a flashback or prologue of Smaug's arrival at the Lonely Mountain, complete with a young Thorin....a Thorin who might look rather like RA does now.....

A cold shower for Ms Silverlode please! And will the horny aunties of the boards please stop elevating their hormones to the level of poetry?

On matters of Thorin's age- late middle-age is a good analogy. The thing about Thorin, is that much like Bilbo, he's reached an age where he must either fulfill his 'pipe dreams' or live out the rest of his days without achieving them. While Bilbo is on the cusp of going to seed and spending the rest of his days as an eccentric but respectable bachelor and country squire, Thorin is on the cusp of becoming too old to mete out any kind of vengeance on Smaug and reclaim the Lonely Mountain. There's a tragic futility to the character of Thorin. While we see Aragorn say to the kid at Helm's Deep 'There is always hope', Thorin is specifically identified as an heir without hope and so i'm hoping to see a rather melancholic and sympathetic vision of Thorin, resigned to at best a heroic and honourable death, but fearful (and suspicious) that Gandalf has just set him up for a humiliating and ignominious one- there's a great deal of pathos to be drawn from the character, and just as much as his dourness can make him defensive and aggressive, it should also show him as capable of sincere displays of wonderment and happiness- the moment where he recovers the Arkenstone should almost have the same effect on him as when Bilbo sees the ship at the grey havens at the end of LotR- the same wide-eyed wonderment and blissful happiness. It's a kind of scope that i fear someone as young, fit and virile as Richard Armitage won't be able to capture, where someone a bit more world-weary and 'past it' would (my first choice for Thorin was actually Anthony Hopkins) but if he can then he really will have proven himself.

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Dr Death

I've watched Armitage's work and he is good at playing characters who have deep rooted emotional conflicts as a consequence of events in their pasts. I sense he enjoys being cast in roles where the characters are complex, often stern, even haughty on the one hand, but have another underlying, more compassionate, benevolent side to them. (Multi dimensional characters). He is the sort of actor that does a lot of research into the backstory of his characters so I have high hopes that he is going to do justice to Thorin. He's also been raised on Tolkien's writing which is re-assuring.

I suppose a full blown Estrogen Island might actually scare some of newer members.