One of my consistent complaints about the second season of Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is not simply that the show’s creators are deviating from the J. R. R. Tolkien source material they are supposedly adapting. It’s that, after having deviated, they have revealed that they are not as good at storytelling as Tolkien himself is. This has shown up in all sorts of ways, from pacing to characterization to world-building. But the most noticeable has been their stretching of insufficient plot material over the time allotted.

That’s not the case in “Doomed to Die,” the penultimate episode of this season. Bringing some of the most interesting storylines together and shedding everything else enables The Rings of Power to bring pretty much all it has to the table. Paradoxically, however, this maximum effort brings into sharper relief how the show falls short of its aspirations.

Almost everything converges on Eregion this week: the hobbits, the Stranger, and Isildur are nowhere to be seen (which is fine with me), though neither are the Númenoreans (which I’m less fine with). The orc army that reached the elven stronghold in the last episode (with Galadriel held captive) begins its assault in earnest, while an Annatar-deceived Celebrimbor continues to work on the last rings, and Durin IV attempts to rally dwarves to Eregion’s aid. These stories have established connections with each other and bring a (mostly) unforced narrative momentum to the episode.

The Celebrimbor–Annatar relationship continues to be a season highlight, notwithstanding its now myriad differences from its lore depiction. Celebrimbor’s horrified realizations that Annatar has foisted a simulated reality upon him and is Sauron bear a certain resemblance to Truman Burbank’s experience in The Truman Show. It may seem a bit low-brow for an allegedly Tolkien-influenced show to borrow from something like that, but it mostly works here. The altered Celebrimbor–Annatar dynamic produces some interesting changes in each of their characters. Sauron claims that, unlike his master Morgoth, he wishes to perfect, not to destroy; Celebrimbor’s retort — that Sauron truly is the great deceiver, capable even of deceiving himself — conveys unexpectedly well at least one aspect of a plausible reading of his character.

When this thread actually has to intersect with the Battle of Eregion, however, it gets a bit tangled. And this is by far the fault of the battle. It’s obvious that the show’s creators worked backwards from the cool things they wanted to happen in the fight and didn’t spend much time thinking about how to fill in the blanks. So you have a caged Galadriel on the orc frontlines interrupting an elven charge, catapults bringing mountain rocks tumbling down, a Boromir-esque elf dying with one last arrow shot, a battle with a troll, and even elven King Gil-Galad charging into battle (and reminding a select few of us of another High King in battle).

The problem is that none of it really makes any sense (though several moments spent mourning a dead horse seem eminently appropriate). Even if Celebrimbor was busy making his rings and Annatar was busy keeping him deceived, it beggars belief that elves inside Eregion did not react to or prepare for the coming assault, and had seemingly no battle plan when it actually began. The elves outside Eregion seem to have no plan, either; they just head into a charge heedlessly, and battle on the muddy plain in front of Eregion without much strategy. It’s hard to discern much of a plan on Adar’s part, either. It would be giving Rings of Power a bit too much credit to chalk up all this lack of strategy to the irrationality arising from his Khan Noonien Singh–esque monomaniacal vengeance quest against Sauron that is inspiring him to be ever more willing to sacrifice orcs as cannon fodder. This is likely an obvious prelude to Sauron’s wresting control of the orcs from him in the season finale (even though Sauron’s threat to do the very same thing in the first episode of this season caused the orcs to rally to Adar in the first place), which won’t make sense but will at least probably kill off Adar, a pointless character.

The battle of Eregion is a convenient encapsulation of how the Rings of Power lacks the command of timing, spatial awareness, scale, and spectacle that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy displayed. Jackson was no battle tactician, and not everything that happens in those movies makes perfect military sense. But when they had battles, they made viewers care about the good guys, felt big, provided a clear sense of what was going on where, and supplied clear motives and plans for opposing sides. This episode’s supposedly epic battle was a confusing mess, and not just because we didn’t learn enough about Eregion before it began (Celebrimbor helpfully points out, mid battle, that orcs have laid an infernal engine upon the thinnest part of the wall) to get a sense of it as a place. For all the attempted shock-and-awe of this episode, it only adds up to a collection of moments.

This has been a problem for the whole show. For all the resources poured into it, it has failed to convey a realistic lived-in sense of its lands or their people. In this episode, a Jackson-imitation pre-battle speech by Durin IV shows, for I think the first time, the full extent of Khazad-dûm, which is a twofold defect: This should have been done already, and it still doesn’t feel that big. And speaking of Khazad-dûm, it is also a problem that Elrond can apparently flit back and forth between there and Eregion on short notice, much as Arondir (another invented character) can get from Pelargir to Eregion in just a few days. These are all signs of a show that, even when it is trying its hardest to be something better, can only but remind viewers of that something better. We can probably expect more of the same as the second season of Rings of Power concludes.

One last thing. About the kiss: I was initially horrified, but the episode makes clear that it was going for the “kiss-of-distraction” trope, seen in, e.g., Captain America: The Winter Soldier. So it may be cliché writing, but I don’t think it’s a lore desecration (though the show has plenty of those to worry about).