Game of Thrones, season seven, episodes 5 and 6: "Eastwatch," "Beyond the Wall" (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 our progress towards the end of Game of Thrones -- which we started watching in June 2019, so it’s taken us nearly a year and a half to reach the penultimate stages of the series -- and though there are still some pretty arbitrary cutbacks to characters and story lines I’ve since forgotten in last night’s episodes, numbers five (“Eastwatch”) and six (“Beyond the Wall”) of season seven. For some reason, though the first six seasons of Game of Thrones had 10 episodes each, season seven only had seven and season eight only had six. I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that George R. R. Martin, author of the original novels on which Game of Thrones was based (he called the entire series A Song of Ice and Fire and the first novel in it A Game of Thrones, but the series creators, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, decided to go with Game of Thrones -- without the article -- as the series title), didn’t finish his projected last two movies in the sequence, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, in time to supply Benioff and Weiss with an ending for their series. Thus the producers were forced to concoct their own ending, which may or may not match either what Martin originally intended or what his final books -- assuming he ever finishes them and they’re published -- will contain. (Martin has writing prequels to the Song of Ice and Fire books dealing with the backstories of some of the families contending for the Iron Throne of “Westeros” -- obviously the British Isles, though with some admixtures of continental Europe and even the Middle East; Martin acknowledged that the real-life Wars of the Roses between the Lancaster and York families for the English throne were among his inspirations -- he gave it away by calling two of his contending families “Lannister” and “Stark” -- and another influence was Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, about the takeover of England by King John after his brother, Richard the Lion-Hearted, left to join a Crusade but then was kidnapped by Prince Leopold of Austria and held for ransom, which John was unwilling to pay because Richard’s captivity meant he could continue ruling.) Once again I’m going to quote the official synopses of these episodes from imdb.com and then make my own comments:

Eastwatch: “Bronn saves Jaime from the lake and he is surprised with the power of Daenerys' dragon. Daenerys offers the prisoners to bend their knees and join her army, or to die. Randyll and his son Dickon from the House of Tarly refuse to serve Deanerys and her dragon turns them into ashes. Arya confronts Sansa at Winterfell and suspects of Littlefinger. Samwell has a deception with the Maesters and decides to leave the Cidatel with Gilly and their child. Tyrion advises Daenerys and Jon Snow to bring a Wight to King's Landing to prove that the Army of the Dead and the White Walkers do exist. Jaime tries to convince Cersei that they do not have any chance fighting Daenerys and her three dragons, but she plots a scheme to destroy Daenerys. Then Jaime has a surprising encounter. Jon and a group head to the Wall and meet prisoners of the Night's Watch that accept to join them in their journey to capture a Wight.”

Beyond the Wall: “Jon and his band of men go beyond the wall in search of a Wight to capture and return to Kings’ Landing. Arya’s and Sansa’s relationship continues to derail with the help of LittleFinger. And Tyrion and Daenerys discuss the future of her reign.”

One of the annoying aspects of Game of Thrones is the sheer multiplicity of names given to some of the characters, reminding me of Dorothy Parker’s quarrel with a play based on Tolstoy’s Resurrection in which the adapter preserved the Russian habit of sometimes referring to characters by their first and last names, sometimes their first and middle names (in Russian the middle name is called a “patronymic” and refers to the name of your father), sometimes by their first names alone and “sometimes by a nickname that has nothing to do with any of the other names.” The character described above as “Bronn” -- the boy who discovers Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his sister Cersei (Lena Headey) fucking each other in a bedroom in a tower of Lannister Castle, got knocked out of the open window by a back-handed slap from Jaime but survived, albeit disabled, and develops supernatural visions and powers that led Charles to compare him to Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert’s Dune) -- is really Brandon Stark (though if he was a Stark, why when he was still a kid was he allowed near the Lannister castle in the first place? Those families are supposed to be bitter enemies!), and he’s abandoned the woman who’s been trundling him around as he’s grown up, first in a sort of sled and later in a wheelchair that looks like a quite modern design even though it’s supposed to be 15th century technology.

Also, “LittleFinger” is really Peter Baylish (Aiden Gillen), who’s quietly and bureaucratically evil -- I’ve likened him to Mitch McConnell, who in the destruction of American democracy has basically been ice to Donald Trump’s fire. Unashamed and undeterred by allegations of hypocrisy and willing to ally himself with anybody if it gets him more power and influence, he’s one of the most thoroughly despicable characters in Game of Thrones even though he avoids the sort of outright brutality most of the other people in leadership positions practice. And it was amusing to note in the above synopses that the race of revivified monsters who live north of the Wall (i.e., in Scotland) are known collectively as “White Walkers” but they’re referred to individually as “Wights.” And it took me a long time to figure out that the order of knights charged with maintaining the Wall and keeping out the White Walkers are the “Night’s Watch” -- not “Knight’s,” singular, possessive. At the start of episode five Daenerys Targeryan -- who, despite her pretensions as a liberator of slaves is turning out to be as power-hungry a monster as anyone else in the Game of Thrones dramatis personae -- demands that the surviving stragglers of Jaime’s army (as noted in the synopsis, Jaime himself barely escaped drowning in a frozen-over lake, though I wasn’t quite sure who rescued him) “bend the knee” and accept her as their overlord, or she will kill them.

Since she won the battle at the end of episode four by having her dragons incinerate the Lannister forces -- it was like seeing a group of people with Middle Ages weapons attacked by modern incendiary bombers -- it isn’t like these people have much of a choice, and Randyll and Dickon Tarly continue to defy her and indeed get put to death … leaving Samwell the Librarian, along with her girlfriend and their son (though as I recall the kid is not biologically Samwell’s offspring), the only survivors of that once-influential household. Samwell gets fed up with life as an apprentice maister (the “maisters” are apparently the only intellectuals in Westeros and they behave like medieval monks, living in seclusion, sworn to chastity and spending most of their time copying books) and he steals the few scrolls that he thinks contain information on how to deal with the White Walkers (remember that Samwell actually killed a White Walker in a previous episode, even though he’s not exactly an heroic action figure) and escapes the monastery with his girlfriend and son. Meanwhile, Jon Snow is in Daenerys’s court trying to convince her that the White Walkers are a mortal danger to all Westeros and she should lead her army and her dragons against them instead of continuing her march to the south to claim King’s Landing, dethrone Cersei Lannister and assume the Iron Throne. There’s already been a conflict between Daenerys and Jon over whether the two can ally as equals (Jon’s preference) or she will make him “bend the knee” and swear fealty to her, with him no more than a provincial governor of the North.

Meanwhile, Jon has left the government of the North to his half-sister Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), who’s having problems of her own maintaining authority not only with the (male) Northerners but her sister Arya (Maisie Williams), who in previous episodes trained to be an assassin for the cult of the Faceless Ones and who gets slipped by Baylish a manuscript containing an incriminating note in Sansa’s own handwriting (though at this point I can’t recall just what the note said). In turn Sansa discovers Arya’s secret: her collection of faces, which quite frankly look like the latex masks they no doubt are but are supposed to be the faces of various victims her cult has killed and, like Eleanor Rigby, keeps in jars by the door until they’re needed as disguises so Arya can assume anyone else’s appearance and voice -- which is how she lured an entire family to drink poisoned wine in season seven, episode one as revenge for that family having killed most of hers earlier on in the action. (As I keep saying, though most of Game of Thrones was filmed while Barack Obama was still President, the show definitely fits the Zeitgeist of the Trump era in the utter amorality and cruelty of all the characters -- the ones who pretend to some higher goal in holding power, like Daenerys, keep getting exposed as hypocrites.)

The big event that happens in episode six is the ill-fated (to say the least!) attempt of Jon Snow and his raiding party to capture a White Walker and bring him (her? it?) back to Daenerys’s court to prove that the White Walkers exist and are an existential threat to Westeros. Daenerys takes the threat of the White Walkers seriously enough that she gets on the back of one of the dragons -- which is a good thing for Jon and his party, because they’re surrounded by them in a chilling scene in which thousands of White Walkers surround them, looking like a cross between John Ford’s Indians and Busby Berkeley’s choristers. Daenerys manages to airlift Jon and his party out of danger, but the Night King (Vladimir “Furdo” Furlik), leader of the White Walkers and apparently the founder of the cult in the first place, manages to throw a glass-tipped spear at one of the dragons. This accomplishes what the metai arrow fired at a dragon by the Lannister armies in episode four didn’t -- it kills one of Daenerys’s three dragons -- and it gets worse: the final cliffhanger scene of episode six shows [spoiler alert!] the White Walkers dragging the dead dragon out from under the frozen lake where it fell, raising it and turning it into an undead zombie dragon, part of their cult.

This follows a surprisingly tender (for Game of Thrones) scene in which Daenerys is clearly moved by the loss of one of her dragons -- she explains that since she can’t bear any children (though if Messrs. Martin,m Benioff and Weiss ever gave us an explanation of why she couldn’t have children, I missed it), the dragons are her children and she’s grieving the loss of one literally like a mother. Our lovably cynical old friend Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage, who got top billing in virtually all the Game of Thrones episodes from season three on and deserved it: even in episodes like this where he gets precious little screen time, Dinklage dominates the screen in every scene in which he appears and, as I’ve said before, here got the role every little-person actor who’s ever lived has dreamed about all their lives) is in the unusual and uncomfortable position of trying to offer empathy and emotional support, rare qualities indeed in the relentlessly cruel world of self-serving moral monsters that is Game of Thrones. As I said in my last post about this show, Donald Trump would be right at home in Westeros except for his total lack of physical courage!