Rings Of Power Episode 7 Review: Why Is There SO MUCH Plot Armor?

Do the writers on this show realize that over the top plot armor is a bad thing? Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Episode 7 not only was a meandering, hour-long mess, but also broke upon well-established lore that completely disregards the movies and books.

Penultimate episodes are meant to have lots of action, tension, plot resolution, and character development/growth that either sets up for another season of the show or concludes season-long story and character arcs. Rings of Power’s penultimate episode did absolutely none of what I just listed. In fact, it pretty much did the opposite as it raised more questions than answers.

This episode mainly dealt with the fallout of the eruption of the volcano, which actually is Mount Doom, and how the people in the blast zone managed to survive and escape the destruction. Plus, there was a few scenes with the Harefoots and the Dwarves/Elves that didn’t do anything to shore up these, respective, plotlines.

First off, the idea that a person could survive the direct collision of a pyroclastic flow is not only laughable, but it is also kind of insulting that the writers thought we would believe that. That “cloud of ash”, as I’ve seen many credible Tolkien fans on the internet brush off when this point is raised, is anywhere between 390-1300°F after the initial explosion, not to mention extremely toxic and poisonous.

Do you really think anyone, whether they are human, elven, orcish, or animal, would survive that? It would have vaporized their body tissues and fluids in mere seconds, just as it did to the people of Pompeii in our real history.

And for those people who say, “Stop complaining. You are okay with orcs and elves running around, but you can’t accept people surviving a volcano’s ash?” all I have to say is…SHUT UP!

Why must we all become mindless, brainless fools who can’t appreciate the physics of a world that is supposed to be like our own with a few key differences (aka: elves, dwarves, orcs, and hobbits also inhabit it)? If this pyroclastic flow discrepancy was established in the lore, then I’d be fine with this scene. But it’s not. There’s nothing written from Tolkien that says volcanos in Middle Earth are not as dangerous as they are in our own world.

Anyway, moving back to the show, the combined Numenor-Southlands plotline basically just followed around the key characters, such as Galadriel, Tar Miriel, Elendil, Theo, and Isildur as they escaped the non-lethal catastrophe in their own way.

Aside from the nameless NPC Southlanders and Numenoreans that nobody cares about, not a single character died from this explosion.

Actually, there wasn’t even a single named character that even got seriously hurt from the blast. Sure, Halbrand suffered a gnarly looking gut wound, but he was able to ride a horse only one scene later after it was established. And Tar Miriel also became blind somehow, but that is probably the best-case scenario a person could have hoped for if they were actually in the middle of a pyroclastic flow.

As for Galadriel, she’s now a good guy who doesn’t want to hunt Sauron down at any cost again! Whoopie! (Don’t worry, this is sarcasm…obviously. But you probably already knew that.)

Not only was this about-face turn completely out of nowhere, but also had zero build up or payoff. In the last episode, she was literally threating to commit genocide against an ethnicity of elves, while also only mere seconds away from killing someone in cold blood.

How can these writers and showrunners be so inconsistent and incompetent with this beloved character?

Is she a cold, ruthless anti-hero like you’ve made her out to be for nearly six hours, or is she a benevolent, kind heroine like we all knew her from past movies/novels to be? You’ve got to choose one as it can’t be both, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay.

Oh, and how could I forget the most lore-breaking moment that has happened to date. While talking to Theo, Galadriel just casually mentions that her husband, Celeborn, is dead and no one has seen him or his body for 1,000 years. WHAT?!?

Celeborn, the guy STANDING NEXT TO GALADRIEL in Lothlorien when the fellowship arrives in the Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring movie is dead? Are these writers and showrunners serious? Do you honestly expect us to not only believe that he’s dead, but also put up with such lore-bending nonsense?

Obviously, he’s still alive and will probably be revealed later on, but why even have this plot thread to begin with. Everyone whose watched this series and/or the Peter Jackson movies or J.R.R. Tolkien novels (which is 99.9% of the audience) knows he’s alive.

It’s plainly stupid to even suggest otherwise. Why couldn’t they have picked literally any other character to use for this ‘fakeout death’ plot?

Is it because they want Halbrand and Galadriel to have a love story, which I’m slowly disliking the more I see those two on screen together, without making Galadriel look like a cheater? Wow, I really shouldn’t have said that I wouldn’t mind a Halbrand-Galadriel relationship idea earlier.

But in my defense, I thought this show was going to be so much better than what it has been since Episode 2. These characters are just so bad that a bold plot point like that is impossible to pull off, even if it isn’t too (key word here) awful in thought.

As for the other two storylines, is there actually a direction for them?

Okay, I’ll start with the Elrond and Dwarves one. In essence, their whole part in this episode is just a long-winded argument between King Durin III and Prince Durin IV about the mithril mining, which ends up getting won by King Durin as he said ‘no’ and his word goes because…he is the king, duh.

Why are we still stuck on Durin III begging his father to mine the mithril part of the plot when he’s already said no a million times?

Yes, Elrond and Durin III go off and attempt to mine the mithril on their own, but how was that ever going to work? There’re hundreds of mithril veins and thousands of elves who need to be armored in it. How was two people really going to mine enough mithril in one night?

Nonetheless, King Durin III obviously finds out about Elrond and his son’s misadventures and banishes Elrond, strips Durin III of his inheritance, and then closes off the mine. How predictable.

Still, I thought this show was going to pull off an insane move and have Disa murder Durin III after he disinherited her husband. The way how she became so ruthless, power-hungry, and politically ambitious was probably the most unexpected and exciting thing that happened in this episode.

I would have given this show a lot more credit if it went down that path, but of course it didn’t as that scene just ended with Disa and Durin IV kissing one another.

(Sidenote: How is there only four ‘Durins’ in all of the Khazad-dum royal family history? Isn’t the greatest honor a royal Dwarven son could get is to earn his father’s ‘Durin’ name? Shouldn’t there be more than just four ‘Durins’ in the thousands of years this tradition and kingdom has existed?)

Actually, forget what I said about that Disa scene nearly being the most exciting thing in this episode. That honor has got to go to the Sauron cultists burning down the Harefoot’s wagons.

Finally, something interesting has happened with this plotline. After weeks of the Harefoots aimlessly trudging along and the Stranger bumbling around like a fool, we have at last gotten some conflict as the cultist caught up to the Harefoot caravan.

Unfortunately, however, the Stranger was chased off by the Harefoots just before the cultist arrived because the Stranger nearly got Norri killed…again.

To be honest, it’s not even the guy’s fault as these Harefoots religious stand as close as possible to him for some unknown reason while he was using dangerous magical powers. How many times do they need to be almost killed before they realize that when he uses magical powers, he’s very dangerous and they need to back away.

Nonetheless, Norri once again brings ruin and destruction upon her people as she not only revealed the existence of the Harefoots to the cultists, but also confronts them about their intentions of trying to find the Stranger by pointing them in the wrong direction.

Needless to say, the cultists ignored her, discovered the rest of the Harefoots and their caravans, and then proceeded to burn it all to the ground. If only they could have finished the job and put the Harfoots out of their misery…

The episode ends with Norri, Poppy, Norri’s mom for some reason, and Sadoc all journeying off to find the Stanger and warn him about the cultists to the utter dimsay of all the viewers. Can’t we just move on from these boring Hobbit wannabes?

What a pitiful episode. From the lore-breaking nonsense, to the physics-breaking nonsense, and then finishing up with just the plot-breaking nonsense, everything about this episode has made me regret watching this show even more. I’m sorry for sounding so harsh, but these writers should never have been this job in the first place. They were obviously not right for the job that had so much money and fan interest on the line.

Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Episode 7, the penultimate episode, gets a 2.5/10 from me. Without that dumb Celeborn line, it would have got a 3.5 just as Episode 6 earned. But, you can’t break the lore so egregiously and not get a whole point deduction from me.

Images Source: Featured Image: (Amazon) (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – Official Trailer | Prime Video – YouTube)

In Text Image 1: (Amazon) (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – SDCC Trailer – YouTube)

In Text Image 2: (Amazon) (Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring)

In Text Image 3: (Amazon) (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – Official Trailer | Prime Video – YouTube)

In Text Image 4: (Amazon) (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – SDCC Trailer – YouTube)