Game of Thrones, season eight, episodes 1 and 2: "Winterfell," "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" (Television 360, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I continued our progress through the last season of Game of Thrones, an outlier in the series because while the previous seven seasons had been issued every year from 2011 to 2017, this one jumped two years and didn’t come out until 2019. Also, while the first six seasons had 10 episodes each, season seven only had seven episodes and season eight only had six -- though we were still startled when the first Blu-Ray disc went into a third episode after the first two. Apparently the Home Box Office (which is what “HBO” stood for lo those many years ago when it was founded as a premium cable channel showing recent movies) video department decided to cram the six episodes onto two Blu-Ray discs, which makes me wonder what the third disc in the box contains. The episodes here were titled “Winterfell” and “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” but they pretty much blurred together into a whole: the story of the combined forces of Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) along with the existing population of the North of “Westeros” (the overall locale is pretty obviously an analogue of medieval England and the Wall that separates the people of Westeros from the “White Walker” monsters that dwell north of them is essentially Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Roman emperor of that name who conquered England and added it to the Roman Empire but got his ass kicked by the Scots and built the wall to keep them out and block them from interfering with Roman rule of England) in a sort of ultimate battle against the White Walkers.

These monstrous menaces, depicted as mindless masses much like John Ford’s Indians or Peter Jackson’s Orcs, are dead people revived into a semblance of life, but they keep the cult going vampire-style by changing everyone they kill into one of them … which suggests that one possible ending for the Game of Thrones cycle is that the White Walkers conquer and/or “zombie-ize” the entire population of Westeros and the rest of the world has to quarantine that island to make sure they don’t take over the entire world. (That’s how it would have ended if it had been written by dystopian science-fiction writer John Brunner -- whose 1972 novel The Sheep Look Up I just read to comment on for a podcast a friend of mine is doing and which seemed to me a beautifully written but also very depressing and all too likely as a prediction that human assaults on the environment are going to lead to the total or near-total destruction of the human species in 100 to 200 years, maybe even sooner.) Anyway, I’ll go with my usual strategy of copying the online synopses on imdb.com and then riff on them:

Winterfell: “Jon and Daenerys have a cold reception in Winterfell. Jon meets his brother and sisters and rides the dragons with Daenerys. Then she discloses to Sam the fate of his father and brother. When Jon meets Sam, he discloses who his parents are. Euron Greyjoy meets Cersei to collect his recompense for joining to her army. Theon rescues his sister Yara and decides to go to Winterfell. Jaime arrives in Winterfell and sees Bran Stark.”

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: “Jaime is faced by his past mistakes. Tyrion's decisions are seen with doubt. The Battle of Winterfell is discussed tactically. Sansa and Danaerys discuss the future. The remaining Night's Watch are reunited. Everyone prepares emotionally with thoughts of their fate.”

I thought these were two of the most powerful episodes in the whole series even though series creator David Benioff and D. B. Weiss had to do without the guidance of George R. R. Martin, who created the Game of Thrones universe for a cycle of novels he called A Song of Ice and Fire and still hasn’t finished (though in the interval he’s written a series of prequels in the “Westeros Universe”). I suspect the two-year wait between seasons seven and eight was because Benioff and Weiss were waiting on Martin to give them more material, and then gave up and wrote their own conclusion -- which was greeted with withering scorn online. To tick off some of the points made in the synopsis, the reason “Jon and Daenerys have a cold reception in Winterfell” is that the residents of the North had elected Jon Snow as their king, only instead of maintaining his full-fledged royal status he agreed to “bend the knee” to Daenerys and support her claim to the overall throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. The resentment comes from the fact that in order to get Daenerys’s armies to come north and fight the White Walkers instead of going after Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), current holder of the Iron Throne, and heading south towards the capital, Jon agreed to “bend the knee” to her and so he left as a king and came back as at best a provincial governor.

The Greyjoys are the mercenaries who have aligned themselves with Cersei for money, and Cersei agrees to a sexual affair with Euron because her long-term incestuous affair with her brother Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has got her pregnant again and she needs another man she can pass off as her baby-to-be’s father. Meanwhile there’s apparently been a final falling-out between Cersei and Jaime even though it’s not to terribly well explained in the script -- Cersei denounces “my traitorous brothers,” plural, and the plural had me flummoxed for a bit. We already know about Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), who was born a little person and grew up to drink and screw a lot (sort of like the poet Charles Bukowski, of whom I liked to joke, “All he ever did was drink, fuck, and write about drinking and fucking”). He was accused of killing his father (which he did) and his nephew, psycho king Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson), which he didn’t, whereupon he was sold into slavery (and I loved the irony that Tyrion and his fellow slave were white and the slavers were Black), whereupon he rose again and is now the “hand” (the prime minister) of Queen Daenerys. What’s amazing in these episodes is that almost nothing happens -- there are no big action scenes and only one heavy-duty dramatic revelation. Jon learns from his brother Bronn, formerly Brandon Stark, and from the ex-librarian Samwell Tarly that he isn’t an illegitimate child of the Stark family after all, but the legitimate son of the late “Mad King” Targeryan whom Ned Stark, his supposed father, rescued from near-certain annihilation.

That means that he and Daenerys, whom we saw having intense, mutually joyous sex at the end of season seven, are brother and sister -- meaning that, like their sworn enemies Cersei and Jaime Lannister, they’re an incestuous couple. So Game of Thrones has the same number of incestuous relationships (two) as Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung -- and Jon Snow has at least one other thing in common with many of Wagner’s heroes: it’s not until he’s actually well into adulthood that he’s finally learned his real name, lineage and identity. (Wagner himself was called “Richard Geyer” well into his teens -- his stepfather was Ludwig Geyer, a boarder in his mom Johanna Wagner’s home, who married Geyer just six months after Wagner Vater died; the implication was that Geyer was Wagner’s biological father and Wagner hated the name because it sounded like the German word for “vulture” and much of the anti-Semitic propaganda of the time depicted the Jews as vultures feeding on the carcasses of dead or dying Aryan civilizations. So Wagner’s uncertainty about his own lineage not only helped him create all those beautiful and remarkable scenes in which his heroes suddenly discover their true identities and destinies, but also fed the anti-Semitic prejudices Wagner picked up from his time and place.)

What I liked about these episodes, especially “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” was their elegiac quality: through much of these episodes the characters are shown just talking, either reminiscing about battles they’ve been involved in before or speculating about their likely fates. The mood is especially downcast because not many people there hold out much hope for their ultimate victory against the White Walkers, who not only vastly outnumber them but have broken through the all-important Wall (because they killed and zombie-ized one of Daenerys’s dragons in the last episode of season seven and the dragon’s breath, which somehow seems to mingle fire and ice, has torn out huge sections of the Wall and left the Northern humans essentially sitting ducks for their supernatural opponents) and are ready to pounce -- indeed, the final shot of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is a chilling one of the live armies advancing and the dead ones coming at them in the other direction, ready for the final battle.

During these last stages of Game of Thrones I’ve been reading some of the blog posts I’ve done about its predecessors -- George R. R. Martin has admitted that the 15th century Wars of the Roses between the Lancaster and York families for control of the English throne -- notably An Age of Kings, the 1960 British TV miniseries that took William Shakespeare’s history plays (eight of the total 10) and told a continuous story from the fall of Richard II at the hands of his cousin Henry Bolingbroke (Lancaster) in 1399 to the troubled reign of Bolingbroke as Henry IV, his son Henry V and the war of conquest he led against France, his early death and the weak King Henry VI who followed him and triggered the rival York family to try to seize the throne by civil war, which eventually they did, only to lose it again to Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Not that any of the writers on Game of Thrones are anywhere near Shakespeare’s class, but “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” comes close to one of the most remarkable scenes in Shakespeare’s history canon: the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, in which Henry V disguises himself as a common soldier and walks among his army, trying to figure out how their morale is and getting a sense of who they are and why they’re there. Though there are overhanging issues raised in these scenes -- including Daenerys’s reaction to the fact that a male has appeared on the scene whose claim to the Iron Throne is at least as strong as hers -- for the most part these episodes, especially “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” have a beautifully elegiac quality that’s a wide departure from the action-filled mayhem we’ve come to expect from Game of Thrones.