Some Final Thoughts on Game of Thrones

It’s been more than a week since the end of Game of Thrones, Part I, and I’m still a little adrift at the departure of characters I’d come to think of as family.   It’s a testament to George R.R. Martin and HBO, who created such a vivid world that a hole opened in our lives when it was all done.

Game of Thrones has been such a rich all-encompassing experience that I couldn’t say everything that was on my mind in my weekly recaps, which were written in a frenzy the morning after each viewing.  And even with a week’s perspective, I’m not going to attempt the definitive, thumb-sucking, what-did-it-all-mean piece, many of which are available by more talented critics than I at your favorite cultural websites.

I have a more limited ambition with this final wrap-up: to make a few extraneous observations that I never managed to squeeze into my recaps:

The End of the Monoculture?

There’s been quite a bit of commentary that Sunday, May 20 might have been the last time that our nation came together to watch and comment in real time on a television show (more on that in the next point).  In other words, R.I.P. to the video monoculture that began when Lucy Ricardo gave birth to Little Ricky on the old “I Love Lucy Show,”  which was the first time television demonstrated its ability to command the attention of the entire population through a mere entertainment program.  I can’t say it will never happen again, but I do thank HBO for holding the line against binging, which has done so much to fracture any hope of cultural unity.  No Netflix show will every be able to accomplish what Game of Thrones has done because the week-to-week roll-out of a series builds a national conversation by giving podcasters, recappers, Reditters, and regular viewers a chance to spend seven days thinking about, analyzing, and arguing over what they’ve just seen.   If this is the end of that 65-year run of television-driven water cooler camaraderie, I’ll miss it.

“The Big Bang Theory” Fans Just Got Screwed

Having just made a point about a monoculture moment, I’m going to contradict myself, though, and note that the idea that “Game of Thrones” generated a national conversation that classic series like “Dallas,” “Cheers,” or “Seinfeld” did is a conceit of the elite media.  Over the past week I have been in many meetings or eaten many meals with people who have never watched a single episode.  In fact, Game of Thrones didn’t even dominate the television set this very week!  The series finale of “The Big Bang Theory” and GoT both drew about 19 million viewers.  By the time all the streaming and DVR viewing is recorded, GoT might pull ahead, but “Big Bang Theory” fans are entitled to ask, “What about us is the national discourse?  Don’t we count?”

The relative invisibility of the “Big Bang Theory” in the national discourse is a good example of why our culture is so at war with itself.  Based on absolutely no data at all, I would wager that the audience for GoT voted overwhelmingly for Clinton while “Big Band Theory” fans voted for Trump.    The blindness or even outright hostility of East Coast media companies, (i.e, the late nigh talk shows and the major opinion journals like The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, etc.) to the tastes of Middle America has never been more apparent than in the disproportionate attention given to a show that, at best, is viewed by ten percent of the population.  No wonder the press keeps getting surprised whenever there’s an election.

Also Screwed?  Book Readers.

Thank God I never read any of these books because I’d be the kind of fan who is constantly complaining about the inconsistency between the written work and the TV show.  But if the plot deviations are bad enough, what’s even worse for a book reader is that deep knowledge of GoT lore did not help in figuring out what was going on.  This was particularly true of the prophecies.  In the end, was there actually a prince who was promised?  What about the Valanqar prophecy predicting Cersei’s demise? And what about all the effort that book readers put into explaining the Golden Company for the rest of us?  Useless. In the end, the showrunners didn’t try to reconcile the prophesies or reward the story’s most loyal fans because they were too busy throwing unearned plot twists at the screen.

There’s Something Rotten About the Bran Betting

Why anyone would ever bet on the outcome of a television show is beyond me.  Before the season started I remember looking at the odds for who would become ruler of Westerous and seeing that Bran was the favorite.  Of course my attitude to that was “Huh, that’s crazy,” and yet as the season progressed, even as the idea of Bran becoming King became even MORE preposterous, the odds rose.  Obviously the outcome leaked somewhere, and why not?  There must have been hundreds of people who knew the outcome and all the NDAs in the world couldn’t have prevented some cheating among the gamblers.

The Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings Precedent

I think we can all agree that the ending of the series landed with a thud and the overwhelming excuse given by the show’s apologists has been, well, it’s really hard to bring a TV show to a satisfying end.  Need we remind you that the very tagline for HBO is “It’s not television.  Its HBO” or that plenty of TV shows had satisfying endings.

And while it might not be fair to compare Game of Thrones to Breaking Bad, I think it is fair to compare it to Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, two other fantasy masterpieces based on beloved books.  To say, “Hold on, HP and LOTR were adapted into movies while GOT became a TV show,” is not valid ; if anything it’s damning that the showrunners had so much more time to tell the story and still ran out of time.  The obvious difference is that they were adapting a book series that wasn’t completed, while the producers of the Happy Potter and LOTR movies had the authors’ complete story to work from. Part of the problem is undoubtedly a lack of storytelling skills.  Part is also a lack of nerve on their part — by rights, Brienne and Jaime should have died at the battle of Winterfell but the showrunners either didn’t want to disappoint their fans by killing them or wanted to provide fan service by giving them an unneeded romance, which chewed up precious time.  And also, frankly, I think the showrunners just misjudged what the fans wanted — no one really asked for “the most epic battle of all time” if that meant giving up a coherent ending.

Sansa’s the Big Winner of Game of Thrones

To be honest, I turned a little anti-Sansa this season, but I have to admit she played the game better than anyone.  Way back in season one she was a callow star-struck teeny bopper who wanted nothing more than to be a great lady.  And now she’s more than that — she’s actually Queen of the North.  Credit to her for surviving rape, manipulation and emotional torture at the hands of the four most malign people in Westeros (Cersei, Joffrey, Ramsay Bolton and Littlefinger) and coming out on top.

Nevertheless, I still hold her partially responsible for driving Dany insane.  First she gave her the cold shoulder at Winterfell even though Dany, her armies and her dragons were only there to defend Winterfell against the army of the dead.  This increased Dany’s feeling of being unloved, but that was nothing compared to breaking her promise to Jon not to tell anyone about his parentage.  That led directly to Varys committing treason, which was just about the final straw making her insane.  So yes, Sansa was right to be skeptical about Dany, but it’s not really fair to say, “see I told you I was right,” when she was the one who pushed her over the edge.

Meanwhile her monomaniacal insistence on independence for the North is a dagger to the heart of Bran’s kingdom.  Instead of being a stabilizing force, the North has set a precedent for succession and a future of rebellion.  What’s to keep Dorne or the Iron Islands from insisting on their own independence?  Thanks a lot Sansa.

Closed Captioning is Your Friend

By the end of the season my wife and I were watching the show on HBO Go, so we could use the closed captioning. The accents weren’t the easiest to follow and the sound editing was frequently muddied (which is kind of crazy for a show of this quality).  I was worried this would make me seem old (to myself at least) but in the end, I was like, screw it – it’s more important to understand what’s happening.

Small Council Absurdity

The most ridiculous scene in the whole Game of Thrones series was the Big Council meeting at which Bran was elected King.  Almost every line of dialogue could be torn apart for its absurdity within the logic of the show.

Given that it would take way too much time to dissect the Big Council meeting let’s take a look at the Small Council meeting as an example of how fan service warped the showrunners’ judgement at the end.  Regrettably, this is the final time that any characters interact with each other and it leaves a sour taste to go out on (fortunately it’s followed by a six minute wordless montage of the Stark children — Jon, Arya and Sansa — walking into their new futures, which is a lot more satisfying.)

The first clue that this is fan service is the composition of the Council itself.  By rights, given their experience, none of them besides Davos should even be there, but the showrunners apparently feel they must give us one more attempt at semi-humorous banter among our favorite characters — and make no mistake, everyone at the table has a devoted fan base.  Otherwise how to explain Bronn as Master of Coin?  If this guy can even do simple arithmetic I’d be surprised, and now he’s going to negotiating with the Iron Bank over Cersei’s debt?  The absurdity is further magnified by the fact that Bronn, as Lord of Highgarden, was not even at the Big Council meeting. No, his appearance was withheld as a final gift to the viewers at the last minute.

Almost as confounding was Sam’s appointment as Grand Maester.  When he left Winterfell he wasn’t even close to being a Maester but suddenly he has vaulted over all the other Maesters to be Numero Uno?  And unless they’ve changed the rules, Maesters are celibate, so where does that leave Gilly and the kids?

Brienne is probably qualified to be Lord Commander of the King’s Guard but isn’t she pledged to protect Sansa?  And then, of course, why does Bran make a point of noting the absence of the Master of Whisperers when he has the power to see everything that is going on in the realm?

Where’s the Human Progress?

I am not interested in watching the upcoming Game of Thrones prequel, which is purportedly set five thousand years before the events of this series.  For one thing, I am too emotionally wrought up by the fates of these particular characters to get interested in a whole new set of characters with the same surnames and preoccupations.

But my real objection to the new series is that there was apparently no progress in the lives of Westerosi between the time of the new series and the one that just concluded.  Are these people humans or what, because a major characteristic of the human spirit is to move forward.  How can this world be stuck in the 13th Century for five millennia?  Maybe it’s because there are no Protestants so no Protestant work eithic.   In any event, I actually find it depressing that in the GoT universe no one except Qyburn ever invents anything and that life is one long cycle of people making the same mistakes for generations after generations after generations.  I’ll eat my words if people tell me it’s good, but I will still find George R.R. Martin’s conception of the human race confounding.

 

 

 

 

Game of Thrones: “The Iron Throne,” or the Great Yada, Yada, Yada

 

Let me say upfront, lest I am accused of being insufficiently grateful or too nitpicky, that yes, “Game of Thrones” turned out to be the “greatest” TV show to date, in terms of spectacle, sweep, and imagination.  And yes, in an age of streaming TV, it will probably be the last of the important “water cooler” shows, where a vast segment of the population, egged on by the elite media, talks about it at work the next day.

And yes, it is very hard to bring a monster show like this to a satisfactory conclusion (although it was done successfully with “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men,” “Six Feet Under,” “The Office,” etc. etc.)

Still, it takes some doing to create an ending that dissatisfies even the most aggressive GoT apologists. Take a look at the Internet: the people are unhappy today.  Even unhappier than I am.  It’s not necessarily the plot resolution itself that’s the problem, it’s the rushed way we got there.  As a lot of smarter than I am have pointed out, it’s inexplicable that the showrunners opted for six episodes instead of the traditional ten during these final two seasons.  I’m sure the rejoinder from them is “what do you people want?  We could barely produce six episodes in the last year and a half and you want four more?” But that’s because they decided to prioritize time-consuming spectacle, CGI, and battles instead of easier-to-film storytelling.

This final episode, “The Iron Throne,” was itself emblematic of the season as a whole, in that it was really two episodes crammed into one: the first a classic GoT masterpiece in its original storytelling style, and the second a pile of rushed, incoherent garbage.

Part One was great

Part One of “The Iron Throne” lasts until Drogon lovingly cradles Daenerys in his claws and whisks her away.  I had to watch the show a second time to appreciate how visually stunning, emotionally satisfying and even thrilling the first half was.  I couldn’t enjoy my first viewing because I had one eye on the clock and, knowing how much was left to accomplish plot-wise, nearly flipped out at the thirty-minute mark, because so little had been checked off the plot to-do list.  But the second time around I could savor the languorous build-up to the final Jon/Dany scene.

The episode opens with Tyrion wandering the devastated streets of Kings Landing, which looks like Dresden after the allies bombed it in World War II — or maybe Hiroshima minus the radioactivity.  Ash is still falling and everywhere you look there are skeletons  or bodies transformed into charcoal versions of themselves.  It’s a powerful and affecting reminder of Dany’s war crimes.

I could have done without Tyrion’s visit to the basement of the Red Keep, where he finds the bodies of the incest twins under a few bricks.  What I learned from this scene is that if Jaime and Cersei hadn’t been so busy hugging at the end they would have noticed that the ceiling was collapsing right above their heads but remaining intact ten feet away; they could have survived by just scooting over a few steps.  And yes, I’m sure Tyrion is upset to find Jaime dead, but what did he expect when he freed him to go find Cersei?  But my real objection to the scene is that it muddies the motivation for his subsequent rage at Daenerys.  He seems more upset by the death of his siblings than of the residents of Kings Landing, even though Dany is relatively blameless for their fate.

More compelling is Jon’s growing apprehension about his queen, as evidenced by Greyworm’s execution of Lannister prisoners in direct violation of the protocols of the Geneva Convention.  That’s not cool and he can’t quite believe that she would approve such a thing, although I’m sure he knows that it’s true.

There has been much unhappiness, shared by me, about Dany’s transformation from Joan of Arc to Adolf Hitler in a mere two episodes, but her Nuremberg Rally is a great scene.  She shows a linguistic adroitness that would make Pete Buttigieg proud, first addressing the Dothraki in their native tongue before switching over to Valyrian to rouse the Unsullied.  The contrast between unruly horsemen and the hyper-disciplined soldiers, who somehow know how to stamp their spears in unison, is scary.  But even scarier is the Queen’s announcement that she plans to take her “liberation” campaign on the road to the rest of Westeros.

Heil Dany!

By now Jon should have realized that Dany is insane, so the scene where he visits Tyrion in prison is unnecessary in terms of creating motivation.  Instead of advancing the plot, this scene exists as the last great GoT discussion about the conflicting requirements of ethics, honor, duty and love.  For me, the brilliance of GoT was not in the fantasy elements, as great as they were, but in its meditation on what it means to be a good leader and a good person.  Ned Stark was a great man but a failed leader because his rigid code of personal ethics made him naive about how to wield power.  Jon Snow absorbed that code, including the moral rigidity, more than any of the real Stark offspring, and consequently should have died about five times more often than he did.  Consequently in this scene, Tyrion is given the job of summarizing for him and for us the moral complexities of leadership — Jon is the living embodiment of “the shield that guards the realms of me,” and he must do what is right for the realm.  He is asking Jon to become the Queenslayer by making the same difficult moral calculus that Jaime did when he became the Kingslayer.

It’s a neat bit of foreshadowing that Jon quotes Maester Aemon when he says “Love is the death of duty.”  Aemon, of course, is the Targaryan who could have been king but gave it up to join the Night’s Watch, which will also be Jon’s fate.  Tyrion, in true Oscar Wilde fashion, inverts the phrase to “Sometimes duty is the death of love,” leaving Jon to wrestle with his conscience again.

I think we are meant to think that Jon is willing to give Daenerys one last chance when he confronts her in the Throne Room.  He begs her to show forgiveness to Tyrion and to build a world of mercy.  Dany responds that it’s a hard pass on the forgiveness and a soft promise on the world of mercy, but only after all her enemies have been eliminated.  Poor Dany, she got the chance to touch the iron throne but not to sit on it because Jon literally sticks a dagger in her heart, realizing that she’s become a monster.

It says a lot about Game of Thrones that the best acting in the episode is done by a CGI dragon because here comes Drogon with an addition to his Emmy nomination reel.  For the second time this season, Jon stands before a dragon who looks ready to incinerate him yet somehow survives.  Instead of taking out his fury on Jon, Drogon shows more emotional awareness than any other character on the show and melts the throne, rightfully understanding that it was the throne, and the pursuit of the throne, that really killed Dany.  This is the highlight of the episode and in a better world would have been the end of episode nine in a ten episode season.

Part Two Sucked

After those 45 great minutes, what happens after that fade to black is a crime against television.  Heading into this episode I assumed that either Jon or Arya would kill Daenerys but couldn’t figure out how the series we would then get to anointing another king or queen given the rampage that the Dothraki and Unsullied would then go on when they learned that Dany had been assassinated.

Silly me, I shouldn’t have worried my little head about that because the showrunners certainly didn’t.  Instead we are asked to assume that Jon descended from the Throne Room, walked up to Greyworm and said, “Hey man, guess what?  I killed our queen, but it was for a good reason,” and that instead of immediately tearing him to shreds, Greyworm responded, “Good sir, I cannot countenance that activity.  Let us assemble the conclave of the realm to see that justice is done.”

The showrunners have yada, yada, yada’d a lot this season in their haste to push the plot forward, but this is the most outrageous example yet.  There probably is a way to explain how Jon is still alive a month or two later and it’s an insult to our intelligence not to show or at least tell us what happened.

Instead, Tyrion is roused from his prison cell and headed to what we can only assume is his execution.  When he appears before the Council in the Dragon Pit, I first thought this was a dream, but no.  Apparently he’s there to stand trial and here’s where we begin to realize that things have gone way off the rails and that any pretense of reality has flown out the window.  Greyworm stands idly by while Tyrion talks himself out of even having a trial and turns it into a Westerosian version of a constitutional convention.  Tyrion’s solution is that they won’t exactly break the wheel but they’ll dent it a little by getting rid of a hereditary monarchy.

The process of choosing the king is played mostly as farce.  First Edmure Tully, most recently hostage of the Lannisters, is told by his niece Sansa to put his ass back in the chair.  Then Samwell Tarley, who’s apparently suddenly become both a grandmeister AND the master of Horn Hill, suggests letting the people decide who the king should be, which is met by outright derision (which is actually the one nod to reality in this scene).

The idea that anyone from this motley crew of old men and accidental nobles (look, there’s Gendry!) should be named king is preposterous.  By rights, the most capable person there is Sansa but instead Tyrion suggests Bran and everyone is like, yep, that makes sense.  Both George R.R. Martin and the showrunners are patting themselves on the back when they have Tyrion make the argument that storytellers are the most important people in the world.  Well that’s pretty self-important but at least it’s an argument.  But from that premise how do we get to Bran, who’s about as tight-lipped as they come?  When did he ever tell a story?  According to Tyrion he’s the repository of all the world’s stories, so by that logic, the king should be a librarian.  Bran is spectacularly ill-equipped to be king, and his inability to father children is the least of his does qualifications (and how does Sansa even know that?  Did the two of them discuss his sex life or lack thereof?)  A leader needs interpersonal skills to build coalitions and inspire people to follow him.  Bran is basically a robot, as we see at the end when he can’t remain at the small council meeting for more than a minute.  You can’t help but think that Tyrion’s real purpose is to achieve justice for the “cripples, bastards, and broken things” he’s been advocating for all series.

Heading home from a weekend trip yesterday, I was listening to “The Watch” podcast on The Ringer and Andy Greenwald made the case that “Bran sucks.”  Part of the problem is that we never learned what his superpowers really are.  Can he see in the future?  And if so, is it possible he could see that Dany was going to burn Kings Landing and did nothing about it?  And why, if the showrunners knew that he was going to be king at the end, did they do such a lousy job of building out his character this season?  He did nothing at all during the battle of Winterfell except warg into some ravens — to do what I don’t know.  All he’s done since returning as the Three-Eyed raven is make cryptic remarks about how everything is turning out like it should have.  Which does suck.  I’d like to think everything in the world is not pre–ordained and that we have some agency in our lives yet here’s Bran saying “Why do you think I came all this way?” when asked if he’d accept the crown. He knew it all along because it had to happen.

After this charade is over and Tryion is named Hand of the King, he goes back to the prison to tell Jon that he’s banished to the Night’s Watch and a life of chastity and duty (“Hey remember how I urged you to kill the queen?  Well that turned out great.  I’m the Hand. Of course you can’t ever have a family, but the cross country skiing is great north of the wall.”)  Jon rightly asks, why there’s even a Night’s Watch now; after all, the white walkers are dead, and there’s a huge hole in the wall that renders it useless anyway.

Look, a lot of people predicted that Jon would end up back in the Night’s Watch, and I would have been fine with that if that had been Jon’s decision.  But it sticks in my craw that as a reward for saving the world twice he’s banished because Greyworm insists on it.  After all, once the Unsullied build their condos on the beaches of Naath and learn how to make Pina Coladas, are they really going to get back on their ships and invade Westeros if Jon Snow skips out of there after a year?  It would have been a lot more satisfying if he had been offered the crown and then turned it down because he felt that he’d violated his personal code too often and that the burden of leadership is too much.

The Long Goodbye

Once the decision on who wins the game of thrones is made there’s a protracted coda to wrap things up.  Brienne takes up the pen and provides a whitewashed ending  to the Jaime Lannister story.  Bron re-emerges, hilariously, as master of the coin.  So the small council now includes Brienne, Bronn and Bran and they are preoccupied with the nuts and bolts issues of governance.

But the bulk of the final 20 minutes is taken up with the fate of the Stark children, who could possibly never see each other again. Arya is heading west of Westeros, a proto-Christopher Columbus (maybe as one Twitter wag put it, she’ll found Virginiaros).  Sansa is Queen of the north after insisting that her people had been through too much to bend the knee again (and yet there they are bending the knee to her!  She finally became the fine lady she always wanted to be.)

The final images of Jon Snow returning to Castle Black and reuniting with Tormund and Ghost are legitimately emotional, as is that final scene of Jon leading the Wildlings back beyond the wall.  With this wordless ending, the series comes full circle because the very first scene from back in Season One showed Nights Watchmen emerging from that same gate to go on patrol for Wildlings.  In the final images of the series, Jon is leading the Wildlings — the men, women and children he once saved at the expense of his own life — back home, in a mission of peace and regeneration.  In a final symbol of hope we see a sprig of greenery popping through the snow.  Winter is over.

Random thoughts

In a pre-season blog post I predicted that Sansa and Tyrion would jointly rule Westeros. I was almost right.  Sansa rules an independent north and Tyrion is the de facto ruler over the rest of Westeros.

That sad collection of lords who attend Tyrian’s would-be trial is a testament to the destruction wrought by the wars following Robert’s Rebellion.  Who is this motley crew? There’s probably a list of them somewhere on the Internet but they are pretty pathetic. The same collection of house leaders from Season One would have been hugely formidable and unlikely to hand the throne over to someone like Bran.  Can you imagine Tywin Lannister, Ned Stark, Water Frey, Randyll Tarly or Olenna Tyrell agreeing to such a thing?  The mind boggles.

Twitter went crazy when Robin Arryn showed up for that council meeting all grown up.  Was it really just two seasons ago that he was still breast-feeding?  Now he’s got his own Twitter hashtag — #hotrobin.

Hot Robin indeed

And there’s the new Prince of Dorne, mentioned cryptically last week as if he was going to play a role in the resolution of this story.  Nope.  He doesn’t say a word.  Or actually, he does say one word — aye — off camera. Anf you know what’s another head fake?  All those letters that Varys was sending to announce that Jon was the rightful heir to the throne.  If anyone knows that information it goes unmentioned.

Who gets to vote?  Why, in that big council meeting is Brienne voting but not Arya?  Davos at least admits he doesn’t have a vote. And  Bronn is Lord of the Highgarden.  Why doesn’t he get a vote? (Probably because they wanted to have a surprise when he showed up on the small council. As if making him Master of the Coin wasn’t enough of a surprise.)

OK, I’ll admit I was a little teary when Jon reunites with Ghost and gives him a proper skin-on-fur hug. This was particularly true when I saw that he’d lost his ear.  That does absolve him of failing to give him a proper good-bye two episodes ago when he thought it was adios forever.

Does is strike anyone else as weird that the last line of THE ENTIRE SERIES by a named character is Tyion’s joke “I once brought a jackass and a honeycomb into a brothel”? This is yet another callback to Season One when he made the same joke but to have this be the last word seems like a lost opportunity, or maybe just another goof.

That new system Tyrion set up sounds good on paper until you think about it for about five minutes.  This only works because everyone’s too exhausted, old, or new to the scene to contest Bran’s election, but who’s to say the next king won’t want his son to rule?  Is that heir going to voluntarily step aside to let a rival get the throne?  Tyrion hasn’t repealed human nature or set up a system of checks and balances.  A smarter move would have been to establish a version of the House of Lords, when the lords of the realm convene regularly to advise and ratify the King’s decision.

What happened to the Dothraki?  We see the Unsullied getting on boats but no word on what happens to the horsemen.  After their scary performance at the Nuremberg rally they disappear from the story.  They sure got a raw deal.  Nearly wiped out in the suicidal charge against the undead, they seem to have a moment when the viciously conquer Kings Landing, only to meekly withdraw from the scene as soon as their queen is dead.

What about the whole religion thing?  Religion played a huge part in the early seasons yet petered out completely at the end.  Was Melisandre right about the one true God?  Who knows.  Or the High Sparrow — so clearly modeled after the Florentine monk Savonarola.  Was his Sept God real?  My guess is that the religious angle was a lot more important to George R.R. Martin than it was to the showrunners.  That didn’t stop them from making Jon Snow into a Christ figure.  Here he is arguing for a world full of mercy and then there he’s in prison looking like Jesus.

Now that the series is over, do yourself a favor and rewatch episode one from 2011.  Tyrion had blonde hair and no beard!  Among other things a rewatch is a startling reminder of how we’ve seen the young Starks grow up, but also of how Jon was positioned from the beginning as the hero.  Within that family he is the clear leader — he’s the one who convinces Ned not to kill the Direwolves and he’s the one teaching archery to Bran.  In the end he was too good for this world.

Game of Thrones: “The Bells,” or War Is Hell

I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of essays and podcasts about “Game of Thrones,” and not one of them predicted the outcome of “The Bells,” even though the show has foreshadowed it for two seasons now.  And I think the reason no one thought Daenerys Stormborn would, in fact, mercilessly sack the city she wants to rule is that it was the most obvious outcome.

“Game of Thrones” made its reputation on surprises — the plot twists that make you gasp — but in the race to the end of the series, the showrunners (David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, aka, the DBs) have gone for easy plot resolutions.  So rather than developing a clever way for Bran to kill the Night King, they have someone (it turns out to be Arya) stab him.  And rather than figure out a clever way for Tyion, or Arya, or even Jaime, to off Cersei, they just have Dany swoop in with her remaining dragon and level the Red Keep.

Once again we are left asking, what? It was that easy?  Why have we — the fans and critics alike — been spinning our wheels trying to come up with a fresh and unexpected ending when all you need to do is deploy a weapon of mass destruction?

I am probably not the only viewer today grumbling that the DBs keep changing the rules on the show.  Last week, we learned that a scorpion crossbow launched from a bobbing ship could hit a flying dragon three times in a row from a half mile away; but this week it seems that a couple hundred of these weapons, shooting at much closer range, couldn’t hit a dragon even once, never mind three times.

Don’t get me wrong, it was thrilling and satisfying when Drogon torched the Iron Fleet, but the fact that he came out of the sun and temporarily blinded the shooters doesn’t excuse their sudden loss of aim.  In the end, for all the talk about how the object of the first part of the last two seasons was to level the playing field between Dany and Cersei by killing off dragons and armies, it turns out that the playing field continued to be unimaginably unbalanced.   And that feels like a cheat.

Also a cheat?  All the jabbering about the Golden Company and Captain Harry Strickland, the distant Targaryan ancestor. They are supposed to be the most formidable fighting force in the world, with a rich back story in the books; but in “The Bells” they are wiped out by Drogon in about 30 seconds.  When all was said and done, poor Harry Strickland only got one or two lines in the first episode of the season and never uttered another syllable again.  See ya pal.

Harry we hardly knew ye

Even putting aside questionable plot mechanics for a minute, I still feel emotionally betrayed by the DBs, who set up a fictional world where we are supposed to be thrilled and repelled by the action in more or less equal measure; they now seem to punish us for having been exhilarated by violence in the first place.  After having drawn us into a violent universe, then inured us to increased levels of brutality, it’s almost as if they suddenly decided that GoT is an anti-war show.

It’s like they’re saying, so you got a secret thrill out of watching soldiers stab each other in the eye, and you sat through rape and torture and even came back after we burned a young girl at the stake?  Well we’re going to turn the savagery up to eleven and let you see the REAL repercussions of war.  I’m sure I’m not the only viewer who was triggered by memories of September 11 when ordinary people raced from falling towers and, if they survived, emerged covered with dust.  It’s almost as if we were watching a stereotypically exciting World War II movie that suddenly switched in the last minutes to the Hiroshima at ground level.  Here you go, war-lover.

Intellectually we know that war is hell, and Tryion and Varys among others have frequently articulated the effect of war on the common people.  Well, now we’ve seen it in spades.  And it wasn’t just the dragonfire that was so appalling; it was also the rape and pillage by the supposed good guys.  This is something that happened countless times from the sack of Rome to the Russian conquest of Berlin in 1945.  But just because this is a fundamental part of war doesn’t mean it was what we signed up for. I’ve felt sick at the end of many “Game of Thrones” episodes before, but never this nauseated and nihilistic.  Since there’s only one episode left, I’ll give the showrunners the benefit of the doubt for another week.  They’ve said the show ends on a bittersweet note but I can’t imagine how we’ll get to the “sweet” part.

Is Character Destiny or Destiny Character?

I asked this question before because the show focuses a lot of attention on the meaning of bloodlines. And with one notable exception this week, the characters seem increasingly unable to escape the fate to which they were born.

Jaime Lannister was literally born to love his womb-mate Cersei and despite trying to redeem himself and commit to a life of earned honor, he is inexorably drawn back to her.  His fate is completely out of his control, and just as they were born together, so too must they die together.

Also fated to die in each other’s arms are the Gleganes. Telegraphed for years, the “Glegane Bowl” is the least surprising development of the episode, although perhaps the rest of us were as surprised as the Hound was to discover that a even sword through the skull would not stop the Mountain.  So as they must, they ultimately perished together in flames.

Someone else who couldn’t change character was Jon Snow.  If he’d only swallowed his disgust and had sex with his aunt one more time, she probably wouldn’t have snapped and gone full-fledged arsonist, but Jon’s rejection is the final straw that pushed her into madness.  Like Ned Stark, Jon is too principled and too pure for his own good, or for the good of humanity for that matter.  A little lying and a little cheating for the sake of the people can go a long way, but Jon can’t/won’t do it.

But, of course, Exhibit Number One in the Case of Destiny vs Free Will is the Breaker of Chains and Mother of Dragons herself.  Dany’s father was the Mad King and Westeros’ biggest pyromaniac until his little girl came long.  As I’ve said, her madness has been a long-time coming and it’s depressing that the showrunners couldn’t have found a way to pull her out of it.  It’s depressing because for so long she was positioned not only as the breaker of chains, but also as the breaker of the wheels of tyranny.  Even in this episode she claims that future generations will thank her for ending tyranny, apparently not seeing the irony of how deliberately incinerating innocent women and children will play in the history books.

To their credit the DBs did lay the groundwork for this outcome over multiple seasons (and again, because this was such a harped-on theme, it was hard to believe they would finally pull the trigger on something so obvious.) There were all those crucifixions back in Esteros and she never did shy away from burning a recalcitrant subject (hello Tarleys!)

More recently, Dany started to go insane with the death of Jorah, became additionally unhinged when her other dragon and fleet were destroyed by Euron, and lost it when Missandai yelled “dracarys” before her execution.  The descent continues when she learns that Varys has been plotting against her (and who are those letters going to anyway?  The unnamed Prince of Dorne?)  It’s not a good sign for her state of mind when she cold-heartedly evaporates the eunuch.  And as noted, she completely becomes undone when Jon refuses to physically love her, vowing at that point to rule in fear if she can’t have love.

But even after she’s won the battle by blowing holes in the battlements and cowing the remaining Golden Company into surrendering, she ostensibly still has a choice: she can become a mere brutal ruler or a monster.  Alas, her fate is to be a monster.  Instead of letting Cersei flee, or even just burning down the Red Keep, which would be bad enough with all the innocents inside, she goes out of the way to burn the city itself, presumably even killing her own troops in the process.  It’s awesome television but it’s also nauseating (as a sidenote: the amount of CGI spent on this one episode alone makes a mockery out of the excuse that the DBs didn’t have the budget to develop CGI of Jon petting Ghost on the head last episode).

There is one character, though, who manages to escape her fate: Arya.  She affirmatively chooses to live.  In a series consumed with vengeance, she rejects her destiny and abjures revenge, even though there are at least two names left on her kill list.  Thanking Sandor Clegane by name was one of the few grace notes in the episode; she escapes the Red Keep and is nearly trampled in the streets, which recalls her escape from Kings Landing following Ned’s death in Season One.

The trained assassin now fruitlessly tries to save others but there’s nothing she can do — high above her Dany is indiscriminately wrecking her vengeance on the people of Kings Landing because they refused to rise up against Cersei.  Eventually knocked unconscious, Arya miraculously finds a white horse (heavy symbolism alert!!), hops on top and slowly rides out of the city.  Gee, I wonder what her mission is now?  Having killed the Knight King,  is it possible she’s added anyone else to her list?

So Many Mistakes

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the past two seasons has been the constant failure of the characters to think clearly about the repercussions of what they are doing.  It’s just been one boneheaded mistake after another.

To be honest, I blame Sansa for most of what happened last night (and to a lesser extent Jon for trusting that high school-grade gossip with a secret in the first place.)  If she hadn’t told Tyrion about Jon’s parentage, he wouldn’t have told Varys and Dany wouldn’t have been paranoid about the whole lot of them.  It’s Dany’s isolation that eventually drives her mad.

Of course, as much as it pains me to say it, Sansa was right about Dany being off her rocker (although not when she first claimed it) and Jon, Tyrion and the rest of them were wrong to put their faith in her.  As the financial advisers say, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and just because she’d been a liberator in Meereen, didn’t mean she could reproduce her results in Westeros.

Also, having seen what Drogon is capable of doing to the fleet, it is completely inexpicable why Dany didn’t just destroy them after they killed her second dragon.  As almost every viewer wondered last week, why didn’t she just fly around and destroy the fleet from behind.  Then they wouldn’t have captured Missandai. What a blunder.

But the most idiotic decision was Tyrion’s plan to free Jaime so he could be smuggled into Kings Landing, rescue Cersei and then get someone to ring the bells of surrender.  I honestly thought Tyrion would be redeemed this episode with the return of some frequently absent brain cells. But no.  I was literally screaming at the TV, “you idiot” as he explained the scheme to Jaime.  After all that’s happened how could he think Cersei would voluntarily leave unless the city was being destroyed in front of her?  And even assuming Jaime could get into the Red Keep and up to Cersei in time, what are the chances he’d be able to ring the bells?

As it happens, someone does ring those bells and Dany breaks her promise to Tyrion to halt the battle when she hears them (and she might have been right about that because it doesn’t appear that Cersei was the one who ordered the bells rung — who knows what kind of double cross might have happened if she’d stopped fighting?)

So once again, Tryrion has accomplished nothing and, in fact, made matters worse.  Is there one clever person left in the kingdom?  We have one final episode to find out.

Some Random Thoughts

If I were the showrunners for “Veep” I’d be very unhappy that HBO scheduled my series finale after this episode.  Who in the world would want to watch a comedy — even a bitterly dark one — after being wrung out by “The Bells?”

Beside the Hound and Arya goodbye, the Jaime/Tyrion farewell was the most affecting scene in the episode.  It was hard not to cry as Tyrion says, “If it weren’t for you, I never would have survived my childhood.”  So there’s a big part of Jaime that’s good and decent, which makes it hard to fathom why he’s returning to Cersei.

Conversely, I was completely unmoved by the Jaime/Cersei reunion.  So what if she’s scared?  Good.  And so much for the many many MANY theories about how Cersei would die: Arya sneaking in with Jaime’s face or Jaime sacrificing her to save the realm, etc.  And what about the so called “valonqar” prophesy in which the witch told Cersei that a younger sibling would “wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you”?  I don’t know why we take any of these prophesies seriously — they all seem like deliberate misdirects.  Can we, for example, stop trying to figure out who the “prince who was promised” is?

What do you have to do to kill someone on this show?  During the fight between Euron and Jaime, I wrote in my notes “Euron kills Jaime” when he ran his sword in Jaime’s guts.  Nope.  Then I wrote “Jaime kills Euron” when he whacked him on the head with the iron hand.  Nope.  Even now I’m not sure that Euron is dead, given that he was only stabbed five or six times and was still exclaiming — inaccurately — “I’m the man who killed “Jaime Lannister.”

Titling the episode “The Bells,” is another screw you by the DBs to anyone who wanted a less nihilistic episode.  Bells are traditionally a symbol of peace and joy, rung at Christmas, before church services, at the end of wars, during sacred ceremonies.  Here they are completely ineffectual, as is any other attempt to prevent a ruinous outcome. As Ramsay Bolton said to Theon, “If you think there’s a happy ending you haven’t been paying attention.”  No lousy bells are going to change that.

Hey Qyburn!  You got what you deserved.

Sad to say, the truest moment of “The Bells” was when the victorious troops went berserk after the Golden Company surrendered.  Granted this was sparked by Dany’s ongoing flame-throwing, but even under the best of circumstances it’s hard for troops to stop rampaging once they’ve entered a city and the adrenaline is flowing.  Grey Worm’s savage and vengeful behavior is typical for soldiers who have lost comrades in battle.

I suppose it’s carping to still be complaining about the time space continuum on this show but the characters seem to be zipping around everywhere like they’re on bullet trains.  How far apart are Dragonstone and Kings Landing anyway?  The show treats them like they’re around the corner from each other.

I think the problem these final episodes is that the DBs don’t have George RR Martin’s creative genius to make everything fit together.  Nor do they have the time they need (although that’s on them.)  But what they really could have used is a writers room.  All the great dramatic shows have deployed a room full of smart creative writers who have brainstormed plots, identified holes and generally helped creatively depleted showrunners see a series through to the end.  I don’t know what the writing process is with this show, but the DBs get writing credit which makes me think they are doing it on their own.

Funniest tweet of the night: “Tough luck for all the people who named their babies Khaleesi.”

What’s Next?

The episode 6 trailer shows Daenerys as Queen of the Ashes being cheered by her thongs of Unsullied and Dothraki armies.  Huh? Who knew that so many of them survived the battle with the undead?

It would be an extremely dark ending to the series if this mass murderer is still on the throne at this time next week.  And yet those huge armies are going to make it difficult for anyone to dislodge Dany without her troops going insane.  And even in “The Bells,” Grey Worm was throwing some serious shade Jon Snow’s way for trying to prevent his army from killing everyone in sight, so we can assume there will be animosity between the Northern and foreign troops.

As for the other characters, it’s hard to see how Tyrion survives Dany’s wrath at his letting Jaime escape unless she’s in a forgiving mood.  It’s also hard to see how Jon and Dany are going to make up after all Jon’s seen. Arya obviously has some role to play too but anyone who predicts the ending is a fool at this point.  The showrunners have made it clear that they are making up the rules as they go along so they can achieve the outcome they want no matter the internal logic of the show.

I do wonder, though, if we’ve seen the end of the North.  Have we said goodbye to Sansa, Bran, Sam, Brienne, Pod, and the rest of them?  That would be unsatisfying.

I will say this, though.  I was more worked up before last night’s episode than I’d been about any show since the season finale of “Mad Men.”  This morning I almost don’t care about the final episode.  I will certainly watch it and hope for a WOW ending but I’m primed to be let down.

 

 

 

Game of Thrones: “The Last of the Starks,” or Dracarys

There are still two episodes left in the “Game of Thrones” series so I won’t openly complain, but I’m getting a really bad feeling about the ability of the showrunners to stick the ending.

It’s become increasingly obvious that they (the showrunners) got to season seven and realized they’d created a huge structural imbalance by making Daenerys too powerful.  She arrived at Westeros with three dragons, two massive armies, a major fleet, the smartest advisers, a personal charisma and political platform that caused people to flock to her side.

In real life, someone with these advantages would have marched straight to King’s Landing, rallied the countryside to her cause on the way, and found a way to oust the unloved usurper Cersei. And if the series had been seven seasons instead of eight, that’s probably what would have happened.  Instead, to stretch the story out and even the playing field against Cersei , the showrunners decided to have Daenerys follow one lame-brained scheme after another.   And now here she is, with a pathetic little band of Unsullied at the Kings Landing gates, making impotent threats against a much stronger Cersei and forced to watch helplessly as Missandei is brutally beheaded by the Mountain.

That’s not to say that that the episode, titled “The Last of the Starks,” wasn’t good television.  When the end titles rolled my heart was beating harder than it did at any time during the battle of Winterfell.  But I’m increasingly unhappy with the unraveling of Daenerys.

The whole episode seems designed to drive her crazy.  In the very first scene she’s mourning Jorah, her most trusted and loyal adviser.  The very last shot shows her consumed with fury at Missandei’s execution (and shout out to Emilia Clarke for the great acting.  I can’t tell if she’s finally become the Mad Queen but she’s definitely a very mad queen.)

In between, she finds herself isolated and alone at the celebratory victory feast in Winterfell’s great hall, with literally no one to talk to. Even boy toy Jon is sitting with his back to her. For a moment, I thought she was going to get her mojo back when she elevated Gendry to Lord of Storm’s End.  That was a very smart move, not only because it cemented Gendry’s loyalty to her, but also because it forced the rest of the assembled lords to acknowledge that she had the right to legitimize Robert Baratheon’s bastard.

But that good moment didn’t last long because when the wine started flowing, everyone started hailing the more beloved Jon Snow and telling stories about his resurrection.  When she went to visit him in his chamber and tried to rekindle their pre-incest passion but he got creeped out.  Worse, despite showing every outward sign of loyalty to his queen, he won’t do the one thing she begs of him — to keep his big fat mouth shut about who mom and dad are.  And here she’s completely right.  She might not have gone to high school or worked in an office but she knows that when someone tells a secret — even if you pinky swear your bestie not to tell — it will eventually get passed along.

And sure enough, ten minutes after Jon tells Sansa his super-duper-promise-not-to-tell news, she’s all “Hey Tyrion.”  And of course the imp passes it along to Varys, which results in them coming this close to plotting treason against her in two separate scenes, just in case we didn’t get it the first time they discussed it.

The turning point in the episode and the one truly shocking surprise, designed to make her completely crazy, was the discovery that Qyburn had managed to develop the Westerosi equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative — massive crossbows with gigantic arrows capable of knocking a dragon out of the sky.

A quick reminder of how SDI was supposed to work

And here we have to stop and pause again to note the military incompetence of Team Dany.  They are transporting an entire army by water, knowing full well that Euron’s fleet is supporting Cersei, and yet it never occurs to them to send scouts ahead or use the dragons as reconnaissance.  And why, after she escaped a full front attack, didn’t she just circle around and blast the fleet from behind is a question that I want answered.  Also, they seem to forget that sitting right there in Winterfell is Braniac, who can see everything that’s happening anywhere in the world — why doesn’t he warg into a raven to scout things out or drop in on Cersei and Euron’s battle scheming?

For that matter, why didn’t Dany heed Sansa’s advice to let the troops recuperate before launching headlong into another war.  She could have, for example, used that time to rally the other houses outside the North to her side.

To me, the killing of Rhaegal is the moment when Dany becomes a real underdog.  Tyrion and the rest debate the ethics of Dany using her dragon against Kings Landing, and as much as I am also against the use of weapons of mass destruction against innocent civilians, they are asking the wrong question.  It’s not should she destroy King’s Landing, but can she?  Did they not notice that the castle is defended with hundreds of those dragon killers.  What makes her think she can now swoop in and burn up Cersei?  By killing Missandai, Cersei’s trying to provoke her into attempting it.  Will she fall for it?

At this point I wouldn’t blame Dany for going full Hiroshima if she could.  She single-handedly built an Esteros empire based on her cunning, courage, and commitment to justice.  All that has gone horribly wrong in Westeros, with her advisers scheming against her and coming up with idiotic ideas (Tyrion’s appeal to Cersei, as brave as it was, turned out to be the dumbest one yet.  In what world would Cersei sail away from Kings Landing when she has the upper hand?)

I’m disappointed that the showrunners have let Dany lose her way like this.  If she’d never met Tyion or Jon Snow, she’d probably be Queen of the seven kingdoms by now.  Particularly disappointing is the autocratic personality she’s adopted since crossing the sea.  She no longer thinks she needs to earn the throne; she insists it’s hers and wants to burn anyone who doesn’t hop to.   The most Machiavellian character on the show (and I say that in an admiring way) is on the verge of becoming the most Hobbesian.

Is destiny character, or character destiny — or what?

Sansa, Arya, Tyrian and Varys all seem to think Dany is descending into madness and the implication is that it’s her destiny because of her Targaryan blood.  I certainly hope that’s not where we’re headed — the promise of the Breaker of Chains was that she’d be different.  How depressing if we can’t change who we really are?

But what really gets me down is that Jaime’s headed back to King’s Landing, ostensibly to defend Cersei.  After all the work we’ve put into his character rehab and now he’s falling off the wagon?  His departing speech to Brienne that “(Cersei’s) hateful and so am I” implies that he can’t change because his character is set, which seems overly deterministic.

A somewhat different approach is taken by Sansa.  When the Hound, in his hilariously insensitive way of showing empathy (“I heard you were broken in rough”) says that if she’d escaped Kings Landing with him she could have avoided all that she replies, “Without Littlefinger, Ramsay, and the rest, I would have stayed a little birth.”  She (like Theon and Bran) seems to think that being tortured and abused turns you into a stronger person and that the terrible things that happen to you shape your character.

Neither approach leaves much room for human agency — you’re either born this way or molded that way by outside forces.  Only Jon and Arya — the two characters most psychically connected — seem capable of controlling their own destiny and that’s because neither of them want what society wants them to want.  Jon doesn’t want to be king and Arya doesn’t want to be a lady.  I don’t think Arya will ever be a lady but Jon could still be king.

So where do we stand?

It seems increasingly obvious that all the most creative and interesting fan theories about how this will all end are out the window and that the showrunners are headed for the most obvious ending.  Cersei, Euron, and the Mountain will all die and either Jon or Dany will end up on the throne.  The only real question besides whether it’s Jon or Dany is: who kills Cersei and Euron (we know who will kill the Mountain).  Jaime, Arya, and the Hound are all headed south and they’ve all got major grudges to fulfill.

Given that King’s Landing is so well-defended, it seems unlikely that a major battle will win the day for the good guys. Something stealthy will have to happen.  And presumably that something stealthy will be a bolt out of the blue, like Arya jumping from nowhere onto the Night King’s back.  So when have predictable surprise to look forward to.

Also, where is Harry Strickland and the Golden Company?  Do the showrunners think we’ve forgotten about them because they’ve gone unmentioned over the past three episodes?  They will factor in somehow but we don’t know how.

Some random thoughts and observations

Why is this episode called “The Last of the Starks”?  That;s a real question.  I can’t figure it out.

Thanks to the Internet for finding this incredible goof Sunday night: someone left a Starbucks cup on the banquet table and it took Twitter to point it out.  I don’t know what is more amazing — that HBO let this happen or that some viewer was eagle-eyed enough to find it.

Just when I finally learned to spell “Melisandre,” I had to go back and learn “Missandei.”  (Actually I never did learn how to spell Missandei and had to look it up every time I mentioned her in this piece.)  Speaking of Missy, her final word, “Dracarys,” means “burn them.”

I’m not happy about the turn in the Brienne/Jamie relationship.  This coupling looks like fan service because so many people were clamoring for it (mostly women I bet), but it’s a failure of imagination to assume a loving relationship between a man and women must eventually become physical (and did they both really have to be drunk for this to happen? Are they college freshmen?)  Besides, what’s the problem with being a virgin anyway.? Neither Arya nor Brienne could be complete without a sexual experience?  I particularly hated their parting scene, with Brienne reduced to just another crying woman, mourning her man leaving for another lover.

I don’t blame Gendry for proposing to Arya.  After all, she’d just come onto him so strong.  He’s not the first guy to misinterpret that.  But he should have known that the women who killed the Night King was out of his league.  Again, I blame this impetuosity on the alcohol. At least she let’s him down gently and doesn’t just say, “Not today.”

Jon’s speech on behalf of the dead is great but I think he plagiarized from some of the Veterans Day events I’ve attended: “We’re here to say goodbye to our brothers and sisters, to our fathers and mothers, to our friends, our fellow men and women who set aside their differences to fight together and die together so that others might live. Everyone in this world owes them a debt that can never be repaid. It is our duty an dour honor to keep them alive in memory for those who come after us, and those who come after them, for as long as men draw breath.”  But this is really another lost opportunity for Dany.  She should have been the one to deliver it.

Twitter was about ten times more upset about Jon handing Ghost over to Tormund than there were about Missandei’s decapitation.   And really, he couldn’t have patted him on the head or rubbed noses before leaving?  Given the importance the six direwolves played o  She n the show, we should have left her to protect Sansa.

I’m uneasy about that goodbye between Sam and Jon.  The “you’re-my-best-friend” language is the kind of dialogue between two people who don’t expect to see each other again.  Also, are Sam and Gilly staying at Winterfell?  It would make sense for Sam to return home to Horn Hill and become the Lord of House Tarly, but there was no mention of that or the fate of Hartsbane, the sword Same gave to Jorah.

Speaking of Gilly and her baby, I don’t think there are any parents or children left on the show.  The entire older and younger generations have all been violently wiped out.  In a show about adult orphans, this means that the sibling relationships have to come to the fore, even if two of the relations (with the Lannisters and the Gleganes) have turned homicidal.  And while we’re at it, there are no marriages left (unless you consider Sansa and Tyrion still married) and all the romantic pairings except for Gilly/Sam and Cersei/Euron have been broken off.  This is a very dystopian world in which no relationship is safe and everyone ends up alone and unloved.

I don’t know why it took so long, but it wasn’t until the second treasonous conversation between Varys and Tyrion that someone finally pointed out that Dany is Jon’s aunt.  Was no one going to state the obvious?  And good-bye to my hope that they would reign jointly, following the William and Mary model.

Did “The Long Night” episode kill off the magical element of the series?  Many of the major magical characters — Melisandre, Beric, and the Night King — are dead.  What this prefigures for Bran remains to be seen.  And Arya too, for that matter — does she retain her ability to take on dead faces?  The Davos comments about the Lord of Light not seeming to know what he wants might also be a kiss-off to the whole religious backdrop of the show.

That stand-off outside the Kings Landing wall was about as tense as the show gets, but also pretty ridiculous.  All of Cersei’s enemies were in clear shooting distance — even the dragon was there — but she didn’t pull the trigger.  Considering how unscrupulous she is, I can’t believe she didn’t wipe out all of Dany’s forces when she had the chance.

Why didn’t Cersei wipe them all out here?  Inexplicable.

Didn’t Euron wonder how Tyrion knew that Cersei was pregnant?  And why isn’t she showing more?  In the intervening months since she told Tyrian about the baby, Dany’s army has marched north, fought the battle of Winterfell and then marched south again.  That’s a very slow-gestating baby.

I’ve said this before but I find it hard to believe that Jaime will kill Cersei as long as she’s carrying his baby.

One final observation. Why the hell did Sansa marry a Jonas brother in Las Vegas? And why did they choose an Elvis impersonator to tie the knot?

This is a ridiculous wedding photo, down to that wedding ring — you have to wonder if they were as drunk as Tyrion on a Saturday night.

* * * *

“She wants to make the word a better place.  I believe in her.”  Do we?