The Rings of Power: Udûn Review (Patreon)

Ah, they’re doing that “late first season” trick where characters meander for several episodes before the show’s general direction becomes clear. That’s useful. It helps clarify some of the show’s blunders in retrospect. The ways in which The Rings of Power was figuring itself out early on is going to look less muddled now that things are coming together. They’re coming together in a messy and cynical, but this show finally has some momentum.

The title “Udûn” got my attention right off the bat. Embarrassing geeks, some of whom have inexplicably gotten laid, know the Sindarin word udûn that Gandalf shouts at the Balrog means “hell.” You might remember that I wrote about the Mordorian valley of Udûn back in Nowhere and Back Again Book I. Back then, I said that Tolkien didn’t tell us much about Udûn, but The Rings of Power has finally given us an angle on it.

While I like to keep Nowhere and Back Again separate from my Rings of Power reviews, that’s not really possible this week. “Udûn” has a sense of geographic symbolism which previous episodes lacked. Places in Middle-earth tend to have names that fluctuate with their nature, but The Rings of Power has mostly reduced Lindon and Eregion to “places where things happen.” This week’s montage where a Sauron worshipper stabs a rock with a magic sword, unleashing an underground flood that flows to Mordor, pours into lava, and creates Mount Doom is the most stunning visual The Rings of Power has produced, and geography is essential to understanding why.

 For one thing, the montage gives us a sense of how Middle-earth’s lands are bonded in a way that we haven’t seen since… honestly, The Return of the King’s “the beacons are lit” sequence. It turns Middle-earth into a living organism. And furthermore, it shows that the bulk of the show’s action has happened in one of the most consequential places in Middle-earth. It creates Mount Doom, which is hell itself. Udûn. We’ve been in that valley this whole time.

This is a dazzling use of visual grammar and mythology. The audience doesn’t even need to know what udûn means to understand what’s happening. It’s a cinematic apocalypse that visually courts John Martin’s The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Galadriel staring at Mount Doom’s birth with a mix of horror and thrilled awe is extremely powerful. The Rings of Power just showed us the birth of hell.

This spectacularly self-indulgent reveal is, of course, completely meaningless. It’s not worth the slog to Mount Doom, which at seven hours has felt much slower than the extended The Lord of the Rings’ 11 hours. The lack of engaging characters or even a coherent plot structure has preempted most audience engagement beyond “oh, I recognize that.” But with the Mount Doom eruption, the show finally feels somewhat ambitious. We’re getting somewhere.

It helps that several plot threads finally intersect. Galadriel and the Númenóreans arrive in Middle-earth and meet the Eregion lot. Adar finally gets to do something other than brood menacingly. And the action sequences, while lightyears away from Helm’s Deep, are visually distinctive, if awful at times (the frame rate changes are jarringly ludic). This begins to feel like one show rather than a weird anthology nebulously tied by messy themes.

Not that this works every time. The “reveal” that Eregion is slaughtering its own is… not a reveal to the audience and bizarrely pointless? What does it say about these people? There’s no thematic content to it or even suspense. McKay and Payne continue to lack a sense of drama beyond “things happen, some of which are bad.” Hell, Halbrand is important purely for archetypal reasons despite being absent for most of the episode.

Adar also presents some problems. In some ways, he’s The Rings of Power reckoning with the orcs’ problematic racial history. It helps somewhat that Adar insists on being called an uruk, giving the orcs a sense of cultural identity they lacked before. This is a genuine improvement.

The problem is that you can’t actually fix Tolkien’s racial politics. While the nerds spouting abuse at The Rings of Power’s actors of color are evil and racist, Tolkien’s work is still irreparably racist. It’s racist in complex ways that sometimes rebuke themselves, but Middle-earth’s racial hierarchy is as fundamental to its workings as reverence for nature, the inevitability of death, and the cyclical nature of history.

The big problem is that The Rings of Power still utilizes the Uruks’ origin story: they’re elves who Morgoth warped into an “evil” race. The text endorses the notion that Uruks are a lesser species who it’s OK to kill, as shown by Galadriel and Arondir acrobatically slaughtering them on horseback. Regardless of the attempt to wrestle with Tolkien’s legacy, Uruks are still an Orientalist race who you should kill for fun.

The confrontation between Galadriel and Adar lays bare this problem. The “evil race” problem comes out strong when two Mormons are writing it (check out the Latter-day Saints’ account of Black people’s creation). Adar’s insistence on a life for his people — which, of course, gets brushed aside — is secondary to Galadriel’s monologue where the Aryan fraulein tells Adar “your kind was a mistake, made in mockery. I vow to eradicate every last one of you.”

This is, of course, the closest thing The Rings of Power has to a protagonist threatening genocide against the Uruks. The show registers this as a bad thing, having Halbrand rebuke Galadriel, after which she thanks him for pulling her back. The massive, show-breaking problem here is that the monologue isn’t a character failure — it’s a severely evil act that’s consistent with everything else she does in the show. Halbrand may disapprove of Galadriel’s rage, but the show explicitly endorses her tactics all the way.

And it’s this kind of implicitly evil logic that drives The Rings of Power. In this world, genocide isn’t evil; saying the quiet part out loud is. It’s Amazon-funded upward mobility propaganda. Be the top dog or get decapitated by an elf. What a disgusting, disgusting show.

Best episode to date.

Udûn

The Great Wave

Adrift

Partings

A Shadow of the Past

Adar