The Rings of Power's Best Line Got Nothing to Do With Sauron
Dialogue in The Lords of the Rings: The Rings of Power is commonly criticized as overdramatic and trying to use high words to cover lack of meaning, but not everyone on the web agrees with that.
Recently the fans on Reddit decided to nominate the best line in the show.
There were various contenders. "Where there is love it is never truly dark. How can [the tree] not grow in a home like yours," sold some viewers on the show's version of Elrond. "Hope is never mere, even when it is meager. When all other senses sleep, the eye of hope is first to awaken, last to shut," was appreciated by many.
And it would not have been unexpected for one of the lines from Halbrand (aka Sauron) to end up as the best, according to the number of upvotes. After all, Charlie Vickers, who played him, is often recognized as one of the better actors in the show. Indeed, the line he spoke during his character's reveal as the Dark Lord's current form, "I've been awake since the breaking of the First Silence, in that time – I have had many names," was rated quite high, and praised even by users who were initially against the Halbrand=Sauron theory.
But the most upvoted line was one in the original post, and it had nothing to do with Sauron. It was the line which Durin said to his father:
"Elrond is as much a brother to me as if he'd been fired in my own mother's womb."
Not only it was excellently delivered, it sounded incredibly heartfelt, given that it came after King Durin's reminiscing of Durin IV's birth and his mother. Not only it reflected Durin's extremely deep, if tumultuous, thanks to natural differences in lifespan and perception of time between their races, friendship with Elrond, it also highlighted the characters of dwarves and its serious, dramatic side, in a way that Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy had failed to do. Some people say that the dwarves in The Rings of Power were the characters that the showrunners cared about the most, and given people's choice of the best line in the show that just might be true.
All in all, while The Rings of Power's dialogue might be far from perfect, it still had its gems, where scriptwriters and actors demonstrated that they cared.