"Game of Thrones," season six, episodes 3 and 4: "Oathbreaker," "Book of the Stranger" (Startling TV, Television 360, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2016)

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

Last night Charles and I picked up where we’d left off watching Game of Thrones with episodes three and four of season six, ‘Oathbreaker” and “Book of the Stranger,” and though I’m using a new computer setup to write this entry and I’m getting a lot of glitches from the differences between this jury-rigged Google Chromebook setup and the iMac I was used to until its hard drive crashed, I’ve once again copied the official episode synopses from imdb.com and will work from them:

Oathbreaker: "Daenerys arrives at Vaes Dothrak. Sam and Gilly sail for Horn Hill. Arya trains as No One. Varys finds information on the Sons of the Harpy. Ramsay receives a gift. Tommen meets with the High Sparrow. At Castle Black, a miracle occurs."

Book of the Stranger: "Sansa arrives at Castle Black. Tyrion makes a deal with the slave masters. Jorah and Daario sneak into Vaes Dothrak. Ramsay sends a letter to Jon. Theon arrives at Pyke. Cersei and Olenna Tyrell plot against the High Sparrow."

What has been most startling about Game of Thrones as it’s evolved is how it’s become more fantastical, more amoral and more bloody. Season six was originally aired in 2016, the year Donald Trump (whom it’s all too easy to imagine as a Game of Thrones character, with his Rabelaisian taste -- or lack thereof -- for money, power and sex, even though it’s hard to envision him O.K. with the comparative lack of creature comforts available to the medieval 1 percent as opposed to today’s!) was elected President of the United States. I’ve already commented on the Zeitgeist issues raised by Game of Thrones, in particular how even though most of the TV series was filmed during the Obama administration the overall gist of the show is very Trumpian.

The characters in Game of Thrones almost never make a pretense of being interested in power for some greater good: all they want is power for its own sake and for the perks it can offer -- lavish banquets and orgies in particular. The few people in the show who proclaim an interest in using power to help the 99-percenters of Westeros (the fictitious kingdom in which Game of Thrones takes place, mostly modeled on Britain but with admixtures of continental Europe and even the Middle East) are written off as imbecilic ninnies (sort of like what Trump is trying to do with Joe Biden in the 2020 Presidential campaign) who simply aren’t tough (or unscrupulous) enough for the real world.

Though it’s medievalist fiction Game of Thrones also seems to exemplify George Orwell’s sweeping denunciation of all revolutionary pretensions ih 1984: “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” The world of Game of Thrones is one in which the strong eat the weak for breakfast and barely even burp, and this is all presented as timeless truth the viewers are expected to accept as uncritically as most of the characters do.

It’s also relentlessly opposed to religion; the fascinating character of the “High Sparrow” (Jonathan Pryce, one of three stars of yesteryear -- along with Diana Rigg and Max von Sydow, returning to medievalist moviemaking 60 years after playing a medieval knight who literally duels with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal) gets to deliver an origin-story monologue in one of these episodes (he was the son of a cobbler, who took over the family business on the death of his father, only he went after the 1-percent market by spending more on his raw materials and adding fancy ornaments and decorations; he was so successful he became part of the 1 percent himself and partook of their pleasures until he suddenly realized how empty they were, whereupon he walked out of that lifestyle and ultimately formed a cult and started imposing his dictatorship of virtue -- too bad he got the first half of Buddha’s revelation but not the second half, the one about O.D.’ing on asceticism and arriving at a philosophy of ‘moderation in all things”), emerges as a self-righteous prig who gets his jollies out of forcing women who’ve (actually or allegedly) sexually sinned literally to walk through the street covered in shit while the people watching yell insults and throw things at them.

One wishes King Thommen (Dean-Charles Chapman), one of the few Biden-like characters in this story -- nice but totally ineffectual and nowhere nearly close to being a match for the amoral power-seekers who dominate this story -- had knocked off this horrible character while he still had the chance, before both his mother (who like the Empress Dowager in China at the turn of the last century who first encouraged the Boxers and then lost control of them, originally protected and promoted the High Sparrow’s cult until she became a victim of it) and his wife got condemned by it. (So far Donald Trump has somehow maintained the support of America’s evangelical Christian community even though his life is a contradiction of so much of what they claim to disapprove of -- avarice, adultery, gambling and an overweening sense of pride. One wishes America’s Christian Right had someone with both the power and the willingness to throw Trump into a dungeon and let him emerge only for a shit-covered Walk of Shame!)

As I’ve noted above, aside from the Zeitgeist issues of Game of Thrones the two most important differences between season six and what has gone before are the increasing gore level and the greater resort to the out-and-out supernatural to keep the plot going. The nastiest piece of work in the dramatis personae since the murder of Thommen’s psycho brother Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) -- the character was so obviously based on Caligula and Nero I thought Gleeson would be excellent casting in case anyone else wants to make a movie about one or the other of these ancient Roman bad boys! -- is Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon), who’s already killed his father to take the old man’s throne and his newborn half-brother just to eliminate a possible future competitor (sort of like Kim Jong Un!), and here in a chilling scene that would have been even more chilling if there hadn’t been eerily similar ones earlier in the series, he cuts the throat of a woman while they’re having sex because he suspects her (rightly, we’re evidently supposed to believe) of treachery.

As for the big supernatural scenes in these episodes, the one in “Oathbreaker” occurs when Jon Snow (Kit Harington) is brought back to life by a sorceress and reassumes command of the Knight’s Watch just long enough to hang the four alleged ringleaders of the plot to kill him (though one of his victims is a young twink type and one expects Jon to tell him, “I’m only hanging you because you’re cuter than I am!”) and the one in “Book of the Stranger” comes when Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) is captured by her old in-laws, the Dothraki. The assembled Khals (leaders) of the Dothraki are trying to decide whether to put her in the convent-like prison for widows of deceased Khals or just to take turns raping her.

Since Daenerys is supposed to have three live dragons under her control, I had assumed she’d summon one of them to serve as a dragonis ex machina and get her out of there; instead she knocks over the big urn-like lamps that illuminate the room and sets it on fire, killing all the Khals who wanted to rape her while she just strolls out of the conflagration, unsinged and with nothing about her the worse for wear -- a shot that in its unearthly combination of beauty and cruelty sums up much about what’s right and wrong with Game of Thrones.