"Journey to the Cross-roads" - Jacob's Thoughts

What actually happens in this chapter?

Faramir sends them off, then disappears back into the wood as though it were a dream; Gollum resumes guiding them some more through Mordor, almost without missing a beat, as though the Faramir episode never happened, didn't matter.  I'm guessing it will matter more later, but Faramir's dreamlike departure doesn't do much to establish what the necessity or point of this little detour into the world of Men was (though, as we've already discussed, he's a far more pleasant character to spend time with than Tom Bombadil--though, like Tom, Tolkien doesn't seem to know much what to do with him, either, sadly).

Samwise dreams of the Shire going to seed (no doubt a subtle foreshadowing of the homecoming in Book VI) then wakes up, more forlorn than ever (a much needed humanizing touch for Samwise after the needlessly cruel way he's been treating Gollum lately).

A storm appears to be brewing (I'm assuming this is chronologically concurrent with the Battle of Helm's Deep in Book III).

Frodo is fatalistic, and increasingly opaque to both Samwise and us as readers (Samwise became our reader-substitute in place of Frodo so gradually that I hardly noticed).

Gollum wakes them up in a panic to get out of the way of the coming troops.  They come to the cross-roads and see a vision foreshadowing the Return of the King.

All important details and proper character moments and nice foreshadowing.  Nevertheless, that is all, apparently, that happened in this chapter.

I've been using the descriptor "table-setting" for a few chapters in a row now, and frankly, I'm getting tired of finding new ways to say it.  My distant, childhood memories of reading this text reassure me that this all pays off soon, and the glacial pace of events in Book IV is almost Hitchcockian in how it keeps ratcheting up the tension, so as to ensure the bigger pay-off; and Tolkien's description itself is also lush enough to be a delight in and of itself to explore, even if Mordor is such a forlorn and depressing place to inhabit, so I feel a tad churlish to complain; nevertheless, this endless teetering between tension and tedium is a balancing-act that Tolkien has been playing all this series long, and I'm starting to strum my fingers a bit--and though I think he has far better command of that balance now than he did at, say, "The Old Forest," I kinda wish he would cease playing these balancing acts altogether.  We all identified places in Book III that could have used some trimming and pruning, and I feel like those same tendencies are starting to show this late in Book IV too.  I would like Tolkien to quit setting up the chess pieces and finally make some gambits, so to speak.