But we still lean towards a different, Ringwraith-shaped fate for Halbrand (his character and actions just don’t seem to match what Sauron should be up to at this point), but it’s fair to say this episode provides plenty of hints that Halbrand might not be who he says he is.
The actual destruction of the dam is carried out by the irritatingly-still-alive Waldreg, who could have been acting under orders from Halbrand, who might have been able to swap the sword hilt for an axe after helping Galadriel to recover it. Adar asks who he is with some interest, and then he is hailed as King of the Southlands (right before the entire village is swept away). He is extremely angry at Adar, which would make sense if Adar had tried to kill him, and he asks if Adar remembers him. We see quite a lot of Halbrand, and the final part of this episode certainly provides some ammunition for the Halbrand-is-Sauron theory. He calls himself “Uruk” but he is an ancient Orc, not one of Saruman’s later Uruk-Hai – Saruman is not only still a good guy at this point in the story, he is not even on Middle-earth yet, and his Uruk-Hai could move in daylight. We get a bit more information about Adar, but the biggest takeaway there is that he claims to have killed Sauron – which, of course, we know is not true, there are six movies that tell us so. The final quarter of the episode is devoted to the aftermath of the fighting. Ultimately, the battle resolves itself in a pretty predictable manner, with Númenor charging in to save the day just as all hope seems lost for the Southlanders. With four competing storylines, we barely know most of them, and none of the significant characters (Arondir, Bronwyn, Theo, Galadriel, Halbrand, Elendil, Isildur, Míriel, Adar) actually die anyway. This kind of pre-battle or mid-battle character work can be a really satisfying way to build up to a big death, but its effectiveness is a little bit limited here because we haven’t really spent quite enough time with these characters beforehand (perhaps excepting Galadriel) to really care if any of them die in battle. In fact, the episode doesn’t quite seem to want to commit to the conflict-driven setting, breaking up the pace with quiet conversations about horses or trees, but it does bring the story into focus and provide considerably more plot movement than previous episodes, which have had to spread their runtime across more storylines. But those sequences featured more actual fighting than this one does. The idea of devoting an entire episode to a single conflict was perfected, of course, by Game of Thrones with installments like season 2’s “Blackwater,” season 4’s “The Watchers on the Wall,” and season 8’s “The Long Night.” These in turn were partly inspired by the lengthy Battle of Helm’s Deep sequence in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. And the less we see of Celebrimbor, the further we are from actually forging any Rings of Power. Isildur’s funny friend Ontamo (Anthony Crum) only gets a few brief moments onscreen, so we miss Elrond and Durin’s warm banter. Elrond and Durin leave a bigger hole, as they, together with Disa, provide a lot of the series’ warmth and humor. The Harfoots aren’t really missed from the story, other than it means the mystery of who the Stranger is will be dragged out for at least another episode. We don’t see anything of either the Harfoots or Elrond and the Dwarves. In between the first two phases of the battle, we also get some interesting moments between Galadriel, Isildur, and Elendil on their ship, but by their next scene they have arrived with the cavalry to join the fighting. Although split across three waves of Orc-led attacks and a Númenorean counter-attack, this is essentially one drawn-out battle. This episode is dedicated to one storyline that brings two of our four main groups of characters together: the Battle of the Southlands and its aftermath. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Episode 6 This Lord of the Rings review contains spoilers for The Rings of Power.
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