Rings of Power’s Grand Spectacle Hides Its Realest Riches

Rings of Power has perhaps, in the eyes of many people, finally become the show they always wanted this week in “Doomed to Die,” as the Siege of Eregion begins and all that doom and gloom plot stuff gets promptly shoved out of the way for a grand old bit of elf-on-orc action. The good news: the elf-on-orc action is, for the most part, the most sumptuous and grandly scaled fight material Rings of Power has put to screen so far. The better news, however, is that the show still remains at its most interesting away from the slick sheen of an unconscionable Amazon budget.

“Doomed to Die” is an interesting sister episode to season one’s “Udun.” They’re both moments where Rings of Power puts aside its desire to pingpong across Middle-earth to explore its myriad disconnected narratives to focus on a climax of grand action, and for the most part, they’re the strongest episodes of their respective seasons so far. But whereas “Udun” leaned heavily on the unfamiliarity of its conflict in the battle for the Southlands—and excelled in playing with that, from the tension of not knowing if most of the involved characters would make it out at all, to the shocking climax of Mount Doom’s eruption—”Doomed to Die” is almost entirely about the dread inevitability of a thing you know the outcome of. Whether you’re a Tolkien diehard or not, you know from the get-go coming into this episode that the Siege of Eregion is not the Battle of Helm’s Deep, or Pelennor Fields: it is a sacking. Characters we’ve been following all season and beyond are going to die. Sauron is going to get his way around the rings of power. Things are going to get much, much worse, before they ever get better, and that “better” is nothing like the status quo our heroes have largely been used to before this moment.

In many ways, the episode’s title is about this familiarity: it’s not just referring to specific characters or the fall of this city, it’s about change itself: Middle-earth does not escape this particular conflict without being changed, without balances of power diminishing and rising, and touching almost every aspect of the show we’ve had so far. As such then, it’s great that for the most part the episode rises to the occasion: Rings of Power has been selling a war since we first got a glimpse of season two, and now it’s finally given us one.

The action, for the most part, is fantastic, playing with familiar scenarios in interesting ways as Adar’s forces truly begin to make the extent of their threat known. It’s compounded by the internal conflict within Eregion itself as one of the initial major breakaways from all the fight-fight-fightiness going on elsewhere, in that we get to see Celebrimbor begin to grasp the nature of what’s really going on in his domain, noticing and then eventually breaking out of, to his horror, Sauron’s illusions as the mask falls. With Sauron no longer caring about Celebrimbor knowing who he really is, Vickers gets to slip back into that chaotic gremlin energy he evoked while still masquerading as Halbrand in season two’s premiere, and while some of it is hilariously petty—it’s grim, but I couldn’t help but cackle at the little magical force-push he does to help make it look like an addled Celebrimbor has just sent poor Mirdania catapulting off the side of Eregion’s walls and right into the convenient path of an axe-wielding orc—for the most part it’s a joy to watch Sauron’s facade fall just as readily as Eregion’s defenses are.

There’s a particularly great moment after Celebrimbor has been re-detained and Sauron thinks he’s managed to truly break the man—that everyone else now believes he’s lost his mind because of the horrors around them, even despising him for his failure to command the defenses—and can now force him to complete the nine rings for mortal men, now fully aware that his work is truly corrupted by Sauron in body and spirit. But Celebrimbor, who was already strong enough to figure out the loop in time Sauron had trapped him in, manages to stand up to the ascendant Dark Lord at his smuggest and actually rattle Sauron for a moment, nailing him as a great deceiver of himself as much as any other denizen of Middle-earth.

Celebrimbor’s fate has been sealed from the second he’s been on the show, but it was really smart for Rings of Power to play this moment with some agency for the forge master, rather than having him completely undone by Sauron’s manipulations. It gives the battle unfolding around them the dramatic weight it really needs, and gives us some of that Lord of the Rings-ian sincerity and hope along the way. Celebrimbor knows he’s doomed as much as we do, but he still resists, he still finds ways to stand up even as he knows his end draws near, and he’s willing to use that to make the necessary choices to stave off Sauron’s success as long as he can, like managing to steal away the completed nine rings and deliver them to an escaped Galadriel after she makes her way into the besieged city.

How she gets there is perhaps the low point of the episode, an intrusion to the momentum of the battle of Eregion just as it’s really getting started—both narratively and literally. Elrond and Gil-Galad’s grand cavalry charge into the orc lines is stopped entirely by Adar whipping out a cage containing Galadriel at the very last minute, slamming the pacing of the episode and the aforementioned charge to a halt just so Elrond and Adar can have pretty much the same chat he already had with Galadriel last week. It’s really weird, especially as it’s all to set up a climax where Elrond, believing it’s the last time he’ll see Galadriel alive, kisses her out of nowhere. Given just how up and down their relationship has been this season—for the most part, really down!—the vibe is unexpected in a bizarre way, even if the show eventually justifies it as Elrond making a distraction to slip Galadriel a brooch/lockpick to get out of Adar’s camp, but it just feels like such an odd twist to their relationship at the expense of necessary narrative chess piece-shuffling. Especially so when the show provides its own simpler opportunity for Galadriel’s escape shortly thereafter, when Arondir, who’s finally finished his jog across Eregion, conveniently bumps into her at the camp just as she’s about to be spotted by the orcs. Same contrivance, significantly less weirdness!

But anyway, that’s one low point among many highs, and the fighting gets to continue, there’s lots of fun action as the siege slips from day into night (the Elrond/Arondir/Gil-Galad team-up to take down Damrod the Hill Troll is particularly good). Hey, other fantasy shows take note—it’s a legible night battle! You see things that are happening! But again, the battle itself is largely an empty spectacle—not that that’s a bad thing, mind; it’s nice to see Rings of Power flex what it can really do with the tools and budget supplied to it. It’s just not where, for the most part, the show is actually doing its most interesting work in this episode.

The other big break we take from the fighting in “Doomed to Die” sees Elrond, before his little tete-a-tete, ride for Khazad-dûm to request Durin’s aid in the battle at the worst possible time for the dwarves, as Durin and Disa truly begin their little rebellion against the King. Again, Owain Arthur is the show’s MVP here, as the scene with the two friends reuniting at these darkest times for each other—Elrond about to command his people to a war not seen in an age, Durin about to stand against his father for the sake of his people—is another of the season’s highlights. But it really again is an interesting juxtaposition of what happens in Khazad-dûm and Eregion. The latter is the conflict of the show, it is the war of the rings that this all built to, but Durin’s decision to stand with the Elves and his friend, and to stand up against his father’s ring-induced recalcitrance, just has a heart the stakes of Eregion don’t really have by their very nature of being so grand and all-encompassing for the series. Everything with the dwarves hits just as hard as the stuff with the siege does this episode, even if the latter is full of tragic death and destruction, because the show has done such a great job in particular with the emotional heart of Durin and his father’s relationship this season.

But all that leads to the climax of the episode, and, as with all good Lord of the Rings battles, a reminder that things have to get really, really shit before that glimmer of hope sparks through. As dawn rises on Eregion’s battered walls, the dwindled elven forces find that Elrond’s dwarven reinforcements aren’t coming—Durin has been waylaid by his father’s ailing mind as he digs deeper and deeper into Khazad-dûm’s depths. It’s a fantastic cliffhanger for the show because it, at long last, gives the siege the weight it was largely lacking in that grand scale. Everything finally, really truly feels hopeless, as a broken Elrond can do little more than mutter that his friend is coming while Gil-Galad rallies the remaining elves to face down Adar’s encroaching second wave. He is, at last, ascendant himself: he stabs Arondir out of nowhere during the melee, he batters down Elrond and takes Nenya from him, and Eregion is now all but his. Now we just have to wait and see how that perpetual glimmer of hope will break as Rings of Power barrels right into its grandest finale so far. The storm’s been weathered, but it’s far from done battering hero and villain alike just yet.

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