"Game of Thrones," season six, episodes seven and eight: "The Broken Man," "No One" (Television 360, Startling TV, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2016)

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

Last night Charles and I watched the next two episodes in sequence of season six of Game of Thrones -- it’s become kind of a default choice for us when we can’t think of anything else in the video backlog to run, and as I’ve occasionally joked after watching all the dire news stories on MS-NBC and elsewhere, “Now let’s watch something that will restore our faith in the essential goodness, kindness and decency of humanity … like Game of Thrones.” The episodes we watched last night were “The Broken Man” and “No One,” episodes seven and eight of season six, and once again I’m going to quote the official synopses and then comment on them:

The Broken Man: The Hound was saved by Brother Ray, the leader of a community, and has a peaceful life working as a woodsman. When three men from the Brotherhood threaten the villagers, The Hound is worried about it but Brother Ray does not believe in violence anymore. Margaery seems to be converted by the High-Sparrow, but when she learns that her grandmother Oleanna Tyrrell is in danger, she contacts her to convince Oleanna to leave King's Landing. Jon. Sansa and Davos are searching for allies to vanquish Ramsay and retake Winterfell. Jaime and Bronn arrive at the Blackfish Castle and Jaime tries to convince him to surrender to the siege he to his castle. Theon and Yara are resting in a brothel and waiting for uncle Euron's attack. Arya makes arrangements to return to Westeros but she is stabbed by the Waif.

No One: Arya recovers after being helped by the actress whose life she saved, Lady Crane, whom she finds murdered when she wakes up as Waif catches up with her. The Hound goes on a revenge trip and finally reunites himself with Beric. Cersei uses the Mountain to get back at the High Sparrow and his people. Then she receives the cruel news that her son, king Tommen, is manipulated by the high Sparrow to ban the trial by combat in the seven kingdoms. Brienne and Podrick reach Jaime and Bronn. Brienne makes an offer to Jaime to get him, Sansa and the Blackfish satisfied. She tries to convince the Blackfish to take his army North and help Sansa get Winterfell back. As Jaime threatens to kill Lord Edmure's son, Edmure decides to help Jaime take Riverrun. Daenerys comes back to the pyramid in Meereen.

The main impression I got from these two episodes is that they seemed to be transitional, setting us up for the action to come -- there was a lot of talk about future battles and preparation for them but precious little action. The synopses are also a bit confusing in that they frequently refer to characters by nicknames; just as “Littlefeather” in season six, episode five was really Peter Baylish (Aiden Gillen), who in his combination of sang-froid, skill at political manipulation and outright amorality reminded me a great deal of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, so “The Hound” mentioned in “The Broken Man” is really Sandor Clegane (Rory McCann), brother of “The Mountain” a.k.a. Gregor Clegane (who apparently got killed in season four but reappears here) and a super-killer with an ax who dispatches three of the four people the leader of the so-called “Brotherhood” wanted to hang. Like an even more demented version of Donald Trump, Sandor doesn’t like hanging because it’s too quick and doesn’t give him a chance to torture his victims and make them suffer before they die. (Remember George Orwell’s catechism in 1984: “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”) He comes on, knocks off a few people and then pretty much disappears until the end of the episode, when the man who’s about his only friend is himself brutally killed.

There are a lot of plotlines floating around in these two episodes, including the one about Anya Stark (Maisie Williams), who for several episodes trained to join the cult of the “Faceless Ones,” who keep a necropolis full of the faces of the people they’ve killed and assume them when they go on their latest murder mission (which couldn’t help but remind me of Jim Morrison’s line from the Doors’ song “The End”: “He took a face from the ancient gallery and he walked on down the hall … ”), only Anya muffs her first killing assignment when she spares the life of the leading actress in a theatre company that tours with a play based on the death of the late king Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) with such wretched, banal dialogue it’s obvious that in this world Shakespeare hasn’t existed yet. She’s marked for death and stabbed repeatedly by “The Waif” (played by Faye Marsey when she appears as a woman and Adam Turns when disguised as a man), once at the end of episode seven (where she’s nursed back to health by the actress she was supposed to kill, and whom “The Waif” finally does in) and once at the end of episode eight -- though we’ve seen enough miraculous resurrections of characters who looked like they couldn’t possibly have survived their injuries -- including Jon Snow, played by Kit Harington, who was revived through magic after an assassination that looked like a combination of Julius Caesar’s and Jesus Christ’s! -- that just because we’ve seen her apparently mortally wounded twice does not mean we won’t see her again. (I remember coming in on my late roommate John while he was watching a scene in The Lord of the Rings in which Gandalf was pitched off a ledge into a crevasse. I explained, “This is a fantasy, so just because you’ve seen someone killed doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t see them again,” He said, “I hate stories like that!”)

Once again the writers seem to be ignoring some of their most interesting characters -- the woman knight Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) does little more than standing around and talking about whom she’s honor-bound to side with this time (she’s about the only character in Game of Thrones who seems to be aware of, and attempts to practice, any of the codes of chivalry from the real Middle Ages!). Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) once again abandons the kingdom she’s supposedly ruling to recruit allies for her struggle against everyone else for the throne of fictitious “Westeros” (obviously the main British island, though as its name suggests Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin moved it west, not east, of the rival island that’s obviously supposed to be Ireland), and her much-hyped dragons this time appeared only in one shot: a single dragon flying way in the background. Given that every time she leaves the people she leaves behind prove wretchedly unable to keep order without her, one would think she’d get the message and stay where she is. Even Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), who in previous episodes has been both the story’s most interesting character and its best actor (as I’ve said before this must have been a dream assignment for Dinklage, playing a character of real depth and complexity instead of the dreck roles little-person actors usually get cast in!), appears here only in one scene in which he tries to get two of his allies in Daenerys’ court, her handmaiden and the soldier who leads her “Unsullied” troops, to break their straight-edge commitments and drink wine. (She likes it; he, to his credit, does not.)

The most important plot line in these episodes is the continuing dictatorship of virtue being run in King’s Landing by the High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce), and while we’ve gotten conflicting signals about just what his creepy theology is it’s obviously strongly patterned on the evangelical Right-wing Christianity of today, with its obsession with micromanaging people’s sex lives and how they deal with the consequences therefrom, which the current Republican Party is essentially seeking to impose as an unofficial state religion in the United States. It’s probably because I so loathe their real-life modern-day counterparts in this country (and elsewhere in the world) that I find the High Sparrow the creepiest and most thoroughly evil character in this story -- far more than the many tribal leaders who glory in wreaking havoc and shedding the blood of their rivals, who are living a brutal code but at least living it more or less honestly! The High Sparrow has raised such a large following he’s convinced just about everybody in the court at King’s Landing, including the king himself, Tommen Baratheon (Dean-Charles Chapman) and his wife Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), who in their earlier appearances were screwing like bunny rabbits but now Margarey has so totally bought in to the High Sparrow’s anti-sex preachings he now has to reverse course and persuade her to have sex with her husband, not for enjoyment but to fulfill her womanly and queenly function to produce an heir. There are also plot lines featuring Margaery’s grandmother Oleanna Tyrell (played by the great veteran actress Diana Rigg, who recently died of cancer but with this part got a far better send-off than a lot of legendary players, especially women, end up with -- can you say Trog?) and Margaery’s attempts to engineer her escape from King’s Landing before the High Sparrow and his moralist minions come after her. At one point King Tommen, under the High Sparrow’s influence, bans trial by combat in Westeros … and for some reason the writer of the above synopsis seems to think that’s a bad thing.

There are also the efforts of rivals Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) -- the real father of King Tommen and his late brother Joffrey (he was having an incestuous affair with his sister, Cersei Lannister, payed by Lena Headey, who first encouraged the High Sparrow’s cult and then became one of its victims) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) with his half-sister Sansa Stark (Sophia Turner) to recruit rival armies, and the effort of Jaime to take the so-called Blackfish castle by threatening to execute the lord’s rather twerpy son Edmurd Tully (Josiah Menzies), only dad seemingly couldn’t care less what happens to his kid. Even Charles, whom I suspect has been liking Game of Thrones better than I did -- he’s had a better memory than I for who is who and what side they’re on (he successfully made it through all three -- or four, depending on how you reckon The Hobbit -- books in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, whereas I got about a third of the way through The Fellowship of the Ring and then gave up in disinterested disgust) -- is getting a bit tired of the speed of the switchbacks between storylines and how many of the most interesting characters seem to disappear for long stretches.