by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I also resumed our amble through the Game of
Thrones series, cracking open the
fourth-season Blu-Ray package and mistakenly putting on disc two because disc
one was hidden behind the cardboard leaflet with instructions for accessing a
digital copy (something I will never use!). That rather gave away the ending of
the first two episodes of season four, “Two Swords” and “The Lion and the
Rose,” which lead up to the assassination of King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack
Gleeson, who as I’ve commented before would make an excellent Caligula or Nero
if anyone decides to make yet another movie about either of them) — not that
this was that big a surprise, given that all through the show so far Joffrey
has been giving just about everyone else in the dramatis personae ample reasons to want to see him dead. The other
main development in these two episodes is the return of Jaime Lannister
(Nikolaj Coster-Walden), who insists on resuming his position in the King’s
Guard even though he was held captive for a long time and his sadistic captors
cut off his right hand, so he has to re-learn how to use a sword with his left hand.
These ambitions are relentlessly ridiculed by
his brother Tyrion (Peter Dinklage, who here as throughout the series is
playing the role probably every
little-person actor has dreamed of, a character with real weight, depth and
multidimensionality instead of either a cute sidekick or a nasty but not
particularly scary villain like his dorky role in Elf) on the eve of the marriage of Joffrey to Margaery
Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), which takes place at the end of “The Lion and the
Rose” but is almost immediately followed by Joffrey’s murder. It’s not made
quite clear how Joffrey dies but
the implication is he drank a glass of poisoned wine (after doing one of his
petty cruelties by pouring his glass of non-poisoned wine on Tyrion Lannister’s head), and in
the final shot of episode two Tyrion is shown holding the glass from which
Joffrey drank, with the obvious implication that he’s going to be framed for
the murder. This being Game of Thrones there are other plot lines galore, including a scene in which the kid
who got crippled after he climbed a tower and saw a brother and sister in bed
together having at each other incestuously, only the brother saw him and pushed
him out the window to the ground, dreams himself into the body of a wolf and
thus has the sensation of
movement he can’t do in real life (and there’s even a point-of-view shot from
the boy-as-wolf’s perspective!) and the confrontation between the guardians of
the Wall and the invaders from the South, and the uncertain relationship
between Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and the Stark family, which he’s technically a
part of — his dad was a Stark but his mom was his dad’s mistress — though about
all that gets him in this story is he’s threatened with death by the Starks’
enemies.
I’ve enjoyed Game of Thrones but been put off and confused by its sheer multiplicity of plotlines
and the abruptness with which the writers and directors (and “The Lion and the
Rose” was scripted by Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin himself!) cut back and forth between them.
I’m also rather put off by the fact that in this tale of medieval life there
are no good guys — Martin and the
series creators, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, seem to delight in getting us
to like a particular character and then having him or her do something totally
despicable — though as I’ve said before about previous Game of
Thrones episodes, that makes this show
perfectly appropriate for the Donald Trump era. Its portrayal of a world in
which all the people aspiring to
“leadership” are wantonly cruel and totally unscrupulous (and so is everybody
else: one of these episodes begins with a group of people seemingly unrelated
to the main intrigues running through the woods, chasing a woman and ultimately
causing her death by shooting her in the leg with an arrow so she collapses and
is eaten by wild dogs; this is carefully shot so the sequence looks like it’s just going to be innocent fun until we
realize what’s really going on) really fits in with an historical era in which
country after country, including the U.S., Britain, Russia, China, Brazil, the
Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Israel and Turkey, has been taken over by
Trump-like egomaniacs who divide their countries and win fanatical political
bases by promising to “Make _______ Great Again,” while not only ignoring but
actively boosting the destruction of the environment humans need to be able to
survive.
