Episode 4


I am starting to feel the strain of the weekly release schedule now. I really wish I had the patience to wait for the series to be over and binge it.
There was not really anything new revealed in this episodes. The hobbits were absent in this episode as the Dwarves were in last weeks. These are over hour long episodes, but with....I guess 4 parallel stories being told side by side, they don't can't cover all without chopping and changing constantly.

In the Dwarf part, the "reveal" was what we already, knew, the Dwarves had discovered Mithril. But other than that nothing really advanced.
It took the whole episode for Galadriel to finally set sail for Middle earth, which we knew was going to happen.
We didn't learn anything about Adar, when Arondir asks him and he is about to answer, a warg interrupts and growls, and he never answers. A bit frustrating.
And the Hobbits are totally absent, so we learn nothing about Meteor man,.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed the episode. I just want more.

One thing that struck me as kind of stupid was Adar releasing Arondir. At the end of the last episode all of the elves die trying to escape, and now Adar just releases Arondir....kind of stupid writing.

Other than that it was all good, I guess from next week the show will have to pick up pace though, we are half way through now, and there is a lot of ground to be covered. On the one hand I like the slow burn, they are holding a lot of their cards, which is a bold decision, rather than just throwing stuff at the audience to get twitter buzz. It shows they are comitted to doing this right I think.

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This was the show's last chance to grab my attention. I'm done.

Amazon fucked this up entirely.

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I am sure you will be back next week bitching about the latest episode.

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It looks like Adar is Maedhros - the eldest son of Feanor.
Supposedly when he was captured by Morgoth he was forced to breed with she-Orcs and now the Orcs call him "daddy".
Or something...

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There are she-orcs?

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That Frankenstein laboratory of Saruman's is something Jackson made up.
Orcs are remade Elves, they are mammals and have two sexes.

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I'm getting tired of the suspense since this should not be a detective show. The two showrunners/writers worked at Bad Robot and J.J. Abrams was one of the creators of the Lost show. I watched a few episodes of Lost and this show reminds me of all the cryptic secrets and clues in each episode of Lost. Most viewers know what is going to happen so there is no point in playing a guessing game about who is who.

I'm glad the aboriginal hobbits didn't show up for this episode. Guyhadriel is still strutting around with resting bitch face
and showing off her ninja skills by shoving five or six guards into a cell and bursting through the glass window of the top floor of the tower. I was a bit annoyed that the Numenoreans were protesting against the elves for stealing their jobs since that reminds me of the present struggle with developed nations and illegal aliens.

The only mystery that I sort of care about is Sauron's identity. I've been thinking that Halbrand is either Sauron or a witch king. Adar showed up wearing a Sauron gauntlet and he could be the one. Of the southlanders, the old tavern owner and Theo both could turn out to be evil. I still think meteor man is a wizard of some sort but he could be Sauron.

So far, the show is mediocre BUT the sets and costumes are nice. Most of the actors are horrible but a few are solid. It's disconcerting for Tolkien fans to watch Middle-Earth stories that Tolkien did not write.

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The difference with Lost was the characters were good. The cast were all top-notch, they were engaging, the dialogue was pretty good and the interplay between the characters excelled. And the mysteries were pretty engaging too.

Rings of Dour neither the mysteries nor the characters are engaging. The cast are all fails. The dialogue is awful. The interplay between character non-existent, its people saying bland lines at each others face, its like a high school play

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Episode 4 was awful. Like watching an amateur stage play where next to nothing happens but it still happens incompetently. Wayne Yip the guy who directed it was also a director on The Wheel of Time so he has hack credentials. The two guys credited with writing it John D Payne and Patrick McKay have never done any writing before (according to IMDb) and it shows.


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