SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read if you haven’t watched ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ episode 6, titled ‘Udûn’, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
With three more episodes remaining in its inaugural season, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” finally delivered the massive battle sequence that fans of the epic fantasy franchise have been patiently waiting for. Although not as massive as the Battle of Helm’s Deep from 2002’s feature film “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”, the episode “Udûn” still greatly expanded the scope of the action of the series, delivering nearly non-stop, near-death moments and ending on a massive cliffhanger that also establishes one of the most significant events in JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth story.
In the episode, the dark elf Adar (Joseph Mawle) and his army of orcs arrive at the mountain fortress where Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova), Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi) and the Southland villagers are supposed to be locked up. They find it empty instead – until Roundir launches a one-man sneak attack and topples the stone watchtower on top of a good chunk of Adar’s forces. Arondir and his fighters regroup before an even bigger assault from Adar; the Southland villagers seem to prevail, until they notice that some of Adar’s fallen minions are actually their fellow Southlanders who pledged their allegiance to Adar in the (false) hope of sparing their lives. The remaining forces of Adar ambush the villagers in a flurry of arrows as their leader searches for and finds the mysterious Blade of Sauron he has been searching for all season.
The day is saved (briefly) when Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) bursts in with her Númenórean army. She and Halbrand (Charlie Vickers) apprehend Adar, who turns out to be one of the first elves corrupted by the evil dark lord Morgoth. As Galadriel interrogates Adar, the human renegade, Waldreg (Geoff Morrell), secretly arrives at the Fallen Citadel with Sauron’s blade and uses its mysterious power to unleash a cataclysm on Middle-earth. The dam holding back a mountain lake opens; its water follows the channels dug by the orcs and their prisoners; and eventually spills into the magma chamber of a nearby dormant volcano. It erupts, blanketing the Southern Lands in fire, ash, and darkness. We have just witnessed the birth of the infamous Mount Doom of Mordor.
Director Charlotte Brändström – who directed episodes of “The Witcher”, “Outlander”, “The Outsider” and “Arrow” – and Clark and Córdova explained to Variety how the monumental episode, full of mounted knights and invading orcs, came to be.
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The Pack Horses of Númenor
Brändström was already familiar with “The Lord of the Rings” and dove into action movies, like “Braveheart” and “Gladiator,” for inspiration, but she also researched actual ancient battles.
“I had studied a lot of Ukrainian Cossacks and how they fought on horseback, hid behind horses, tried to avoid arrows and bullets,” she said. “They were incredible riders. I wanted to do something different when the Númenóreans came to the village to save everyone. We worked on that for months in advance in New Zealand to make sure they were on horseback. I knew it would be spectacular.
One of the episode’s most stunning moments comes when Galadriel, Halbrand, and the entire Númenórean crew arrive on horseback to rescue Arondir and the villagers of the Southlands from Adar’s orc army. The streak used 20 to 30 horsepower and a total crew of 150 to 200 people, Brändström said.
She would have preferred to use even more horsepower but, as with many “The Rings of Power,” the majority of the episode was shot during the height of the pandemic.
“It was very difficult to get access to training horses to be part of this battle,” she said. “I tricked it into coming from a lot of different directions and reusing the same horses,” then I increased their numbers with visual effects.
To prepare for the sequence, the riders trained for four months, with three hours of stunts per day and three days of riding per week. The training was particularly helpful for Clark; while Galadriel is a natural horsewoman who deftly gallops into battle wearing her shining armor, the actor had never ridden a horse before.
“A lot of us had started out never riding – me anyway – and were quite nervous and scared,” she said. “I rode a horse called Titan, which is apparently one of the best horses they’ve ever had and the best trained. I feel like my riding skills depend a lot on the horse I was on, but I’m not terrified anymore. Once you feel comfortable on a horse, it’s the closest to magic I’ve ever experienced. You also have this connection to people from the past, something that humans have done forever.
During the fierce battle, Galadriel quickly dodges the orcs’ spears and arrows as she slips from the saddle onto the side of her horse, but Clark admits a stuntman has taken her place.
“I can’t believe it was possible. Before doing this, I thought a lot of horse stunts were CGI, but that wasn’t the case,” she said. “There were a lot of amazing stunt people on there, but their horses were amazing and so was the connection they had with them. Seeing the stunt team say goodbye to their horses when we were done was really moving.
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Rounding Bloody Faceoff
Not to be outmatched by Galadriel, Arondir eliminates the ranks of orcs with his bow and arrows and collapsing the huge stone watchtower with a flaming arrow at the right moment. His most intense moment, however, comes as he confronts a hulking orc, who throws him into a clearing in the village. Arondir manages to stab the berserker in the eye, but he is pinned and nearly strangled above a well. The orc removes the dagger from his face, causing black, disgusting blood to spurt across Arondir’s face, but the elf is saved by his beloved Bronwyn, who sends the brute out from behind.
“There are no stilts or camera tricks,” Córdova said of her fight with the gargantuan orc. “The guy is massive, amazing movement and a fighter. I had to climb on top of him, step on his hip and leg, wrap myself and strangle him as he moved. It’s almost like being on a mechanical bull. There were no platforms, no cables, we weren’t supported by anything. I was on the back of this massive man trying not to fall.
The actor said his training for the battle took eight months and that fight alone was three months of preparation. After all the archery lessons, martial arts training, wirework and fight choreography, he “lived in a perpetual state of pain” and was “full of bruises”.
“The hardest thing was when he broke my spine with my back,” Córdova said. “I had to keep my head forward, tuck my chin into my chest so that when he slaps me, my neck doesn’t whip me. But, of course, sometimes it is. My neck was just destroyed; I was like a walking robot.
In addition to her bruises from the brutal fight scene, Córdova had to cover herself in the orc’s blood, which he claimed was a mixture of gooey chocolate, gelatin, and food coloring.
“It was so sticky and so uncomfortable and so cold when we were shooting these nighttime shots,” he said. “Everything kept going into my chest protector. So I had this sugary goo pool on me for the better part of two weeks.
Courtesy of Prime Video
The Birth of Mount Doom
The episode ends on an even darker note with the birth of Mount Doom in the future region of Mordor.
Brändström only learned of this critical turn of events after arriving in New Zealand. “I just thought, wow, this is just a director’s dream,” she said. “The pressure was trying to make it as good as possible. It was a lot of hard work, mixing special effects and visual effects and real stunts and a lot of hard work from the team.
To recreate the ash and smoke billowing from Mount Doom, Brändström turned to real-life natural disasters.
“I’ve studied every volcanic eruption you can think of,” Brändström said. “We looked at ash cloud formations, from the eruption of Pompeii to what happened in New Zealand a few years ago, in the Canary Islands, Italy.”
The creation of Mount Doom was one of the few scenes in the episode that took place in daylight. The rest of “Udûn” takes place in the dark of night – and the mud of a New Zealand winter.
“We lived in mud and rain for months,” said the director. “We had seven weeks of shooting at night. I never saw the light of day. I came home, went to bed and got up when it was dark. It was just night the whole time.
