A thought occured to me the other day, about the ending of the LOTR film trilogy. If, as is rumoured, the scouring of the Shire has been cut (not at all unreasonable – it’s a nice coda, but it’s not going to work very well for a cinema audience) and the ending of Frodo and Sam’s part of the story is at Mount Doom (and any big happy reunion at the end if there is one, obviously), then I wonder if Jackson will leave Mount Doom unaltered? I wonder if he can? The end at Mount Doom isn’t heroic or redemptive for any of the protagonists – the only who comes out of it looking half decent is Sam, by virtue of well, not doing very much.

The obvious thing to do is make the ending more redemptive for Smeagol, but given the lovely bit of wrong-footing Jackson pulled off in the Two Towers in regard to Smeagol/Gollum I wonder if he’s aiming at that or not. I mean, thinking about it, the end of The Two Towers could be to make an eventual redeption all the more powerful, but I tend to think that’s it’s just staying true to the book, while working in the film’s alteration of Gollum/Smeagol into a split personality affair. We’ll see.