Two nights ago Charles and I cracked open the Blu-Ray box of season five of Game of Thrones with its first two episodes, “The Wars to Come” and “The House of Black and White.” The online synopses read as follows:
“The Wars to Come”: Cersei
comes to the funeral of her father Tywin Lannister and blames her brother Jaime
for his death. Tyrion arrives at his destination transported in a wooden box
and Lord Varys discloses that Jaime had asked him to save his brother. White
Rat is murdered in a brothel and Daenerys asks Grey Worm to find the killer.
She visits her dragons in the dungeons but they do not respect her. Jon Snow is
training a teenager, but Melisandre brings him to talk to Stannis Baratheon. He
assigns Snow to convince Mance Rayder to bend his knees for him and make his
people fight with his army. Will Mance accept the deal?
“The House of Black and White”: Arya Stark sails to Braavos and arrives at the House of Black and White
to seek out Jaqen H'ghar; however she is not welcomed to enter in the house and
she throws her coin away into the sea. Brienne and Podrick are eating in a
tavern and see Sansa and Little Finger, but Sansa refuses to follow Brienne.
The men that are escorting Little Finger and Sansa unsuccessfully hunt Brienne
and Podrick down on the road. Cersei shows to Jaime that their daughter
Myrcella is in danger and Jaime seeks out Bronn and makes an offer for him to
travel with him to Dorn. In Meereen, the Son of Harpy is captured and Daenerys
has a meeting with her leaders to decide his fate. Barristan advises her to
give a fair trial to the man; however Mossador disobeys her order and kills the
Son of Harpy. Daenerys sentences him to death and there is a riot in Meereen.
Jon Snow is invited by Stannis Baratheon to serve him; in return, he would give
the North to Jon and he would be Jon Stark, Lord of Winterfell. But Jon ...
Charles and I hadn’t watched any of Game of Thrones in over a month, but as I’ve said before the series
— though mostly filmed before Donald Trump became U.S. President — is a perfect
illustration of the Trump Zeitgeist:
a bunch of 1-percenters in power who don’t give a damn about anyone below them
and are willing to do whatever it takes to maintain their power out of sheer
lust (both the political and
sexual kinds!) and greed. Writers George R. R. Martin (whose still unfinished
multi-book cycle A Song of Ice and Fire was the source for Game of Thrones), David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have created a world
in which any hint of belief in a
cause outside one’s own well-being is ruthlessly punished and the cynicism of
the characters is maddeningly consistent. It’s interesting to see Tyrion
Lannister — the most morally complex of the characters and the one most honest
that self-preservation is all
that’s motivating him —smuggled out of King’s Landing in a wooden box, which
couldn’t help (at least to me) recall the opening of the film The
Invisible Man’s Revenge (in which Jon Hall
similarly escaped from prison by literally hiding in a bale of cotton: when we
see a knife cut the container open from inside it’s a marvelous bit of shock) and the macabre
Velvet Underground song “The Gift” (in which a young man named Waldo Jeffers
decides to pack himself inside a box and mail himself to his girlfriend — only
as she attempts to open the package with a large knife she accidentally stabs
himself to death with it) and complain about the difficulties of eliminating
human waste in there.
But the most powerful scene in these shows occurs at the
end of “The Wars to Come” in which Mance Rayder, leader of the Wildings north
of the Wall separating Westeros from whatever the highland kingdom is called
(i.e., Hadrian’s Wall between England and Scotland), not only refuses to “take
a knee” in support of Stannis Baratheon but stoically accepts being burned at
the stake as the price of his refusal. I admired the guy so much that I was
hoping as he was being burned there’d be a huge rainstorm that would put out
the fire, save him and give the lords who were trying to enlist him an omen
that they’d better leave him alone … but no such luck. That’s what happens to anyone in Game of Thrones that shows the slightest bit of integrity: they get
killed in as nasty a way as the writers can think up. (Actually, I’ve read that
being burned at the stake was a relatively humane form of execution because you
would be killed by smoke inhalation before the fires actually started to
consume your body. But people who were considered really behind the moral curve, including Queer people, were
not burned at the stake but were
bound up and thrown directly on the fire so they’d really suffer — which is how the term “faggots,” which
originally meant logs of firewood, came to be applied to Gay men.) The “House
of Black and White” in the second episode is actually a large castle that’s so
called because it has two entrance doors, one of which is black and one white,
and it’s inhabited by a bald Black guy who at the end of the show takes off his
latex mask (the idea that people with only a medieval knowledge of technology
could invent the latex mask is almost as preposterous as the idea in both
versions of One Million [Years], B.C. that cave people could have invented the push-up bra) and reveals he’s
a white guy with long hair.
The character arc of Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia
Clarke) as she travels around the back kingdoms of “Westeros” (which is mostly
supposed to be the British Isles, though there is at least one community that
looks like ancient Egypt, complete with hieroglyphics, animal-headed gods and
pyramids; and another a city with canal-like streets obviously modeled on
Venice) supposedly “liberating” slaves (who end up right back under the thumbs
of their former masters as soon as Daenerys’ armies leave — just like Southern
African-Americans were shoved back into near-slavery after the end of
Reconstruction!) and getting into trouble when one of her “Unsullied”
(presumably eunuch) warriors is caught in a whorehouse (the characters have the
same question we do — what was he doing in a whorehouse) and his throat is slit — only when the assailant is
killed by another “Unsullied” Daenerys, who had been determined to give the
killer a fair trial, puts the killer’s killer to death and starts a riot from
which she has to be evacuated by her soldiers, who lift their shields over her
so she doesn’t get hit by the rocks the rioters are throwing at her. About her
only consolation prize is that one of her dragons, who in the previous episode
looked like she’d lost control over them, this time nibbles at her hand in a
gesture of affection and fealty. Game of Thrones is full of the generally accepted mythos of what the Middle Ages were actually like, but it’s
also full of understated but unmistakable parallels to the modern world,
notably Daenerys’ self-righteous concept of “justice” that gets her into
trouble her advisors try to warn her against — though it seemed odd that the
phrase “taking the knee” is used here as a symbol of subservience whereas in
modern America it’s become a symbol of defiance!
