by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the
next two episodes in sequence of Game of Thrones, “The Wolf and the Lion” and “A Golden Crown,”
picking them up after over a month away from the show — and watching most of
these episodes in a state of confusion as to who was who and what side they
were on. Basically Game of Thrones is a modern-day medievalist reworking of the War of the Roses — the
Lancasters are called “Lannisters” and the Yorks are called “Starks” (which, as
I joked when we started watching this show, suggests that centuries later one
of their descendants became Iron Man). It takes place in a supposedly mythical
kingdom called “Westeros” which is pretty obviously the British Isles (when the
brother-and-sister team of Viserys and Daenerys Targeryen,[1]
played respectively by Harry Lloyd and Emilia Clarke, whine about wanting to
conquer the mainland of Westeros even though they’re stranded on an island and
they don’t have ships or the resources to construct any, I thought, “Oh,
they’re in Ireland”) — actually seven kingdoms, sort of like pre-19th century Germany, loosely
confederated and at the moment ruled by King Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy). Yes,
I know his last name sounds like a
defense contractor, but he’s actually a Rabelaisian figure who reminded me of
King Henry VIII — especially when he insists not only on holding a joust on the
grounds of his palace but riding in it himself until it turns out that he’s
grown too fat to fit into his suit of armor. (The real Henry VIII insisted on
entering jousts even long after he was way too out of shape to compete — and the other knights had to figure out
ways to let him win without getting killed themselves.) One of the knights is a
pageboy-haired blond cutie who is hopeless in the lists — especially in the
face of an unscrupulous guy in black armor who slaughters his own horse to
force the pretty boy to engage in hand-to-hand combat (not an easy thing to do
in armor) and makes the pretty boy get his ass saved by another warrior. Later
there’s a scene in which the pretty boy shaves the chest hair of his ally and
then goes down on him — the first hint we’ve seen that the Game of Thrones universe contains Gay people (or at least Gay sex
— it wasn’t until the word “homosexual” was coined in 1865 that the idea began
that being Gay was something you were and not just something you did), even though there have been a lot of hot young women flashing their
breasts on screen and getting fucked, almost exclusively (at least from the
camera angles the Game of Thrones directors use to shoot them) in the ass — which makes me wonder how any
kids get conceived in this world.
The most interesting scenes in these two
episodes concerned Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), little-person brother of
Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Walden) and Cersei (Lena Headey) Lannister, who’s
captured by a couple of Stark princesses and their army and locked in one of
the most intriguing jail cells in movie history: the front of it looks like a
normal cell but the back end of it is an open window leading to a fall of
thousands of feet, so he could leap out of the cell but only to a certain death
below. Tyrion, one of the most interesting characters in the story (especially
given how many women he’s able to seduce despite his diminutive stature — Peter
Dinklage probably loved acting this role after all the stereotypical cute
little-person roles he’s had to play!), eventually talks his way out of his
imprisonment by demanding a trial by combat, and when he asks for another man
to fight on his behalf as his champion, a knight rides in on a boat drawn by a
swan and … oops, wrong story. One of the courtiers takes on the role of
Tyrion’s champion and makes the mistake of winning. The sixth episode, “A
Golden Crown,” ends with one of the show’s most chilling scenes: Daenerys
Targeryen and her husband, Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen) — whom she married just
to gain access to his army so, once she figures out a way to get it across the
Irish Sea (or whatever they call it in this universe), she can reconquer
Westeros for her family and install herself on the Iron Throne (a nicely
preposterous prop whose back is a bunch of swords jammed into its base) — decide
to get rid of that annoying brother of his once and for all. They strip him of
his golden belt, melt it down in a crucible, and pour the molten gold over his
head — apparently Viserys couldn’t bleed or be wounded in battle, so they had
to find this more outré way of
killing him (though, as I once remember explaining to my late roommate/client
John while he was watching The Lord of the Rings and he got to a scene in which Gandalf was pitched
off a ledge into a seemingly bottomless pit, in a fantasy story just because
you actually see someone die does not necessarily mean you won’t see them again — to which he replied, “I hate stories like that!”), albeit when the gold is
poured over his head it forms an almost perfect helmet shape instead of just
glopping all over him as would happen if anyone tried this for real. (This show
should probably come with a lot of “Don’t try this at home” warnings.)
Oh, and as Anna Russell would
have said if she’d lived long enough to parody Game of Thrones the way she did Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung (which is actually a model of clarity compared to
this — Wagner edited most of the auxiliary races and the subplots concerning
them of the Nibelungenlied and came up with a taut, easy-to-understand story line even though
Charles likes to make fun of Wagner’s Ring because there are so few characters in it and so many of them are
Wotan’s progeny), “Ya remember the dragon eggs?” Charles and I haven’t got into Game of
Thrones far enough to see actual
dragons — all we’ve seen of them so far are three eggs that are being carefully
coddled by their owners and which Viserys Targaryen tries to steal (though
we’re not sure whether that nasty execution he gets was punishment for this or
just his sister and brother-in-law deciding he was dispensable and getting rid
of him) — and there’s also the crippled boy who wants to be a knight, who’s
rescued from bandits in the woods who try to strip him of his silver spurs and
his white horse. I can see why Game of Thrones “hooked” the huge audience it did — and also while
the universe’s creator, George R. R. Martin, turned down all offers to make it
as a feature film but accepted the one these producers, David Benoit and D. B.
Weiss, made him to do it as a TV series. (It’s a real pity Erich von Stroheim, with
his obsession with making mega-length movies out of not particularly long
novels like Frank Norris’s McTeague, isn’t alive today: the cable and “streaming” formats in which books
can be stretched out on screen to many hours of running time would have been
ideal for him!) But it’s also a show that hovers on the thin edge of risibility
and frequently goes over — I found myself quoting the dialogue from Monty
Python and the Holy Grail at
several points, notably when one of the knights’ throat is slashed, it spurts
out geysers of blood, and I said, “It’s only a flesh wound!”
