Game of Thrones, season seven, episodes 1 and 2: "Dragonstone," "Stormborn" (Television 360, Startling Television, Bighead Littlehead, HBO, 2017)

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

Last night Charles and I broke open the box of season seven of Game of Thrones -- and I was startled to discover that while the first six seasons contained ten episodes each, season seven had only seven episodes and season eight, the last one, had just six (at least if I’m counting the episodes on imdb.com correctly). Once again I’ll quote the imdb.com synopses and then add my own comments:

Dragonstone: “Jon organizes the North's defenses. Cersei tries to even the odds. Daenerys comes home. Arya reminds the Freys ‘the North remembers.’ Sam adapts to life in Oldtown. The Night King makes his way south. Bran and Mera arrive at Castle Black. Jon and Sansa plan the defense against the long night. Cersei forges new alliances. Samwell trains to be a maester. Arya gets her revenge. The Hound takes shelter in a familiar place. Daenerys arrives at Westeros.“

Stormborn: “Daenerys receives an unexpected visitor. Jon faces resistance. Tyrion plans the conquest of Westeros. Cersei gathers her allies. Arya has a reunion with old friends. Sam risks his career and life. Tyrion convinces Daenerys, who gruesomely doubts Varys's motivation, to avoid a bloodbath attacking King's Landing, rather sending Theon and Yara's Iron Fleet to ship the Dornish army from Sunspear and lay siege with the Tyrell troops, while Unsullied are shipped to Lannister home Casterly Rock. Jon Snow is haughtily invited to acknowledge 'his queen' Daenerys at Dragonstone, where Grey Worm and Missandei consummate their love. Cersei summons several lords, demanding fealty, while Jaime offers to elevate Randyll Tarly as Warden of the South, undoing loyalty to house Tyrell. Qyburn shows Cersei a prototype ballista to kill dragons. Cook Hot Pie tells Arya the Boltons are smashed by Jon, the new King in the North, who leaves Sansa in charge at Winterfell as he sails against all Northern lords' advice to request Daenerys' help against the Winter forces after harshly warns Littlefinger to keep off Sansa. Samwell performs a forbidden surgery on Jorah's 'greyscale' infection. Euron's fleet … “

One thing I’ll say for Game of Thrones as it progresses is that as the cast of both individuals and families (“houses”) thins out it’s getting easier to sort out the intersecting plot lines and get a clearer view of who’s allied with whom and which bitter enemies from previous episodes are about to make common cause, whether sincerely or to double-cross each other. I’ve been saying all along that though most of the TV series was produced while Barack Obama was still President, the show very much fits the Zeitgeist of the Trump era. The rulers in Game of Thrones are almost all insane egomaniacs interested in power only for its own sake and for the wealth (in both money and sex partners) it offers them. Episode seven begins with a huge banquet featuring all the surviving members of the Frey family being treated to an unusually tasty wine -- only the wine is poisoned and the Frey leader at the head of the table is actually a woman member of the Stark family in magical disguise (Game of Thrones began relatively realistically but has acquired more supernatural elements as it has gone on).

This is revenge for an earlier mass slaughter of the Starks by the Freys of which the only two survivors were women -- plus Jon Snow (Kit Harington), who’s actually the son of old man Stark but by a woman other than Mrs. Stark -- so early on he was read out of the family and forced to join the Knight’s Watch, or the Night Watch, or whatever it’s called, whose main business is to maintain the huge border wall that divides Westeros (i.e., England) from the northern part of the island (the obvious inspiration was the wall the Roman Emperor Hadrian had built to separate England, which he’d conquered, from Scotland, which he hadn’t) and protects the normal human beings in Westeros from the “White Walkers,” zombie-like creatures who are revivified dead people and whose armies continually grow larger because everyone they kill becomes one of them. “Dragonstone” -- the episode is named from the rare mineral that is the only substance that can kill White Walkers once and for all, though they can also be burned with fire and the connection is made that dragons breathe fire and thereby they would be useful as a weapon of mass destruction against the White Walkers.

Alas, virtually Westeros’s whole supply of dragonstone is sitting under a castle, so the only ways Jon Snow and the Northerners he’s leading can get at it is either conquer the castle or ally with the people who already have it, So Jon Snow, who’s biologically a Stark even though as an illegitimate son he’s not allowed to use the name, has the uncomfortable task of approaching Queen Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) even though her principal advisor (her “hand”) is Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage, who’s seen precious little in these episodes, although when we glimpse him he’s as overpowering a character as ever) -- and the Lannisters and the Starks have an historical rivalry as intense as the real-life Lancasters and Yorks, whose dynastic struggle for the throne of England in the 15th century, known as the Wars of the Roses, was clearly Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin’s inspiration for this medievalist tale of dynastic rivalry and civil war. (Shakespeare wrote a cycle of eight plays about the real Wars of the Roses and in 1960 the BBC filmed them as a 15-part mini-series called An Age of Kings -- and more recently they did it again under the title The Hollow Crown.)

The only problem -- well, there are a lot of problems, not only the historical rivalry between Lannisters and Starks but also the suspicious attitude of everyone in Jon Snow’s court about him going to Daenerys’ castle and her insistence that in order for her to agree to the alliance he would have to “take the knee” -- i.e., assume a secondary role and essentially agree to put himself and his men at her service. Meanwhile, Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), as widow of the former King and mother of the two previous kings, both of whom are now dead (evil Joffrey assassinated by his half-brother Tyrion and good Thommen a suicide after the mass destruction of the religious cult of the High Sparrow that Cersei had at first encouraged until it turned against her), is openly ruling from the Iron Throne with her brother Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) pretty openly serving as her consort. (She’s had a long-term incestuous relationship with Jaime and he was actually the father of her two sons, though she was married to the official king at the time and they bore his last name, “Baratheon.”)

Though the reference in the title leads us to think we’ll see more of her, Daenerys doesn’t appear until the very end of “Dragonstone” -- and Tyrion doesn’t appear until she does even though Peter Dinklage (the little-person actor who got the part of a lifetime -- indeed, the part every little-person actor dreams of) is currently being top-billed at this point in the series. During “Stormborn” (one of Daenerys’s honorific titles) we see that the so-called “Unsullied” -- castrated (but still butch-looking) soldiers who are part of her army since she liberated fhem from their former slavemasters -- isn’t quite so unsullied after all: he’s fallen in love with Daenerys’s Valerian-language interpreter and she’s hot to trot for him, though after she realizes he’s got something missing in the physical manhood department (in a bizarrely directed scene -- we get both front and back views of her nude but the camera averts its eye from even the hint of frontal masculine nudity), they end up in bed together anyway and he goes down on her instead. (English professor and early Gay activist Seymour Klineberg recalled hearing a student in a class in which he was teaching Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ask why Jake Barnes didn’t think of that.)

Once again we get to see precious little of the three dragons Daenerys has -- though we do get a look at a potential dragon-killing weapon (sort of a medieval version of an anti-aircraft gun) -- and “Stormborn” ends with a pitched naval battle I couldn’t make heads or tails of. Charles, who’s more attentive to details like this than I have, said it was part of a civil war between members of the Greyjoy family of the Iron Islands, who have the most extensive navy in this world and whose aid will be crucial to the Lannisters if they want to keep Daenerys from conquering the Iron Throne. We also get quite a few glimpses of Samwell Tarly (John Bradley), who in previous seasons was essentially Jon Snow’s comic-relief character (basically Alan Hale to Kit Harington’s Errol Flynn) but who since has gone into training to become a “maistre” -- essentially a librarian, though his duties include such unpleasant tasks as shoveling the other characters’ shit from their chamber pots into the big latrines and serving them food that doesn’t look all that different from the shit. (Was there something in Westerosian diets that gave them all diarrhea?)

At least the plot lines are getting less confusing as they become less numerous, though as it progresses Game of Thrones is also getting more supernatural, more violent and less sensual -- though there was a promising Lesbian seduction scene between one of the princesses and the Fire Queen Melisandre (Nathalia Emmanuel) that, alas, got interrupted by that naval battle. I’ve enjoyed Game of Thrones but I’m also relieved that there’s less of it remaining as I thought there was -- and I’m not so sure it will still seem relevant to the Zeitgeist if the November 3 election goes as I want it to and next year Joe Biden sits on the Iron Throne.