Episode Seven, “Doomed to Die,” opens with Celebrimbor working on the nine rings. He is still under Sauron’s illusion. Outside, the towers of Eregion are being torn down by catapult fire. Annatar tells Mirdania that Celebrimbor’s mind is gone, and that Annatar is taking over the defense of the city. Adar’s army turns their attack to the cliffside, bringing rocks down to dam the river. Narvi realizes that the ring has taken over the king’s heart, and he and his men side with Durin IV and Disa. Elrond has come to see Durin. Durin tells Elrond that he is about to overthrow his father, but Elrond has come to ask for Durin’s aid in saving Eregion and Celebrimbor. Celebrimbor realizes that the world around him appears to be moving in a loop, frozen in time. He breaks free of Sauron’s illusion and sees the truth of what is happening to Eregion, who Annatar really is, and that he has tainted the mithril Celebrimbor used to forge the nine rings.
Celebrimbor finds Mirdania and tries to tell her the truth about Annatar, but no one believes him. Annatar uses his power to knock Mirdania over the wall, making it look as Celebrimbor threw her; an orc kills her. Annatar promises Celebrimbor that he’ll spare Eregion if he finishes the nine rings. Cavalry from Lindon arrives, including Elrond and Gil-Galad. They charge, but stop when Annatar reveals that he has Galadriel. In parlay, Adar tells Elrond that Celebrimbor has fallen to shadow, and that Elrond cannot save him. But he can save Galadriel by exchanging the ring. Elrond refuses the offer, and asks to say goodbye to Galadriel. He kisses her, secretly passing her his broach.
Durin IV addresses the dwarves of Khazad-dûm, telling them of Sauron’s attempts to enslave the world with magic rings, and that the strength and loyalty of dwarves is far greater than Sauron knows. The dwarves agree to march to Eregion to aid the elves. Elrond sends his forces to defend the walls of Eregion. As the battle turns, the orc Grugzûk (Edward Clendon), tells Adar that many orcs are dying. Adar says that he loves them too much to let them become Sauron’s slaves, and that they must breach the city at any cost. Adar discovers that Galadriel has escaped. In disguise as an orc, Galadriel witnesses Adar carrying out funeral rites for the dead. Several orcs discover her, but they are killed by Arondir’s arrows. She discourages Arondir from sacrificing himself in an attempt to take down Adar.
Narvi reports to Prince Durin that the king has killed Narvi’s men and is going to dig. Narvi worries that he will set free the beast under the mountain, and that if Durin takes the army to Eregion now, there might not be a Khazad-dûm to return to. Alone in his workshop, Celebrimbor comes to a decision and tries to destroy the rings, but they are indestructible. He chops off his own thumb in order to free himself from the manacle Sauron has chained him with. Outside, soldiers try to return him to the tower when Galadriel arrives and stops them. Celebrimbor tells Galadriel about the nine rings, and gives them to her, asking her to save whoever she can while he buys them time to escape and carry the nine out of Sauron’s reach.
As the elves take down the siege engine, Adar sends a giant troll into the fray. In the tower, Annatar looks for the rings. Celebrimbor’s soldiers attempt to arrest Annatar, but he makes them kill each other instead. Elrond, Arondir, and Gil-Galad work together to take out the troll. Adar leads his remaining forces into the fray as dawn breaks. Elrond declares that the dwarves are coming, but only a lone elven rider, Borohir (??) arrives to tell them that Durin recalled his army. As the remaining elves engage with the enemy, Elrond continues to insist that Durin will come. Arondir fights Adar, and falls. Elrond watches the rest of the elves die as the orcs breach the walls. Adar takes the ring from him.
Here’s the trouble with the storytelling of The Rings of Power: We can see it very clearly here in episode seven, because in the character of Sauron (Annatar) it is arguably the most important, and therefore it’s the most obvious when it fails.
Throughout the series, the writing often fails to seed important themes, plot points, or motivations before they become relevant.
Eärien’s character is a perfect example of this. She is introduced to us in season one, but she only becomes a character with motivations and opinions when the plot needs her. As a result, her actions seem to come out of nowhere. Although she states aloud both her anger at Míriel and her mistrust of the “elvish stone,” because we knew nothing about her, we don’t know how to interpret her motivations or see any kind of character arc: Whether she always was against elves and elvish ways or whether she came to that hatred, and that hatred of Míriel, only because of her brother’s death is important to her character, to Elendil’s character, and to understanding the greater conflict in Númenor. The same can be said of Pharazôn, whose envy of elvish immortality and access to Valinor only comes up after he is crowned. The temple that he has destroyed, and the “old ways” that Míriel and Elendil follow, are ostensibly part of the connection Númenor has to elvish ways, and should have been set up from the beginning in order to have the escalation make sense, and be clear in the minds of the viewer.
There are other examples, but the most important for this season is the question of Sauron. The conversation with Celebrimbor, in which Sauron brings up the torture he suffered under Morgoth, raises thematic questions about the nature of corruption and evil that are actually quite interesting, but ultimately left me asking the same question I have been asking all season: How does the show intend me to understand who Sauron is as a character?
Sauron relates his manipulation and imprisonment of Celebrimbor to his own experience at the hands of Morgoth, asking if Celebrimbor can imagine what it is like to be tortured by a god. This empathy, he suggests, is why he doesn’t like to have to treat Celebrimbor this way, and he insists that he himself is the victim of Celebrimbor, forced into doing things he doesn’t want to do because Celebrimbor wouldn’t just make the rings. It isn’t far from the language that a human (or their fantasy equivalent) abuser might use towards their victim. “Why do you make me be the bad guy?” “You don’t know what it was/is like for me and my pain.” etc. Celebrimbor even points this out, and the viewer is reminded of Adar’s own description of being corrupted by Morgoth and meeting Sauron for the first time.
However, Sauron is not a mortal. He is a powerful spirit, a fallen-angel-esque figure. In the source material, the corruption of Sauron is mythological: There’s no real explanation of whether he went willingly to Morgoth’s seduction or was dragged forcibly into darkness, because for the story, it doesn’t matter. Then, in season two of Rings of Power, Sauron is a person, often a point-of-view character, and the viewer is the only one who sees everything that he is doing, starting from the very opening of the season, with his “death” at Adar’s hands and his rebirth as Halbrand. Throughout the season, Sauron is given some classic cinematic moments that would normally be given to a sympathetic villain or even an anti-hero, e.g. the old man from whom he obtains the sigil of the Southern kings encourages him to find hope and to forge a new path for himself. He endures suffering at the hands of Adar and the orcs, and hears a story of his own past from Adar’s point of view. He even befriends an animal and gets it to kill its masters for him.
Then comes this speech, this reminder that even Sauron was, perhaps, not always evil; he was tortured and turned, just as Adar was, by someone who was at least as far above Sauron on the power scale as Sauron is above Celebrimbor, and probably more. And later, when Celebrimbor tells Galadriel that perhaps no one in all of Middle-earth could be strong enough to resist Sauron, it seems that we are meant to wonder if anyone in creation, mortal, elf, or maiar, could be strong enough to resist Morgoth.
It’s an interesting direction to take the story, given how much the question of corruptibility is a part of The Lord of the Rings. In that series, Tolkien asks if humans (and their fantasy contemporaries) can be strong enough to destroy something that should never have been made, as an allegory for what he saw in modern industrialization and modern warfare, but he also brings in a very Christian perspective on evil: While men may be “weak,” and dwarves “greedy,” and elves “arrogant,” the evil of Sauron is something more than that of mortals. It is Evil with a capital E, a corruption that comes from outside the human condition. To strike a balance, thematically, between these two very different E/evils isn’t easy to do. The Rings of Power isn’t managing it here, with Sauron, because this story comes too late. We don’t know if he believes any, or some, or all of the words he says to Celebrimbor; for all that Celebrimbor suggests that Sauron does believe them, and that he is deceiving himself even as he deceives others, it is not at all clear whether Celebrimbor is right.
Sauron also claims to be different from Morgoth because he doesn’t want to destroy but to perfect. He uses some version of the word perfect several times in the episode, and he tells Celebrimbor that his goal is to use the rings to create “a perfect peace.” The concept of a villain who wants to control everyone to “stop war” or “for their own good” is a common one in media and literature, and it felt very silly just thrown in there like that. Again, if this is actually supposed to be important to Sauron, it should have been seeded earlier. If it isn’t, then it is a very loaded concept to just drop in and move on from.
This is a shame, because the scene between Galadriel and Celebrimbor is actually quite powerful. As Celebrimbor suggests that no one in all of Middle-earth is strong enough to resist Sauron and wonders if the fight really is about strength at all, the viewer experiences a moment of foreshadowing, knowing what it will take to destroy Sauron for good, knowing what it will cost Frodo Baggins to carry the One Ring, infused with every bit of will and malice and hunger that Sauron ever brought to bear on the likes of Galadriel or Celebrimbor or anyone else, knowing that even Frodo will eventually succumb to it, at the end when the mercy of Bilbo Baggins comes to rule the fates of many. But coming as it does on the heels of Sauron’s confession, one is left wondering if we are supposed to think of Sauron, who was once a servant of the Valar, but who was not strong enough to resist the will of Morgoth. Because who, really, could be?
If Celebrimbor is right, and Sauron is deceiving himself most of all, perhaps that is the actual thematic takeaway from the episode. Perhaps the point is not being strong enough to resist, but in being open-eyed and honest with oneself. While Sauron insists that he is Celebrimbor’s victim, Celebrimbor confesses to Galadriel that he intentionally blinded himself to the truth of who Sauron was, because he wanted what Sauron offered so badly. In this confession, Celebrimbor distinguishes himself from Sauron, and takes ownership of his own part of his corruption.
Elrond and Durin’s reunion was one of the best scenes, and one that was actually beautifully seeded in the series. The viewer comes to this moment with all the knowledge of what Elrond’s last request for aid led to, and what has happened to Durin III and to the dwarves because they gave that gift of mithril. When Elrond suggests that what has been happening to him is more dire than what has been happening to his friend, the moment is painful, and comes off as selfish and self-centered, though Elrond’s perspective, as he faces battle against both Adar and Sauron, is understandable. Thematically, it was clear that Durin’s choice—to focus on his father and the dwarves’ own dire situation or to take his forces to aid the elves—would have dire consequences no matter which way he chose.
In his speech to the dwarves of Khazad-dûm, he claims that Dwarven loyalty is greater even than their love for their mountain home, but leaving Durin III to his own devices and potentially setting the monster free doesn’t just mean the potential loss of the infrastructure of Khazad-dûm, but the death of all those civilians who would be left behind while the army went to aid Eregion. Durin has a choice between loyalty to his friend and loyalty to his people, and it may be that Elrond won’t be able to forgive him that choice. After all, we know that the Elrond of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings didn’t care for dwarves much, or trust them, and something must have brought him there.
Perhaps, if Elrond learns that Galadriel was able to take the rings away from Eregion, he will be comforted by the fact that at least that much of their objective was achieved, and that his followers’ sacrifice was enough to stop Sauron from obtaining them. After all, the reason Durin couldn’t fulfill his promise is somewhat the elves’ fault; it would be a lot, morally speaking, to expect him to sacrifice his own people’s safety to ride off and fight for someone else. But Elrond and Durin probably won’t have a chance to talk about this, which will help stoke that division. Aramayo’s heart-wrenching despair and shock as Elrond repeats over and over that Durin is coming, shows how much the seeming betrayal might affect the elf going forward, and why it might be difficult for him to trust again, even if he can be brought to understand.
Aramayo also shines in the parlay between Elrond and Adar. As Adar reminds everyone, Elrond is a politician, and the way he uses his words and controls the situation, despite being severely disadvantaged both by the situation and by Adar’s numbers, is some of the best writing of the series, and beautifully executed by the actor. (I’d also like to give a shout-out to the way Clark played Galadriel’s bafflement over the kiss.)
The deaths of the Lindon elves at the hands of the mountain troll are pretty brutal, but it’s the deaths of Mirdania and Elrond’s archer friend, Rían (Selina Lo) that made the most impact. Rían’s, at least, is a heroic death, rather reminiscent of Boromir’s in The Fellowship of the Ring, but it lacks impact because she was never as developed as a character. As a result, though I love an impressive elven archer and I couldn’t stop thinking about Haldir in The Two Towers, Rían’s death becomes all about Elrond’s experience of it. Which feels especially egregious following Mirdania’s murder.
I can’t see a single point in killing the character off that way. It’s clearly supposed to be a thematic escalation, with Sauron becoming more and more willing to throw his metaphysical weight around, but it doesn’t add anything to the sequence of events. There isn’t even a big reaction to her death—I thought at least the point of killing her would be to further turn the elven soldiers against Celebrimbor, but they keep the same attitude throughout, and later it only takes one quick comment from Galadriel to convince them that Celebrimbor is telling the truth. Celebrimbor is upset about her death in the moment, but it quickly gets lost in everything else he has to worry about.
Mirdania’s character has paralleled Eärien’s this season, and suffered from the same shortcomings—her emotional journey in being manipulated by Sauron (and feeling cast aside by her mentor) hasn’t been given any attention, in the same way that Eärien’s journey in siding with Pharazôn (and feeling cast aside by her father) hasn’t. Both women exist as background and as reflection of the journey of the two more prominent male characters—an example of the stark limitations of the show’s attempts to add female roles into a narrative that doesn’t have many in the source material. Tolkien’s work doesn’t have nearly enough female characters, but if you aren’t going to make them fully-fledged, why add them at all?
I also wish the show had been a little more clear about who Fëanor was, considering how important he is to Celebrimbor’s motivation. He’s been mentioned several times, and the hammer has featured prominently, but his identity has never actually been explained, just as the palantir have never been explained, just as the silmarils are mentioned off-handedly without explanation. It would have been simple enough to actually give Celebrimbor a little speech to someone about Fëanor in a way that could make it clear why Celebrimbor feels like he has such big shoes to fill. Really, since in The Silmarillion, Fëanor’s creations and choices shaped the situation and choices available to the elves who followed him, there was a lot of opportunity here to do something really interesting.
Granted, there may be rights issues to what the writers have access to use in this case, but so much focus is given in the show, and in this episode in particular, to the fact that Sauron and Adar were both in some ways made by the influence of Morgoth. We have half a history, allusions to the fight that came before, to the actions that shaped the enemy, but not to what shaped the good guys. We don’t know why the elves are fading or who Fëanor was and why Celebribor is so driven. We know Galadriel is driven by the murder of her brother, but have little context to what the fight that led to his death looks like. We don’t understand the roots of the conflict in Númenor, either.
This world lacks depth, pretty much everywhere except with dwarves and with the Harfoots, and I really felt it in this episode.
On a completely different note, is it bad that I watched Celebrimbor spoon mithril out and thought, dang, that mithril looks tasty? It felt like I was watching an ASMR video of someone making fancy coffee. It was a really nice little moment of cinematography, and the finished nine rings also look a lot better than the three and the seven, so props (heh) to the prop makers here.
Next week, the season ends…
