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Message: <blockquote data-quote="OB1" data-source="post: 8815592" data-attributes="member: 6796241">Maybe I am misremembering, but after the big battle with the horses, didn't they go over a nearby hill and see the boats anchored in a river?  I took that as they had sailed the boats up-river to be closer to the southlands.  Such a thing was seen in RotK.  The number of horses on those ships I don't have an answer for, but if anything, that's a production/budget issue rather than a writing issue.  I'm willing to overlook that as 'movie-magic'.  Fair if some don't.Well, in Star Wars it was 3 in pretty quick succession.  Droids end up at Luke's farm, and they happen to need a translator and an astro-mech.  The first astro-mech that Lars picks happens to have a bad motivator.  Ben happens to be wandering nearby when Sandpeople attack Luke.For the RoP sequence, we have Galadriel being 'rescued' by Sauron (which given the end of the season, seems very likely was not a coincidence), getting attacked by the sea monster (again, may not have been a coincidence) and being found by Numenorians in the ocean (we don't know how long they were at sea, could have been quite a while).As for Galadriel's decision to jump ship, we see characters in LotR do all kinds of out of character things when tempted by the One Ring.  The One Ring is what Sauron poured his "malice, cruelty, and his will to dominate all life".  That sounds like abilities Sauron has intrinsically, and that his creation of the Ring amplified (would love to understand more from you on how that idea fits in with Tolkien's writing on the matter).  So perhaps what the series is showing us is that Galadriel's obsession with hunting Sauron isn't just something from within her, but an effect upon her from Sauron, much in the same way the Ring drives people.  The Ring is Sauron.  That Galadriel doesn't tell everyone at the end of the season about what she discovered could also be much in the same vein here.  Just because we haven't seen all of Sauron's plans laid out yet doesn't mean they aren't behind the story we're watching, effecting it.  Is it important to Nori that the Stranger is Gandalf (or some other wizard)?  It's not, because she's meeting him for the first time, and that name wouldn't change the way she feels about him.  Bad writing would have been for him to say, "I'm Gandalf" like it means something to her (again, see Khan in ST: Into Darkness).  If you were watching this series without any knowledge previous works, the name wouldn't mean anything to you either.  What's important is what the writers actually show, that Nori doesn't know if she can trust this Stranger or not through much of the season, which is reasonable given her upbringing and Harfoot society.  That she does end up trusting him matters to the story.  Even then, the writers hint at who the Stranger is to the audience in the final scene, probably precisely because they wanted to end the mystery for LotR fans.  That's a smart, in character, in universe way of ending the mystery, not bad writing.Now, this is a major deviation from Tolkien's work, and I can see fans of Tolkien being concerned about what bringing Gandolf and the other wizards into the 2nd age means for the overall structure of the story.  How that could lead to a domino effect of other changes.  But that only makes this story different, not bad.</blockquote>

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