little information the average viewer has it is at least paradoxical we know that her father likes the elves and we know that he was or if her title is to be believed he still is the king and he's just not on the throne because he's unwell and people didn't like him now though we're informed that his predecessors and her contemporaries all hate the elves and she is shall we say aren't fully ambiguous on this point to be clear I'm not asking for a point by point explanation it is acceptable it is desirable even to leave the audience asking questions are the two problems arise here number one the best way to encourage questions of the audience is to provide them with Loose Ends of at least a partially formed tapestry which we don't yet have and then number two given the pace at which we're flying through events we're going to be leaving numenor again very soon does the audience actually have time to ask these questions and consider the possibilities before they cease to be timely and then number three if events move on based on conclusions the audience has not been able to reach how much of what follows will make sense is it even supposed to make sense I get the strong impression it's moving so quickly in the hopes that we Overlook the fact that it doesn't make sense and then [ __ ] me the dialogue again it just continues in its horrible horrible way Queenie asks why ocean man bought Mighty Morphin Power elf back to numenor he says the sea put her in his path and the sea is always working this is always right to which she responds the sea cannot commit treason what the [ __ ] does any of this mean damn it I played that actual Galadriel clip I'm not too worked up about the apparent contradiction these are two different groups of people different attitudes different upbringings maybe the C did something mean to Collateral at some point in her past but no the interplay between the sea is always right and the Sea cannot commit treason the implications seemingly being that ocean man did or might have committed treason by obeying the sea which is always right so in that case why is that treason if the numenoreans believe the sea is always right is the sea suborning treachery is this some kind of fishy entrapment going on how do these characters actually reason their way through these sentences or do they not is it just as all the rest of the dialogue is designed to give the vague impression of meaning and import but no actual substance because writing is hard ocean man tells her that he only did what he thought was right to which she responds if that is truly your wish what what if oh my [ __ ] giddy [ __ ] if what is truly His Wish why do these sentences not string together he said he only did what he thought was right does she mean that thinking he was doing something right was his wish he wished to think that he was doing something right well that makes dangerously little sense it's not that he wished to do something he believed was right is that he did something he believed was right this is clumsy as [ __ ] this is drunk clown on a pogo stick dancing through a Minefield writing find better words you hacks but anyway she says that if whatever was truly his wish was truly his wish she needs him to perform her a service and that then is this episode's first Cliffhanger scene transition these work when they are used sparingly they do not work when you overuse them which is what this show has done and will continue to do I suppose it wants us to be intrigued but I'm still stuck trying to untangle that [ __ ] dialogue but that's probably for the best because I would otherwise be very very very bored moving on you might think that given we've just been introduced to a brand new and very important place with brand new and very important characters that the show might decide to linger here for a while to actually start building things out beyond the bare scaffolding they've just started directing but no we have another Indiana Jones map sequence and we're over at the Southlands with Don Lemon and the Orcs that for reasons known only to the show's writers they have decided to turn into vampires occasional vampires anyway but sometimes fry when they are exposed to the sun this of course is not law accurate the law is more subtle than this the Orcs hate the sun because of the history they share with melkor the Valar plays the Sun in the sky quite some time after the trees are destroyed and even melkor in some sense fears it Orcs then are weakened by the sun they fear the Sun and they shun the sun saruman's genius with the urukai was in creating a Genus derived from the orc that could nonetheless move in daylight with relatively little issue but the Orcs aren't incapable of moving in the sun they aren't supposed to fry as soon as it makes contact with their skin they just hate it and loathe it and fear it in this show though they fry sometimes but they have a genius work around they wear clothes yeah that's all it takes they wear clothes this this has more issues than Ezra [ __ ] Miller at a nightclub if the Orcs can go around in the Sun by wearing clothes they have no problem being in the sun just get [ __ ] dressed you cretins or have one Orc in every 10 carrying a parasol as I think morla suggested the show is also quite selective about when and how they fry sometimes they do and sometimes they don't they don't fry if there's a cloud over the Sun for example but in that case just burn stuff and hide under the smoke oh God oh God foreshadowing there are lots of ways though that you can limit the sum if all it would have taken to equip them for the sun is a sombrero and a poncho it would have made all the battles of the third age so much easier Sauron probably would have won and of course we get more problems Don Lemon explains that the passages seemingly go under much of the Southlands and that this must be how the Orcs Escape detection and then because the show doesn't dress us to remember the events of previous episodes it clumsily reminds us by having some nameless co-prisoner explained that the Orcs are searching for something and Don lemon's immediate response is some kind of weapon perhaps gee what a very convenient plot relevant assumption to make the most convenient plot relevant of all the assumptions you could make hey guys remember that sword in the last episode that's relevant remember look have some handy dialogue to jog your memory from characters who have absolutely no connection to that sword and so no reason to immediately make this conclusion and for [ __ ] sake it can't help itself leave any character talking for more than 20 seconds and they will inevitably [ __ ] up something they just finished saying remember how this guy literally just finished telling us that the Orcs had been tunneling to avoid detection well he's now informed us that they've been ransacking Village after Village meaning they would have been [ __ ] detected you let his shagging [ __ ] weasel we have this problem in the last episode incredibly far-sighted elves with watchtowers dotted all over the place and didn't spot the tunnels fine fine you have to be kind to the writers but you can make that make some kind of sense but scores of ransacked Villages the last one was on fire for [ __ ] sake there was Smoke billowing into the [ __ ] air do you not think they might have noticed that and Hell the stretch of the tunnel they're digging now is out in the [ __ ] open they have to chop down trees to make progress through it we get a panning out shot where it turns out they've been burning the forest down along the line of the tunnel oh writing oh show oh no and now we have characters just magically knowing [ __ ] the tower warden from the last episode who you'll probably have forgotten all about but whom we're obliged to remember because the show is about to make us try and care about him well he just randomly comes out with all the plot necessary information the Orcs are searching for a thing they've ransacked Villages for it they have a successor to morgoth they worship him they call him Ada etc etc and the warden thinks that Adar is Sauron who we were recently told the elves had forgotten all about but I guess we've forgotten that the elves had forgotten all about him okay then how does he know all of this how long has he been here how do the timelines work in this show we have no idea how much time is elapsing per our previous Don Lemon scenes it's pretty much a straight line perhaps half a day between him leaving the warden at the Village flirting with his woman finding the sick cow finding the burned out Village going into the tunnel and getting captured assuming I'm right about that how is the warden being captured and discovered all this in that little time how of all these elves being captured in that little time apparently nobody told the Orcs that careless talk costs lives we're told that ADA which is an Elvish name could well be Sauron because Sauron had many names I have no doubt the show is going to want us to think the datar is Sauron at least for a little bit but nah my money is still on hunk for reasons we will come back to we get another dumb simply sweep the enemy from these lands like salt from a table uh but then thankfully they're interrupted by an orc before anyone can point out that that makes no [ __ ] sense the orc tells them to cut down a tree the warden doesn't want to cut down the tree because the writers know [ __ ] all about elves except the most superficial things they decide to have a rebellion to save the tree there is a tweet there is a tweet that says this is the most Tolkien of all the things shills just get in the [ __ ] sea the head orc guy randomly then promises water rations but of why I mean it's self-evidently a trap surely no one is going to be a silly [ __ ] take the water nope the warden is a silly [ __ ] and he takes the water he passes it around and some random we don't know or care about gets his throat cut and the show goes all slo-mo and the music gets very sad [Music] as though we're supposed to feel really deeply sad about whoever the [ __ ] this is the problem is I'm pretty sure the only line we've had exchanged between him and any other character until this episode is something about him smelling praise where it's due the choir music here is lovely this is something McCrory has shown he's quite good at there have been a few occasions now where things have slowed down quietened down and he has deployed the choir to good effect the problem is that the music is trying to evoke emotions we just don't have for what we're seeing we've only just arrived we barely even know our protagonist in this scene Don Lemon is for all intents and purposes a plank of wood with a face drawn on it all we know of him is that he fancies that um that one that woman still don't know her name we absolutely do not know the warden or that we know about as much about the warden as we know about Don Lemon this is the first time then we spend any meaningful time with him and we absolutely know nothing whatever the [ __ ] about the random guy they have just decided to kill I think we may be seen him once before he's basically just an NPC he has no established relationship with Don Lemon he has no relationship at all with the audience he has no relationship with the plot except that the plot needed to sacrifice an NPC In This Moment but anyway everything slows down we get the pretty quiet music and Don Lemon is very sad and the show is blatantly reaching out to pluck on our heartstrings but we haven't even got that instrument out yet we've had no reason to this is all just stuff happening it's paint by numbers it is entirely unearned hell compare it even with hammer in The Two Towers Hammer is ferdin's door Ward he's the guy who greets Aragorn Gimli Legolas and Gandalf and tells them to hand over their weapons we know more about him than we know about this elf guy Hammer is killed by a wag on the way to Helm's Deep and the film doesn't so much as pause to take a breath to linger on that we're invited then to feel a bit sad later when we meet his son but that's it that's quite subtle but then you make the connection and you realize that this is what war entails and no one really has time to mourn yet rings of power though is taking a character with less development than [ __ ] hammer and portraying it as though it were the death of Boromir it's just a a very very strange choice and it doesn't even add anything to the show because we get straight back to the argument about the tree and Don Lemon agrees to cut it down and save everyone's lives he apologizes to the tree he has a bit of a cry such Tolkien the music tells us that this is all very significant and it's supposed to be we know the elves do love nature but absolutely nothing about this scene has been earned and then because the show can't resist its panoramics it does decide to do more damage to its setup Orcs tunneling to avoid detection nah needn't have bothered they can just burn and defile whole areas of Woodland along the line of their tunnel they can build a massive [ __ ] trench and nobody gave a [ __ ] Christ in the Prius anyway back in numenor Mighty Morphin Power elf is sneaking off but ocean man just happens to arrive in precisely the right place at the right time to catch her and so she naturally threatens to kill him this is just her default setting I don't mind ocean Man by contrast I think he can act he also gets some half decent lines but here he has done a dirty because he's been used as one of the most glaring contrivances in the show so far we learn he speaks Elvish she asks how he knows it he says it's still taught in the Hall of law back at his hometown and so for um reasons I guess because the writers couldn't think of any other way to get the plot moving again they're off they're off across numenor immediately she knows exactly where they're going he says it's a short ride she says did you say ride and no this is not an invitation for them to [ __ ] but it is the Prelude to our eyes getting [ __ ] by perhaps the most cringe slow-mo shot in the last decade's worth of slow-mo shots [Music] that's that's embarrassing it gives one of mccurry's motifs a chance to try and impress itself upon us but we are quickly distracted by this wanton self-indulgence it kind of works for the horse it kind of works for the dress it categorically does not work for the face humans generally look a bit weird in Ultra slow-mo anyway but they look especially weird when they've been told that they have to look Overjoyed but have no real idea how to convey that emotion Mighty morphod power elf doesn't look happy here she looks like a bit of the saddle has gone up somewhere it shouldn't have and because we're in very slow motion she is stuck like that in pain grimacing in much the same way as the audience is there's absolutely no reason for this shot again you could have fixed it with a simple alteration keep the slo-mo for the horse in the dress speed up again all the way or near enough for the face shot also I don't know maybe get her a new face or at least ask it to try another expression I assume they had multiple takes of this is this really the best one they had the Jackson films had their slow-mo moments of course but these were a seldom this slow and B seldom this slow on facial close-ups and see seldom deployed this pointlessly they were used in the main to convey a point the reaction to Gandalf's fool which masterfully contrast with the pace and freneticism of the preceding Chase and provides payoffs that are still tension of the fight with the balrog then boromirs Doom when we realize he's going to die but he has resolved to lay down his life for his friends there are a couple that are only used for contrast purposes like the Nazgul chasing the hobbits through the woods in Fellowship for example but by and large they all add value to their scenes and perform some sort of dramatic purpose this shot though well it adds a bit right up until the face shot Mighty morphid power elf isn't a bad looking less normally but here penises across the world did shrink and be downcast with much fear and suffering the shot closes with a random lingering focus on a piece of rock that looks like the geographic embodiment of whatever it was she accidentally sat on to make that face and then we cut back to hunk who is trying to block himself a job as a Smith this by the way is evidence for his Sauron that's Sauron was known in his time as a master smith he was also a shapeshifter with obvious ties to the Southlands since these will eventually become Mordor he also needs to reach numenor in order to corrupt it from within and given this Show's Pancham for speeding up the most relevant details the fact he is already here would be very convenient for the writers there is other evidence too some of which we will see later such as his pawnshop for manipulation the show is trying to throw us a bait to distract us even Steve in the last two episodes was they think designed in part to have us asking whether he might be Sauron after all is lying in the fiery meteor crater for example resembles a flaming eye the fire around him is not hot and cold fire is established in episode 1 as being evidence of great evil his arrival in a meteor is not too dissimilar to his preferred mode of Transport at the end of The Hobbit while it also seems to bring death alongside it the blackening Leaf in hand later the dead fireflies in his but Steve is still quite obviously supposed to be Gandalf even if the next episode is going to lay it on exceptionally thick but the show wants you to believe otherwise the only argument against tonka's Saron that has any Merit I guess at this stage in proceedings if you haven't seen the subsequent episodes would be Ada to whom we shall shortly be introduced Adar is in the right place the South lands at the appropriate time Sauron should have been there the numenoreans will depart from Middle Earth to fight him which could allow them to capture him and bring him back but he would have first or at least at some point to come into contact with calibrombo for the forging of the Rings If Adar were the Sauron of the law which he quite clearly is not if I had to place my bet before seeing the subsequent episodes at the time I was drafting this first version of this script my bet was that Adar would transpire to be a foil a lieutenant of Sauron who may indeed be captured and bought to numenor but hunk will still be Sauron and well we'll see if I'm proven right anyway hung isn't allowed to work as a Smith until he has a special badge so he picks a fight with a young Brian blessed who has said badge Brian blessed is a stupid fat hobbit I mean a man he is very anti-immigrant I'm looking forward to where this is going I'm looking forward to it about as much as I would look forward to being given an enema with sulfuric acid but hunk becomes Brown again he can shapeshift into characters from better shows apparently and he buys everyone a round of drinks which allows him to steal Brian blessed's badge I did wonder where he got the money for the food and beverages he buys them here but I don't think it's a huge twitch of the imagination to suppose that he stole someone's purse he walks off with the badge but again conveniently Brian blessed and his gang of goons know exactly which side streets he went down and they Corner him at which point he decides he knows Kung Fu and he beats the [ __ ] out of all of them whereupon he is arrested over in the library it transpires Mighty morphid power elf wanted to go to the hall of law she was fortuitously told about before her horse aneurysm to find the meaning of sauron's symbol but if you thought that was contrived just wait just just wait it's gonna get so much worse the library looks Lovely by the way it's aesthetic is delightful but you will note how full it is Scrolls parchments shelves and shelves and shelves of the stuff it'll take the best library in a good long time to find any reference to so obscure a symbol as the one Mighty morphod power elf found because remember she searched for centuries and she only found two of them even if angry floorboy found one in episode 1 because the show exists on mystery box writing but [ __ ] that the librarian courteously Waits long enough for Mighty Morphin Power elf to have a perfunctory law building conversation with ocean man about elrus who built the library whose brother is elrand they also just about managed to squeeze in some problematic law substitution it's explained that the King was forced from the throne because he was too nice to the elves in the law he was indeed nice to the elves the only King drawn from the ranks of the faithful in a good long time and the last while numenor stood but in the law he died which paved way for our farizon to marry his daughter tar Muriel and take the throne rings of power has a much clunkier version of events here ocean man explains that they forced him from the throne because he was nice to the elves and now he spends his days in a tower in the palace but tamiril his daughter rules in his place as queen regent which poses problems in the first place I'm not sure it will be typical to Dethrone a king only to ernoble his daughter his closest relative and the one personally closest to him if your reasons for dethroning him were his perceived disloyalty to numenor would you not have deposed his entire house his immediate relations in order to install a rival claimant from your own faction in the second place Queen Regents as opposed to Queen ragnan's typically rule conditionally the exercise power derived from another source such as an heir who hasn't yet come of age I don't believe that she has any children in this show so with whose power is she acting as Regent it can't be the Old King surely because he was removed except that he still carries the title of King and later we'll see a mighty morphid power elf demand to negotiate with him over Queenie herself which leaves you with the implication that she is acting as his Regent but she can't be his region if he was dethroned because that would seem at least to have missed the whole damn point of getting rid of him to begin with World building [ __ ] it no one needs this kind of stuff anyway Mighty morphod power else exchange with ocean man is far shorter than that legalistic Spiel and the librarian pops back into the scene it hasn't been more than three minutes in Universe since he first laid eyes on the incredibly rare symbol she showed him and yet he has near instantly found the one document in the entire library that they need to move the plot along and my God how they move it along brace yourselves for this it's a doozy the entire Library just happens to have one piece of paper on which that symbol has indeed been drawn without apparently reading anything at all ocean man explains that it is the account of a human spy retrieved from an enemy dungeon but this then must have been hundreds if not thousands of years ago by the way but I guess the paper survived and there is a symbol drawn on it to record the tower's location Mighty morphid power elf looks at it she looks at her copy of the symbol they are indeed the same she says wait a moment I must be blind she walks over to the map underneath the picture of elrond that she saw earlier she places the symbol on the map and turns it around and wouldn't you know it it's a symbol depicting [ __ ] Mordor my God but it gets worse the inscription on the ancient piece of fabric is written in Black speech you might remember that elves find it painful even to listen to Black speech but [ __ ] it she's fine we however are not because the speech is so foul uncontrived that the sky darkens and we feel Doom upon us Mighty Morphin Power elf translates and I quote directly it speaks not only of a place but a plan by which create a realm of Their Own or evil would not only endure thrive plan to be enacted in the event of morgoth's defeat are his successor what the where where'd you even begin where can you start with writing like this so to recap fortuitously a human spy was locked up in a tower in the Southlands thousands of years ago somehow while he was locked up he heard the evil people lay out in every relevant detail their diabolical scheme to create an evil realm where evil could thrive created by morgoth's successor and either the evil people laid out their diabolical schemes with an earshot of the human spy who just happened to have a quill ink and parchment on him or they wrote all of this down themselves with all the information that Mighty morphid power elf would need thousands of years later to explain the plot to the audience of rings of power they're a [ __ ] Bond villains more serious than this this is this is underfucking believable you thought the weird slo-mo constipation shop with City no no you do not know what silliness is listen Mighty Morphin Power elf jumps off a ship is picked up by a raft that is a contrivance she means useful and probably evil hunk that is a contrivance when they are then picked up by a ship that can't legally sail where they're floating well that's also a contrivance when they are then brought to the one place she needed to be to get to the library she just learned about in a chance conversation that that's a contrivance where it turns out they have one copy of a thousand year old spy's account from the Southlands with a map of Mordor which she spots because she happened to see a map earlier that is a contrivance and this thousand-year-old spies account just happens to lay out all the Bare Essentials of sauron's Master Plan what absolute cognition retardant Womble brained inbred platypus wrote this [ __ ] and to top it all off it's irrelevant it's all irrelevant she already knew about the Southlands she was already going to the Southlands all this does is fast forward to the conclusion of a mystery the show could have surprised us with or at least surprised its characters with hell have her go to the Southlands and arrive too late have her go there and realize what she's up against is so much bigger than she could have foreseen have her beaten back have her lose have her knocked away have sauron's full might be revealed as a shock to her do anything do anything except this this is staggering the awful writing the only thing that could possibly make it worse is if when she arrives in the Southlands it turns out that this entire sequence is irrelevant because all of that happens anyway and um well we'll get to that and you know what it gets even better because this symbol is a map reference right it's a map reference for the Orcs to follow do you know what um do you know I'm just give three guesses three guesses I'm gonna give you like 10 seconds do you know what you generally need for map references to make sense [ __ ] Maps let's play a game here's a random symbol guess what it is go on try it have another three guesses you're gonna need it to get to the next Mystery Box because that's how good things are written you know what this symbol is right it's quite obvious to you I'm sure you know what it is yeah yeah exactly you were right let me just open Google Maps let me just find the bit of the map I was looking for let me rotate that symbol and yeah you were completely right as I'm sure you guessed it is the island of Thera in Greece that's where you're going and you knew that definitely you you absolutely figured that out didn't you yeah the Orcs definitely have access to Google Maps everyone in Middle Earth has Google Maps no they didn't ask the [ __ ] Google Maps either this map point is so widely known across Middle Earth that the Orcs know exactly where to go just by looking at it in which case it is so widely known that Mighty Morphin Power elf didn't need to wait until she saw the map in numenor to make this connection or you do need the map in which case the symbol is probably useless to the vast majority of Orcs because Orcs do not carry [ __ ] Maps around with them what is this writing a billion dollars it's a billion dollars worth of writing a billion dollars but they couldn't hire an actual non-retation not a single one [ __ ] Dora the Explorer is better than this [ __ ] Lego Star Wars puzzles are better than this my God sought it we get some more intriguing music but it bizarrely doesn't at all fit the scene it depicts [Music] this music is Sinister it reminds you kind of maybe of the dwarves but instead no this weird ominous soundtrack is the transition to the [ __ ] office only I mean they're not Hobbits prancing around singing a cute little song what the hell is going on in the show I wonder if the ominous soundtrack is foreshadowing some dark turn in their story but um again going back to my first draft of this script I had no idea I had no idea but we're coming to that in a moment don't worry don't worry we're gonna get to the Harvard's that's um that's some special [ __ ] now I said in the last video that the not Hobbits at least had some charm to them they are losing it however quite quickly in their first shot in episode 3 which decides it wants to do a little pantomime dance with them you might remember that this group is hyper cautious and afraid they have a pressing need to migrate because there have been Hunters spotted in their close vicinity recently do you maybe think that prancing about and chanting through your secret little gypsy Village might not be the best thing to do if your goal is to remain hidden and because things are spiraling rapidly downhill do please remember the words [Music] nobody goes off Trail and nobody walks alone because the show is about to turn this previously affable bunch of communitarian Gremlins into darwinian monster midgets who probably eat their own dead yep [Music] yeah that's that's where we're going Brandy's dad twisted his ankle in the last episode and he's still feeling it so having just heard that nobody goes off Trail or walks alone we learn they fear that they will be left behind because he can't carry their Caravan on his twisted ankle oh yeah well well if you're watching this for the first time you might be thinking maybe that's an unfounded fear maybe they're just fretting needlessly they wouldn't seriously just leave their injured neighbors behind to die would they but I'd say is though that they'll be fine because they'll stay at the front of the Caravan that um that poses some logistical questions in the first place how if your leg is [ __ ] in the second place even if you started at the front of the Caravan wouldn't you be so slow that you'd eventually get to the back or do you mean to say that the people behind you wouldn't overtake the slowest person in the front but if they wouldn't overtake the slowest person in the front why would they leave behind the slowest person in the back what's the difference this is some weird poverty variant of the trolley problem where both of the answers are [ __ ] even packs of wolves travel with the slowest member in the front are you really suggesting so are you really trying to tell me that this charming affable bunch of protojippos are less civilized than [ __ ] Wolves At Night Brandy and paj have an argument about helping Steve find Lenny Henry's Starbuck oh and guess what they have a fight guess what the fight's about Brandy being silly and naive and adventurous and just not like the blah but blah blah blah every [ __ ] time stop it we know we know this every scene every scene has the same argument you know the rules were not supposed to be out this bad if we didn't do everything we weren't supposed to do we'd hardly do anything at all we can't believe I missed them maybe artists are closer to home that way you don't miss anything don't you ever wondered what else is out there I've told you countless times we have each other we're safe that is how we survive Brandy with your father's nose and always poking us into trouble you are far too curious and meddlesome to have been born in Harford what's that supposed to mean I didn't go looking for this but you're not turning away because I can't that's because you won't why is it your problem play a different tune show we know all of this I'm bored of this now I would like to have some character development please you've had three hours okay being you know being kind let's be kind these two characters do have some chemistry it's a shame though that they're given very little to work with Brandy finds the relevant page in the star book but she's interrupted and she has to hide happily Lenny Henry stops to compose some poetry or maybe another racist comedy skit that he won't ever be canceled for and it gives her time to steal the page she needs as Podge turns up to distract him the scene has its merits the not Hobbits are still on the whole Charming if you forget they're about to abandon their injured friends and just toddle off merrily the show then borrows from Bilbo's party speech quite overtly in fact Randy and parjo kind of marry and Pippin too the show is not afraid to um borrow from older and better Productions again though I actually think well okay okay I have to split my mind here when I first drafted this script I thought this was a nice scene it does actually do some good work fleshing out their lives their society it fills in their memories and their feelings it is on your first watch before you know what comes next it's a lovely scene but um well well what happens next they're about to kill their maimed and injured but they're Charming but that darwinian [ __ ] bags but they're lovable except they're about to eat the sick like roadkill probably but but they're cute guys things things have become very weird and they only get worse Lenny Henry gives a warm emotional feelingly written scene remembering those of their Community who have died and that's that's all quite lovely until [ __ ] I can't believe Until you realize that a lot of these people were um well should we say euphemistically Left Behind meaning they didn't die suddenly they weren't attacked they weren't murdered by outside strangers lots of them probably could have been saved they were just left behind on the road to fend for themselves and and die off or or as we'd later learn in episodes no five is it maybe they were actually kneecapped by their neighbors just actual sabotage and this this makes this speech severely dark because after each name and cause of death there's a chorus of we'll wait for you miles bright happened stuck in the Snows of the mountain pass we wait for you as I said on efab this is this costume is trolling because you didn't wait for them that's why they're dead you selfish little [ __ ] well my prediction I have to oh yeah oh no that's embarrassing my prediction in the last video was that the injury to Brandy's father would prevent their migration and lead to them staying longer in the camp the camp would then be beset by an evil of some sort her community would be massacred and that would force Brandy Steve and probably Purge out onto the road together her carrying a burden of guilt at this chain of events having been caused by the very adventurousness she once desired but now has no choice but to indulge in it might have been a little bit formulaic a little bit obvious but I think that's a serviceable device that's what I was expecting them to do but every time I expect the writers to do something obvious but competent well they surprised me they surprised me I never anticipated that they would go off migrating and just leave behind their wounded like [ __ ] Savages hell Ada the big bad guy this show is teasing is about to show more remorse for a dying orc than the not Hobbits show for their close neighbors and kin oh no oh what have you done to these people meanwhile Steve examines the page from the Starbucks Brandy got him and accidentally sets it on fire because I'm because [ __ ] it I guess I mean something had to happen this is something therefore this had to happen he panics he knocks stuff over he causes a panic rather than run away though or butcher him like the awkward brutal little Savages they apparently are now for some reason the not Hobbits just kind of hide but then Steve has learned Brandy's name now good job someone asks I'm [ __ ] if I remember her real name and this prompts them to come out of hiding though it also gets her in trouble the group interrogates Brandy and this is another opportunity for you guessed it the same [ __ ] argument will you please [ __ ] stop they proposed to kick it out but Lenny Henry says Nah their Caravan can come but it has to be at the back of the line and this is bad of course because it means they'll be left behind it's the father's fears manifest though I'm still unsure of the logistics of overtaking or the morality of overtaking if they're allowed to be overtaken they can still end up at the back and get left behind anyway and then there's another problem because if they already know where they're going what's to stop them just arriving later than everyone else ah and you're recall I'm sure that the song earlier said that nobody walks alone unless they do apparently they're obviously going to leave them behind what's even the point of singing that song if you're just going to abandon your Kinfolk anyway it's a lie it's a big fat lie you little [ __ ] liars and for this to seem anything other than jarring as hell the show really needs to do more work to expand on this point it will and oh no I regret saying that because it will do more work later it just makes everything worse subtle hints of barbarity though you could have thrown those in earlier at least it wouldn't have come as such a shock if you unfailingly portray the not Hobbits as close-knit lovable communitarian bobble heads but then suddenly have that assumption exploded by revealing that they are probably cannibalistic little murderous Psychopaths the viewer is left doing all of the work on behalf of the writers in an attempt to justify it and hmm can you work your way toward a justification at all I mean if you're being incredibly charitable and I mean incredibly charitable you could say this is supposed to depict an earlier more callous time a less civilized doggy dog world or Hobbit eat Hobbit world but again dad's viewer doing work on writer's behalf that's being charitable toward writers who haven't earned the charity if past experiences any guide it's much more likely that they're just so bone-headed they didn't even spot what they were doing the same old argument about Brandy being unnaturally bold and adventurous continues to play out but this one at least has then a flavor of Steve I now regret that choice of words Brandy believes he's special but no one agrees with her apparently the law has determined that anybody who breaks them will be a d Caravan but Lenny Henry shows the mercy and says Brandy's Caravan can still come but as aforementioned it must be at the back of the line which means the same damn thing doesn't it and then we have another another argument and it's exactly the same again we'll once more forced to ask why does everyone in this show speak in the same tortured similes and metaphors but the tallest milkweed gets snipped writing is just really really really hard back in numenor Ocean man sailor twink and generic sister are having dinner together sailor twink says he wants to defer and go back to their home in the western shores of numenor for reasons not adequately explored and it will be forgotten by the next episode ocean man though says there is nothing there the past is dead this bear in mind after he's just come back from a library where the past was actually really [ __ ] useful indeed so okay well being fair to the writers they are pushing at some deeper darker reason for all of this but once again the dialogue doesn't match up with prior events this is why at the beginning of the first video I said that seemingly insignificant laziness in the Small Things is worth pointing out it really is so often indicative of an approach that creates many more and many bigger problems later on then a messenger arrives and reminds us what sister's name is but I mean [ __ ] if I'm gonna remember there are too many of these barely relevant NPCs to begin with I have a nasty feeling this one will be forced to be relevant the next time the show tries to eight Game of Thrones because in subsequent episodes she's going to start flirting with beardy Boy's son I don't know his name either and that's going to be unfailingly horrific to witness the relationship between ocean man and sailor twin has some promise some potential I'm not [ __ ] romantically no it's not that like Game of Thrones I hope but they do actually seem to have a semblance of life history and it's a bit of a shame that we're not spending any more time with either of them to really flesh this stuff out and that the show keeps trying to distract us from it with more stuff as happens here with the Revelation that sister has been accepted into the Builder's gold um will that be relevant later I I don't I don't know and I don't care Mighty morphod power elf presumably still being hunted because remember she broke out of jail anyway she finds her way into prison where hunk is being kept though how she knew that's where he was I don't know and it turns out that she's found something else in the mystery box another thing from the library with the Sigil of the king of the Southlands on it the same sigil as that won by hunk meaning [ __ ] hell comp reading this out reading this out it doesn't make any more sense because he's wearing a symbol on little little Broach thing and she found that off screen in the library of contrivance that means that he is now the king of the Southlands undoubtedly undeniably though that makes that's how this show works that's logical that makes perfect sense all right there's no nothing to fault without reasoning well I didn't accept that of course having just discovered the evil enemy plot is conveniently written down on a thousand-year-old piece of fabric waiting for her to go and read all about it and realize the Mortal Peril all the world faces she then stuck around for a bit I guess looking for another symbol that she just happened to remember seeing him wearing when they were on the raft together and having that that argument I I kind of think I have to restate this just to take it in she goes she goes to a library the library has the one thing to decode the Mordor symbol and the map she needs for that it has a message from evil guy and that message tells her what the evil plan is and how much trouble the world is in but she doesn't rush back she stays in the library she reads a few more books she looks for the symbol maybe or she just finds it by chance I don't know because it's off screen the symbol matches the one that how brand Sauron hunk is wearing that makes him the king of the Southlands because he's wearing a brooch that he could have just picked up from anywhere and that he tells her he lifted from a dead man but she doesn't believe him so so nah just [ __ ] it I don't get whatever this show has this perennial problem with a flow of information are we actually meant to remember the Builder's Guild stuff from earlier do you even remember the Builder's Guild stuff for murder you know I mentioned it like two scenes ago but so much has happened in the five minutes in screen time there's a lapse since then the stuff with his sister you know the whole she joined the Builder's Guild she's flirting with Chancellor's something if that's important why put it right before this much more important Revelation about the supposed Royal lineage of hunk if you place secondary information for ancillary characters right before huge main plot relevant information dumps there is a good chance the audience will Overlook or forget about the former entirely and this is doubly unforgivable since the show really doesn't feel its time that well there are long stretches where nothing happens more competent Riders would have shifted events around in the timeline so to speak allowing for a more even spread a more constant flow of relevant information secondary characters being built up without being overshadowed by the main plot and its protagonists you even have placed the Builder's Guild information right back towards sister girl's first introduction to us she arrives on the beach to meet with sailor twink they have a short conversation on the way back in which this information is dropped nothing else of note is happening around that scene anyway comparisons with Game of Thrones are again invited because Game of Thrones at least through its first four seasons was very good at spreading this stuff out amongst his large and growing cast but perhaps a more pertinent comparison will be from the two towers do you remember the kids that you see very early on as Saruman is speaking to Sauron about how he will attack Rohan and we get a flash away to a village where her mother is shepherding her children away onto horseback and sending them off to ederas to escape the oncoming Army of dunland these kids recur I believe four times across the entire film they're scenes I don't think a single one of those scenes lasts longer than 30 seconds you see them escaping you see them arrive at ederas which is how they become aware that the villagers are being ransacked you also know in not seen from one line of dialogue from the little girl that their mother has not joined them there you then see them again when they arrive at Helms Deep where they are reunited with their mother and then finally I believe you see them once more when all the men and boys are called away to man The Walls against saruman's armies four short scenes I don't think they take up in total more than three or four minutes of screen time it's actually a little subplot in its own ride and it perfectly builds up the stakes for that battle scene because you've got a family torn apart you've got the joy of them being reunited and then you have this sudden tragic realization that this boy we've seen who's been so brave so far is likely going to die because he's being torn away from his mother again in a bid to save his mother and sister he's being conscripted incredibly efficient really fills out the world makes it seem like there is always something going on it's placed at a proper distance between important scenes that the full weight of it takes place so we at least notice it it's not bundled in two seconds before the next big fight scene it's a way of conveying the profound emotion the way the world feels about the events taking place within it brilliant example of writing that is the direct antithesis to the approach to writing taken by rings of power where there is not thing for vast oceans of time and then just random pieces of maybe relevant information thrown in so soon before a major plot relevant piece of information that it might as well not have been thrown in at all because no one's going to pay any attention to it that driver dispensed with we learned that hunk does not want to be king there is some hint of backstory given about the war with morgoth which Mighty Morphin Power elf seems to say that the noldor that's feyenoor's house started Punk points out that his people sided with morgoth and this leads Mighty morphod power elf to suggest that they can redeem both of their bloodlines but again this makes no damn sense without the kin slaying and the Flight of the noldor and the banishment that we overlooked from episode one it's not there if that stuff still exists in rings of powers World which will probably be retroactively explained if it does everything else has been then she couldn't have been sent back to valinor in episode 1 because they were banned from going back because of the kinslaying and so she couldn't ended up here for those of you joining this series in this video If you haven't seen part one yet the explanation of it is there but the short form version is when in episode 1 we learned that morgoth destroys the trees the elves take up their swords to go to Middle Earth to fight against morgoth that's what episode 1 tells us in the actual event Mongolian destroys the trees angodians is the mother of sheilob at the behest of morgoth morgoth steals the silmarills which have been invented by feyenoor and he kills feyeno's father fan or Wants Revenge The Valor tell him not to go he tries to leave anyway his fellow elves the taleri elves refused to let them use their ships so the noldor massacre the Larry elves is the first kin slaying and they leave on those ships for this they are banned from returning to valenor it is the ban of the noldor if this show is saying or suggesting that there is a kinslaying which it seems to be given Mighty morphod power elf is talking about redeeming both Bloodlines then she can't have been going back to valinor so she can't have jumped off the ship so she can't have arrived in numinal so she can't be standing here so none of this could have happened we learned that Mighty morphod power elf's grand plan part of it anyway is to elevate hunk as king and persuade the people of the Southlands to rise up against Sauron she says theirs was no chance meeting or fate to all Destiny it was the work of something greater greater is not the word I'd have chosen for this writing team but it sure as hell wasn't fatal Destiny it was desperation and the needs of bad writing back at the palace we find Queenie saying portentous things to her father apparently the moment they feared is here the elf has arrived there is a prophecy apparently so we're now further compounding the problem of backloaded information within the last what five minutes we've had supposed character development for ocean man sailor twink and generic sister but that was quickly overshadowed by the mystery box Revelation that hunt is maybe a king and that he and Mighty Morphin Power elf will join forces to raise a rebellion in the Southlands which is at least competing for our attention with the new knowledge that there is some mysterious prophecy in numenor as Queenie related to us though she is talking to a [ __ ] vegetable because her King is paralytic and this dialogue is really only meant for the audience's benefit and then back with the not Hobbits Brandy's family Caravan does indeed fall behind because Dad can't walk though Podge is Brandy's friend so she stays behind with them one thing to note here parch has no parents with her she's is the only one on her card which means that her parents are some of those um Left Behind which means in the scene where they're giving the speech memorializing their dad she is going along with Lenny Henry taking the piss out of parents that were probably killed and eaten by the harfords she was probably forced to eat her own mother lends a really different tone to that scene eh anyway they're struggling but then Steve well was he in the Caravan it really looks like he's climbing out of the Caravan here and that makes it that much harder to carry but the alternative I guess is that it's just bad film editing and he was just hiding behind it the whole way but anyway he emerges from behind and he fixes it for them and he says friend um well how he's learning these words I have no idea it's not as anyone spending any time teaching him Steve incidentally appears to have abs in case anyone ever had a weird fantasy about a ripped Gandalf if you did you're strange but it will make do this is the best you're gonna get though it does make you wonder why they didn't even try and enlist his help back at the start why did they not ask him to carry the Caravan for them and then back with the Orcs it all gets a little bit Matrix as the elves rebelled against the slavers who are vampires in this show when it's convenient for the show to have them as vampires this time they do fry in the sun one elf gets free but he gets an ax in the back as he jumps up the tree roots the fight progresses there is a full comprehensive and if I may say so myself rather entertaining breakdown of this over at evap it's a long one if you want the full thing the link is in the description my short form version of it follows Don Lemon does a ridiculous [ __ ] move and knocks the Orcs tent down except not really he knocks part of it down but it doesn't seem to have any effect at all on the course of the fight partly because the show is once again capricious with its Orcs and their sunburn so I guess the move was just there to look cool and I've heard a few people principally in response to Mighty morphod power elf's takedown of the troll in episode 1. pointing to Legolas taking down the Muma kill or surfing on an urukai Shield as though this means any elf for any reason can do do anything they like because it looks cool this is a silly argument as it happens I am not overly fond of the Mumma kill scene but its point is to serve as multiple payoffs Legolas is a muted character throughout the three films he has few lines he is not especially expressive he has few opportunities to really show himself and he has given few moments to shine in conversation or an interaction so sparingly Jackson gave him these wow moments part of the point of which is to be funny because of the contrast if Legolas went around doing that kind of thing in every fight scene it would have seemed implausible it would have seemed objectionable it would have removed all sense of threat and Menace from any battle he is involved with the Lord of the Rings trilogy put in a lot of time and effort to earn him two moments of what you might call Pure badassery which in both cases is supposed to lighten the mood a little bit from what might otherwise have been an oppressively Bleak and intense battle these are moments of character idolization that work by contrast with his normal strength and narrative breaks that interrupt severity to stop it from becoming monotony meaning that they are narrative payoffs as well and then of course in the mumikil sequence it serves as the payoff to one of the trilogy's few and longest running jokes the kill count competition between Legolas and Gimli personally I find the Mumma kill a little bit cringe sure but it isn't thoughtless it serves a number of purposes and in some cases has payoff for long-running setups if you have any elf any random elf do implausibly brilliant things whenever the plot needs it to happen or because the director is talentless and want people to be superficially impressed by the spectacle you are doing something very different that is thoughtless not thoughtful it is laziness it is not earned reward that has potential impacts on the plot going forward because we're left to ask in any seemingly perilous scene any of these elves is involved with well why should we really bother investing in it and why should we feel any kind of tension when we know they can just invoke bullet time and awesome their way out of whatever Corner they've been backed into because this is all just lazy and intended to make us superficially impressed by a protagonist who still has no character to speak of after three hours of episode it accomplishes nothing in the fight scene itself the Orcs unleash an absolutely horrific CGI work that looks like a pug with some kind of syndrome and by horrific I don't mean the in Universe this is a horrifying creature I'm faced with kind of sense I mean out Universe it looks unbelievably [ __ ] it looks cheap which isn't something you'd expect to say of a show with this budget its movement is terrible at times it almost looks stop-motion compare it with the two towers Works 20 years old now it's staggering that they should have got this so badly wrong I know Rags likes them but he has strange taste in dogs Don Lemon snags the pug in some chains and does another Matrix leave starving the orc leader in the neck stick the almighty the Glorious the wonderful stick and allowing the warden we barely remember to escape he climbs out of the pit the wag goes after him but Don Lemon saves him with a spear uh is this was this was this actually stop motion can you do mocap on stop motion its movements are so jaggedy and weird and uncanny everybody involved in this should be fed to some actual bugs from 2002. everybody's favorite newly demoted CNN anchor goes to climb up after him but he finds that the warden has been shot in the lower mid abdomen with an arrow that I well again another argument about this on evap I insist this would not have killed him no way I mean the shock might have stopped him right but hell Boromir kept going with four of the things in him Don though who remember has just used Matrix powers to do incredible jumps cannot make the jump we just saw the warden make I do love me some super power consistency now you might think even if he did get up he'd just have been shot but oh no no indeed just wait until you see what the next episode has in store either the Orcs are selectively terrible shots or Don Lemon has plot armor so thick it actually bends the air around him and we get to see him actually catch an arrow in mid-flight so he'd have been fine if the show had let him get up the top of the trench but it can't do that yet because we need our Cliffhanger ending so he gets grabbed and pulled down and bought before well okay the show wants us to suspect that this guy Ada is Sauron well for reasons that previously explained I'm still pretty sure that this is a deflection hunk still my bet for Sauron I'd put pretty good odds on it then again hell I was wrong with my prediction about the not Hobbits because it turns out that what I consider to be the bare minimum level of competence for the writers to meet is in fact far above their Collective abilities 90 of the time but this brings us to the end of episode three now I think I've taken up quite enough of your time already so I don't propose any lengthy preparation though I will take this opportunity to issue a warning on efap we were asked to rank the episodes from worst to best and I'm pretty sure the conclusion went something like [Music] 867-54321 which means I've already covered the best this show has to offer and it's only going to get worse from here I'll be taking a short break from the series to recharge this video has been one long nightmare to make and I'll be moving on to cover black panther 2 wakandan Boogaloo before I return to rings of power theoretically because I am now a full-time YouTuber subsequent installments will not take quite so long to put together but I am not setting a deadline because setting deadlines is an invitation to miss deadlines my goal is to finish this critique series before Mauler gets done with Game of Thrones I do have a couple of announcements before we close as mentioned and if you're a regular Watcher you'll have heard all of this already I have just become a full-time internet person if you'd like to support my work here there is a patreon link in the description as well as the usual Super Chat and super thanks options and channel memberships are now open giving you access to custom emojis and such these are primarily a means of donating I'm still mulling over suitable rewards packages I do a monthly Patron shout out and that'll round off this video the little platoon is also expanding I have a second Channel and I am currently planning to turn that over to Shorter reviews response videos and bits of Music my colleague who runs our sub stack has just launched his channel as well which is worth checking out if you like Posh English reactionaries talking culture politics and religion links for all of this are in the description we also plan on relaunching our weekly current affairs show on a new channel and there will be news on that when I have it finally as mentioned at the top the response to the Call to Arms I issued in the previous video an encouragement to create and to share with other creators has been literally overwhelming hence the fact I'm still working on replying to everyone who has messaged me on the back of it as I have suspected there are plenty of you out there with brilliant ideas and immense creative potential sadly there are too many of you out there with all of that for me to review everything that's been sent I'd need about five parallel lifetimes to get through it all but that potential absolutely should be tapped and so the plan at the moment is to create a Discord server and then later on a website where we can all gather together share scripts stories artwork and ideas for the same offer feedback and criticism collaborate and generally start building our own crowdsourced Mythos to replace that which we've lost to the Barbarian morons in Hollywood and the artistic establishment the website will take longer to put together but I hope to have the Discord server up and running in the next few weeks some of you have kindly offered your services already I still have no idea what I'm doing even anyone else wants to lend a hand setting it up and modding it please get in touch with me on Twitter link for that is in the description as well All That Remains for this video is the monthly patreon shout out so my heartfelt gratitude goes too and here is the moment where I butcher your names silver Kur David Murphy disembodied Lego Head Metal Jazz disco Greg kleich Instinct Cole Bowman a shiny sword Ethan zirkle ocella dragger drag Dre draggle job kirkich I think wolfbane Juno how to Maki Kim Nexus slidebelts.com Tito obici JK Zach Connell Trevor Jerry French Daniel Zahn MLP Keith Holmes Jr Thomas Adams Ricardo rakis gabalduck Tristan Richardson Stephen Diaz Rayne Steinberg inverse flip PT d2012 Verner bital ATS 67 Paul F Dennis Michael envist Nick Shandy Joshua Rosenblum ghost pants Joe Schumacher Panic chicken curious Borg Todd Stone nexolius flopmeister Zachary Daniel Ronald matar Stephen Ralph Greg Kane Tobias linkholtz basso Matthew Coates Aaron Hugo's desk Nate Mallory Benedict Schneider Alex Sean ledden T Grimm now random Supernatural quote random character Sami Q dark streams music s Tony yep Brandon cartinelli John Cole and Jenny thank you all and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: The Little Platoon

Views: 618,144

Keywords: Rings of Power, Rings of Power review, Rings of Power critique, Nerdrotic Rings of Power, Rings of Power is bad, Rings of Power battle, Galadriel, Sauron, Rings of Power trailer, Rings of Power episode 3, Rings of Power episode 4, Disparu Rings of Power, Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, Return of the King, Tolkien, Tolkien interview, Middle Earth, Howard Shore, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos interview, EFAP Rings of Power, Aragorn, Helm's Deep, Legolas

Id: XYgcSEW6nPc

Length: 131min 56sec (7916 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 08 2022