Well, I'm happy big things actually started happening in this episode, but man they are prettty much not even trying to stick to a faithful adaptation of the books at this point. I'm not one to be super picky about that in general and always understood they were going to have to fill in a lot of gaps with original material, but even the basic story of the creation of the rings was completely changed in several ways and it's not clear to me why that was necessary at all.

The pacing of this show is so weird. In some ways it's excruciatingly slow, but then in the finale, the whole story of Sauron influencing the creation of the rings and then being revealed was reduced to a 15-minute montage. I'm really confused by the complete lack of mention of the 9 rings for men and 7 for the dwarves, which were supposed to be created before the 3 elven ones. Did those get created off screen? Is Sauron going to come back later and fool them again into creating them? Just really weird. I'm a lot less sympathetic to creating new characters and storylines if you're going to abridge and radically change the canon you do have.

And then there's the mystery man quoting Gandalf... *sigh*

I mostly liked this ep tbh. Fine with assuming we are getting a bit of false narrator and halbrand is more deceptive than it seems.

Harfoots still suck. Wish halbrand and G had banged for the lols.

I don't really mind Halbrand being Sauron. One of Sauron's whole things in this age is that he was a deceptive shapeshifter and manipulator. I just wish they had gotten to it sooner and then spent more time with him deceiving the elves into creating the rings. It felt like he showed up, taught master smith Celebrimbor what an alloy is, and then was gone in an afternoon. Seemed like a long con for such little payoff.

Yeh I was really confused about this as i forgot about those other rings until they song during the credits

So canonically the rings were created.. and then what? What did Sauron do for thousands of years until the big war?

Dont the Dwarves have massive buffs to their resistance to evil saving throws and so resist the rings for the most part?

The Elves just take theirs off when they realise the rig is in?

Which makes me ask, how does Galadrial wear hers in LoTR?

Also Saurons attempt at doing things a nicer way and showing some remorse/wanting redemption was the most interesting element of the show, if they had put more effort into that it could have really raised the bar of the show.

Still amazed at Gandalf shouting Im Good. Show dont tell.....oh wait.

Yeah, the dwarves were inherently more resistant to control. The rings mostly just made them more obsessed with treasure, which led them to other catasrophes later with dragons and balrogs.

Sauron notoriously didn't have the one ring to rule them all during the third age, so it was relatively safe at that point for the elves to use theirs.

Wait wat, were does it tell us that.

Should spell that out more clearly imo.

obvious sarcasm is obvious

Just got around to watching the show with the missus. Went it with pretty low expectations but overall I found it okay. I love the movies and played the LotRo MMO for around 10 years on and off, so the main thing that kept my interest was spotting things I knew. Obviously the visuals were amazing.

However, the story, acting and directing were all bad. How is it possible to watch 10 hours of TV and be completely indifferent to any of the characters? I couldn't tell you the name of 1 character aside from ones I knew going into the series. Feels like a lot of the characters are miscast, none more so than Galadriel and Elrond. Harfoots were obviously WOAT but at least it looks like we'll see less of them in season two.

Whole thing reminds me of the Star Wars prequals.