We see no indication whatsoever that Bard is the ringleader behind a revolutionary Lake-town faction, let alone that he should be summarily arrested by the Master's men during the dwarves' visit to Lake-town as opposed to months earlier.

The town is rife with spies spying for no particular reason, as Bard - their primary target - is portrayed here as merely a smart, competent bargeman who wishes his hometown wasn't suffering from famine-like food shortages. Where did Jackson get his conception of Tolkien's fictional republic? In the hands of Jackson, Lake-town becomes the domain of an unelected despot whose rule of law extends no farther than a jackboot kicking down doors at midnight. Putting aside that Thorin knows, as we all know, that dragons already have inside of them a substance as hot as molten gold, making immolating a dragon with molten gold an impossibility, does anyone know why the massive dwarven totem Thorin stands atop during this desperate attack is filled with molten gold in the first place? And - moreover - molten gold that comes out if you just pull a couple chains really hard? Sure, the dwarves had just lit the forges of Erebor - itself an unlikely feat under the circumstances, especially in the time allotted for it - but are we really to believe that the second the forges are fired up, elsewhere in the dwarven stronghold a fifty-foot high statue of a dwarven king instantly explodes, presumably killing everyone standing anywhere near it?Ģ. During what has been referred to in The Atlantic as the dwarves' 'MacGyveresque' battle with Smaug - a term which, incredibly, makes it sound more plausible than it was - Thorin's final gambit involves drowning Smaug in a lake of molten gold.

Smaug i am king under the mountain