by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9 p.m. I ran the next two episodes in sequence
of the mega-hit premium cable series Game of Thrones, of which I bought the first six seasons on either
DVD or Blu-Ray because they were specially priced in commemoration of the
series’ recent ending on HBO, the premium channel on which it originally aired.
(Does anyone besides me remember that “HBO” originally stood for “Home Box
Office”?) The third and fourth episodes of Game of Thrones were called “Lord Snow” (after the bastard son of
the Stark ruling family whose shameful lineage led him to be exiled by his dad
and sent to join the “Night Watch” that staffs the wall that protects the
more-or-less federated country of Westeros (i.e., England) from the dangerous
“North Country” (i.e., Scotland) and the “White Walkers,” ghost-like creatures
who live there. Only since the wall does a good job protecting Westeros from
the North Country all on its own, the knights of the Night Watch pretty much
just hang around, do practice battles with each other and fuck — though where
they find female partners for this (there don’t seem to be any actual Queer
folk in the Game of Thrones
universe, even though Harry Lloyd plays the part of exiled and disinherited
King Viserys as a screaming queen — though for some reason episode four shows
him having sex in a bathtub with a woman, and the woman is the prostitute his sister has been having a few
Lesbian dry-humps with in an effort to teach her how to tame her warrior
husband she married at Viserys’s urging to supply him with an army to regain
his rightful throne — I’m not making this up, you know!) is something of a
mystery. Game of Thrones has
become a worldwide sensation and I can pretty much see why, but even this early
I’m already starting to show signs of ennui, partly because of the sheer multiplicity of
families, characters and plot lines involved (and the rapidity with which the
directors and scripters of these shows cut from one to another of them) and
partly because only a few of the characters are all that interesting.
Lord Snow
himself (Kit Harington) is the closest this show has to a sexy romantic lead
even though in the all-male (and sworn to celibacy, like the Grail Knights in
Wagner’s Parsifal — though not in the source novel by Wolfram von Eschenbach Wagner
adapted for the opera — not that they do so great a job of
keeping that vow, sort of like modern-day Roman Catholic priests) Night Watch
there isn’t a romantic partner he can be hot and sexy with. The most interesting character in the piece remains
Tyrion Lannister (little-person actor Peter Dinklage), whose normal-sized
brother Jaime was having an affair with Queen Catelyn (Michelle Fairley) of the
Stark family and, at the end of episode one, pushed 10-year-old Bran Stark
(Isaac Hempstead Wright) out of a window after he discovered his mom and Jaime
fucking. Bran survived but became disabled, though in episode four he’s being
outfitted with a special saddle so he can ride a horse, and therefore be a
warrior, even though he can’t walk. There’s also a jousting tournament that
results in the death of a knight in silver armor at the hands of one in black armor, but the most interesting plotline in these
episodes is the appearance of a comic-relief character, Samwell Tarly (John
Bradley), who shows up at the Night Watch intending to join even though he’s
overweight, hopeless at fighting and a coward besides. The other knights use
him as a sort of animate training dummy, knocking him to the ground and
repeatedly striking him with their swords as well as kicking him, but “Lord”
Jon Snow befriends him. The rather hapless character seems like a mashup of
Alan Hale’s Friar Tuck in the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and Vincent d’Onofrio’s character in
Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Viet Nam war film Full Metal Jacket — and I can only hope Samwell takes the same sort of
revenge against his tormentors d’Onofrio did against his in Kubrick’s film!
