Discussion of The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter Eleven

Join Cam and Maggie for – BREAKING NEWS: New Lord of the Rings movie just announced! We start the episode by reacting to the exciting announcement of new anime prequel The War of the Rohirrim. Then we move into discussing this wonderful chapter, the last part of the first half of Two Towers [yes that was a lot of math for me]. Crystal balls are the object of fascination here, as Tolkien pivots hard back to magical objects being the roots of all evil and the main engines propelling the story forwards. This time, it's Pippin forming an unhealthy attachment to the magical red flag, and depending on who you ask, he's either falling victim to the will of the crystal ball itself [Maggie] or being possessed by Saruman [Cam]. Gandalf the Grey seems to return, later on, and The Black Riders are back too – it's like a family reunion. We bask in the gothic aesthetic of the Black Riders and take a moment to side-eye Gandalf the White waxing poetic about magical objects when he sort of is one himself now. At one point, Cam uses the term "reanimated corpse" and we finish by considering this chapter as a concentrated version of Tolkien's Middle-earth story. Picture an accordion all scrunched up, it's like that with hobbits.

In our Second Breakfast, we reflect on our recent viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and our brains' inability to consume any art now without connecting it back to LOTR. It's exhausting, but you seem to enjoy it. One is sci-fi and the other is fantasy, but they're kinda exactly the same story written around the same time? Cam's got examples, and Maggie jumps to / spoils his grand finale about thirty seconds into the conversation. Here, I'll just do it here, why not? What's the point, you know, like, of anything? HAL is the Ring.

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