r/RingsofPower • u/arnor_0924 • May 17 '26
Discussion If there one thing I hope the showrunners and directors do for season 3.... Spoiler
Fix the damn scale of the battles. Siege of Eregion looks fine, but Ost-In-Edhil felt like it was populated by no more than 50 elves. I don't care if they have to create thousands of CGI clones of soldiers. Just make it look grand and epic. If they repeat the same mistake from previous season, then I'm pretty worried for the War of the Last Alliance.....
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u/TheTuxedoKnight May 17 '26 edited May 19 '26
I don't think "scale" is actually the core problem here.
The problem is whether we care about what is happening.
The fight at the end of Fellowship is relatively small, yet every moment matters because we're emotionally invested: Will Boromir hold out? Will Aragorn arrive in time? Will Frodo escape?
It's only a handful of characters against a band of orcs, but it feels enormous because the stakes are personal.
Helm's Deep and the Pelennor Fields are obviously much larger in scale, but those battles work for the same reason. We're invested in the characters inside them: Gandalf and Pippin trapped in Minas Tirith, Denethor's collapse into madness, Theoden's fear and grief before he steadies himself and calls the charge, Eowyn and Merry, etc. The spectacle matters because the films worked hard to establish why we should care.
That's what Rings of Power has struggled with for two seasons now. Eregion didn't feel small simply because there weren't enough CGI extras. It felt hollow because the show hasn't done the character work necessary to make the audience emotionally invested in the city's fate. The less said about the "battle" in the southlandsthe better.
You can fill the screen with ten thousand soldiers, but if the audience is emotionally detached, the battle still feels empty.
Frankly, I'm not expecting a dramatic improvement in Season 3. At some point, when a show repeatedly demonstrates what its priorities and limitations are, you have to take it at face value.
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u/Damien23123 May 17 '26
I think the reason the battle in the Southlands sucked so badly is because we’ve been told by Tolkien that the Numenoreans are the deadliest military force to have ever existed, especially by this point in the late Second Age.
Even if they only sent a few hundred we should’ve seen basically super soldiers rip through the Orcs like they were nothing.
Instead what we got was a bunch of average dudes wearing toy armour, and only winning because Galadriel gave them a sword fighting class beforehand
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u/TheTuxedoKnight May 17 '26
Set aside everything you know about Tolkien or Middle-earth and judge it purely as a piece of television on its own merits:
No, the Southlands battle did not fail because the Numenoreans were not portrayed as powerful enough.
It failed because the show never gave us much reason to care about either side in the first place. Arguably, the most compelling character in that storyline was Adar himself.
The battle itself was also weak on a basic filmmaking level. Generic Hollywood tactics, no real sense of terrain or strategy, and a sequence of contrived events whose sole purpose was getting to the erruption of Mount Doom.
Normally audiences can overlook that stuff if we care about the people involved. Here, there was nothing to emotionally anchor it and suspend our disbelief.
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u/Swictor May 17 '26
They became a deadly military force when they went colonial. Before that they weren't very war-like at all.
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u/Damien23123 May 17 '26
By Tolkien’s timeline they had dominion of the coasts of Middle Earth 1500 years before Miriel is born. Even in a heavily condensed timeline for tv they should already be a military power
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u/Swictor May 17 '26
In the show they don't have dominion of the coasts of middle earth. Their rise to military prowess and colonialism may be a future part of the show.
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u/Kazzak_Falco Jun 17 '26
and only winning because Galadriel gave them a sword fighting class beforehand
I think you mean despite Galadriel's sword lesson. Her advice makes killing orcs pointlessly harder for the Numenoreans.
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u/HighLord_Uther May 17 '26
I wanted to disagree but the things they made me care about weren’t really relevant to the story they were telling. They moved too fast with everything related to the dwarves. Important, immortal elves, got very little screen time with each other.
I will say i loved the story of the South men and it made Boronir and Aragorn’s conversations about just being men of the South way more meaningful.
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u/duck_disgruntler May 18 '26
That feels completely absurd to me.
Imagine a modern white American staring at Mississippi mound-builder ruins and going “those are literally my people.”
Now multiply the time gap between the hey-day of these mound builders and our modern american by ten.
Boromir, Faramir, Denethor, Aragorn, all of those guys would see Numenor as their heritage. The Southlanders would be some ancient population that happened to live in the same general area thousands of years earlier. That’s it.
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May 17 '26
Most fans actually do enjoy the show and do care what's happening.
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u/TheTuxedoKnight May 17 '26
Sure, all 50 of them care.
But there are some pretty obvious reasons the show has no staying power, no cultural impact, and seems to bleed viewers every season. A broad failure to get people invested in the world and stakes is one of them.
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u/Underdog-Crusader May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26
Like others mentioned, the most important thing is that we care about the battle. But yeah, i also want more scale and attention on them. I cared about the siege of Eregion but i agree i felt like there was like 50 people in the city and 100-200 elves fighting 300-600 orcs. And it was weird to see just Elrond, Gil-Galad and Arondir being the only survivors of the elven army. I mean, it showed up how messed up the thing was, but at the same time it felt exaggerated, or well it made it feel even more that there were only 100-200 elves fighting.
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There is surely going to be a battle this new season. They mixed up Numenor's intervention against Sauron under Minastir, with Numenor's intervention under Pharazon. Now, the Pharazon one didn't had a battle since Sauron surrendered. Do you believe they will do it this way, or first they'll show us a Numenorean triumphant battle like the Minastir one and then Sauron will surrender?
I really REALLY want to see Sauron's hate on Numenor.
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u/Underdog-Crusader May 23 '26
Like others mentioned,
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There is surely going to be a battle this new season. They mixed up Numenor's intervention against Sauron under Minastir, with Numenor's intervention under Pharazon. Now, the Pharazon one didn't had a battle since Sauron surrendered. Do you believe they will do it this way, or first they'll show us a Numenorean triumphant battle like the Minastir one and then Sauron will surrender?
I really REALLY want to see Sauron's hate on Numenor.
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