Game of Thrones, season seven, episodes 3 and 4: "The Queen's Justice," "The Spoils of War" (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 continued with season seven of Game of Thrones, screening episodes three and four, “The Queen’s Justice” and “The Spoils of War.” The imdb.com synposes of these seem a bit more complete (and more confusing!) than usual, giving a lot of information about the backstory that given my low tolerance with following the details of a serial have me thinking, “Oh, that’s what that was about.” Anyway, here are the synopses so I can riff on them:

The Queen’s Justice: “Jaime and Cersei welcome (later celebrate in bed) Euron Greyjoy's victory parade and appoint him admiral in reward for capturing chained Yara and the Dirnish Sand Snakes, enabling Cersei to punish Ellaria, forced to watch in chains how her daughter dies from the same slow poison as Jaime's. Despite Tyrion's mediation, Jon gets a cold welcome from Daenerys, who gives chasing Cersei priority over stopping the Winter army and demands feudal homage from Jon to 'his queen' to become her warden of the North, yet Tyrion convinces her to allow the 'potential ally' mining the dragon glass. Archmaester Ebrose releases cured Jorah, Sam only gets a congratulation and no formal punishment. The Unsullied land and successfully storm Lannister home Casterly Rock, using the secret tunnel Tyrion added to the sewage system for whoring purposes, but find the garrison tiny, while they are stranded as their ships are burnt and Jaime's army lays siege knowing supplies won't last, then marches on Tyrell … “

The Spoils of War: “Daenerys seeks advice from Jon and Tyrion to win the war. Theon returns to Dragonstone asking his queen for help rescue his sister. Jaime faces an unexpected encounter while transporting the Red Keep's gold. Arya returns home to Winterfell.”

As I’ve noted before, as Game of Thrones has progressed it’s become simpler to understand -- though “The Spoils of War” pulled something they haven’t done in a while, which was to suddenly pull back into a set of characters and a plot line they’d been ignoring for a while -- but as the series has progressed it’s also got more gory. As noted above,m “The Queen’s Justice” begins with the brother-and-sister couple Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Cersei (Lena Headey) Lannister, who’ve been carrying on an incestuous relationship for decades (which quite frankly seems to be the worst-kept secret in Westeros) even while she was married to the old king Baratheon until he was killed in a mysterious “hunting accident” early on, and it’s pretty clear that Jaime is the biological father of the last two kings, psychopathic Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) and his too-sweet, too-nice brother Thommen, who both got killed -- Thommen committed suicide after the destruction of the religious cult he was into (more on that later) and Joffrey was poisoned at a big tournament and his uncle Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage, who after the first two seasons got top billing and deserved it; it’s the sort of complex, multidimensional role, sinister but also roguishly charming, that probably every little-person actor who’s ever lived has wished for) was the prime suspect. He ended up sold into slavery (I loved the irony that he and another white character were kidnapped and sold by Black slavers), only his wits and resourcefulness have allowed him to rise again and beocme the “hand” (essentially the prime minister) of Queen Daenerys Stormborn Targeryan (Emilia Clarke), whose family held the “Iron Throne” that rules (at least theoretically) all seven kingdoms that make up “Westeros” (i.e., Britain, though my husband Charles seems to think I’m overstating the Westeros=England parallel and notes other cultural and geographical referents in the show that seem to incorporate cultural aspects of continental Europe and even the Middle East) until her father went crazy and was murdered by Jaime, who got the nickname “Kingslayer” for doing the deed.

Now Cersei, as either the widow or the mother of the last three kings, is holding down the throne herself after having obliterated the cult of the “High Sparrow” (Jonathan Pryce), a religious crazy who won a great deal of power before Cersei, who had sponsored him at first (sort of like the Empress Dowager of China with the Boxers at the turn of the last century) but soon lost control and ended up on his hit list before she figured out a way literally to blow him and his whole cult up. (Good riddance, I say, though I’m sure my revulsion towards the cult of the High Sparrow was largely conditioned by my even more visceral hatred of the radical Christian Right of our own time and their similar push to have the government tell people in great detail how they may or may not have sex, with whom and how, and deal with both the good and not-so-good consequences therefrom.) At the current stage of the story the contest for the Iron Throne seems to have narrowed down to three main groups: Jaime and Cersei, who have a strong army and the backing of the Iron Bank (the closest Westeros has to a capitalist institution) but need allies; Daenerys and the renegade Tyrion, who’s created a formidable force out of the “Unsullied” (castrated slave warriors she’s liberated), the Dothraki (a Mongol-like warrior clan she married into several seasons ago and stayed in charge of after her husband died) and three dragons she hatched from eggs even though there hadn’t been live dragons in Westeros for hundreds of years.

The third group contending for power is the Northern army led by Jon Snow (Kit Harington, for my money the sexiest guy in the cast -- it’s the part Errol Flynn would have played if this had been a Warner Bros. swashbuckler in the 1930’s), who wants to ally with Daenerys and who risks his own life to go see her about the possibilities therefrom. Alas, the possibilities for an alliance aren’t great because Jon -- who’s really the illegitimate son of old Ned Stark and therefore the sworn, eternal enemy of the Lannisters -- wants it to be an alliance of equals and wants Daenerys’s army to march against the White Walkers, zombie-like monsters created from the bodies of dead people who have virtually supernatural powers and can only be killed by fire or dragonglass (a rare mineral of which by far the largest known deposit is under Daenerys’s stronghold). Daenerys has no interest in sharing power with an ally: she demands that Jon “take the knee” -- i.e., swear feudal fealty to her -- and acknowledge her as the rightful ruler of all Westeros, while Jon would only be a provincial governor of the North under her ultimate authority. What’s more, Daenerys doesn’t believe the White Walkers are such a menace after all -- and Jon’s protestations that they threaten the entire existence of the human race, or at least that part of it that inhabits Westeros and its surrounding territories, make him sound like a scientist trying to persuade a Republican politician that human-caused climate change is real or that COVID-19 is a threat people should be required to protect themselves against by wearing masks and staying at least six feet apart from each other. We know what a menace the White Walkers are because we’ve seen them in action, but Daenerys and her crew blissfully deny the dangers they pose -- including the ability to increase their own numbers because any normal human killed by them becomes one of them.

This episode also features Samwell Tarly (John Bradley), who started out as a comic-relief character to Jon Snow (sort of Alan Hale to his Errol Flynn) but who’s grown as a character as he’s gone through several events (including a love affair, contrary to the rule of celibacy imposed on the Night Watch, defenders of the Wall separating normal humans from the White Walkers, in which he and Jon were both enlisted -- though, needless to say, Jon broke that rule too) and ended up training to be a “maester,” essentially a librarian and the closest thing the world of Westeros has to an intellectual. (There doesn’t seem to be any sort of organized educational system in Westeros apart from the maesters’ monastery-like abodes which house the world’s libraries -- including secret stacks only the most veteran maesters are allowed access to. In this world the only way to learn job skills is to become an apprentice, and there have been plenty of scenes of young boys and girls learning warrior skills in practice and getting their asses kicked until they catch on how to fight properly.)

Samwell got knowledge from one of those forbidden books of how to cure a nasty disease called “greyscale,” which literally turns human skin into a scaly, stone-like grey substance, despite the ban on the procedure imposed by the head maester of his community because it was considered too dangerous. It involved scraping off all parts of the skin that were infected and the raw skin beneath covered with a special salve -- a process excruciating to watch (I had just about reached my revulsion limit when director Mark Mylod blessedly cut away to something less grotesque) and with the potential for spreading the infection. (Remember this was centuries before anyone in the medical business thought it would be a good idea to keep one’s hands clean before and between procedures. In fact, Joseph Lister got hell from other doctors in the 19th century for daring to suggest that they might want to clean up between patients to prevent themselves from spreading infections from one patient to another.) For his “reward” he’s told by the head maester that instead of being thrown out of the community -- the usual penalty for disobedience -- he’ll be sentenced to a dreary life of copying old, decaying manuscripts to preserve their contents in the pre-Xerox age.

The big thing that happens in “The Spoils of War” is the debate within Daenerys’s camp of whether and how to attack the Lannisters: both Tyrion and Jon argue for a slow, relatively humane campaign aimed at confronting the Lannister army and defeating it while still keeping the allegiance of the people. Daenerys wants to use her three fire-breathing dragons to mount an all-out incendiary campaign against the Lannister army even though she’s warned that will make her look like just another bloodthirsty conqueror only interested in building up her own power no matter how many people she has to kill in the process. Daenerys gets on one of the dragons herself and leads the genocidal campaign on the Lannister army -- which she’s previously tricked into coming out into the open -- and the result looks like a modern army unleashing its full might on a bunch of peasants armed with little more than swords, shields, spears and arrows. According to an imdb.com “Trivia” note, no fewer than 20 stunt people were set on fire to create this sequence -- though director Matt Shakman manages to use some of the usual camera tricks to make it look like even more -- breaking the previous record set by Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan for most stunt people ever set on fire (13) in a single scene. The war is a total rout for the Lannisters -- though we’re quite clearly shown that Jaime escapes the holocaust that literally incinerates his forces -- and it makes a grim ending to this episode and a striking twist of fate in the overall story. At least we’ve finally got to see the much-ballyhooed dragons in action, and even the anti-aircraft weapon the Lannister side had invented to try to shoot down the dragons succeeds only in wounding one.

There’s also another character who gets re-introduced in this episode -- Brandon Stark (Jerome Flynn), who as a child scaled the walls of Lannister Castle and peered into a bedroom where Jaime and Cersei were doing their Siegmund and Sieglinde impressions. Jaime back-handed him out the open window and he survived but became permanently disabled, and for most of the series after that got trundled around by a woman retainer who kept him alive while he talked to tree spirits, had visions and developed an ability to communicate telepathically with wolves and get them to do his bidding. Now he’s grown up and his mobility has improved -- he hasn’t recovered but someone has invented a surprisingly modern-looking wheelchair for him -- and he’s sent away the woman who’s been caring for him all this time (ingrate!) and now insists on being called by his original name (though what a Stark boy is doing at the redoubt of his family’s mortal enemies in the first place is a mystery -- if writers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, adapting George R. R. Martin’s extensive and still incomplete multi-novel saga A Song of Ice and Fire, supplied an explanation I’ve long since forgotten it.

All in all I’ve liked Game of Thrones as much because of its cheeky immorality as anything else -- it’s the sort of thing you’ll find entertaining if you believe human beings are basically pond scum, but at least occasionally charming and always interesting pond scum, and that’s what’s made it so appropriate for the Zeitgeist of the Trump administration. Donald Trump would fit so perfectly into the world of Game of Thrones -- totally unscrupulous, avaricious, driven only by what will satisfy his greed and his dick, and reigning and staying in power by a combination of inducing awe into enough of the population to remain popular while making everyone else fear him -- though even the nastiest Game of Thrones characters at least have a degree of physical courage Trump utterly lacks!