F: "Do you know why a ship floats and a stone cannot? Because the stone sees only downward; the darkness of the water is vast and irresistible. The ship feels the darkness as well, striving moment by moment to master her and pull her under. But the ship has a secret. For unlike the stone, her gaze is not downward but up, fixed upon the light that guides her, whispering of grander things than darkness ever knew."
G: "But sometimes the lights shine just as brightly reflected in the water as they do in the sky. It's hard to say which way is up and which way is down. How am I to know which lights to follow?"
F: "Sometimes we cannot know until we have touched the darkness."
Now, I love clever, well-written dialogue and am willing to forgive a show or movie which contains it quite a lot- wooden acting, poor special effects, even some questionable plot points- but this ain't it. This is needlessly convoluted and frankly, fatuous nonsense. Finrod's rhetorical question is ridiculous; a stone does not sink because it's looking downwards and attracted to darkness. Likewise, a ship does not float because it is "looking" at the light. But let's pretend for a moment that his metaphor- if that's what it's supposed to be- makes some sort of logical sense; when Galadriel asks how she can know which lights to follow, he tells her that sometimes you have to touch the darkness before you can know which way is up. If this reply is supposed to complete his previous thought, what Finrod is saying is that, in order to float, you first have to sink... this metaphor becomes more and more tortured as we go along. Boats actually float much better if they haven't sunk first, and I know from personal experience. As a child I took a boating safety course during which we were required to paddle a canoe out to the middle of the lake and then fill it with water up to the gunwhales, causing it to sink to surface level (canoes contain air pockets so can't completely sink). Then we- the kids in the canoe- were to get out, arrange ourselves on either side of the canoe, and vigorously see-saw the sides up and down until we got enough water out to refloat the boat. The problem was, we couldn't do it; I suspect none of us were at the time big/strong enough to push down hard enough while treading water, to accomplish the task. Instead, we ended up swimming to a nearby small island, dragging the swamped canoe with us to where, once we could stand on the bottom, we turned the canoe over and dumped out all the water before paddling sheepishly back to shore. All this to say that the dialogue here, like so much of what is said and done in this episode, means nothing and doesn't work on any level.
You know where you can find a successful rhetorical question? In the movie Batman Begins: "Why Do We Fall, Bruce? So We Can Learn To Pick Ourselves Up." Succinct, to the point, and makes perfect sense. Unlike any conversation in this show.
G: "You Have Not Seen What I Have Seen."
E: "I’ve Seen My Share."
G: "You Have Not Seen What I Have Seen."
Amazing! It's like Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and Bernard Shaw all rolled into one. Leaving aside- for the moment- Galadriel's monumental arrogance, this dialogue is just ghastly. In fact, most of the dialogue in this episode is awful. Tolkien's elves tend to speak in a rather old world, slightly formal way. The elves in The Rings of Power sound well, modern, for lack of a better term. Galadriel often sounds like a sulky, grievance-mongering millennial, Elrond is the epitome of the term "metrosexual" and when Finrod is going on with all that light and darkness/floating and sinking claptrap, he sounds like some smarmy self-help guru. I half expected him to pull out a bottle of essential oils and start talking about self-care and learning to love yourself as you are. This isn't even addressing the way everyone looks- hair cut short and perfectly coiffed and styled... Elrond looks like he's ready for a L'Oriel commercial, not any kind of serious action. But more on that in my next post, for now let's just stick with the writing which, story-wise and dialogue-wise, is very badly done. And really, there's no excuse for this: with the excessive amounts of money they spent, they could certainly afford to hire good writers. And they're using- allegedly- source material by a writer who was famed as a linguist, to the point that he wrote whole languages to lend a sense of realism to his novels. These people couldn't manage to find examples to follow of how his characters were supposed to sound and act? They only possible explanation is that they didn't care about being true to Tolkien, either in the letter or spirit of his writing- or worse, thought that they knew better than he did.
In my third- and final- post on this episode of The Rings of Power, I'll discuss the rest of the plot and why none of the characters- especially Galadriel- are compelling in any way.