The time-leap criticism seems odd to me. In what way did the show diminish the scale of the journey made from Numenor, and at what point did it ever suggest that all events were completely and exactly concurrent? With GoT the vast distances travelled made no sense in light of previous seasons and in terms of understanding Westeros’ geography. With this, while I get that it felt quick, just because they didn’t make the conscious choice of showing the entire journey doesn’t mean that there was a sizeable time scale to it. It’s not much of a suspension of disbelief to think the initial fight was happening late at night into the dawn and the charge came early light. In GoT it made no fucking sense because of what we knew to be concurrent events and the continental-sized distances travelled in stupidly short times to support plot contrivances.
I get some of the back and forth in this thread but honestly if you’re going to watch it purely so you can seemingly come in here to shit on something, it really makes no sense to me. There’s been nearly 6 hours of content so far, I wouldn’t put myself through 6 hours of something I hate. I get passions run high with Tolkien but come on.
Also, Tom Bombadil was one of Tolkien’s more bizarre creations and would have jarred with the tone of the trilogy whilst also being narratively inconvenient - to establish him properly would’ve taken some time which would have bloated already long movies that they had to make big editorial choices on to ensure their running times were viable with cinema audiences. The scouring of the shire should have been in there though, even if just for the extended editions.
I enjoyed Galadriel for the first time, she didn’t grate on me in this episode.
Spoiler
I still think Halbrand will be a corrupted King of Men and likely the Witch King of Angmar himself, rather than Sauron. Sauron is either yet to be revealed or has been slipped in far more surreptitiously at this point I reckon.