Though Galadriel does not die in “Udun” episode 6 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, she does survive the volcano with a new sense of unearned devotion to her cause. Here’s how the Amazon show is failing J.R.R. Tolkien’s super elf.
Galadriel has been a particularly difficult character for Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series so far. While readers of Tolkien’s work (the main book trilogy, its appendices, and everything else) know her to be one of the most powerful and interesting beings in Middle-earth’s history, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power also has to make her a compelling and fallible protagonist in a TV show. And so far it hasn’t managed to find a balance between the two.
While her moment-to-moment actions have been questionable in every episode, “The Eye,” the second-to-last episode of the season, felt like a culmination of all the disappointing and frustrating choices the show has made with Galadriel so far.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power episode 7.]
The Rings of Power introduced Galadriel to audiences as if her badassness was a preordained fact. It was assumed this was just something everyone knew, like the showrunners saying, “She’s Cate Blanchett from Lord of the Rings, you know her — she’s cool.” But the show never actually did any of the work to establish her competence as one of the world’s greatest immortal warriors or her credentials as one of the most brilliant and ambitious elves.
Instead, we get one troll fight in the opening to prove Galadriel’s martial prowess before the series begins its meticulous dressing-down, which includes: banishment from her people, almost dying in a storm and having to be rescued by a human, being rude and repeatedly mocked at Númenórean court, and finally having that same human teach her (an immortal elf!) the finer points of diplomacy and the art of conversation.
The one thing she is right about is her righteous fury over Sauron. Viewers that already know where the story is going know that Sauron is still out there and should be hunted. But because the show wants to hide his identity from the audience, it further undermines Galadriel’s character, without a single other success or victory to build her up.
