Peter Jackson made it very clear that he sees The Hobbit trilogy as tying firmly into The Lord of the Rings - while The Hobbit book does relate to Tolkien's later masterpiece, Jackson has gone all out using as much material as possible to make the bond between them far stronger than originally intended. There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to achieve this degree of unification between these sources, but more often that not these references and links to The Lord of the Rings feel as if they've been shoehorned into the project just for the sake of it. Elijah Wood's Frodo cameo at the beginning of An Unexpected Journey let audiences know immediately that these links would be present and plenty more followed throughout the rest of the movies, often slotted in in a most incongruous manner. Perhaps if these cross-references had felt more intuitively placed in the storyline they wouldn't have stood out as being so obvious - unfortunately this wasn't the case, and the result is a number of scenes which feel more than a little out of place.
