Two nights ago Charles and I watched the next two episodes in sequence of our amble through the eight-season series Game of Thrones, whose episodes are actually combining with the novel I’m currently reading — Jon Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, a near-future novel about the disastrous consequences of both air and water pollution (the Mediterranean has literally died — it’s covered by a permanent layer of oil and everything in it has perished), seafood has become a rare luxury because it has to be harvested from lower and lower depths where the pollution hasn’t sunk to yet, and in two twists that are happening now, people can’t go out without wearing face masks and no one dares go to the beach (also there’s a grey layer of smog over the atmosphere so almost never can one actually see the sun in the sky) — and the actual news reports of today, particularly the U.S. government’s utter inability to deal with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the very real possibility that there may be nothing modern medical science can do to stop this virus (the successive pieces of news that even if you’ve already had COVID-19, the disease SARS-CoV-2 causes, you can get it again three months later — which raises questions as to whether a vaccine against it is even possible; the vaccine candidates have shown “promise” in stimulating an “immune response,” but how long will that immune response last? — and the virus can transmit as free-floating viral particles in air, which means it can pass right through a mask) and it may be as far beyond our current state of medical knowledge to solve as smallpox and plague were in the Middle Ages) into a sort of dystopian miasma in which the horrible insights into the basically greedy, avaricious, amoral and unscrupulous aspects of human nature come together and produce a state of utter hopelessness and despair.
As I’ve noted before in these pages, Game of Thrones is a perfect story for the Trump era because it posits that human beings are basically evil, that they have no motivations beyond their own self-interest — the rich and powerful machinate against each other and don’t care how many of the not-so-rich and not-so-powerful they kill in the process, and the not-so-rich and not-so-powerful merely scramble as best they can to survive it all. As I’ve started doing recently, I’m reproducing the imdb.com online synopses of the two most recent episodes Charles and I screened last night, as much as an aid to keeping track of the myriad plot lines as for any other reason:
The Gift: At Castle Black, Jon Snow,
Tormund Giantsbane and a few Rangers head north of the Wall. Master Aemon has
reached the end of his days and Sam gets a warning. Stannis and his army face
the ravages of winter and Ser Davos recommends they return to Castle Black. At
Winterfell, Sansa begs a terrified Theon to help her escape but he proves an
inadequate ally. Tyrion and Ser Jorah are sold at a slave market. In Meereen,
Daenerys gets unexpected advice from Daario. In King's Landing, Lady Olenna
calls on the High Sparrow to seek her grandchildren's release but gets no
satisfaction. She may have found an ally. A gloating Cersei visits Margaery in
the cells below the Red Keep but the High Septon has a surprise for her. In
Dorne, Jaime sees Myrcella who makes it clear that she considers Dorne her home
and that she has no intention of leaving.
Hardhome: In Braavos, Arya is learning
slowly and is regularly tested. She poses as an oyster seller and is assigned a
specific task. In Meereen, Daenerys sits in judgment on Ser Jorah and Tyrion.
While Jorah is again banished, Tyrion soon becomes her advisor. In Winterfell,
Sansa learns something important from Theon. Roose Bolton meanwhile awaits
Stannis' arrival but Ramsay disagrees with his approach. In King's Landing,
Cersei learns from Qyburn that the High Sparrow has a strong case against her
and recommends a way out for her. At Castle Black, Sam recovers from his
wounds. Jon Snow and Tormund Giantsbane arrive at their destination north of
the Wall. While some of them accept the offer of land in the south, many do
not. Before they can leave, however, the army of walkers arrive.
One of the things that makes Game of Thrones so confusing is not only that there are so many plot
lines, but the series’ creators, George R. R. Martin (who wrote the original
cycle of novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, of which A Game of Thrones
— note the article — was merely the first of five he’s already published plus
two he’s outlined and promised but has got stuck on), David Benioff and D. B.
Weiss, so relentlessly intercut between them that you feel you’ve been
whipsawed from one to another just as you’re getting into one of them. These
shows are full of “Meanwhile … ” moments and the sorts of things that Anna
Russell made fun of in her parody of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung (which is actually a model of clarity compared to
Game of Thrones): “Ya remember __________
?”
The cutbacks keep taking us away from the interesting characters (Daenerys
Targeryan, Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister) and inflicting the boring ones (Stannis
Baratheon, Peter Baelish) on us. The most interesting things that happen in
“The Gift” are that Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), who’s been reduced from
being “The Hand” of the King to shipwreck victim who’s about to be sold as a
slave in Meereen.
There Daenerys technically freed the slaves and then found
that an awful lot of them didn’t want to be free, so she restored the gladiatorial “Fighting Pits” by
popular demand even though running these pits, in which 12 or so warriors go in
and, as in the Hunger Games, the object is for only one to survive — which,
aside from the morals of it, seems an appalling waste of manpower for a woman
who’s hoping to use Meereen as a base of support for an amphibian invasion of
“Westeros” — i.e., Britain — from across the Irish Sea and would seem to need
all the fighters she could muster. Anyway, with the gift of gab we’ve seen him
show in previous episodes, Tyrion talks Daenerys into taking him on as her
advisor even though she’s understandably miffed at the whole Lannister clan
because Tyrion’s much taller and hunkier (though hobbled because his right hand
was cut off by a captor to torture him) brother Jaime (pronounced “Jamie”) (Nikolaj
Coster-Walden) killed Daenerys’ father, the former King of the Seven Kingdoms
of Westeros (sometimes the Seven Kingdoms seem like a federal association and
sometimes they don’t) — and Tyrion points out that he’s killed more Lannisters than anybody, including his
mother (she died giving birth to him) and his father (the crime that forced him to flee Westeros in the first
place), and therefore he’s been more of an instrument of revenge against his
own family than either she or anyone fighting for her ever could be.
The other
big thing that happens in “The Gift” is the witchhunt led by the cult of the
“High Sparrow,” who seems to be trying to reshape the religion of Westeros from
a pantheon of seven gods (hence the seven-pointed star that’s emblazoned on a
stained-glass window above the Iron Throne and also on the floor of the throne
room) to a single god with seven incarnations and a particular hatred for
anyone who has sex outside a normal heterosexual marriage and only for purposes
of reproduction (in other words, that same monstrous denial of human sexuality the
Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have wreaked upon the
world!!!!!), and like most of their real-world equivalents they’re particularly
hard on Queers. They’ve targeted the brother of Margaery Tyrell (Natalie
Dormer), the current wife of king Tommen Baratheon (Dean-Charles Chapman) and
therefore at least nominally queen of the Iron Throne, for being Gay. Then they
arrested Margaery for having lied in their rump “court” to try to protect her
brother. Then they double-crossed
Tommen’s mother, Cersei Lannister Baratheon (Lena Headey), who supported them
in the first place as a counterweight against her enemies, and had her arrested, held in a cell and periodically visited by
an aging woman acolyte who offers her water (the ladle from which she offers it
is shot by director Miguel Sapochnik — a marvelously multicultural name! — to
look like a cobra’s head) but only if she agrees to “confess.”
We’re not sure
what she’s supposed to “confess” to, but we think it’s because of the rumor
that’s been spread through the entire show that Tommen and the previous king,
Joffrey are the products of an incestuous relationship between Cersei and her
brother Jaime (ya remember Jaime?).
We know they were having an
affair because a kid who was climbing the outside of the castle tower caught them,
and Jaime gave him a back-handed slap when he appeared at their window and he
fell, surviving but becoming permanently disabled — though this character, who
became rather interesting especially when he turned out to have the power to
control wolves and other animals telepathically, seems just to have
disappeared. (Charles said a lot
of interesting characters have just disappeared from Game of Thrones,
including most of the strong women in the dramatis
personae — though there are a few left, including Olenna Tyrell, played by the
great Diana Rigg, who in the 1970’s became a feminist sensation for her superb
performance as a female James Bond in the British TV series The
Avengers and in 1994 was acting in a
Broadway revival of Euripides’ Medea
just when Newt Gingrich was blaming Susan Smith’s murder of her two kids on
Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society and the “permissive culture” it had
supposedly engendered, and I was amused that just then a 2,500-year-old play
was running on Broadway with a similar situation. (It’s true that Susan Smith
killed her kids because she was dating her boss and he didn’t want the kids
around, while Medea killed hers to get back at their dad for leaving her, but
the principle was not that
different — and I also found it ironic that when Susan Smith invented a
fictitious criminal to blame for the deaths of her kids, she made him Black:
the original Karen!)
A few of these plot threads get continued in the next
episode, “Hardhome,” but that one eventually resolves into a quite good and
surprisingly (especially for Game of Thrones!) unified story about Jon Snow (Kit Harington),
bastard son of the Stark family, who’s reaching out to the Wildings, a human
tribe living north of the Wall which the order Snow is now leading, which I’m
not sure whether it’s called the “Night’s Watch” or the “Knight’s Watch,” is
reaching out to in order to come south to the other side of the Wall and accept
his offer of farmlands where they can settle and be safe from the “White
Walkers,” a race of ghosts who, like Bram Stoker’s vampires, keep expanding
their numbers by turning anyone they kill into one of them. They can only be
destroyed by a substance called “dragonglass,” which if they’re stabbed with it
causes them to shatter instantly. Jon and his principal ally among the
Wildings, Tormund Giantsbane (Kristofer Hivju), try to get the rest of the
Wildings to accept their offer but, in a negotiation that couldn’t help but
remind me of Israel and Palestine, the Wildings go on and on and on about how many of their number have been killed by
members of the [K]night’s Watch, going back over centuries — and just as Jon
and Tormund are evacuating the Wildings who’ve agreed to go and leaving the
rest in their keep, the White Walkers stage a mass attack to put an end to the
Wildings once and for all and either destroy them or enlist them into their
undead ranks.
The sequence is one of the best sustained action scenes in the
entire Game of Thrones cycle, not
only because it’s allowed to unfold continuously but because the director
(Miguel Sapochnik again) and writers (Benioff, Weiss and Dave Hill) have
created plenty of opportunities for suspense, including Jon losing the
all-important bag full of dragonglass blades and some spectacular shots of
slain Wildings transforming into White Walkers as they leave earthly existence
and join the nearly invincible army of the supernatural. (One odd thing about
Game of Thrones is their rather grudging
feints towards the supernatural in what’s an otherwise at least physically
possible storyline: Daenerys’s dragons, whom we’ve seen far too little of, are the cycle’s other main
supernatural element.) As the White Walkers break down the gates of the
Wildings’ castle, and Jon’s carefully planned evacuation turns (like all too
many real ones) into a panicked flight as the people who had originally planned
to stay rush the boats that were taking the evacuees to Jon’s ships and
threaten to sink them and kill all their occupants. For once a Game
of Thrones episode not only hung around one
plot line long enough to keep us caring about it, it delivered spectacular
action, thrills and genuine pathos as Jon Snow is injured in the fight against
the White Walkers and his fate remains in doubt as the episode ends.
