The first episodes from ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ left me true sweet and sour taste. Visually, it has always looked wonderful despite small errors resulting from the rush, but in return, I did not care a bit about too many characters, which directly affected the interest in what the Amazon series was telling me.
It wasn’t until ‘Separations’, the fifth chapter of the series, when more things began to click, especially because characters that at most caused me indifference began to be more attractive and everything began to fall into place, thus subtracting weight from that component more Intro to ‘The Rings of Power’. That has gone further ‘udûn’an impressive episode that has also served to tell us a fundamental fact in the history of Middle-earth.
Beware of spoilers for the episode from here on.
Much more focused and even more spectacular
In ‘Separations’ several plot lines have been completely left aside to focus on the battle of the Adar army against the humans of the Southlands. Anyone already knew that this place was doomed to become Mordor, but there was always the question of how and when that would happen. The eruption of Mount Doom at the end of the episode has made it clear that this is imminent.
We’re not that far ahead of ourselves, however, as the Amazon Prime Video series flexed its muscles before Adar’s cunning plan could be executed. It is true that this spectacular battle cannot be compared, for example, to that of Helm’s Deep in ‘The Two Towers’, but this is still a first step towards the fall into darkness of Middle-earth. As such, it has more than delivered.
In addition, the battle has received a fairly clean visual treatment, making it clear that time has been dedicated to the choreography so that all the money spent, which has not been exactly little, can be seen on the screen. Yes, it may have had a little out of tune like those Galadriel acrobatics, but let’s not forget either of certain crazy things Legolas did in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy.
has also been a success the way of structuring the confrontation, as the dynamics of the battle undergo various fluctuations, from the apparent initial victory of the inhabitants of the Southlands to the saving arrival of the army of Númenor when all seemed lost. Above reproach in dramatic terms, no matter how much anyone could see something like this coming.
The strangest thing of all is that the emotion and the spectacle on the battlefield has not been the best of the episode. That privilege must be given to moments more focused on the dialogues, from that conversation between Isildur and his father about the former’s horse, detecting that something is happening to him that seems to be a harbinger of what will happen later when he gets hold of the One Ring, to the Galadriel’s talk with Adar that makes it clear that her purity can blow up at any moment.
All in all, the execution of Adar’s plan when everything seemed lost is the star moment of the episode. From Theo saying that the artifact in question made him feel powerful, in what seems like a clear parallel with the One Ring, to when it becomes clear why the character played by joseph mawle he was digging tunnels nonstop.
It is true that the violent eruption of Mount Doom is still a first step, but now it seems clear that all the cards are on the table. The question remains of who Sauron really will be, but now stopping to theorize about it is not as important as knowing how everything will evolve. By now the Southlands should already be rendered useless and the casualties will be huge. Of course, not for a second has anyone believed that Galadriel could have died.
The question now is to know how they explain it so that there is no feeling that the main characters of the series are simply untouchable. Just in that aspect we have the only really debatable decision of ‘Separations’, because that apparently mortal wound of Bronwyn It was a golden opportunity for the series to increase the sense of danger.
In short
For my part, I think that ‘Separations’ has been The best episode of ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ so far. In the visual aspect, it even takes a step forward with the arrival of the first battle, in the plot it begins to make things clearer and also offers a much more focused story, the icing on the cake being the good treatment of the characters. So yes.
In Espinof: