Last night Charles and I watched the last two episodes of season five of Game of Thrones, “The Dance of Dragons” and “Mother’s Mercy.” As usual of late I’ll quote the imdb.com synopses of these episodes to remind me of what happened in them, and then comment:
The Dance of Dragons: Things are not going well for
Stannis and his army. Winter is upon them and they are attacked in the night
losing most of their stores. Unable to move forward or back, he dispatches Ser
Davos Seaworth to seek help from Castle Black. Jon Snow and the survivors of
the attack at Hardhome make it safely back to the wall but the reception they
get is anything but warm. In Dorne, Doran Martell takes the diplomatic route
telling Jaime that Myrcella can return to King’s Landing with him provided
certain conditions were met. In Braavos, Arya sees Lord Tyrell who arrives to
speak to representatives of the Iron Bank. He’s accompanied by Meryn Trant, one
of the men on her list. In Meereen, the Great Games begin but the needless
killing is not to Daenarys’ or Tyrion’s liking. Ser Jorah defeats his opponents
in the arena but a trap is sprung and the Sons of the Harpy attack. Rescue is at
hand however.
Mother’s Mercy: Stannis attacks Winterfell.
Sansa and Theon find themselves on a difficult situation. Arya challenges the
many-faced god. Daenerys is surrounded by acquaintances. Jaime and Myrcella
leave Dorne. Cersei confesses. Sam goes to oldtown to become the new maester [meaning
the librarian]. Jon receives news about his
uncle Benjen.
I’ll comment rather briefly on these episodes: they suffer
from the usual problem with Game of Thrones
generally — there are too many plot lines, and the editing between them makes
the episodes choppy (just when we’ve absorbed the relationships between the
currently on-screen characters and started to identify with them — to the
extent to which anyone less psychopathic than Donald Trump could identify with anybody in Game of Thrones — we’re rudely and crudely wrenched to another set of
characters) — and also series creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss seem to
have made the series more openly gory as it rolled on (I worried about Charles’
gore quotient because much of what was going on last night was pushing my gore tolerance threshold, and his is even lower than
mine!), to the point where during one of the gladiatorial contests Daenerys
Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) has reluctantly reauthorized in the land of Meereen,
one fighter cleanly sliced another’s head off and I couldn’t resist quoting the
line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “It’s only a flesh wound.” Aside from the gore, Game of
Thrones is so full of human cruelty that,
as I’ve commented ad nauseam
before, it’s the perfect story for the Trump era (even though most of it was
filmed while Barack Obama was still President). A group of people with no
morals, no scruples and a casual indifference to the sheer numbers of people
who are going to get killed in pursuit of their goals. Among the big things
that happen in these episodes are the gladiatorial games and their invasion by
the “Sons of the Harpy” (oh, so that’s who those people in metal masks who invaded Meereen’s Colosseum were!
I joked that they were the Game of Thrones equivalent of Anonymous!), who start killing contestants and
spectators alike until Daenerys flies away on one of her three pet dragons (ya
remember her dragons?). The
attempt of Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane) and his army to attack and
conquer the North gets defeated by an even bigger force from heaven knows
where; and previous to that the insistence of the fire-god priestess that
Stannis’s “hand” (essentially his prime minister) literally have his daughter burned at the stake as a sacrifice
to ensure the success of the mission.
Queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) is
forced to endure a “Walk of Shame” by the culto the so-called “High Sparrow”
(though the at least three religions we’ve seen practiced in Game of
Thrones are derived from the Abrahamic
tradition of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, they share not only the
viciousness and intolerance of all real-world religions, the Abrahamic ones in
particular, but their obsessive micromanagement of people’s private lives,
especially their sex lives: there’s still a part of me that wonders how on
earth someone can be both Gay and a Christian given what organized Christianity
has to say about us, and this despite the fact that I’ve had three serious
partners, including my current husband and partner of 25 years, who consider or
considered themselves Christians!) in which she’s forced to walk the streets
naked and get pelted with garbage (she’s supposedly being punished for
committing incest with her brother, but compared to her Siegmund and Sieglinde
got off easy, he dying in battle and she in childbirth!) and a cross is burned
onto her neck. The final scene is one in which Jon Snow (Kit Harington) is
lured to his death by a false tale about a dead friend of his supposedly having
survived and killed by the other [K]night’s Watch members, who stab him one
after the other in a scene obviously
copied from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Charles warned me that Jon Snow’s character may actually survive this,
since Kit Harington did the talk-show circuit to be interviewed about Game
of Thrones even after this episode pretty
definitively eliminated him. The final shot of “Mother’s Mercy” is of his blood
flowing picturesquely out of his body and into the snow, and it’s hard to
imagine even a fantasy character surviving that without direct supernatural intervention of a kind Game
of Thrones has mostly avoided — though its “teases” of dragons and other
impossible beings and event are annoying and I found myself wishing Messrs.
Benioff, Weiss and George R. R. Martin (who wrote the five-novel cycle, A
Song of Ice and Fire, on which Game
of Thrones is based) had decided one way or
another: either make theirs a frankly and openly supernatural universe or kept
it within established physical reality!
