by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I watched the last two episodes
of the second season of Game of Thrones,
“Blackwater” and “Valar Morghulis.” “Blackwater” at least focused on a single storyline
and made a good deal of sense: Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane) assembles an
army and navy to invade King’s Landing, the city whose previously impregnable
castle contains the Iron Throne, whose occupant supposedly rules all “Westeros”
(i.e., medieval Britain), and seize the Iron Throne from Joffrey Baratheon
(Jack Gleeson) and his fiancée. His forces outmumber those of Joffrey and the
Lannisters — and in fact Joffrey isn’t really a Baratheon, but the product of
the previous Queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) having had an adulterous
relationship with her brother Jaime Lannister (who’s been a prisoner of
somebody or other for the last two episodes and therefore we haven’t seen much
of him in quite a while). Gee, when Wagner’s Siegmund and Sieglinde had an
adulterous incestuous affair in Die Walküre they produced Siegfried; in Game of Throne the incestuous adulterers gave us a pathetic little
nerd (when he started whining about how he was expected to lead the defenders
of the King’s Landing castle in battle but he really didn’t want to, I
half-expected him to say, “I’d go into battle, only those damned bone
spurs of mine are acting up again!”) who’s
so creepy and bloodthirsty he could have given lessons to Caligula and Nero
(and indeed Jack Gleeson would be good casting if anyone wants to do yet
another movie on either of these two bad Roman emperors).
Despite being
outnumbered in both men and ships, Jaime Lannister’s brother Tyrion (played by
little-person actor Peter Dinklage in a performance that has stolen the entire
series: after all the dreary roles he’s had to put up with as the corrupt CEO’s
henchman he’s really shone in Game of Thrones and it’s obvious this was the role of his lifetime!)
works out a defense: he covers the bay through which the invaders have to pass
with a film of oil and has a bowman launch a flaming arrow at the ocean’s
surface, setting the oil on fire and taking down most of Stannis’s script with
it. Had we stopped at the end of episode nine, though, I would have presumed that
Stannis’s forces won the battle despite Tyrion’s “blackwater” strategy: people
armed with a battering ram break into King’s Landing and ultimately take over
the Iron Throne, while Tyrion Lannister, participating in the battle
personally, gets a severe head wound that seems likely, given the primitive
state of medical care in the Middle Ages, to dispatch him permanently. My first
indication that that wasn’t how it turned out was in the credits sequence for
episode 10, which showed both Peter Dinklage and Jack Gleeson in the cast and
indicated their characters were still alive — and indeed it seems that Joffrey
somehow survived the events of episode 9 and retained the throne despite
threats of both outside invasion and interior rebellion, while Tyrion is still
around, thanking the efforts of the herbalist who cured him and continuing to
plot to keep his biological nephew on the throne.
Alas, the “Valar Morghulis”
episode was more of the usual mishmash, cutting back and forth so fast between
the various plot strands of this saga previous milestones of plot incoherence
like the 1916 Universal film of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under
the Sea seem crystal-clear by comparison.
The big news in this version is the walk-through of Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia
Clarke) through the Cave of Skulls or something equally gloom-ridden in search
of the three dragons she literally hatched through her body but which then
either disappeared or were taken from her (how, if dragons are supposed to be
so invincible?), and the final appearance of the White Walkers from the North,
zombie-like menaces (actually they look like what would have resulted if George
Romero had directed Frozen) we’ve
heard talked about throughout the first two seasons but haven’t actually seen
yet. Aside from its fascinating intimations of the Trump era (most of Game
of Thrones was shot while Barack Obama was
still President but it’s full of anticipations and premonitions of the utter
amorality of the leaders that would come into power at the end of the 2010’s in
the U.S. and Britain as well as Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines and earlier in
Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Poland, people whose contempt for democracy is
matched only by their willfulness: like the ruling Inner Party in George
Orwell’s 1984, they don’t seem to
want power to accomplish anything, just to be the boot stamping on the human
face … forever), Game of Thrones
seems rather slow going to me: I can see why it ultimately became so popular
but it’s still a depressing meditation on the human condition whose message is
little more than “Humanity sucks, humanity has always sucked, and the humans who want to rule over humans
suck even more than everyone else.”
