by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I decided to pick up where we left off on season
one of Game of Thrones, the eight-year
mega-series based on the cycle of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin. We had
previously got up to the end of episode six, “A Golden Crown,” in which Robert
Baratheon (Mark Addy), current occupant of the Iron Throne (a weird contraption
whose back is made up of swords, appropriately enough given the willingness of
potential monarchs to kill each other to get there), goes off on a hunt and
leaves his “head,” sort of a Prime Minister, Eddard Stark (Sean Bean), to rule
in his place. Only during episode seven, “You Win or You Die,” word comes back
that Robert has been mortally wounded by a boar (a sort of pig with horns whose
meat is very stringy and gamey — I know the last because I’ve actually eaten
some at the local Carnitas Snack Shack). He dictates a will on his deathbed
that Stark is to serve as regent until Robert’s son Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) is
of age to take the throne. Eddard’s principal adviser is a nasty villain named
Peter “Littlefinger” Baelish (Aidan Gillen) — you can tell he’s a villain
because he’s better looking than the other males in the court of the Seven
Kingdoms and his costume is better tailored than anyone else’s — and when
Eddard won’t take the tough measures Baelish recommends, including seizing the
throne for himself by revealing that Joffrey and his sister were really the
products of an incestuous affair between Robert’s queen and her brother,
Baelish double-crosses him, arranges for Joffrey to take the throne
immediately, kills all of Eddard’s sons — except Robb (Richard Madden), who
escapes to the north; and another one who’s out of reach for reasons we’ll find
out later — and arrests Eddard for treason. Joffrey is engaged to Cersei
Lannister (Lena Headey), whose family are the Starks’ bitterest rivals (it’s
obvious that when he came up with the names “Lannister” and “Stark” George R.
R. Martin was thinking of the real-life Wars of the Roses, in which 15th
century England endured a civil war between rival royal families named
Lancaster and York!), but he’s pissing her off by making him witness his
brutalities, including mounting his dead enemies’ severed heads on pikes and
personally overriding the former Queen’s and Cersei’s own pleas for mercy by
beheading Eddard right in front of them. Joffrey emerges as a real piece of
work, proof that they didn’t break the mold after they made Caligula and Nero,
and indeed Jack Gleeson would be excellent casting if they make another movie
about these evil Roman emperors.
Meanwhile, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke)
— why do characters in fantasies have to have such tongue-twisting and
virtually unspellable names? — is still stuck on the island adjoining “Westeros,”
the fictional locale of Game of Thrones (though it’s pretty obviously supposed to be England and Ireland,
respectively — and the Wall that’s a constant conversation topic in this show,
to the point where there’s a whole order of knights who have nothing to do but
guard it, represents the Roman emperor Hadrian’s wall separating what’s now
England from what’s now Scotland), where she married Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa,
who after he left this series got to play Aquaman — and a considerably hunkier,
more butch Aquaman than the one from the comics, in which he was just plain
dull) of the Dothraki tribe, who from the name of their ruler seem to have been
Genghis Khan’s Golden Hordes from Mongolia transposed into medieval England.
Daenerys is the granddaughter of a former king who was deposed and murdered
ostensibly because he went insane, and she hooked up with Drogo because she was
hoping his army would be the tool with which she could invade Westeros and gain
the Iron Throne herself — only they remain stuck on the island to the west of
the main action and, though they know what ships are, they supposedly don’t
have the resources to construct any.
Meanwhile (in Game of Thrones, as in S. J. Perelman’s retrospective review of the
1916 version of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, “everything … happens in the meantime; the
characters don’t even sneeze consecutively”), Jon Snow (Kit Harington),
illegitimate son of Eddard Stark (who because of the “stain” on his birth
wasn’t allowed at court and thereby escaped Joffrey’s vengeance), has gone off
to join the Night’s Watch, the group of misfits who take an oath for the rest
of their lives to defend the Wall (ya remember the Wall?) and do nothing else — though that doesn’t stop Jon
from wanting to join his half-brother Robb and set up their own kingdom in the
north of England, oops, I mean Westeros, even if that means deserting the
Night’s Watch, which like just about every crime in this medieval world is punishable by death. (I must say that
for much of the later going in these episodes I had Jon Snow and Robb Stark
confused — which in a way is a tribute to casting directors Nina Gold and
Robert Sterne for finding two actors who look as similar as Kit Harington and
Richard Madden instead of trying to pass off dramatically different-looking
people as brothers, even half-brothers.)
Charles and I had originally planned
to watch only two episodes last night, “You Win or You Die” and “The Pointy
End” (written by George R. R. Martin himself — he contributed one script to
each of the first four seasons but then left the story in the hands of the
series producers, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss), but I suggested we continue
on and watch the final two episodes of season one, “Baelor” and “Fire and
Blood,” as well. I can see why a lot of people “binge” this show — watch
several episodes in quick succession — because it takes about an hour or two of
running time just to get into the spirit of the piece and have any hope of
keeping track of who these people are and what sides they’re all on. The series
keeps cutting back and forth between both major and minor plotlines, as
Daenerys’s husband Khal Drogo is mortally wounded by a rival Dothraki who wants
to take over; Daenerys calls in a middle-aged witch healer to save her husband;
the witch healer was already raped by several Dothraki and for revenge she
performs a “blood magic” spell on Drogo that saves his life but keeps him in
suspended animation and simultaneously kills the fetus Daenerys was carrying
that she hoped would be the heir to the Dothraki throne. (The Dothraki are the
main characters who speak a tongue other than English, and while George R. R.
Martin was content merely to write a few sentences of the supposed Dothraki
tongue and then supply the English translation, the show’s producers decided to
make Dothraki a full-fledged language, using Martin’s words as the basis for a
tongue with its own rules of grammar and a 500-word vocabulary.) Daenerys ends
up smothering her vegetative husband with a pillow and tying the witch healer
to his funeral pyre, then she gets on it herself — not to commit suicide à
la Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Ring (and the more modern big-scaled fantasy series I
encounter the more I love and respect Wagner’s work for telling a big story in
legendary times but giving it dramatic and philosophical weight, and also
making it coherent!) but to hatch three dragon eggs she’s been carrying around
with her a long time, which turn into three baby dragons that literally erupt
from her body as she returns from the fire, singed but still alive, at the end
of the final episode of season one.
While all this is happening the Lannisters’
hunky blond prince, Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), has been kidnapped by one of
the family’s enemies, and his little-person brother Tyrion (played by
little-person actor Peter Dinklage, who quite frankly is the best actor in the
cycle — and also happens to be playing the most strongly conceived character)
is trying to figure out how to get him back while at the same time enjoying his
greatest pleasures in life, riches and women. There are various characters in
this story, including a white dog with supernatural powers that takes out Jon
Snow’s enemies when they get too close to him; a girl who was practicing
swordfighting when her family is slaughtered and she’s forced to escape
disguised as a boy (shades of Sylvia Scarlett!); a couple of barbarian tribes who attack the main
characters but let themselves get persuaded to join the intrigues on one side
or another; and the mysterious White Walkers who live on the other side of the
Wall (sometimes this series sounds like Donald Trump’s wet dream!) and against
whom the Wall is supposed to protect everybody else.
Speaking of Donald Trump,
though Game of Thrones started
filming in 2010 and first aired in 2011 — so most of its production took place
during the Obama administration — the show now seems to be very much part of
the Trump Zeitgeist, particularly
in its cynical portrayal of politics as literally a game rich, powerful and
well-connected people play with utterly no interest in the well-being of anyone
else. I remember taking a course in British history in junior college in which
the professor made the point that in real feudal England, the common people were generally better off under a
strong King than a weak one, since under feudalism the most direct source of
people’s oppression was the feudal lords who held them and the lands they
worked under a system which basically made them slaves even though the lords
didn’t outright own their workforce. The big threat a King had to his power was
from these same feudal nobles, and one of the ways a strong King had to ward
off a threat from the nobles to challenge or overthrow him was to hurt the
nobles in their pocketbooks by giving (and guaranteeing) more rights to the
commoners. But in Game of Thrones,
as in most medieval-set fiction, the common people seem barely to exist except
as rape objects for the 0.01 percent. Still, I can see why Game of
Thrones got the following it did, not only
for the mental challenge of keeping all the characters, their families and
their allegiances straight, but also because it reflects the modern-day cynical
Zeitgeist about politics; like The
Hunger Games (especially the last book in
the cycle, Mockingjay), it’s a
warning about the futility of all
political action: a statement that, in the famous saying that “when elephants
fight, the grass gets trampled,” the rulers are the elephants trampling the
rest of us and about all we can do is whatever we can for self-preservation to
make sure we aren’t among the
leaves of grass the elephants trample.
