by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I screened the last two episodes in season four
of Game of Thrones, “The Watchers on the
Wall” and “The Children.” Once again I’ll reproduce the synopses on imdb.com in
hopes that they can sort out the confusion some of the episodes plunge us into
— “The Watchers on the Wall” is synopsized, “Jon and Samwell are on duty on top
of the Wall. Ygritte wants to be the one who kills Jon Snow. A petrified Gilly
returns with her baby to Castle Rock, reporting about the wildling attack at
Mole’s Town. The Nights Watch prepare for battle. The wildling army attack the
wall in the night, with giants riding mammoths. Jon sets out on a dangerous
journey to help set things right,” and “The Children” is listed thusly: “Jon
Snow meets Mance and they discuss a peaceful alternative to the battle. Out of
the blue, Stannis and his army put the Wildlings under siege and Mance
surrenders. Jon asks for mercy for Mance to Stannis since he was well treated
by him when he was his prisoner. Tywin wants to force Cersei to marry Loras and
they have an argument. Cersei discloses her affair to her father and tells that
she will make it public if he insists in marrying her. Jaime and Lord Varys
help Tyrion to escape, but he kills Shae that is in Tywin’s bed with his hands
and his father with a crossbow. Then he leaves King’s Landing with Varys in a
ship. Daenerys learns that her black dragon killed a three-year-old girl and
she locks them up in the dungeons. Brienne and Pod meet Arya and The Hound and
Brienne has a deadly sword fight with The Hound to keep Arya. Bran, Jojen, his
sister and Hodor reach their target but they are attacked by Wights.”
Actually
“The Watchers on the Wall” was the most entertaining Game of Thrones episode I’ve seen yet because it focused on only one plot line — the Knight’s Watch defending the wall
against a siege by the Wildings, cannibals whom the Wall was built to keep out
of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros (much like the real-life Hadrian’s Wall which
the Roman emperor Hadrian had built to wall off England, which he had
conquered, from Scotland, which he hadn’t). The Wildings’ siege is led by a
bear-like creature who gets captured in the battle, which the Knight’s Watch
win … for now, since the Wildings (who are made to look “bad” by scarifying
their faces — it’s a look I’ve seen on real-life photos of Black hunter tribes
in Africa but it’s a bit disorienting, to say the least, to see it on white
people) vastly outnumber them. I was particularly struck by the sequences in
which members of the Wilding army attempt to scale the Wall itself — which is
actually composed of a thick layer of ice, though there may be a wooden
framework under the ice — and the Knight’s Watch defense, a giant metal scythe
that slices off the outer layer of ice (I didn’t know the Wall came with a
self-destruct mechanism!) and anyone unfortunate enough to be attempting to
scale it at the time.
Incidentally the Wildings themselves use what looks an
awful lot like modern-day mountain climbing equipment, and watching this whole
sequence now was eerily ironic since on Monday night Charles and I had watched D-Day
at Pointe-du-Hoc, a side battle to the main
invasion in which a detail of 225 U.S. Rangers were assigned to scale the
cliffs on that part of the Normandy coastline in order to get to the top and
destroy or wreck six giant German cannon (actually captured French ordnance)
which otherwise would have ahelled the amphibious invaders at Omaha and Utah
beaches. I had remembered seeing this extraordinary feat dramatized in the 1962
D-Day film The Longest Day, and
when I wrote about it I compared it to medieval warfare and said, “[T]he men charged with taking a German gun battery at the
top of the cliff use ropes fired up from air guns with anchors that hook on to
the German barbed wire, and the Germans respond by getting wire cutters and
trying to cut the parts of the wire where the anchors have hooked, so the
invaders will fall from the cliffs to the rock below.” Though in the D-Day film
we were supposed to root for the men doing the climb and in Game of Thrones we
were rooting against them, the sequences seemed quite similar. I was also
impressed by the depiction of woolly mammoths being used by the Wildings’ army
— including one giant beast that was supposed to pull open the doors of Castle
Black, the Knight’s Watch’s last redoubt — though I find myself wondering
whether they were done entirely with CGI or they took footage of elephants and
“tweaked” it with CGI to give them the longer, curved tusks and woolly coats of
mammoths. (I was leaning towards the latter until I saw the next episode, which
featured two fully convincing dragons that were almost certainly done entirely
with CGI.)
Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and his comic-relief associate Samwell
Tardy (John Bradley, playing the kind of role Alan Hale did in Warner Bros.’
1930’s medieval extravaganzae with Errol Flynn) were the main characters in
“The Watchers on the Wall,” and Jon remained the focus of the start of “The
Children” as he sneaked out of Castle Black to meet with Mance Raydar (Ciarán
Hinds), the leader of the Wildings (so far the Wildings had been pretty much an
undifferentiated mass of zombie killers and it’s only now that we get some
indication of their individual personalities), with the suggestion being either
that he’s sending out a peace feeler to see if he can ward off the inevitable
or he’s been a secret agent of Mance’s all along. Alas, after the relatively
tight-knit drama of “The Watchers on the Wall,” “The Children” is a reversion
to the choppy plotting and confusing editing that’s been the norm for this
series. At least we got to see Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) again, having
one of her petition sessions in which a man who was oddly made up to look like
the common image of Jesus Christ brings in the charred corpse of his
three-year-old daughter, burned up by one of Daenerys’s dragons — so she chains
up the other two (albeit anyone who’s seen the original King Kong is naturally going to be afraid of how long those chains
will last) but the third one is still at large. I was hoping that the writers
of Game of Thrones would create the
human-dragon bonding that’s so much a part of the late Anne McCaffrey’s Pern
books, but no such luck.
We also get to re-meet Tyrion Lannister (Peter
Dinklage, who’s consistently been the most authoritative actor in the series,
at least partly because he’s playing the most genuinely conflicted character),
who at the end of episode eight had been sentenced to death after both his champion and the prosecution’s warrior had killed each
other in the trial by combat, but he’s helped to escape and responds by
strangling his former mistress Shae — whom he discovers in his father’s bed
(was dad taking his son’s sloppy seconds?) — and then shooting his dad with a
crossbow just after Tyrion’s brother Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Walden) and sister
Cersei (Lena Headey) decided to confess that they’ve had an incestuous love
affair going on for 20 years or so and both the late King Joffrey (the sorely
missed Jack Gleeson) and his kid brother, the current (ostensibly) reigning
monarch, are products of this incestuous union and not blood Baratheons (the
family who held the Iron Throne at the start of the series until the reigning
Baratheon was murdered and the killing faked to look like a hunting accident)
at all. As I’ve noted before, Game of Thrones is a near-perfect expression of the Zeitgeist of the Trump era (even though most of it was filmed well
before Donald Trump was elected President) in its deep-rooted cynicism towards
the very concepts of idealism, leadership as a public service, or even what we
like to think of as basic human decency. No sooner do writers George R. R.
Martin, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss give us a character we think we’re supposed to identify with and actually like and respect than they
take that away from us, either by killing him or her off in a hurry (these last
few episodes are full of people we’re
given elaborate introductions to and led to believe will be important characters in future episodes, then are
quickly killed off) or by showing them behaving as the same sort of slimeball
as everyone else in the dramatis personae.
I’ve enjoyed Game of Thrones in a way,
but sometimes it’s seemed like watching a slow-motion car wreck and a real
trial to spend so much time with these awful people!
