by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched the last two episodes of
season three of Game of Thrones — and
once again I can see why a lot of people “binge-watched” this show, either on
DVD’s or streaming, because it takes a while to remember where the locations
are, who these people are (since this is a medievalist fantasy just about
everyone except the people in the very top brackets of society wears crude
clothes, mostly furs, and are dirty all the time), which sides of the various
conflicts they’re on and what they’re actually doing, let alone why. The
episodes were called “The Rains of Castamere” and “Mhysa,” and are summarized
on imdb.com as follows: “Robb and Catelyn arrive at the Twins for the wedding. Jon
is put to the test to see where his loyalties truly lie. Bran's group decides
to split up. Daenerys plans an invasion of Yunkai. … Bran and company travel
beyond the Wall. Sam returns to Castle Black. Jon says goodbye to Ygritte.
Jaime returns to King's Landing. The Night’s Watch asks for help from Stannis.”
In case you were wondering, Robb Stark (Richard Madden) is the legitimate heir
on the Stark side of the battle between Lannisters (read: Lancasters) and
Starks (read: Yorks) at the heart of much of Game of Thrones; Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley) is his wife (I
think)/
Bran is the boy prince who caught his elder brother and his elder
sister screwing each other, was pitched out of the tower where he caught them,
took a header of about 50 feet or so and ended up disabled (though in these
episodes he’s developed a superpower: he’s able to “freeze” attackers, human or
animal, by mental will power alone, though he doesn’t have full control over
this and sometimes it doesn’t work); Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) is the
rebel queen from across the “Narrow Sea” (which I supposed meant the Irish Sea
but Charles thinks it’s the English channel, and the land across from it where
Daenerys is stranded for lack of ships to get across and fight for power in “Westeros,”
i.e. England, is a George R. R. Martin conflation of continental Europe and the
Middle East, since we’ve got people who look like Scythians and Saracens as
well as a smattering of Blacks); Sam (John Bradley) — full name: Samwell Tarly
— is the heavy-set character who in the early going seemed just like your
typical comic-relief character (when he trained for the Night’s Watch, the
group of volunteer soldiers who guard the wall of ice separating Westeros from
the North and the “White Walkers,” homicidal ghosts not that different from the
zombies in the George Romero films) — but develops some heroic characteristics
when he accidentally discovers the “dragon blades,” which look like ordinary
obsidian cave-people’s tools to us but are made of a magical material that can
literally shatter a White Walker’s body when it’s thrust into one — and Jon
Snow (Kit Harington) is Robb Stark’s illegitimate half-brother, who was exiled
to the Night’s Watch but broke his vow of celibacy by falling in love with his
prisoner Ygritte — whose “farewell” to him at the end of “Mhysa” consists of
shooting three arrows into him and leaving him for dead, though he manages to
ride back to Castle Black, the last redoubt of the Night’s Watch.
The “Stannis”
they’re asking for help from is Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane), uncle (I
think) of the current King Joffrey Baratheon (though he’s really not a
Baratheon — the murdered King married a Lannister and she was the sister who
had a Walküre-like affair with
her brother, only instead of producing Siegfried they created Joffrey, a
psychopathic nerd reminiscent of ancient Rome’s “bad Emperors” like Caligula or
Nero — either of which would be good roles for Jack Gleeson, who plays Joffrey
as a great and fun-to-watch super-villain) who considers himself the rightful
heir and wants to deliver Westeros from Joffrey’s homicidal madness. At the end
of “Mhysa” we also get to see another scene with Daenerys and her dragons,
three beasts she created when she got 300-year-old dragons’ eggs to hatch and
who — though they’re hardly big enough for humans to ride the way Anne
McCaffrey’s dragons of Pern are — are still mightily impressive and dangerous
fighters whose very presence and obvious bloodthirst have enabled Daenerys and
the armies she’s been able to recruit by capturing slave populations and
offering them their freedom. At least the two sexiest guys on this show, Jon
and the new knight Daenerys signed up at the end of episode eight when he was
assigned by the leaders of the city of Yunkai to kill her but decided he wanted
to fuck her instead, end up these episodes still relatively good-looking and
with all their parts intact — hot guys on this show tend to end up losing their
hands or their dicks. I’m not exactly enjoying Game of Thrones, but it’s an interesting cultural phenomenon and has
some good and witty lines and sequences even though the relentless successions
of bloodbaths, loveless sexual couplings, and dingy scenes in forests tend to
get a bit wearing at times!
