Here’s another major change, the last one of my own changes on top of the edit I’m using for a source.
In the original, the scene where they arrive at Mirkwood has two topics. Firstly is that Mirkwood is bad, and that Gandalf should go off and do some investigating. And secondly is that Bilbo almost tells Gandalf that he has the ring, and then in a major failiure of character that foreshadows his fall to the ring, and the ring’s power, he decides not to.
Since my episode 3, ‘Riddles in the Dark’, features Bilbo’s discovery and first usage of the ring, I wanted to end on the moment where he decides to keep it a secret. But since my episode 4, ‘The Return of the Shadow’, features the Mirkwood exploration (which is quite long), I felt that the exposition about Mirkwood belonged with the episode in which they explore it.
Therefore, I decided to chop it into two scenes - one where they arrive and Bilbo fails to tell Gandalf about the ring, and one where Gandalf explores it then decides to leave the dwarves to explore it alone.
So, originally, it played out like this:
- The party arrive outside Mirkwood
- Bilbo fiddles with the ring as the ring whispers
- Gandalf peeks in a little, and identifies their path
- Bilbo says the forest feels cursed, Gandalf says they have no other option
- Galadriel warns Gandalf that something’s afoot
- Bilbo gets a little ‘ring shock’ as Gandalf explores
- Gandalf announces he’s leaving
- Gandalf notices something’s up with Bilbo, who fails to tell him about the ring
- Gandalf warns the party about Mirkwood and leaves
- The party enter Mirkwood
Now, episode three ends like this:
- Bilbo discovers the ring
- Various other things happen
- The party arrive outside Mirkwood
- Bilbo fiddles with the ring as the ring whispers
- Gandalf notices something’s up with Bilbo, who fails to tell him about the ring
- I extended this scene a little, especially the last shots, also adding a zoom and a more ominous audio track, to let this moment have a little longer to land.
(I think this works nicely, because the first thing that happens to Bilbo upon arriving at the location where Sauron is, is that he starts to feel the pull of the ring. It wants to be found. This scene also makes Gandalf seem more shrewd - he notices something is up with Bilbo immediately.)
And episode four begins like this:
- Thorin/Gandalf flashback (unrelated to what I’m telling you about here, it’s just what happens in this episode)
- [Implicitly here, time may have passed while they searched for the path]
- Gandalf peeks in a little, and identifies their path
- Bilbo says the forest feels cursed [now implicitly having been near to it for a while, or having felt the pull of the ring], Gandalf says they have no other option
- Galadriel warns Gandalf that something’s afoot
- Bilbo gets a little ‘ring shock’ as Gandalf explores [reminding the audience of the events of the last episode]
- Gandalf announces he’s leaving
- Gandalf warns the party about Mirkwood and leaves
- The party enter Mirkwood
These are definitely the trickiest cuts I’ve had to do. Luckily, the score during these scenes is very jerky and mysterious, with lots of cuts to the forest as if it’s spying on them, so I think I’ve managed to make these cuts as clean as possible while maintaining coherency.