by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the
next two episodes in sequence of series three of Game of Thrones, “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” and “Second Sons.”
These were considerably better and a lot more interesting than the two immediately preceding episodes, “Kissed by
Fire” and “The Climb,” partly because they focused a lot more extensively on
the three most interesting characters — Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage, who
in the third season is top-billed and, as I’ve commented before, obviously
relished and rose to the challenge of a multi-dimensional character instead of
the usual villains or smarmy sidekicks little-person actors usually get cast
as); Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke), who armed with three dragons she’s
managed to hatch from old eggs and thereby revive a species thought to have
been extinct for hundreds of years; and King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson),
a blond-haired psychopath who’s the current occupant of the Iron Throne and a
sort of successor to such “bad Emperors” in ancient Rome as Caligula, Nero and
Commodus. (If anyone makes yet another film about Caligula or Nero, Gleeson would be perfect casting for the
role.) These also got considerably more screen time in the open air instead of
the dank interiors that dominated the last two episodes, and the plots seem
generally more coherent: Daenerys uses her looks, her wiles, her money (a
fortune she’s extorted from each city she’s occupied) and her dragons (even
though we only see one of them, and that barely at all — I admire the Lewtonian
reticence of the Game of Thrones filmmakers to “tease” us with the dragons instead of bringing them on
in large numbers and full force, but I was really hoping that with all the
publicity about dragons that Game of Thrones would start looking more like my imagination’s
idea of the films that could be made of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of
Pern books) to free the slave
armies that abound on her side of … well, they have different names but clearly
“Westeros” is England, “The North” is Scotland and the island she’s currently
stranded on for lack of ships to take her across the sea is Ireland.
She’s
recruiting them to her cause and at the end of “Second Sons” she’s able to get
a group of knights called the “Second Sons” (after the old English laws of
primogeniture, which provided that the first male heir got everything and
subsequent boys born to a noble family got nothing and had to fend for
themselves — many of the people who ran Britain’s Third World colonies in the
18th, 19th and early 20th centuries were
second and third sons who took those jobs because there was nothing for them to
do at home) on her side after three of them decide to kill her — only one (a
long-haired cutie who’s just about the sexiest guy we’ve seen in Game of
Thrones so far) decides he’d
rather fuck her than kill her and kills his two comrades instead (revealed by a
shocking scene in which he opens his cloak and there are their two severed
heads). The other big piece of news in these episodes is the forced marriage of
Tyrion Lannister to one of the Stark girls, intended to create a dynastic link
between Lannisters and Starks (names Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin obviously drew from the Lancasters and Yorks, two real-life
feuding families in 15th century England whose battles for the throne
became known as the “Wars of the Roses” because the Lancasters’ emblem was a
red rose and the Yorks’ a white one) — only the 14-year-old Starklet Tyrion is
paired with seems to be the one reasonably attractive female in the entire dramatis
personae Tyrion doesn’t want to fuck. There’s also a plot line in which a
reasonably attractive young man is seduced by the red-haired priestess of the
“Lord of Light” (this seems to be the Game of Thrones equivalent to Christianity, whereupon most of the
people worship the “Old Gods,” here represented by a tree with a face in it à
la The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the
Rings, in what George R. R.
Martin seems to have paralleled to the old Norse religion of the Vikings that’s
been drawn on by artists as varied as Richard Wagner and Mighty Thor comic-book creator Jack Kirby) into a bondage
session in which — not having
offered him a safe word — she applies leeches to him because she and her
relatives need “royal blood” for some potion or other they’re producing.
And there’s
a final cliffhanger in which comic-relief character Samwell Tarly (John
Bradley, playing the role Alan Hale would have if this has been a 1930’s
sword-and-sorcery script from Warner Bros) and his sort-of girlfriend Gilly
(Hannah Murray) encounter a White Walker (ya remember the White Walkers?) from episode one and nearly get killed, only for
some reason, after touching Sam’s sword and turning it into metal dust,
self-destructs but may have some
comrades out there in an episode that has all the earmarks of a quite good
serial cliff-hanger. I can see why people got addicted to Game of Thrones and why so many people “binge-watched” whole
seasons of it at a time — it takes a while just to remember who is who, how
they’re related and what side they’re on (or who’s double-crossing whom) —
looking back on it via DVD or Blu-Ray sets of the first six seasons after the
series run has finished (though the idea that any of these parties could lay claim to the Iron
Throne on a permanent basis when, like so much else about this story, the way
the title of King changes hands either through bribery or assassination is
redolent of the later, more decadent stages of the Roman Empire is absurd and
therefore the supposed “resolution” of the story at the end of season eight
cannot really be assumed to be final).
I’ve had other observations about Game of Thrones over the time (since June 2019!) Charles and I
have been watching it, including how strongly it reflects the Zeitgeist of the Trump administration and the neo-fascist
rulers and parties that are taking over country after country after country
even though most of the series was filmed while Barack Obama was still U.S.
President and Great Britain also had relatively enlightened leadership instead
of the Trump-like boor, Boris Johnson, who won the last British election in a
landslide; certainly its portrait of a world in which the contending parties
fight each other for power for its own sake and the interests of common people
are simply ignored is looking more and more like the one we live in now!
