Last week in the three-episode season premiere of Rings of Power‘s sophomore outing, no one but Sauron was having a good time. To the surprise of very few people, this week in episode four, “Eldest,” not only do characters who are not Sauron continue to not have a good time, arguably they are having a somehow even worse time than they already were. And that’s kind of the thing: everything is so bleak right now, the world itself feels like it’s beginning to respond to evil’s rise.
“Eldest” does, on the surface, not particularly have much going on to advance the encroaching, inevitable doom pervasive throughout Rings of Power‘s second season so far. There’s a few plotlines we don’t follow up on at all, like besties Annatar and Celebrimbor engaging in totally-not-sinister jewelery crafting, the political turmoil in Númenor in the wake of Pharazôn’s eagle-backed populist surge, or the dire plight of Khazad-dûm that Durin and his son are beginning to reckon with. If anything, the show is beginning to splinter its already fractured storylines even further, as this week we not only pick up a new plotline with Nori and Poppy encountering their fellow halflings in the Stoors as the separated Stranger runs into Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear, already having a blast with this whimsical, powerful, heavily accented piece of Tolkien history), but we also seemingly see Arondir and Theo’s paths diverge after the latter’s rescue.
What we do get to see, in spite of it being more of these separated plotlines, is unified in a few ways. The least interesting but perhaps most pertinent way to Rings of Power‘s overall narrative is that, as we mentioned, everyone’s really miserable. It’s not just a mood thing, although that’s part of it. It’s like the evil that sprung forth from Mordor’s manifestation and Sauron’s mask falling off of Halbrand at the end of season one has just begun to fester across all Middle-earth. As Tom Bombadil mysteriously notes to the Stranger after taking him in, he is so old he has seen the land change from verdant fields to barren deserts as malignance has slowly taken hold. The orcs that Galadriel and Elrond’s company begin tracking now don’t just wander in broad daylight, they march the roads in armies, destroying forests and picking off wildlife as they go. As Arondir, Isildur, and Estrid—who, surprise, really was a former, although not exactly by choice, member of Adar’s wildmen—go out on their search for the missing Theo, we watch the lands around Pelargir just grow increasingly despondent, from dwindling forest to outright swamp.
Even when this natural sickness is not directly manifested in the world, it’s represented by the ugliness that’s burrowed into the hearts of mortal folk. Galadriel and Elrond are practically almost always at each other’s throats as they bicker over who’s really leading the Elven company to Eregion, spurred by the latter’s distrust of the former’s ring of power, and her desire to wield it above any cost if it means stopping Sauron. This becomes even more prominent by the episode’s end, when she stays back to let Elrond and the remaining elves flee from orcish patrols, leading to her capture by none other than Adar himself. Meanwhile Isildur and Estrid’s will-they-won’t-they relationship goes through an absolute rollercoaster after Arondir clocks that the wound on her neck was actually an attempt to disguise her allegiance to Adar. Even as she argues she had little choice in the wake of the Southlands’ transformation, and even as she helps both him and Isildur survive during their search for Theo, this mistrust between them all constantly drives tension whenever we return to that subplot this episode. Back in Rhûn, things are less explicit, but we still see Tom almost fear the Stranger asking him to help him control his magical power, and confront his destiny to counteract Sauron’s evils, because he’s already seen another wizard fall to that growing evil in Ciarán Hinds’ mysterious Dark Wizard. Even the Stoors are standoffish when Nori and Poppy find their way into their small village, only to have that distrust turned upon them when the wizard’s easterling forces come knocking in search of the new halflings.
But even though that’s actually quite a decent chunk of what’s going on in “Eldest,” it’s really, like we said, the least interesting manifestation of this festering evil. It’s all perfectly good character stuff, but it’s miserable people largely being miserable with each other, and we’ve had a lot of that in season two already. The actual response that goes beyond the misery we’ve already seen taking root in the hearts of our heroes is that of Middle-earth itself: the natural world has been disturbed by this rising evil, and manifesting that disturbance as an almost physical affront. When the Stranger first meets Tom, he comes across a tree that reveals itself as a Huorn, swallowing him up like it can almost sense the danger of the magical power within him—power already manifested for evil in Rhûn in the Dark Wizard. Elrond and Galadriel’s company are forced to navigate a different path to Eregion, and through it encounter the resting place of some Barrow-Wights, suddenly disturbed from slumber by the grimness around them. It’s twofold in Arondir and Isildur’s plotline: first we learn that the bogs that the fringes of Pelargir have been transformed with reveal themselves as the home of a giant, bizarre slug creature that tries to eat them, only for Estrid to prove her trust (momentarily at least) by saving them.
It’s the next earthly reveal that is the most telling of all though, and neatly ties together the episode’s theme with Rings of Power‘s overarching championing of shared hope in the face of dark. Arondir quickly comes to realize that whatever strange entity attacked the wildmen and scooped up Theo last episode was no human or Elf, or even orc: it was the forest itself, a pair of Ents awoken by the decay of the Southlands and the wildmen’s destruction of their treefolk. It’s literally the world rising up in response to this evil and lashing out at the pain being enacted upon it, giving us a real sense of scale as to just how bad things really are in Middle-earth right now. And in Arondir’s bargain with the Ents to save Theo and the surviving wildmen’s lives (including, unfortunately for Isildur, Estrid’s betrothed, womp womp), that dedication to respecting the natural world going hand in hand with saving it and its peoples alike from Sauron’s dark tide is what saves the day, healing Theo and Arondir’s shared wounds over Bronwyn’s death in the process.
Across Rings of Power all of these storylines are sown with mistrust and fear as things clearly get darker and darker, but there is always this sense of hope, if only people can work in tandem. With each other, with the land itself, this is a fight that is existential to Middle-earth itself, to Arda itself: it requires a scale beyond just big fights and grand armies, but good people working with the land and its creatures to drive back decay. That, perhaps more than anything else, is maybe the most Tolkien-esque idea that Rings of Power has put on screen so far, and worth showing, even in an episode that ostensibly doesn’t really drive this season much further forward.
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