Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – Season 1 Episode 7 Recap & Review

The Eye

Episode 7 of Rings of Power starts with Galadriel and the others surviving a pyroclastic flow. How? Don’t ask questions, just consume product, that’s how! A flaming horse gallops past, while Galadriel finds Theo absolutely fine, while most of the structures in the village are still intact. So with all the survivors together, they head off in search of salvation.

Meanwhile, the psychotic Harfoots decide to get the Stranger to try and fix what’s happening to their world. When a tree falls on Nori, they’re lucky she’s not hurt because as we know, the Harfoots will just leave their wounded behind. Anyway, The Stranger’s magic seems to have worked, as the trees begin sprouting masses of food that they greedily harvest.

However, the Harfoots aren’t alone. They’re being watched by that mysterious trio we saw last week. They silently head off but Nori decides to stop them. That’s a bad move, as the leader sets fire to their caravan and burns everything, food included. As a result, they decide to follow Nori, although Sardoc is convinced this is a bad move.

Elrond asks for access to the Mithril mines from King Durin III, offering up to furnish the city with game, grain and timber from the elder forests for the next five centuries. I mean, that’s a long period of time and with Elrond dropping to his knees, he pleads with the King of the dwarves for help in this endeavour.

Disa though is not happy and believes they should reopen the mines themselves and see if there’s a safe way of mining mithril. When Durin slides a piece of mithril across the table, it ends up next to the infected leaf and seems to heal it.

So Elrond and Prince Durin begin mining mithril together, and there’s some lovely banter between them. Honestly, these two and Disa are the best parts of the show. When King Durin sees his son in the mines, the pair have a pretty fiery chat. These scenes end with that aforementioned leaf floating down the recesses of the mines where it happens upon a mighty balrog.

Down in the Southlands, Galadriel decides they should rally to the land of the living, away from where the volcano has struck. The next scene we cut to Elendil and the others, where we see hundreds of Southlanders and Numenorians are are absolutely fine and not even burnt heading through the trees.

As Theo and Galadriel walk together, the former is convinced that her mother and Arondir are dead. “What cannot be known hollows the mind. Fill it not with guesswork.” Says Galadriel, who spent most of the first episode guessing Sauron’s whereabouts and leading an expedition across the world on hunches and guesses alone. So we can add hypocrite to the list of negative traits this woman holds!

Anyway, they make it out of the Southlands, where Galadriel reveals that Celeborn, her husband, is dead. She said goodbye to him and he went off to war… but hold up, why didn’t the commander of the northern armies go to war as well? We saw her collecting helmets like a Jenga game so we know she was at one of the wars. Why didn’t she spend all that time looking for her husband rather than Sauron?

After another repurposed scene, this time from Fellowship with Theo and Galadriel hiding from an orc rather than a Ringwraith, they evade Adar and his orcs as they near.

Anyway, they make it back and find both Arondir and Bronwyn, who are absolutely fine. Galadriel approaches Miriel, who’s blind now. There are ships waiting to take them back, while Miriel vows that Numenor will return and when they do, they’ll be ready.

Bronwyn is also leaving too, heading off to an old Numenorean colony by the mouth of the Anduin. They call it Pelargir and apparently there’s fresh land and water there. Galadriel meanwhile, is heading off to the High King, while Halbrand is wounded but otherwise fine.

Over in the Southlands, Adar decides to change the name of the Southlands to Mordor.

The Episode Review

So how did Galadriel and the others survive a pyroclastic flow last week? Was it a vision? Elvish magic? Nope, it was just… bad writing. it’s not even explained. It’s one of the most frustrating things with this show and it’s shocking how bad the writing is.

Given the sheer amount of money that’s been spent on this project, the screenplay is absolutely atrocious. To make it worse, there’s absolutely no consequences for anything.

Sure, the visuals are good but at the same time some of these interior sets and costume designs look awful. We’ve already seen the show copy and paste in extras rather than actually hiring more people, while the choreography and battle scenes leave a lot to be desired.

Rings of Power is one of the worst shows this year and it’s hard to fathom how much money went into this project. If there’s one saving grace, it’s that we only have 1 more episode left of this next week!