"Game of Thrones," season six, episodes five and six: "The Oath," "Blood of My Blood" (Television 360, Startling TV, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2016)

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

Two nights ago Charles and I watched episodes five and six of season six of Game of Thrones, “The Oath” and “Blood of My Blood.” Once again I’ll copy the synopses from imdb.com and then riff on them:

The Oath: Littlefinger faces the consequences of his actions. Sansa and Jon make plans. Daenerys decides Jorah's fate. An uneasy truce in Slaver's Bay doesn't withhold Tyrion from trying to improve the situation. The Ironborn choose their new ruler. No -one (Arya Stark) is given a new mission and witnesses a play. Bran learns about how the Long Night came to be but brings chaos upon his group. Wyllis holds the door.

Blood of My Blood: The White Walkers reach Meera and Bran but they are saved in the last minute by a mysterious black rider who turns out to be Benjen Stark. Sam and Gilly arrive at Horn Hill, where Sam introduces Gilly and Crastor's son to his family. Defending Sam, Gilly confesses that she is a wildling, which is appalling to Randyll. Nevertheless, Randyll accepts the baby into his home. However, Sam changes his mind in the last moment and decides to take Gilly, the baby as well as the Valyrian sword of his father with him and leave his home for good. King Tommen is allowed to see Queen Margery. Instead of killing the actress playing Cersei by poisoning her, Arya recovers her Needle and makes different plans. Jaime and the Tyrell army march into King's Landing, trying to stop Margery's planned walk of shame but the High Sparrow already thought this event through, making sure he will succeed in the end by manipulating King Tommen to take his side. As a result, Tommen fires his father from his job as ...

One of my sources for confusion as to who’s who in Game of Thrones is the sheer multiplicity of plot lines and the way the writers wrench us back and forth between them -- and I must confess my husband Charles has a better ability than I do to keep track of who is who and what side they’re on. Also, as Game of Thrones has progressed it’s become more supernatural and also more gory -- though these two episodes were at least a bit of an exception to the gore, at least. The White Walkers still remind me an awful lot of the brain-eating zombies in George Romero’s films -- they’re supposed to be an implacable menace but at least the dead warriors in Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung were revivified so they could be heroes guarding Wotan’s Valhalla for all time, while the ones here look like someone gave Romero the budget to make a film set in the Middle Ages.

The most powerful scenes in these episodes barely got mentioned in the above synopses -- we’re supposed to believe that the White Walkers were able to breach the defenses of the cave where Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright), the kid who in the early episodes climbed up the side of the Lannister castle wall (what, if the Lannisters and the Starks are supposed to be sworn enemies, was he doing there?) and witnessed Jaime and Cersei Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Walden and Lena Headey) in the throes of incestuous passion and they responded by pitching him out of the window of the castle tower, permanently disabling him) and his minder because Bran dreamed that the king of the White Walkers touched him (and he also had a dream where his beautiful twink chest was pierced by a stone knife with which he was stabbed), and now the two of them have to flee for their lives while being chased by a horde of hundreds of implacable, instinctive enemies who can’t be reasoned with, stopped or successfully fought without the exotic weapon “dragon glass,” which is in woefully short supply.

The most emotionally wrenching story here is the one about Samwell Tardy (Jon Bradley), who brings his girlfriend and their baby (though actualy, as noted in the synopsis, she's someone else's baby) back to the ancestral home from which he was exiled years before -- and suddenly a character that’s been basically a comic-relief foil for Jon Snow (Kit Harington) (I’ve joked that if Warner Bros. had made this story in the 1930’s Alan Hale would have played him) suddenly becomes a figure of weight and pathos as he gets himself thrown out of his family again when the woman accidentally “outs” herself as a “wilding,” the tribe of Northerners that though (unlike the White Walkers) are still human, nonetheless are hated by just about everyone else in the story because they’ve survived for centuries by raiding the other tribes.

The other most interesting story in these episodes concerns the High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce), a religious leader who’s built up a huge cult following so large and powerful they can literally tell the King of Westeros, Tommen Baratheon (Dean-Charles Chapman) -- a guy who’s way too nice for the cutthroat world of power in Game of Thrones (it would be like replacing nice Barack Obama with nasty Donald Trump -- oh, wait, that actually happened!) -- who’s ultimately recruited into the cult of the High Sparrow, an offensive moralist who’s somehow able to get away with anything (even though, unlike most of these people either in fiction or in real life, there’s no hint that he’s personally participating in the behaviors he condemns so vociferously in others), who’s trying to save his wife Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer) from the High Sparrow’s wrath by adopting the High Sparrow’s sick religion himself and ordering Jaime Lannister (Tommen’s ostensible uncle and actually his father as well, since he and his brother, former King Joffrey, were products of the long-term incest between him and Cersei) to stand down just when he had assembled an army to slaughter that disgusting religious pedant and all his followers. (Once again a figure in Game of Thrones is able to escape accountability for his evil -- also like Donald Trump.)

Though most of Game of Thrones was filmed before Trump became President the show definitely reflects the Zeitgeist of the Trump years -- the various characters pursuing power for its own sake and the lip service paid to codes of “honor” that the characters actually break left and right. There’s also a metafictional conceit in these episodes in that “No-one” -- actually Anya Stark (Maisie Williams) -- is ordered to assassinate an actress in a theatrical troupe that performs a play about Tyrion Lannister’s (Peter Dinklage) successful assassination of his nephew Joffrey, and while it might have been trippier for the actor playing Tyrion to be a normal-sized person simulating little-persondom by going about on his knees and tying the rest of his legs behind hlm like Jose Ferrer as Toulouse-Lautrec in the 1952 Moulin Rouge, the casting director for Game of Thrones was able to come up with another little-person actor. There’s also the contest for the leadership of the “Ironborn,” a contest between Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen), who’s somehow recovered from being hypniotized into slavery and rechristened “Reek” in previous episodes (if they explained how that happened, I forgot), his sister -- who’s clearly more qualified but this is one of those realms, like the United States, that won’t allow its head of state to be a woman) -- and their uncle, who pulls rank on both of them.

Also part of the problem with Game of Thrones is that some of the most interesting characters -- like the woman knight Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie, who’s complained off-screen that she doesn’t get considered for many roles because she’s six feet tall -- the opposite of Peter Dinklage’s problem and an indictment of what we as a society still consider “appropriate” for women and their roles!) -- are some of the least effectively used, and even Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke), who’s in the thick of the dynastic battles because her father was king until he went insane and was murdered by Jaime Lannister -- is supposed to be the “Mother of Dragons” but we see very little of her, and none of her dragons, until the very end of episode six, when we finally get to see her ride one. I suspect we haven’t seen more of the dragons simply because the producers of Game of Thrones couldn’t afford enough time on CGI computers to give us more of them -- so perhaps my dream that one day Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books can one day be filmed will remain elusive.