Warning: The below contains full spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Episode 3, which is now streaming on Prime Video. If you're not caught up yet, read a spoiler-free review of the two-episode premiere here, and dive deeper into a new major location this episode sets up here.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power continues its leisurely worldbuilding in this week’s episode, but the exposition never drags thanks to spirited performances and the show’s abundant visual spectacle. It’s a shame we don’t get any more Elrond — aside from seeing him in portrait form in the library of Númenor — but we are introduced to his future brother-in-arms Isildur along with the founder of Gondor’s whole family.
Episode 3 picks up almost exactly where the previous installment left off with Galadriel waking up on a boat and wondering if she’s been saved or just thrown into an even worse situation than being shipwrecked. The answer is complicated. She and Halbrand have been rescued by Isildur’s father, Elendil, who takes them to his home in Númenor despite the island nation’s ban on allowing elves on their soil.
Like the drama caused in Episode 2 by Elrond simply forgetting that 20 years is a long time for non-elves, Episode 3 drives home how immortality changes your perspective. This time, it’s Galadriel who is surprised how much Númenor has changed in the centuries since the Valar raised it from the sea to reward the humans who fought against Morgoth. There’s something deeply surreal about her walking into an ancient building and pointing out that she personally knows the guys that made it.
Morfydd Clark continues to shine as Galadriel, filled with ferocity and arrogance that doesn’t serve her well in the hostile court of Queen-regent Tar-Míriel. Halbrand helps cool things down, showing a keen gift for diplomacy along with his skills as a thief and a nasty temper when pushed into a fight. It seems that Galadriel has found an early Aragorn, a human king fleeing the responsibilities of rulership that she needs to push to rise to the occasion.
Halbrand, though, may be more rogue than ranger – like Aragon, he’s running from the failings of his forebears, who in this case served Morgoth. The fatal flaw of Tolkien’s humans is that they’re corruptible and it would be a fitting and tragic fate for Halbrand to be pushed to achieve enough greatness to earn one of the nine rings given to the human lords who would become the Nazgûl.
Speaking of humans with future dark fates involving rings, we meet Isildur as a precocious teen distracted from his disciplined naval training by strange whispers he hears on the wind. As played by Maxim Baldry, he’s instantly likable, his charms enhanced by his goofy buddies and the pressures he faces from Elendil, who seems far too quick to point out his son’s shortcomings while ignoring the good he’s doing by encouraging his sister. But his dad’s got good reason to discourage Isildur’s interest in sailing west. While the show hasn’t specified it yet, the elves banned Númenoreans from sailing too far in that direction to keep them out of the Undying Lands. When Galadriel decided to forgo her journey, she wound up in waters patrolled by Númenor, showing just how close the two realms are.
That ban is part of what caused Númenor’s big rift between those who want nothing to do with the elves and those who still honor them, dubbed the Faithful. Sauron will eventually capitalize on the human desire for immortality to corrupt the Númenoreans and we’re seeing the build up of that now. The show’s messaging around the elves is a bit muddy. On one hand, it seems to be portraying them as arrogant colonizers pulling humans into their wars and magnanimously rewarding those who side with them while subjecting those who don’t to generations of surveillance. But then the elves are also right in that evil has not been defeated. Those who would rather take their chances on their own are dooming themselves to corruption or death.
Not that the elves are capable of standing against that creeping darkness alone. Arondir is in an awful situation this episode, taken captive by the orcs along with the rest of his squad and forced to help them dig the tunnels they’re using to avoid sunlight. They’re almost assuredly searching for the very ominous artifact that Theo found, though we don’t see any of him or Bronwyn this week, so we’re left wondering what effect the kid’s blood will have on the blade.
The scenes involving the Harfoots, meanwhile, remain among the best in the series, serving the same role as the Shire did in Lord of the Rings by demonstrating the stakes of the coming war and the people who will be inevitably swept up in it no matter how much they just want to mind their own business. Nori and Poppy are consistently adorable in their antics. Poppy helping Nori steal from Sadoc Burrows brings some solid comedy to an episode otherwise packed with serious drama and exposition.
The ritual of the book of those left behind, which resembles the Jewish Yizkor service, is a beautiful way to show more about the Harfoots as a people and Poppy as an individual while also demonstrating the stakes facing Largo Brandyfoot. It’s nice to see The Stranger finally literally pulling his weight for the Harfoots instead of just being kind of a messy nuisance. While the jury is still out on who this mysterious character will end up being, I’m fairly convinced this is a very addled Gandalf sent to help Middle-earth in the coming crisis and his connection with the Harfoots will later explain his enduring soft spot for the Hobbits. (That said, there are a few reasons it might not be Gandalf, which you can read about here.)
Like in the previous two installments, everything in Episode 3 is visually stunning. Númenor is reminiscent of both the majesty of Gondor and The Wheel of Time’s Tar Valon, while somehow exceeding both in its detail and grandeur. Every costume is finely crafted, from the veils the orcs wear to try to shield themselves from the sun to the Harfoot ritual getups. Using scrolls instead of books in the library of Númenor helps show its age but must have been much more complicated to put together since there’s so much variety between the craftings.
The cinematographers also do a fantastic job of blending majestic sweeping shots of the landscape with dramatic closeups. Galadriel’s ride with Elendil is reminiscent of the long journeys spent on horseback throughout The Lord of the Rings trilogy and, visually, it does a great job of selling Galadriel’s joy of being in the saddle with the imagery of her beautiful white horse’s hooves lightly touching the sand.
Episode 3 also delivers the show’s most spectacular fight to date in the elven escape plan. It’s a brilliant work of creative choreography and escalating stakes as the group artfully stacks their chains in a perfect star to attempt to break free and seizes the advantage of daylight by breaking down the orc canopy in the midst of an incredibly high-stakes game of tug of war. The wild-eyed warg is also appropriately terrifying and having the whole noble effort end in tragedy is a brilliant emotional misdirection.
Thinking forward to next week, it looks like we’re finally going to get a glimpse at Adar. It seems extremely unlikely that he’s actually Sauron — he’s more likely just a powerful lieutenant deployed on the hunt for an item his master covets. Adar means father in elven, so it’s possible he’s responsible for creating this batch of orcs. Next week will surely deliver some answers and hopefully bring us back to the dwarves to reveal what they’re trying to hide from Elrond.
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