This is the final part of our five part (I, II, III, IV) series on the Siege of Eregion in Amazon’s Rings of Power. Last time, we looked at the orc siege and marveled at both their lack of works and also their nonsensical siege engines, concluding that Adar had launched a siege assault which would have failed without outside intervention had it occurred in the real world (indeed that it was the very model of an ill-advised assault as described in pre-modern military manuals).
This week, despite not one but two armies unexpectedly showing up in Adar’s rear while he is still fully engaged with the cities defenses, he is going to win his assault that should have failed even under ideal circumstances.
The resulting battle covers a lot of screen time over two episodes (s2e7 “Doomed to Die” and s2e8 “Shadow and Flame”), but it is frankly such a confused mess that not a lot seems to clearly happen: from Elrond’s arrival to the final ‘resolution’ scene with the survivors taking up hope again is a staggering 110 minutes (including cut-aways to other plots), making just this post-the-cavalry-arrives sequence almost twice as long as the entire Siege of Gondor (also including cutaways, c. 60 minutes). There are repeated ‘fake-outs’ where the show threatens – not terribly credibly – to kill major characters, a long sequence where an ogre shows up, accomplishes nothing and then dies and so on, but not a lot of actual consequence occurs.
Instead the battle moves through just a few phrases: Elrond’s cavalry arrives, triggering a battle outside of the city. This effort fails and the city is breached, which triggers a battle in the city streets. Then a dwarf army arrives, enabling the evacuation of what appear to be at least a dozen surviving Elves (including all of the surviving named characters, of course). In that brief description, this sequence almost makes sense, but the show loses basically all sense of spatial and chronological relationships in these scenes, making them even more of a confused jumble where, because this is Rings of Power, nothing matters.
However that basic phase sequence does provide us a way to structure the conclusion of the Siege of Eregion.
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The Cavalry Arrives, Stops and Then Arrives Again For Some Reason
The open field battle – as distinct from the siege – begins with the arrival of Elrond and Gil-galad. The sequence of scenes that follows fails both as a piece of storytelling in the emotional sense, but also as a matter of logic and consistency. Elrond’s cavalry (and the orcs fighting them) jump around in the next several scenes (often confusingly after the story cuts away to some other plot), without a lot of reason but also in ways that are confusing even to a non-specialist audience. Regular viewers can, I think, get a sense in these scenes that the way Elrond handles his cavalry doesn’t make a lot of sense and that weakens what little suspension of disbelief might be left. While Peter Jackson had some moments, particularly in the Siege of Gondor, where he seemed to somewhat lose track of where things were, he was generally much better at this and at key points very deliberately zooms out to let the audience see exactly how many orcs or Rohirrim or elephants there are and where they are coming from. By contrast, Rings of Power is deeply inconsistent with how many of these fellows there are or where they are. Indeed, Elrond’s cavalry is going to end up somehow teleporting through Adar’s army to end up at the wall on the other side of the riverbed and go from a large host to about two dozen riders in a sharp drop that doesn’t seem explicable by massive casualties.
I considered at the outset of this series trying to draw a ‘blocks and arrows’ tactical battlemap of the engagement but found that I had so many arrows just labeled with question marks (‘how does that get there through those guys?’) that I abandoned the effort, and if I can’t keep track of where characters are with a pen and paper, I assume most audiences will struggle as well.
The scene opens with an elf horn ringing in the distance as Elrond’s cavalry arrives, another clear effort to evoke Peter Jackson’s rendition of the Ride of the Rohirrim, which this show so desperately wants to subvert that this will be its second attempt to do so (there will be what is basically a third attempt later in this very sequence). Elrond’s cavalry is clearly behind the orc army, moving over a stretch of open space surrounded by trees. And I should note that, from a historical-tactical perspective, this is basically the ballgame: Elrond is commanding an unexpected force of cavalry arriving behind an unfortified body of infantry which is fully committed assaulting the walls and – unlike the Witch King’s far more capable managed army in the Siege of Gondor – which has no reserves to call up. The moment that elf horn rings, this battle should be unsalvagably lost for Adar, whose sole concern should now be trying to get off of the field with as many of his orcs as he can to avoid annihilation.
But this is Rings of Power, so nothing matters.
Instead, astoundingly, Adar is able to recall his orcs across the mudsoaked riverbed from the wall they were attacking mid-assault and rush them through a forest to form a battle line to meet Elrond’s cavalry force (to add a fantasy element, in daylight, which should be a problem). And I want to be clear here that we know this is what they do because the show stops to show us the orcs rushing into position. This is, to put it lightly, not a thing armies were generally able to do.
Book and Film Note: I think part of the issue here may be that a ‘fudge’ from Peter Jackson’s adaptation here has metastasized. In the books (RotK 122ff), Théoden’s force arrives unheralded and largely undetected: he only sounds the horns as the charge begins (after his speech) meaning the Witch King’s army had perhaps at most a minute or two to prepare for impact and so are taken entirely by surprise. Peter Jackson, to heighten the tension, lengthens this out, sounding the horns first and then having the Rohirrim form up for a big speech while the orcs rush to line up to receive them. This is a fudge (“Why would Théoden reveal himself so early?”) but it doesn’t trip up the audience because the outcome is the same: the orcs are unable to resist the onset of the Rohirrim and crumble. Here, however, the ‘fudge’ is made load-bearing in the story and the result is frustration, as Elrond’s taste for dramatic – and Adar’s ability to respawn and teleport his orcs at will – determines the outcome of the story.
Meanwhile, the scene sequence for the Elf cavalry is profoundly baffling more in a ‘bad editing’ than ‘bad tactics’ sort of way, though it is the latter. At 24:21, we see a single horseman sounding his horn, alone in a field, then immediately following at 24:25, we see the Elf cavalry galloping forward at full tilt with a big dramatic chant. We get (at 24:31) a huge wide shot (above) of this mass of cavalry that shows way more horses then we will see in any subsequent scene, presumably moments away from impact. But then we have almost 30 seconds (quite a long time in this sort of medium) of the orcs getting into position, with Adar walking, slowly and menacingly, like they’re in no immediate danger. At 24:53, we cut back to Elrond’s cavalry now standing still in a field (weren’t we just charging? why didn’t we keep charging?) with Elrond out in front where we now pause to have close-ups on everyone’s face looking worries. We’ll come back to this, but I find the characterization of the Elf army and its command structure as baffling and incompetent. In any case, Gil-galad (because he’s here, but not in command despite being the High King of the Noldor), nods and Elrond gives his general’s speech, which is – in its entirety – “Death to our foes!”
Just a masterpiece in missing the impact of a two and a half thousand year old storytelling device. This isn’t a film critique, but it is simply amazing to watch the showrunners stall a scene like they are just learning to drive a stick shift. And yet there are they, fumbling with the clutch and the gear stick while Elrond tries to come up with something to say.
The cavalry then rushes forward in a big charge, with a big dramatic chanting soundtrack but of course we need to subvert the Ride of the Rohirrim again – showing that you can not do what another, better storyteller did in another, better story is not the apogee of storytelling – so the audience is denied the emotional release of impact and instead the orcs unveil their prisoner, Galadriel and Elrond pulls his cavalry to a half just a few yards away from the orcs to negotiate.
So, for one, obviously Elrond should not stop this charge. One of the problems that Rings of Power has, which Peter Jackson’s adaptations avoided, is that it really does treat all of the non-named characters as little more than props. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of the writers that Elrond, in this moment, has a duty to his cavalry and that what he’s doing here is exchanging hundreds of lives for just one: the moral mechanics of a hostage situation do not translate to a large battle because so many lives are in the balance. Stopping the charge would be a deep moral failing, of the sort that is inconsistent with Elrond’s character both in the legendarium and in this show. This guy presses this charge home, even though it will bring him sorrow.
Of course that’s putting aside the physical aspect here which is that Elrond could not stop this charge in this moment even if he wanted to. In the show, he gives a single order ‘halt’ and the entire formation quickly comes to a stop. If you have ever attended, say, a horse race – much less a cavalry battle – you know how absurd this is: one has to shout to be heard by a neighbor over the pounding hooves of a dozen horses down on the track. This is the pounding hooves of hundreds of horses, the clanking of their armor, and the shouting of the enemy: there is no chance even with elf ears many riders could hear his loudest shout over the din (and he doesn’t even shout very loud).
This is part of why for historical cavalry things like banners and heraldry were so important. A medieval knight might not be able to hear the orders of his lord or captain once things got started, but he could follow the gonfalon banner of his small unit (the conroi): if that banner turned aside, he’d know to do so as well. If it slowed to a stop, he’d slow to a stop. But that system simply wouldn’t allow for this sort of precision and in any case every rider that isn’t Elrond has every incentive to deliver this charge.
Book Note: Tolkien, of course, understands this much better and so the position of Théoden’s banner is clearly noted in the Ride of the Rohirrim: “Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them” (RotK, 123). Apart from the striking metaphor of Snowmane outracing the white horse upon the flag, we know how the rest of the Rohirrim know to charge: they see that white horse upon a field of green racing forward, and they follow it (or they follow the banners of their own marshals and lords forward likewise; we get a reference immediately following to the conspicuous plume of Éomer’s helmet.
More broadly, this entire engagement with Elrond attacking the orc army from behind never happens in the narrative we do get for the fall of Eregion. Instead, we’re told, “The scouts and vanguard of Sauron’s host were already approaching when Celeborn made a sortie and drove them back; but though he was able to join his force to that of Elrond they could not return to Eregion, for Sauron’s host was far greater than theirs, great enough to both hold them off and closely to invest Eregion” (Tales, 228). From the sound of it, then, Celeborn led out some of Eregion’s army into the field and won a victory against the advance elements of Sauron’s force and then grouped up with Elrond’s army moving south from Lindon, but they were then blocked out of the siege.
Sauron’s army in this scenario is evidently large enough to be engaging in meaningful operational art, moving in several distinct columns: Celeborn engages and defeats the lead element, then marches to link up with Elrond but Sauron evidently has enough troops available to have one column invest Eregion and another block Celeborn and Elrond. There are a few ways an army could do this. Sauron’s army might simply occupy a strong natural defensive position on the route that Elrond and Celeborn must take to reach the city, thereby blocking the route. Such a position exists: the town of Tharbad dominates the main crossing over the Gwathló River, so a large orcish army fortified on the far bank might be in a strong enough position that Celeborn and Elrond can’t give battle (but not so strong that the orcs could simply crush them).
The other way to ‘stand off’ an army like this is through logistics: a defending force could engage in scorched earth tactics (seeking to destroy or remove all available forage), while closely shadowing an enemy army. By staying close enough to give battle if inclined, the shadowing force can prevent its enemy from sending out foraging parties and gathering supplies effectively, while at the same time, the shadowing force need not offer open battle (instead moving from one position of natural strength or fortified camp to another). This was the Roman approach to Hannibal in Italy after the disaster at Cannae in 216, to bottle him up by denying him the foraging opportunities he needed to campaign, while avoiding ever getting close enough to get drawn into another pitched battle (since Hannibal kept winning those). In this situation, Celeborn and Elrond maneuver, looking for an opportunity to shake the shadowing force or bring them to a pitched battle (to defeat them and move to save Ost-in-Edhil) but simply never got the opportunity in time before the city fell.
Once again, I suspect the showrunners may think themselves clever but if you are going to deny the audience the moment of emotional release they want, you ought to do it in a way that makes sense and pays off other details, not in a way that feels cheap.
In any case, this leads into a negotiation that goes nowhere, but provides us an opportunity to briefly discuss the odd nonsense of the organization of Elrond’s army.
Wait, Who Is In Charge Here?
Put bluntly, the composition, organization and command of this force makes little sense either in the context of what we see in the show or the broader legendarium. Once again, I noted that while Peter Jackson had relatively little screen time – far less than this show! – to work with, we actually do get some of the outlines of how the armies of Gondor and Rohan are organized, in part because details from the books like the men of Théoden’s house are preserved. Their characterization is even stronger in the books, but it remains present in the films.
Rings of Power comprehensively fails at this. What we are shown is a highly disciplined body of heavy cavalry – Elrond orders these guys to stop a charge in mid-gallop and they not only stop, they do it in unison keeping a perfect line. And that visual language of the Elves as extremely disciplined (in the synchronized sense) is borrowing visual language from Peter Jackson’s Elven infantry in The Two Towers (itself not my favorite of his additions). But this is a very odd conceit, one at odds with both the legendarium as well as the Elven society we are shown: it is an unthinking recourse to a certain set of signifiers of military skill without regard to if those signifiers make sense here.
In terms of the broader legendarium, certainly the impression we get is that Elven military culture is a heroic warrior culture that prizes individual skill at arms rather than collective synchronization. The heroic figures of Elven wars are, after all, individual aristocratic warriors, fighting on their own – figures like Glorfindal, Ecthelion, Turgon, Fingolfin or Fingon. From that kind of a society, we might expect considerable individual combat skills, especially from the hero-aristocrats, but not a neatly uniform army of interchangeable mechanical soldiers. Even in the context of the Rings of Power show, we see an Elven society split between its many quasi-independent lords: Gil-galad, Elrond, Círdan, Galadriel, Celebrimbor and though we have not seen him yet, Oropher (Thranduil’s father; Legolas’ grandfather), who all have a lot of autonomy and thus probably their own military forces. This is not a disciplined, professional army but an aristocratic collection of warrior bands.
But also why is Elrond in charge? Gil-galad, the High King of the Noldor, for whom Elrond is merely a herald, is riding right next to him, but in a terminal bought of ‘main character syndrome’ it is Elrond who gives the non-speech, commands the cavalry, conducts the subsequent negotiations and then leads the army. And, because this fits nowhere else, his title is ‘commander,’ a title that also feels out of place and tinny. For one, the rank of ‘commander’ is rare in armies generally (it is generally a naval rank) and more to the point is relatively recent, emerging in the 18th century (as “master and commander”) to describe the commanding officer of a ship too large to be left to a lieutenant but too small to merit a captain. Tolkien, by contrast, tends to stick with ranks that have their origins deeper in the past: we get Captains, Marshals and Generals, all terms with roots deep into the Middle Ages. Honestly, I think this would have been a good opportunity for a rank title in Quenya or Sindarin or, failing that, he ought to have been ‘Captain’ or perhaps ‘Lord.’
No such issue occurs in the books, though our account of this battle is extremely thin. The reason Elrond is leading the army is because Gil-galad is not present, because the war is happening in Eregion and Gil-galad’s realm is Lindon (Tales, 228). It thus makes sense that when he sends a relief army, he does not go in person, because he needs to be in Lindon ruling and probably preparing for a wider war. That said, there’s no question that Gil-galad is the overall leader of the Elven efforts and he will eventually take his army all the way to Mordor, falling in battle fighting Sauron personally beneath the walls of Barad-dûr. Were he present in Eregion, there’s no doubt that he would be leading the force.
Finally, I’ll note that over two seasons this show cannot decide the visual language it wants to use for Elven military equipment. In the first season, Galadriel went through three different completely differently styled forms of armor and Season 2 introduces two more: the steel plate Elrond’s cavalry wears (with no mail, despite the fact that Galadriel wears a mail hauberk in Season 1), which neither resembles Galadriel’s plate armor suit on the boat or her plate armor suit in the climax of the previous season, and then the armor of the soldiers of Eregion, whose armor is…rusted? They seem to wear what is clearly intended as bronze armor, but heavily corroded, with that characteristic green patina of copper-rust. This too is baffling to me: this is the – following the show’s titles – “City of Elven Smiths,” surely it should have better armor, rather than old, rusted armor made of a metal that the rest of the Elves evidently abandoned using long ago. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the bright gleam of polished metal armor was considered valuable by most ancient and medieval armies because it was intimidating: these soldiers ought to have polished their armor to a brilliant shine.
Tactical Confusion
After the negotiation scene (in which nothing much really happens), the show cuts back to the dwarf story before coming back to the siege, so while we see Elrond plan to renew his attack, we don’t see how he renews it, but instead cut back to the battle already in motion and here the showrunners have indulged in one of the most irritating tropes of battles in film: the confused, disorganized melee.
Some Elves are on foot, many are on horseback and they’re fighting somewhere in the forest, with Elrond ordering them to ‘defend the city’ and ‘to the wall!’ And what seems to be happening is that Elrond’s elf cavalry is pushing through the orc siege camp (we see him riding past tents) into the drained river. We even, to add insult to injury, see the elves’ horses get bogged down in the riverbed (where the orcs and their giant reverse battering ram had no problems at all).
We then cut to what is very clearly night on the river bank (the orcs have torches) as Adar’s orc lieutenant informs him that “the elf is faring better than we expected, his troops have destroyed five of our trebuchets.” Adar, of course, continues the effort and after a few more cuts away to other story threads, we rejoin Elrond in the midst of a confused melee in the riverbed itself.
And it is hard to know exactly how to analyze this sequence because there are so many baffling problems: it seems clear the showrunners have an outcome they want and they know they need some action sequences but no thought has been given to how those might fit into an overall battle in which combatants have to move around in obedience to the laws of physics and time.
We can start with the basic visual conceit: the repeated images of confused masses of almost evenly intermixed extras engaging in a confused series of one-on-one duels, scattered almost at random. And indeed, this is a common enough visual motif that when I describe ancient tactical systems, students do occasionally ask, in effect, “how does this system work once a confused melee develops” and are surprised when the answer is “that doesn’t happen.” The people fighting in armies, after all, want to survive and breaking into a confused one-on-one melee functionally guarantees most of the combatants will die. Such a fight would be over in mere minutes and the victory would certainly go to the side that maintained a more cohesive formation, since they would be able to swift win a bunch if one-on-lots duels. Once again, I have to note that Peter Jackson was generally better about this: while his heroes, like Aragorn or Gimli, sometimes have their moments of aristeia and plow into entire groups of enemies, the armies as a whole tend to stay in fairly clear groups in most of his scenes.
One step up from this problem is the question of just the physical terrain of this battlefield. Elrond has, apparently, pushed through the orcs in the forest, cut through their camp, pushed into the river basin and is now engaging the forces climbing the wall from the rear as they still attempt to push up the ladders. Under those conditions, where are Adar and his lieutenant even having their calm conversation? The loss of five trebuchets is a minor affair in all of this: Elrond has punched directly through Adar’s front line. If Elrond has reached the wall Adar doesn’t have an army left, because Elrond will have had to go through them to get here. I’m a broken record on this, but Peter Jackson does this better: we understand that at Helm’s Deep, when Éomer (standing in for book!Erkenbrand) reaches Théoden, that’s basically it and the battle is over, because the orc army is between them. Likewise, when Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas reach Éowyn, Merry (and the dead, filling in for book!Men-of-Lebennin-and-Losarnach, reach the gates) where the Witch King fell, that’s basically it and the battle is over, because their fight happened to the north and east of the city, but Aragorn’s force has arrived from the south and west, so Witch King’s army was between them.
And the other, other problem here is time: Elrond’s cavalry arrives seemingly at drawn. The sun is up when they come thundering along and the initial fighting scenes seem to happen in daylight. When we cut back, it is clearly night: there are torches all around and the lighting has gone back to being terrible. And Adar’s lieutenant is worried that they may not get through the wall before dawn. To which I can only ask how long have these fellows been fighting? By the ‘clock’ the show seems to set for us, Elrond’s men have been in something like continuous, direct melee fighting for something like twelve hours. One might, I suppose, argue they are elves and slow to tire but we normally figure regular humans can manage at most something like thirty minutes of this sort of exertion; longer battles likely consisted of exchanges at range and ‘pulses’ of close action as formations came together. But the decisive moments of melee fighting pretty much have to be brief for any individual soldier. Elves may be able to do more, but at no point is it suggested orcs have massively more endurance than Men and if elves had twenty-four times the stamina in combat as Men (or Dwarves, or Hobbits, or Orcs) I rather suspect we’d hear about that. The problem seems to be that the showrunners are putting the battle ‘on pause’ when we’re not looking at it, but needless to say that’s not how battles work.
In the process of this confused melee, a whole bunch of things happen which don’t matter. Elrond orders his master archer to take some sort of super-critical shot to disable the reverse-battering-ram (because one more arrow is definitely going to swing this battle), but she’s shot down before she can do it (oh no!). Why this matters given that the elves can simply walk up and stab the guys managing the reverse battering ram (or just ignore it, given that it makes no sense) is unclear to me. But then she makes the shot and there’s a huge explosion (oh no!), but this doesn’t cause the Elves to gain and sort of apparent advantage (oh no!). Then Adar sends in a large troll (oh no!) but the Elves kill him (oh no!) but he breaches the wall before he dies (oh no!), so the surviving Elves gather for a last-ditch defense of the riverbed, all twelve of them.
At the very least it would have made more sense for them to fall back into the breach, a narrow, confined space where armored heavy infantry might make a good fight of it. The intended emotional beat here is another vapid subversion, this time of the arrival of Erkenbrand!Éomer at Helm’s Deep: Elrond gazes towards the rising sun (so his elves have been been fighting, hand to hand, for twenty four hours straight) hoping for the dwarves to arrive and turn the tide of the battle, but they don’t and so his force gets overwhelmed in the open mud-pit. In part of that long sequence, Adar fights Arondir, the wood elf scout with questionable tactical sense from season 1, and stabs him twice in the chest, which made me assume that Arondir dies in that scene, but in the next episode he’s up and running around, so we can add “chest wounds inflicted by large swords” (through your useless wooden breastplate) to the list of things that don’t matter.
There is also an entire sequence where Galadriel escapes being held in Adar’s camp, sneaks into the besieged city and tries to rescue the civilians, but is recaptured. I simply want to note two things about this sequence: first it is presented as significant that Galadriel is ‘saving’ what appears to be, at most, a half-dozen people; once again the show just fails to do a good job managing scale. Second, this entire sequence of scenes, eating up a bunch of screen time, serves merely to get Galadriel from Adar’s camp, back to Adar’s camp, while removing some rings from Ost-in-Edhil so they can be delivered to Sauron, who was – immediately before this scene – in Ost-in-Edhil, the place where the rings were. In short, the entire sequence is wholly unnecessary for the story: Sauron could have recaptured the rings from Celebrimbor (as he does in the Unfinished Tales!) and found Galadriel still with Adar back in the camp with no change to the narrative (there’s also a problem with Galadriel’s subsequent fight with Sauron where the showrunners do not understand how Tolkien does ‘contests of power between supernatural beings,’ but I hope to come back to that in a few weeks with a discussion more broadly about the metaphysics and morality of Tolkien’s legendarium).
Just when it looks like Gil-galad and Elrond will be executed, the dwarf army shows up inside the city. How did they get in the city? How did they make it, undetected, to set up this firing line directly above where the orcs were holding their high-value captives?
Who knows? The show certainly doesn’t; I suppose we might guess they came over the mountain behind the city, but that just raises the question of why Elrond was expecting them to show up out in front of it and why none of the orcs spotted or heard a large body of plate-armored heavy infantry before they were lined neatly up into firing lines on the rooftops. In any case, the dwarves teleport in and attack, driving the orcs back and this enables the escape of the remaining Elves, which ends the battle. Now the confusing thing is that the arrival of a second entirely unexpected relief army, this time the formidable army of Khazad-dûm, merely enables the escape of the Elves, rather than allowing them to retake the city. Presumably because at this point everyone knows that in fifteen minutes, the respawn timer for the orc army is going to tick over and then they’ll be in trouble.
Conclusions
Book Note: The most sustained description of this event is in the Unfinished Tales and it gives us little detail about the final moments of the city, save that the city was ruined and that Celebrimbor personally led a final, doomed defense of the treasuries of the Mírdain, the artisans of Eregion (Tales, 228) where he “himself withstood Sauron on the steps of the great door of the Mírdain; but he was grappled and taken captive, and the House was ransacked,” by which I understand that Celebrimbor, at least initially, was able to hold Sauron off but was quickly overwhelmed. The Nine Rings, rather than being with Galadriel, are found in the House of the Mírdain, while the location of the Seven Rings is tortured out of Celebrimbor. Functionally no part of that actually occurs in the show: Celebrimbor is instead murdered by Sauron in his own smithy and of course Sauron hasn’t commanded the attack on the city at all, Adar has.
The final piece of the sequence is that Adar’s orcs do find Sauron in the ruins of Ost-in-Edhil and Sauron instantly takes control of them, using them to get close to and them murder Adar, which he then does, easily. Adar’s orcs have to ask Sauron, “are you Sauron?” because they do not know, which loops back to the staggering idiocy of Adar’s plan: he has brought an army Sauron can easily control and even his handpicked lieutenant is incapable of actually recognizing Sauron standing right in front of him and has to ask.
Now we’ve spent five posts and goodness knows how many words discussing the historical, tactical and operational nonsense of this sequence. Trebuchets deliver high explosive yields at modern artillery ranges, armies teleport through empty countryside and seem to require no need or logistics, Elves and Orcs fight non-stop hand to hand for a day straight and at the end of it the Respawning Orc Army just respawns. Again.
Meanwhile, neither the tactics nor the character moments of the battle matter in the slightest. Not one but two unexpected relief armies arrive behind the orcs and neither has any meaningful effect on the progress of the battle. The Master Elf Archer makes her heroic shot in her heroic sacrifice and it doesn’t matter a jot; you could take it out of the story and nothing changes. Adar fails to defend his camp, launches an ill-advised assault on the city with weapons made of nonsense and it doesn’t matter, he wins anyway. Both Elrond and the Dwarves’ arrivals are the culmination of character arcs stretching the entire season and neither impacts the story at all: if both had stayed home and let the city fall, nothing of consequence would have changed, except that slightly more faceless Eregion_Civilian_01 extras would die and slightly less faceless Elf_Warrior_01 extras would die.
Arondir is stabbed, in the chest, with a massive two-handed sword and is running around and fighting in the very next episode, which takes place at most minutes after he was left dying in the mud.
I will, for a moment, give Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire some credit: one of the emotional beats that George R. R. Martin has mastered is the one in which the fellow with the best tactics, rather than the best character, wins the battle, where the emotional blow is that storylines are abruptly cut off because someone dies and that is just how war is sometimes. But to make that storytelling work successfully, those results still need to be the result of character decisions, carefully tracked and planned and paid off: maybe Stannis deserves to win the Battle of the Blackwater, but he doesn’t because Tyrion is more clever and found a weapon – previously discussed! – to turn the fight in his favor.
Now I would argue such ‘subversion’ is already the wrong fit for a story told within Tolkien’s legendarium, which runs on different rules than Westeros does (for one thing, armies in Middle-earth have to move at reasonable speeds). But it is also clear that the showrunners here haven’t even mastered the subversion correctly: GRRM’s storytelling works because the subversions are set up, they are the carefully laid consequences of well-established character personalities and decisions. The late seasons of Game of Thrones fell apart precisely when that careful setup was abandoned in favor of getting to the Big Scene quicker (and further ‘subverting audience expectations’ when I suspect GRRM’s end-game, should he ever finish the books, is that the final subversion will be heroic tropes played entirely straight when the remaining Starks really do save the world with the Magic of Destiny and whatnot).
The failure in Rings of Power‘s Siege of Eregion is that if you treat the mechanics of the battle itself as merely set dressing, then the decisions the characters are making stop mattering too: no decision Elrond, Gil-galad, Galadriel, Arondir or almost anyone else makes changes much of anything about this sequence. Small ‘hope spot’ victories amount to nothing, immediately reversed because the plot has somewhere to go and is staggering there, slightly drunk, no matter what. That break of cause and consequence, a problem I noted in the first season, doesn’t simply damage the usefulness of, say, using a movie sequence to teach about historical warfare, it damages suspension of disbelief and audience enjoyment.
If nothing matters, why am I watching?
And this is Rings of Power, where nothing matters.
