Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part II: Falling Towers

This is the second part of our look at many of the smaller issues of historical realism in Amazon’s Rings of Power, following on our more substantive discussion of the major worldbuilding problems the show experienced. I had hoped to keep this at two parts (actually, I had hoped this would just be a one-off sequel), but every time I come back to these scenes this post gets longer and so at this point it has been necessary to break it into three parts. Last week we looked at a range of problems centered around metalworking and armor. While the failures there were mostly par for the course for this kind of fiction, they contrast unfavorably with the far greater care lavished in the Lord of the Rings books and Peter Jackson’s film adaptations, while at the same time metalworking and smithing are far more central to the themes of Rings of Power and thus ought to have been given more care.

This week we’re going to look primarily at tactics, with a particular focus on the orcs and Southlanders in the climatic battle of episode 6, “Udûn.” Then next week we’ll look at the Númenóreans and their tactics, as well as a discussion of the ships in the show. Now battle tactics are not a major theme of Rings of Power, so one might reasonably ask why they deserve this attention. However, the plot of many of the middle episodes quite clearly builds towards a ‘major’ battle (which at last happens in Ep. 6, “Udûn”) and while this battle doesn’t actually matter very much to the plot (its net effects are almost entirely undone by the beginning of the next episode, a nasty habit Rings has of stepping on its major plot and emotional beats in order to ‘surprise’ the audience and only considering the emotional impact within episodes and not between them), it’s clear the battle was supposed to carry a lot of emotional weight and tension.

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