I don’t want to start a whole thing, but this was actually my least favorite thing about Rings of Power.
It’s the wrong damn Durins to be teasing a Balrog! The prince is Durin IV, and the Balrog no diffs Durin VI after he delves too greedily and too deep.
Maybe they’re planning to have the dwarves fight and defeat him, and like seal him away for a couple hundred years or whatever but… Can you not? The Balrog is supposed to be ignoring this whole period, slapping that snooze button and blocking Sauron’s calls.
I’m honestly hoping that was just some early foreshadowing for something that won’t pay off for several seasons.
But I do expect that they’ll get there over the five season arc, which is supposed to depict events spanning the entire Second Age. Time compression aside, I have enjoyed the adaptation so far. They are already fudging things quite a bit in having Durin IV be the son of Durin III, rather than an anointed reincarnation several generations down the line as the lore describes, but I don’t mind it so much, because it allows for an equivalent story to be told in a coherent manner for the episodic tv format.
If purists had their druthers, each episode would have dozens of new characters and be set in a completely new time period, with decades or centuries passing every week. It would be an incomprehensible mess.
I think it would have been interesting to tell each season as a notable period in the Age, with a permanent cast of elves and wizards and a rotating cast of dwarves and humans, but yeah the adaptation would always have had to take shortcuts.
“Ai! Ai!”, wailed Legolas.
