by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
While Charles and I watched the
Lifetime movie Twisted Twin on Saturday
night the skullduggery got so thick that midway through it I joked, “After this
I’d like to watch something that will reaffirm my faith in the basic goodness
and decency of humanity —like the next two episodes of Game of
Thrones.” Charles and I did indeed watch
the next two episodes in sequence in our traversal of Game of Thrones on Saturday and Sundah, respectively, after the
Lifetime movies, episodes five and six of season four, “First of His Name” and
“The Laws of Gods and Men.” (One thing about Game of Thrones is that we’re not sure just what religious beliefs
the people practice, aside from the woman who leads the fire-god cult, though
the mainstream religion seems to be a pastiche of various pagan practices in northern Europe before
they adopted Christianity.) Actually “First of His Name” was one of the dullest
Game of Thrones episodes in which
surprisingly little happened, and
it was so far as I can recall the first one that had a woman director (Michelle
MacLaren). I hope this is just coincidence and the producers, David Benioff and
D. B. Weiss, didn’t decide, “Hey, this script has almost no action — let’s palm
this one off on a woman director!” We’re halfway through the fourth season —
and almost halfway through the total eight-season run of the show — and we’re
still on the first of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones source novels, A Song of Ice and Fire — though according to Martin’s Wikipedia page A
Song of Ice and Fire was his generic title
for the overall series and A Game of Thrones was the first novel in it — the TV producers merely
swapped the titles. The other books in the series are A Clash of
Kingdoms, A Storm of Swords, A Feast of Crows, A Dance with Dragons, The Winds
of Winter and A Dream of Spring — though he hasn’t finished the last two and this
forced Benioff and Weiss to write their own conclusion of the cycle since
Martin hadn’t given them one. (I’m also surprised to find from Wikipedia that
Martin is American; I’d always assumed he was British.)
Part of the problem is
that the three most interesting characters from the first three seasons were
either not in this episode at all or were in it only briefly. King Joffrey
(Jack Gleeson, who plays the mad monarch very much like the bad Roman emperors Caligula and Nero
and would be a great choice if anyone wants to make yet another film about
either of those two) was permanently dispatched at the end of season four,
episode two when he was fed poisoned wine at the party that was supposed to
celebrate his wedding — and Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage, turning in a
superb performance in a fascinatingly multidimensional role a far cry from the cute sidekicks or black-hearted
villains little-person actors usually get cast as) isn’t in episode five
because he’s accused of poisoning Jofrey and is in a prison cell awaiting
trial. Now Joffrey’s younger brother Tommen (Dean-Charles Chapman) is being
crowned king even though, like Joffrey, he’s not the son of the late king Baratheon but is the
product of both adultery and incest between Queen Cersei Lannister (Lena
Headey) and her (and Tyrion’s) brother Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Walden, who in the
absence of Dinklage gets top billing for this episode). (The adulterous,
incestuous lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde in Wagner’s Ring produced the great — if hopelessly naïve — hero
Siegfried; the ones in Game of Thrones produced a psycho and a wimp.) At least Dean-Charles Chapman looks enough like Jack Gleeson I can believe in them as
brothers (one of my bêtes noires
in movies is when I’m asked to believe that two characters who look nothing
like each other are biologically related). There are also subplots, some of
them involving two women (a grown woman with a butch blonde haircut and a young
girl who has tousled brown hair and looks scruffy) who carry swords and aspire
to knighthood (and the older one wears armor and has a hapless guy following
her around trying to be her squire). There’s a nice scene in which the girl who
wants to be a fighter does some dancing around with her little sword and the
guy with her tells her that’s no way to fight — she looks like Gene Kelly would
have in The Dancing Cavalier, the
swashbuckler musical he was supposedly making as the film-within-the-film in Singin’
in the Rain.
Things pick up considerably in
episode six, “Tbe Laws of Gods and Men,” in which Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia
Clarke) re-enters after just a brief appearance in episode five (she’s told by
one of her courtiers that the slaves she supposedly “liberated” in her march
through “Essos,” the island supposedly to the east of “Westeros” where the main
action takes place, were re-enslaved by their former masters as soon as she
marched her armies out of there. Realizing that she needs to fight a holding action
to maintain control of Essos before she can launch the amphibious invasion it
will take to conquer Westeros and sit on the Iron Throne (a bizarre assemblage
of a seat with swords stuck in it forming its back — it looks like a
porcupine’s pincushion), she releases one of her dragons in episode six (did
you remember that Daenerys has hatched three dragon eggs and the dragons are
now, if not fully grown, at least big), though it doesn’t do much but use its fiery breath to fry some poor
goatherder’s goats beyond recognition, causing the goatherder to appeal to
Daenerys for compensation (which he gets). More importantly, Peter Dinklage
returns to the cast in episode six as Tyrion Lannister is accused of poisoning
Joffrey and is subjected to a weird sort of trial that in one respect proceeds
like the trials we know — there’s a courtroom and witnesses who are asked
questions to elicit information and evidence — but there are no attorneys and
Tyrion is not allowed to
cross-examine the witnesses against him. Tyrion’s father, who’s also chairing
the three-judge panel that’s supposed to be hearing the case, and whom Tyrion
explained in a previous episode was not biased in his favor — quite the contrary: “He’s long wanted to get rid
of me” — offers him a secret deal: Tyrion can spare his life if he accepts a
sentence of being assigned to join the Knights’ Watch in the North — probably
not a good deal for Tyrion not only because it’s presumably difficult to fight
cannibalistic monsters when you’re only about 3 ½ feet tall but because Tyrion
would have to give up sex to honor the vows of the Knights’ Watch and Tyrion is
perhaps the horniest character in a veritable dramatis personae of horndogs of both genders and all conceivable
orientations. Then Tyrion’s mistress Shae (Sibel Kekith — that’s supposed to be
the name of the actress instead of the character but it sounds like something George R. R. Martin would have made
up!) turns up as a devastatingly effective and credible witness against him,
Tyrion realizes he’s been double-crossed and, in a quite effective cliffhanger
ending, he demands the right of trial by combat instead of this quasi-legal
process that is obviously going
to be rigged against him.
Meanwhile there’s another character named Tara
Greyjoy (though imdb.com spells her first name “Yara,” “Tara” is what I thought
I heard on the soundtrack) who’s trying to get her brother Theon (Alfie Allen)
released from the prison where one of the other factions is holding him, but
Theon has been held under such unspeakable conditions his mind has broken
completely and he’s become convinced his name is “Reek.” (This reminded me of
real-life prisoners who have had mental breakdowns after being held in long
periods of confinement, including the Irish Republican Army detainees who
responded to long-term detention by smearing the walls of their cells with
their own shit.) Later the nasty guy holding Theon captive persuades him to
infiltrate Tara’s/Yara’s court by pretending to be Theon — the sort of twist Martin, Benioff and
Weiss love to throw at us as
writers. I’ve made several comments about Game of Thrones as a Zeitgeist issue; though most of it was shot while Barack Obama was still U.S.
President it seems a great reflection of the ethos of the Trump era; all the characters in it are greedy, selfish and out
only for themselves, and in some ways Tyrion Lannister, with his airy
indifference to the truth of whatever comes out of his mouth and his equally
airy indifference to where he puts his dick, into whom and for what, is the
most Trumpian of all the Game of Thrones characters even though he’s more a lovable rogue than the total moron
Trump is — and Tyrion has the saving grace, which Trump doesn’t, of knowing what he doesn’t know. I can tell why Game
of Thrones attracted the mass audience it
did but I’m not sure why I’m drawn to it personally; much of it is compelling
drama, but it’s also driven by such a deep-seated cynicism towards human
nature. About the only person in the story who’s talking about wanting to be a
“good king” and use the power of the throne to help people is young Tommen
Baratheon, and we look at him and think, “He’s still young. He’ll grow out of
such nonsense.”
