Game of Thrones, season six, episodes one and two: “The Red Woman,” “Home” (Television 360, Startling TV, Bighead Littlehead, Home Box Office, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I cracked open the DVD boxed set of season six of Game of Thrones and resumed our progress through this depressing saga, which seems to me to embody all the most sordid aspects of classical medieval fiction — the endless battles, bloodlettings, religious manias, family feuding and dynastic wars — without the corresponding elements of chivalry and nobility that had been part of the formula of medievalist fantasy ever since the Middle Ages were still going on. (In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, in the thrall of my first obsession with Wagner and everything Wagnerian, I sought out some of the literary sources for his music dramas — the anonymous Song of the Volsungs and the Nibelungs, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival — and found them utterly fascinating reading. Gottfried’s Tristan gripped me the way a contemporary novel about legendary times would, and Wolfram’s Parzival was slower going but still valuable not only as a work of literature but also as one of the few accounts we have of what being a medieval knight was like by someone who was one — and quite frankly a long-form mini-series adaptation of Parzival would probably interest and entertain me personally more than Game of Thrones). As before with my comments on Game of Thrones, I’m going to start out with the official imdb.com synopses of the two episodes that began season six, “The Red Woman” and “Home,” and then offer my comments on them, at least partly because (with a few exceptions) the narrative threads of the episodes are so diffuse, with so many cuts back and forth between plotlines and whole story strands and sets of characters totally overlooked for huge chunks of screen time and then suddenly brought back (no wonder so many people “binge-watch” Game of Thrones: it’s just about the only way you can remember who’s who and what sides they’re on!):

The Red Woman: The fate of Jon Snow is revealed. Sansa and Theon flee the Boltons. Jaime and Cersei reunite in King's Landing. The High Sparrow continues to grow in power. The Sand Snakes make a daring move. Tyrion takes his first steps in ruling Meereen. Daario and Jorah pursue the Mother of Dragons. Daenerys is brought before the Dothraki.

Home: Bran trains with the Three-Eyed Raven. In King's Landing, Jaime advises Tommen. Tyrion demands good news, but has to make his own. At Castle Black, the Night's Watch stands behind Thorne. Ramsay Bolton proposes a plan, and Balon Greyjoy entertains other proposals.

What struck me most about season six was that the creators, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss (they were adapting a series of medievalist fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin collectively known as A Song of Ice and Fire, but with Martin blocked on the last two books he had planned to complete the series, Benioff and Weiss were required to come up with their own ending, which has been widely criticized), seem if anything to be ramping up the already high level of cruelty and gore. Season five ended with a pitched battle in the castle of the Knight’s Watch, the Montsalvat-like order to which Jon Snow (Kit Harington) was exiled because he was an illegitimate son in the Stark family (the fact that Martin named two of his feuding families “Lannister” and “Stark” suggested he was drawing on the real-life Wars of the Roses, which consumed England during the 15th century and involved a battle over the English throne between two families named Lancaster and York). Eventually Snow rose to become the commander of the Knight’s Watch even though he was regularly violating the order’s vow of celibacy by having at least one girlfriend on the outside (but then a lot of the Knight’s Watchmen were breaking that vow and screwing around), only he pissed off the others in the order by letting in their historical enemies, the Wildings, to save the Wildings (who, despite their long-standing enmity with the Knight’s Watch, were at least fellow human beings) from being slaughtered by the White Walkers (ghosts of previously slain warriors who are a sort of cross between the dead heroes with which Odin peopled the armies of Valhalla, Bram Stoker’s vampire cult and George Romero’s zombies; the gimmick is that if you’re killed by a White Walker you become one, and Jon Snow’s plan was not only to save the Wildings but to enlist them on the side of normal humanity against the White Walkers, who are growing in number and threatening to storm the Wall that alone protects the rest of the Game of Thrones world, “Westeros,” from being overrun by them).

Alas for Jon, the other Knight’s Watch members could only think of the Wildings in terms of all the Knight’s Watch members and their families the Wildings had killed during their centuries of feuding, so at the end of season five, episode 10 the other Knight’s Watch members attacked Jon Snow en masse and stabbed him repeatedly in an assassination I suspect was patterned both on the real-life killing of Julius Caesar and Shakespeare’s depiction of it in his famous play. Only if you thought David Benioff and D. B. Weiss were going to let one of their most obvious masculine heartthrobs get killed off permanently, you had another think coming: the titular “Red Woman” of episode one, a sorceress who’s got just about everyone who’s either fallen for her, enlisted her aid, or both, gets enlisted to use her magic to make Jon’s wounds magically heal and essentially resurrects him (and episode director Jeremy Podeswa does indeed stage this to look like the Resurrection of Jesus, especially in having his wounds magically heal and disappear on screen). Also at the end of season five Queen Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke), whom at first we were supposed to like because she was sweeping though the various kingdoms on the island on the other side of the sea from the one Westeros is on (obviously we were supposed to be thinking England and Ireland here, though just to confuse things there are part of the Game of Thrones world that evoke continental Europe and even the Middle East) freeing the various slaves, only we later grew to hate her for being such a naïve idiot and refusing to accept the native customs of the places she was conquering, fled an attack by some sort of resistance group called the “Sons of Harpy” (who distinguish themselves by wearing beak-like metal masks into battle and pretty much slaughtering anyone they come in contact with) escaped by flying away on one of the three dragons she hatched from still-surviving dragon’s eggs, thereby reviving a species everyone else thought was extinct.

Only she’s been able to do damned little with the dragons — and David Benioff and D. B. Weiss haven’t either. They went to the trouble of hiring excellent effects people to produce almost totally convincing dragons but have hardly shown them at all, and what was originally laudable Lewton-style reticence is getting very annoying — particularly since having escaped the kingdom of Meereen on a dragon’s back didn’t stop her from getting captured and enslaved by the Dothraki, a tribe whose leadership she married into back in the first season in hopes of gaining them as allies in taking back the Iron Throne of Westeros following the assassination of her father (got all that?). Meanwhile, Ramsay Bolton, one of the younger and cuter aspirants for power in this world, methodically and remorselessly kills his father and then throws his infant half-brother and the woman who just gave birth to him into a prison cell full of fighting dogs (that’s the “plan” given the rather anodyne reference in the above synopsis; like the currently living and ruling North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Ramsay is determined not only to let anyone who might be a threat to his power live, he’s particularly out to get anyone within his family that might compete with him for power), just one episode after two female assassins equally methodically and privately dispatch a young heir whose family has decided he’s too weak even to live, much less rule.

As I’ve noted several times before, though the bulk of Game of Thrones was filmed while Barack Obama was still President, in terms of the Zeitgeist this is a story that very much reflects the Trump era, with its aspirants for power after it just for its own sake. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” Game of Thrones is a world almost totally devoid of the gentler emotions — the few characters who actually show any kindness or consideration for others are damned as weaklings and dispatched to oblivion as soon as the writers can arrange it, and even romantic love (as opposed to sexual desire, which is very much a part of these tales) is carefully kept out of the world of Game of Thrones. In the fifth season the writers introduced religious mania in the person of the “High Sparrow” (Jonathan Pryce), who comes off like a medieval witchhunter or a modern-day Right-wing evangelical Christian in his zeal to apprehend everyone he considers a “sinner” (which basically seems to mean anyone who likes sex, straight or especially Gay), extract “confessions” out of them and humiliate them in public — another aspect of Game of Thrones that seems all too contemporary today. Even the minor characters, like the sighted girl who regularly takes on a blind beggar girl and makes her fight (and of course the competition is totally one-sided and the poor blind girl does a lot of hapless flailing about with her combat staff in mid-air), seem gratuitously cruel to each other.

Had Martin, Benioff and Weiss followed the example of previous medievalist writers (including the ones I noted above who wrote while the Middle Ages were still going on!) and leavened the bloodshed and gratuitous cruelties with some sense of nobility and chivalry, some sense that their world had some moral codes even if they got broken a lot, Game of Thrones would be a considerably better and nobler drama than it is — but then it wouldn’t seem so “right” for our Trump-led political era, in which the current U.S. President has become such a personification of political evil and how a sufficiently strong-willed and determined man can destroy all our pretensions of “democracy” and establish himself as a Nietzschean Übermensch, the strong ruling over the weak by sheer force of will, goading his followers into virtual worship at his feet and running roughshod over, and ultimately destroying, anyone and any institution or norm that could conceivably check his goal towards absolute power!