The last two nights Charles has been home because he hasn’t had to work he and I have continued our sojourn through Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin’s cycle of medieval fantasy novels and the TV series by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss based on them. So far we’re two episodes away from the finish of season two of this eight-season series, and as I’ve commented about previous episodes even though most of the series’ nine-year run (2011 to 2019) took place while Barack Obama was still President, the show almost perfectly fits the Zeitgeist of the Donald Trump era. The episodes we watched the last two nights were “The Ghost of Harrenhal” (one wonders whether the place name was a deliberate allusion to “Karinhalle,” the monumental estate Nazi second-in-command Herrmann Göring had built from the money, furniture and art he looted from Holocaust victims and occupied countries and dedicated to his late daughter Karin), “The Old Gods and the New” (it’s not clear what the mainstream religion of the Game of Thrones universe is, but the use of the name “Odin” associates the old gods, at least, with genuine Norse mythology and there are also practitioners of witchcraft and what would in our time be called New Age thought), “A Man Without Honor” (an odd episode title because just about everybody in Game of Thrones is without honor — indeed that seems to be the whole point of the show, and why it fits so well with the Zeitgeist of the Trump era) and “The Prince of Winterfell.”
“The Ghost of Harrenhal” begins with the bloody murder/execution of the Gay
king, brother of the murdered Robert Baratheon. Robert was nominally the father
of the current king Joffrey, a psychotic nerd played by Jack Gleeson in a way
that makes it look like he’s auditioning for Caligula or Nero, but Joffrey and
his sister are really the products of an incestuous affair between Robert’s
queen, Cersei Lannister [Lena Headey], and her brother Jaime, pronounced
“Jamie” [Nikolaj Coster-Walden][1],
who’s imprisoned at the start of this run of episodes but who escapes by
murdering his cellmate just when we’ve begun to like the cellmate — a typical Game
of Thrones trick is to give us a character
who gets killed off just when we’ve started to like him or her. Meanwhile, Jon
Snow (Kit Harington) is lured into a trap by a woman knight and taken prisoner,
then presumably executed by one of the many would-be kings who figure, like the
historical Vlad the Impaler (the real-life Romanian warlord of the 15th
century who was the model for Bram Stoker’s vampire character Dracula — Vlad
was also known as “Drakulya,” the Romanian for “little dragon”) or the more
recent Saddam Hussein, thinks he can keep power by killing his subjects
willy-nilly. This guy exhibits the charred bodies of Jon Snow and his crippled
half-brother hanging from beams on the outside of the entrance to his castle,
but at the end of episode eight we learn, to no particular surprise, that the
bodies are really the two sons of the farmer the king had tortured to get the
information as to where Jon and the boy were and that Jon and the boy are still
very much alive. While all that is happening — one problem with following Game
of Thrones is the way it seems to have been
edited with a yo-yo, so just as we’re finally feeling comfortable that we know
who’s who in one particular plot thread we’re yanked out of it and deposited
into another one (no wonder so many people “binge” this series — it takes so
long just to figure out who is who, how they relate to each other, and which
side of the endless multi-player conflicts they’re on … this week, because part
of the essence of Game of Thrones
is how quickly and easily the characters switch sides and double-cross each
other), so we’re constantly pulled away from the more interesting villains like
Joffrey or Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) to the relatively dull ones who
do little more than clomp around in the snow or kill each other.
In this
sequence of episodes, Daenerys is in the city of Qarth (pronounced “Kath” for
some reason) trying to enlist the aid of the merchants who have made Qarth the
richest city in the Game of Thrones
universe (and, interestingly, the only one in which upward mobility exists: at
least two of the Qarthians tell Daenerys and us that they arrived in Qarth dead
broke and built up huge fortunes as merchants). She’s referred to as the
“Mother of Dragons” because she was able to get three 300-year-old dragons’
eggs to hatch and produce baby dragons, but she loses control of them and they
slaughter a large number of Qarthians at the end of episode six. The writers
and directors really tease us
big-time with the dragons; after showing them as dragon cubs at the end of
season one and in an episode earlier on in season two, they disappear from the
action — apparently they’ve been kidnapped (how? They’re supposed to be
invincible fighting machines!) and taken to the Land of the Undead, or
something like that, in Qarth, and Daenerys has to risk her own life to go
there and retrieve them — and so in the four episodes under review here we
don’t see dragons at all even though we’re continually being “teased” about
them. In one of these episodes Daenerys, after having turned down the suit of a
large Black merchant who offered her an army and a fleet of ships to reconquer
the Seven Kingdoms (it’s been established that the Targeryans were the ruling
house of “Westeros,” the fictional setting of Game of Thrones that’s obviously patterned on the British Isles) if she’d marry him —
she says she won’t marry someone just to obtain an armed force, even though she
did that once before in the earlier episodes — she approaches the rich, effete
white guy who’s the other self-made man in Qarth and who earlier complained
that he couldn’t get to sleep until it was already daylight. Being me, I
couldn’t help but start singing “Lullaby of Broadway” with suitably altered
lyrics — “When a Qarth baby says goodnight, it’s early in the morning/Qarth
babies don’t sleep tight until the dawn.” Daenerys (why do fantasy writers have to give their characters
such indigestible names?) offers him a big share of Westeros’s riches in
exchange for his help now, but he decides she’s too speculative an investment
so he turns her down — and guess how he ends up? Right: a bloody corpse!
I can
see why so many people got addicted to Game of Thrones and how it became such a huge success, but aside from
the sheer difficulty of remembering who’s who and what sides they’re on (which
is why I gave up on The Lord of the Rings about a third of the way through the first book, too), I’m finding Game
of Thrones pretty mind-numbing in the sheer
brutality and amorality of its story. At least William Shakespeare, in his
similar but at least nominally fact-based series of British history plays, gave
us some people we actually liked
and wanted to see prevail; Game of Thrones is essentially what the Shakespeare history plays would have been like
if all the ruling-class
characters had been like Richard III. It also doesn’t help — though this is so
common a fault of medieval fiction (or, for that matter, medieval history) I
really shouldn’t kvetch about it
— that we don’t really get a sense of what life was like for the medieval 99
percent. Occasionally a commoner crosses the path of royal intrigue — like the
poor farmer who gets tortured, and his sons get killed, by the warlord who
wants to know where Jon Snow fled to — but he lasts only long enough to fulfill
his plot function and then either gets killed or simply disappears. And while Game
of Thrones has its share of sex scenes,
they’re mostly as loveless and ugly as the rest of it — and they also make
medieval clothes look considerably easier to take off than I’ve read elsewhere
they were!
[1] — Gee, when Wagner had brother and sister fuck he gave
us Siegfried. When George R. R. Martin did it he gave us Caligula, or at least
someone very much like him.
