"Game of Thrones," season six, episodes nine and ten: "Battle of the Bastards," "The Winds of Winter" (Televison 360, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2016)

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

Last night at 9 p.m. Charles and I watched the final two episodes in season six of Game of Thrones -- our “Westeros odyssey” has now journeyed three-fourths of the way through the show’s entire run and things are beginning to settle down a little if only because so many of the lead characters are being killed off in one cataclysm or another that the remaining plot lines are getting easier to follow and the key suspense issue of who will end up on the Iron Throne ruling all “Westeros” (obviously based on the main British island) is getting closer to resolution -- much like the sort of murder mystery in which so many of the characters are killed it gets easier to figure out whodunit just by process of elimination. As with previous Game of Thrones episodes I’ll quote the synopses on imdb.com and then offer my glosses:

Battle of the Bastards: Meereen is under siege and the fleet of the masters is attacking the city. Daenerys wants to destroy their cities but Tyrion convinces her to not incur in the same mistake of her father in King's Landing. They schedule a meeting with the masters to discuss the terms of surrender. However the masters misunderstand and believe Daenerys want to surrender. She rides Drogon and together with the two other dragons, they burn part of the fleet. Meanwhile Daario and the Dothraki attack the Sons of the Harpy. Then Yara and Theon team up with Daenerys to accept the independence of the Iron Isles and to overthrow Euron. In Winterfell, Jon Snow, Sansa, Davos and Tormund meet with Ramsay, and Jon Snow proposes a dispute between them instead of sacrificing lives in a battle. Ramsay does not accept and they schedule the battle in the morning. Jon Snow plots a scheme with Davos and Tormund and Sansa warns that Ramsay plays dirty. When both armies are ready to battle, Ramsay brings a surprise that ... Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The Winds of Winter: Cersei and Loras stand trial for their crimes, while Jaime celebrates victory with Walder Frey at The Twins. Davos confronts Jon about Melisandre's actions, and Littlefinger reveals his intentions to Sansa. Meanwhile, Bran continues his quest for knowledge in the far North as "winter" finally arrives. “Battle of the Bastards” emerged as one of the most effective Game of Thrones episodes because it basically had only two storylines: Daenerys Targeryan’s (Emilia Clarke) attempt to keep the city-state of Meereen from being reconquered by the slaveholders who had ruled it before and were anxious to regain power once they got rid of these pesky abolitionists (much like the American Southern white leadership’s successful campaign to restore white supremacy in the decades after Reconstruction), and the battle over Winterfell between Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon) and the invaders led by Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and his half-sister Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner). Outnumbered two to one, the Stark forces stake a position outside Winterfell and Sansa warns Jon not to be lured by Bolton’s attempts to provoke an attack. Only Bolton, who since the death of former king Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) has been the most openly evil character in the cycle, sends Rickon Stark (Art Parkinson) -- who I wasn’t sure whether he was Jon’s and Sansa’s brother or their nephew -- on a doomed run to the Stark lines with Bolton’s massed archers shooting at his back until they finally killed him. This stirred Jon to launch an immediate attack which went wretchedly for him in a scene that recalled the real-life Battle of Agincourt -- only with the difference that the side that outnumbered the other was also the side that picked the smarter tactics. At Agincourt in 1415 the French sent out their cavalry first (there’s an hilarious scene in Laurence Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Henry V showing that the French horsemen wore such heavy armor they literally had to be raised onto their horses by pulleys instead of being able to mount them normally) while the British massed their archers in the front line and mowed down the French cavalry (who were also disadvantaged by the fact that it had rained the night before the battle and the horses literally got stuck in the mud).

This time it’s the bigger Bolton forces who put their archers in front and rain death on the Stark army in a scene that looks like an army with flintlocks charging into the face of an enemy with machine guns. The Stark forces are predictably overwhelmed and to administer the coup de grace Bolton orders his men to form a circle around Stark’s beleaguered survivors with spears and shields so they can murder them en masse when the Seventh Cavalry almost literally rides to the rescue -- in this case they’re the Blackfish army, whose castle is led by a bratty 10-year-old and whom Snow previously sought out for aid, thought they had rebuffed him, and went into battle without them anyway. As for Daenerys, she’s given an ultimatum by the slavers’ commander to leave Meereen and allow her “Unsullied” troops to be sold back into slavery, as well as her woman companion. Her version of the Seventh Cavalry is her three pet dragons, whom after being talked about in previous episodes that “teased” us with occasional glimpses of them and their power, we now get to see all of them in the same frame, incinerating enough of her former enemies and scaring the rest into giving up. This gives Daenerys not only control of Meereen but a fleet of ships, which she can use to get off the island she’s been stuck on (which, though east rather than west of Westeros, is obviously supposed to be Ireland) and stage an amphibious invasion of Westeros -- though she upsets her boy-toy by leaving him behind to run Meereen, at least in part because she plans to regain the throne of Westeros essentially by selling her body to the highest bidder and making the most politically and militarily advantageous marriage she can.

Episode ten, “The Winds of Winter,” finally dispatches the series’ most obnoxious character, the High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce), in a scene based on the real-life Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which diehard Roman Catholics planned to blow up both King James I and the British Parliament by exploding a large store of gunpowder under their building to stop the persecution of Roman Catholics by the British government. The plot is led by Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) and annihilates the High Sparrow and most of the cult that’s assembled to try Loras Tyrell (Finn Jones) and his sister Margaery (Natalie Dormer), Loras for being Gay (for some reason all these creepy religious cults seem to pick on us!) and Margaery for having lied under oath to protect him. Loras pleads guilty and gets a scar carved into his forehead -- a permanent version of the scarlet letter -- and Margaery is about to be tried when the plot works, the High Sparrow’s keep is blown up and this horrible “holy” man meets the ending he deserves. (I only wish it were as easy to get rid of all the so-called “evangelical Christians” who clog up our politics and establish a similar dictatorship of “virtue” in which the government and the church tell people what they can and cannot do with their bodies!! As I told Charles last night, I have a particular loathing for the High Sparrow because of my visceral and enduring hatred for his real-life counterparts in our own time.) Alas, Cersei’s pilot backfires when her son Tommen (Dean-Charloes Chapman), who had been recruited to the cult, commits suicide after its destruction.

There’s also the unwelcome return of Peter “Littlefinger” Baylish (Aidan Gillen), who in his combination of unscrupulous opportunism, hypocrisy and unemotional coldness reminds me of Mitch McConnell and who’s still marketing his dubious services as an intriguer to various factions in the coming wars. And we get a glimpse of Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright), the disabled kid who’s being trundled around by a woman after having been advised by a talking tree with a human face who may or may not be one of this universe’s old gods (Max von Sydow, who ended his international career much the way he began it -- as a medieval knight literally playing chess with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal) -- and also assassin Arya Stark (Maisie Williams), who knocks off yet another creepy Old Fighter in one of the last scenes: she’s left the No-Name cult but is still putting her training there to use. I’ve written before about Game of Thrones as a reflection of the Zeitgeist of the Trump era (even though all but the last two seasons were filmed while Barack Obama was still President), with its depiction of politics as a ruthless no-holds-barred struggle between people who (with only a few exceptions) don’t even pretend to any higher social goals or to be in it for anything other than the power and the material rewards theirefrom -- money, the luxuries it buys and the sex it also buys. (Anya’s victim at the end is an old reprobate who buys himself prostitutes and then doesn’t pay them, sort of like Donald Trump with his lawyers.) I’m fond of joking after Charles and I have had MS-NBC on for a while, “Now let’s watch something that will reaffirm our belief in the kindness, decency and goodness of humanity … like Game of Thrones,” but I can’t help but think that the popularity of Game of Thrones and the rise of Donald Trump to near-absolute political power are two sides of the same coin: a deeply rooted cynicism in the power of people to be virtuous and at the same time the hope for an all-powerful father figure who will run everything on our behalf and Make Westeros (or America) Great Again.