I put on the next two episodes of season five of Game of Thrones, “Kill the Boy” (episode five) and “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” (episode six). Once again switching from MS-NBC to Game of Thrones only underscored what a perfect story this is for the Trump era: a saga with no heroes, just a bunch of opportunists all out for themselves, seeking power not for any idealistic reasons (the one character who actually shows any idealism, nominal King Tommen Baratheon, is played by Dean-Charles Chapman and is depicted as a pathetic wimp who’s only being kept alive by his powerful and unscrupulous mother, Cersei Lannister, played by Lena Headey) but just to have it. Though it’s nominally set in the distant past rather than the near-future, Game of Thrones is a good illustration of George Orwell’s maxim that humanity’s future is “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” There’s no one in the dramatis personae we really like — though there are a few people in Game of Thrones, like Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage in the role every little-person actor who’s ever lived probably dreamed of: a complex, multidimensional character who can do the most outrageously evil things and retain his roguish bad-boy charm) and the female knight Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie, whose six-foot height no doubt makes her difficult to cast but she’s ideal here), for whom we have a grudging admiration for their survival skills. As before I’m reproducing the imdb.com synopses of these episodes, this time with bracketed, italicized notes I wrote immediately after seeing them to keep important details in my memory, because the biggest single problem with Game of Thrones is how many different plot threads original author George R. R. Martin and his adapters, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss (who got Martin to sell the rights to his books, a cycle collectively known as A Song of Ice and Fire of which the first book in the series is called A Game of Thrones — oddly Martin still hasn’t finished the last two books in the cycle so Benioff and Weiss had to come up with their own ending to the saga, which got roundly criticized when it was originally shown, though given how impermanent anyone’s hold on power is in this story it’s impossible to imagine a truly permanent ending), try to keep going at once. Charles is also upset at how many plot threads have simply got dropped and apparently forgotten about by the writers —though that doesn’t mean they won’t suddenly reappear: Game of Thrones is full of the sorts of moments Anna Russell made fun of in her legendary parody of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: “Ya remember ___________ ?” Anyway, here are the bare facts of what happened in episodes five and six:
Kill the Boy: In Meereen, Daenerys has to decide how
to deal with the former masters after the death of Ser Barristan Selmy and the
injuries inflicted on Grey Worm. She decides to round up the heads of the 13
richest families in the city and introduce them to her dragons [who burn and
eat two of them]. Jorah Mormont and
Tyrion Lannister approach the ancient city of Valyria and, after witnessing
something quite incredible [a flying adult dragon], they are set upon by the Stone Men, and Mormont does
not escape unscathed. Sansa finally sees what has become of Theon, courtesy of
Ramsay Bolton's jealous mistress Melisandre. [Theon has been brainwashed to
forget who he is and goes by the name “Reek.”] Ramsay is particularly cruel to Theon at a
dinner, much to Roose Bolton's displeasure. At Castle Black, Jon Snow tries to
convince Tormund Giantsbane to move his people south of the Wall and settle in
lands that will be made available to them. Most of the men of the Watch object
to the plan.
Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken: Arya is tested by Jaqen H'ghar in the
House of Black and White and he tells that she is ready to become someone else.
Tyrion and Jorah have a conversation about Daenerys and Jorah's father and how
he was murdered by his own men; out of the blue, they are captured by pirates
and turned into slaves. Little Finger stumbles with Lancel in King's Landing
and has a meeting with Cersei and he plots against Stannis Baratheon and the
Bolton. Jamie and Bronn are riding in Dornes and they meet Myrcella; however
they need to fight against the Sand Snakes. Lady Olenna meets with Cersei to
discuss the future of Loras Tyrell. He is judged by the High Sparrow and
Margaery Tyrell is involved and arrested with her brother to a formal trial [because
Loras is Gay and Margaery lied when she said she had no idea of this]. Sansa marries Ramsay Bolton and he humiliates her [by
making Reek watch them on their wedding night and apparently raping her in the
ass].
In case you were wondering, the title of the “Kill the Boy”
episode doesn’t actually refer to killing a boy — though there’s been enough
bloodshed in these shows one could readily imagine it would — but to the advice
Jon Snow (Kit Harington) gets from one of the old sages that abound in this
story (even though he’s put another one to death at the end of one of the
previous episodes: he killed the leader of the Wildings, a human tribe on the
other side of the Wall separating the seven kingdoms of “Westeros” from the
White Walkers, a tribe of ghosts who live north of the Wall and survive, like
George Romero’s zombies, on eating people; though Jon had him burned at the
stake he alao fired an arrow into him, which I thought was a coup de grace and a quasi-merciful attempt to spare him from being
burned alive … though as I pointed out in my comments on the last two episodes,
being burned at the stake was actually a relatively humane way of execution
since you’d die from smoke inhalation before the flames burned your body;
however, homosexuals were considered so especially evil that instead of being
burned at the stake they were bound and tied up, then thrown directly on the
flames with the fire logs, which is how the term “faggots,” which originally
meant fire logs, got to be a derisive slang term for Gay men. This time Jon and
the new/old advisor decide to offer the Wildings safe passage, asylum and
settlements inside the south on the other side of the wall, even though the
Night’s Watch tribe Jon is supposed to be leading and the Wildings have been attacking
and killing each other for centuries. (The script frames it as an interesting
parallel to the long-standing religious conflicts in Northern Ireland and how
difficult it was to frame a peace agreement there and get it to stick despite
all the long-standing enmity and bloodshed between the sides.)
The advisor says
that Jon should proclaim this policy and deal with the hostile reactions to
“kill the boy” inside him and let the man come forth. As in the previous two
episodes, though, the most interesting plot line of this one is the “High
Sparrow” cult Cersei Lannister encouraged and then quickly spiraled out of her
control (sort of like the Dowager Empress of China at the turn of the last
century, who originally sponsored the Boxer Rebellion as a way of controlling
the claims the Western powers who had claimed more and more authority over
nominally independent China, then had to turn towards the West to save herself
and her imperial regime from the Boxers) and the McCarthy-ite way the High
Sparrow’s agents ramp up the witchhunt until it ensnares the woman who’s at
least nominally the Queen of Westeros (but of whom Cersei is fiercely jealous
because she threatens Cersei’s control over her son, nominal king Tommen).
There’s also an interesting plot line involving Tyrion Lannister, who isn’t as
interesting a character when he’s on the outs fighting just to survive than he
was on the “ins” manipulating the others at the royal court and indulging
himself with wine and women. In the previous episodes he was captured by Jorah
Mormont, who is (or at least is representing himself to be) an agent of
Daenerys Trageryan (Emilia Clarke) and is taking Tyrion to Daenerys in a
two-person boat when they’re menaced first by the Stone Men and then by
slavers. Jonah warns Tyrion not to let the Stone Men touch him as they fend off
the Stone Men’s attacks — we get the impression that they will actually turn to
stone if a Stone Man touches them (a rare bit of the supernatural in a story
that for all its brutality and typical fantasy-like unbelievability has mostly
at least stayed within the normal laws of biology and physics, except for those
damned White Walker characters), though that actually happens to Tyrion he
seems to survive with no lasting ill effects.
Then when their boat is
shipwrecked because of the Stone Men’s attack they end up on a shore where
they’re set upon by a slaving party — and I loved the irony that in this story the slavers were Black and the people they’re
trying to enslave were white! Tyrion, with the gift of gab and the utter
unscrupulous that’s made his lovable-rogue character work through the entire
series (as opposed to the hatable
rogues that make up most of Game of Thrones’ dramatis personae), talks the Black captain out of killing him and
slicing off his cock for sale (apparently a little-person’s dick was the Game
of Thrones era’s equivalent of Viagra) by
saying the only way anyone can be sure it’s a little-person’s member is if it’s sliced off in their
presence. When the leader of the slaving
party says that they can tell it’s a little-person’s dick because it’s
correspondingly little, Tyrion smiles and winks with Peter Dinklage’s most
charmingly hypocritical smile and wink and says something on the order of, “You
couldn’t be more wrong.” Game of Thrones is alternately entertaining and maddening, and as I keep saying it’s a
perfect story for the Trump-era Zeitgeist because the characters (with only a few rare exceptions) are so
utterly amoral and driven by a lust for power for its own sake (as well as
“lust” in the non-metaphorical
meaning of the term) they fully live up to the denunciation of both Donald
Trump his father Fred as “sociopaths” in the new book Too Much and
Never Enough by Mary Trump, Donald’s niece.
Game of Thrones mirrors the Trump
family’s creed and its valuation of strength and power as the manly virtues,
while compassion and empathy are the qualities of suckers and creeps. If Donald
Trump belongs anywhere, it’s on the Iron Throne, not in the White House as the
powerful but constitutionally constrained ruler of a republic; one wishes we
could consign Trump to the fictional world of Martin, Benioff and Weiss and
restore a measure of sanity to the real one!
