At the climax of the Odyssey, Odysseus's grand plan is... to simply lock all of the suitors in a room and rely on brute force to dominate them. This has always struck me as somewhat incongruous with the rest of his story, where he tends to rely on cunning and deception rather than simple physical superiority. Sure, he and his companions hide the weapons, but if there wasn't a godlike epic hero on their side, the suitors could easily have overwhelmed them. It seems anticlimactic, frankly. Is there any scholarly or ancient commentary that addresses this, or am I alone in my opinion?
I don't think it's incongruous with the story. Athena disguised as Mentes in the first book says:
I wish that such an Odysseus would come now among the suitors.
They all would find death was quick and marriage a painful matter.
[Lattimore's translation]
So the killing of the suitors is set up already before any other parts of Odysseus' journey are narrated.
I also think thematically it fits fine. A lot of the Odyssey is about disguise and revealing true identity; consider the Cyclops incident: Odysseus manages to escape by a trick (calling himself οὔτις - Noman), but still has to reveal his identity to the Cyclops to get the heroic credit. Further, the Odyssey makes the homecoming of Agamemnon and Orestes a parallel for Odysseus and Telemachus - like Clytemnestra, Penelope might have remarried, and violence is the way to reclaim one's house in that situation.
Lattimore, in his introduction to his translation, proposes the battle in the dining room links "the Ithakan episode" (as he calls it) to the Trojan War. He sees the fate of the suitors as a divine punishment in retribution for their offences against hospitality. He objects to the killing of the suitors ("Their doom seems excessive to me. I do not know how it seemed to Homer. But Penelope cried over her pet geese....") [Oops, forgot to finish this thought] but he doesn't think the passage doesn't belong. In fact, he calls it "their necessary slaughter."
Fagles, in his introduction, connects the deaths of the suitors to their failure to recognize Odysseus upon his return, unlike a number of other characters that successfully recognize him (after he reveals himself, to be sure - that seems like a slip on Fagles' part in my mind). Fagles puts so much weight on the recognition scenes that he actually describes the climax of the poem as Laertes recognizing Odysseus, not the killing of the suitors.
Lombardo, in his translation, also links the battle in the dining room to the Trojan War, noting that the war was undertaken to defend the honor of Menelaus as in Ithaca Odysseus defends his honor, challenged by the suitors threatening his marriage as Paris threatened Menelaus'.
Whether the killing of the suitors is meant to be the climax or not, Odysseus seems to still be conforming to the heroic ideals of the poem.