For God’s Sake, Watch “The Good Place”

Over the past year my wife and I have watched only two TV series live (the old-fashioned way in real time): “Game of Thrones” and “The Good Place,” which had its season finale last night.

In some respects these shows could not be more different; the big budget, violent hugely popular mega-show vs. the sweet, small sitcom that hardly anyone’s watching.  But they have a surprising number of things in common.  They are both highly serialized, densely plotted shows that wrestle with deep questions on how to conduct yourself in a sinful world, especially when your own impulses sometimes lean toward the baser side of life.

Stretching the analogy too far would be ridiculous because they land on different answers.  In the dynastic power struggles of “Game of Thrones,” we learn early that being good itself is not enough.  The fate of the guileless Ned Stark is proof of that, and from then on the more moral characters are constantly debating among themselves what ends justify what means.  When we’re done with it, The “Game of Thrones” existential conclusion is that life is inherently tragic and that you need to do a lot of bad things to save the people you love — and then you’re punished for it!

There is no physical violence in “The Good Place,” but there is a similar struggle over how to live a good life.  The premise of the show is that Eleanor, an attractive but selfish white trash dirtbag played by Kirstin Bell, wakes up one day in the Good Place, a secular version of heaven, despite having lived a decidedly unvirtuous life.  She assumes she was sent there by mistake, a conclusion she tries to keep hidden from Michael, the architect of the village, played by Ted Danson.  From then on it’s a wild ride, with the show rebooting at least once a season and with at least one shocking twist to rival “The Red Wedding.”

Ostensibly the show is not religious.  The word “God” is not mentioned, never mind Jesus, Allah or Muhammed.  The Good Place and its counterpart the Bad Place are obviously based on popular conceptions of heaven and hell and those words are rarely used either; same with “sin,” “devils,” “Satan” or “angels.”

And yet, with its assumption that there’s an afterlife in which your earthy behaviors are rewarded and punished, the show doesn’t cater to atheists either.  If anything, “The Good Place” has a humanist approach to morality, assuming that humans can solve their own problems.  And this might be offensive to many conservative Christians, who believe that only God can save souls.

Despite explicitly rejecting religious themes, the show is definitely religious-adjacent.  Eleanor’s Good Place roommate and ostensible soulmate is a philosopher and over four seasons, the show spends a good deal of time explicitly teaching Eleanor (and by extension, the viewers) some of the basic tenets of philosophy.  This can’t help but overlap with a lot of Christian thinking.

I need to emphasize that even with the overt philosophizing, “The Good Place” is still a very funny stitcom.  In order to keep viewers from tuning out during the heavy thinking, the jokes come fast and furiously and they range from fart humor to wisecracks about modern life.  It’s this combination of the sacred and the profane that makes the show unique.

As the series wore on, it became hard not to cry at least once an episode.  The show eventually came to understand that love and forgiveness are the path to the Good Place.  Love and forgiveness for each other and love and forgiveness for yourself.  In a pivotal episode the main characters come upon a man who’s trying to live a blameless, sin-free life (by not harming the environment, not eating meat, living alone in a shack, etc.).  He’s  eking out a joyless existence, miserable because, as a human, he cannot be sin-free.  This is exactly the problem that tortured Martin Luther, who, as hard as he tried, could not stop sinning.  Luther’s answer, straight out of St. Paul, was the concept of unwarranted grace — the idea that if we ask for forgiveness and truly repent we will be forgiven.  Similarly, in “The Good Place,” you can achieve a form of grace-by-another-name by living in community with those you love; you don’t have to be perfect, but you do have to be doing your best.

Coincidentally, just as the final episode of “The Good Place” came on, I was reading “Love Wins,” a book of pop theology written by the preacher Rob Bell.  The subtitle is “A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.”  I doubt the creators of “The Good Place” ever read the book but this is also EXACTLY what the show is about.  Bell rejects the premise that most of humanity is going to a place where they will be tortured for all eternity, arguing instead that over time, even in the afterlife, every soul will reject its sinfulness and find a way to God.  This is more or less where the show lands.  In the final scenes we see that people who acted hurtfully and selfishly in their earthy lives transformed after they died and made it to the Good Place after all.  Indeed, according to “The Good Place,” the best thing about the Good Place is being able to spend as much time as you want with the people you love.  And let’s face it, you can’t do that if the people you love are in Hell.

Some additional thoughts:

—  This is not a series to binge.  The best way to watch it is to go to Netflix, watch the first episode, listen to the show’s podcast (The Good Place: The Podcast), and then watch the show again, looking for all the jokes and nuances you missed the first time.  This podcast is brilliant.  It’s hosted by Marc Evan Jackson, who plays Shawn on the show, and in addition to recapping the show, he interviews the writers, producers, actors and other craftspeople who put the show together.  Not only do they analyze and explain the main themes but they provide the best behind-the-scenes commentary on how a network TV show is actually put together.

— I have a whole new appreciation for the acting of Ted Danson.  I probably took him for granted on “Cheers,” but now that he’s aged and mellowed his comedic abilities are even more obvious.

—  As great as Ted Danson is, the true acting genius on the show is Darcy Carden, an improv star playing Janet, a robot-like assistant who gradually becomes more human-like over the course of the show.  Famously “not a girl,” Janet manages to convey intense emotion while still maintaining the flat affect of a non-human.  And in a tour-de-force episode that should be taught in acting classes everywhere (“Janets”), the four main characters are hidden in her “void,” which means they take on her physical appearance.  Consequently, Darcy has to play all four characters throughout that episode, each with their recognizable tics and characteristics.

—  The “Good Place’s” concept of time is very similar to the eternal time that C.S. Lewis posits in “Mere Christianity.”  Time in the afterlife is not linear and leading from one place to the next. Instead it doubles back and loops around until it looks like the name Jeremy Bearimy in cursive English.  This is a good example of using silliness (the name “Jeremy Bearimy”) to sweeten a convoluted, mind-bending concept.

—  The show liberally name drops the names of philosophers like Aristotle, Plato, and Kant and dramatically illustrates some philosophical concepts like the Trolley Problem (i.e., would you be the pull the lever to divert a trolley that was headed toward a group of children if it meant sending it onto another track where it would kill just one innocent person?”)  In the final episode a couple of real-life philosophers played themselves — the kind of in-joke, or “Easter Egg” that the show has become known for.

—  The final line of the show is “Take it sleazy,” a joking homage to Eleanor, who managed to rise above her disadvantaged childhood but never forgot that she was the kind of dum dum who would only-semi-ironically say something like that.

— One last comparison to “Game of Thrones.”  When the GoT series ended so atrociously there were many apologists who said that it’s impossible for a series to “stick the landing” because the fans want too much.  The end of “The Good Place,” which has been enthusiastically embraced by the fans, shows that it absolutely is possible to produce a satisfactory series finale as long as you have the vision and courage to see it through to the end.

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?

 

Game of Thrones: “The Long Night,” or Not Today

The biggest surprise about last night’s epic battle for Winterfell is that there wasn’t a big surprise.  Going into the season it was easy to predict that the end of episode three (the longest battle in TV or film history, we were told repeatedly) would end with someone sticking a piece of dragon glass or Valyrian steel into the Night King and bringing that story line to an end.

Then I read and listened to so many theories that I convinced myself the showrunners would not go for anything so obvious.  After all, solving the existential threat at the heart of the Game of Thrones extended universe with three episodes to go is bound to leave the remainder of the series an anticlimax, right?  And certainly they would come up with something more ingenious than a knife to the gut or a spear to the chest, right?

I’m not going to complain about the moment when Arya somehow leaped over 10,000 wights, pulled that very cool hand switch, dropping the knife from one hand to the other, and plunged it in. Am I the only one who who was reminded of the great scene in “The Karate Kid” when Ralph Macchio defeats a bigger and stronger opponent with one surprise kick? And of course it was satisfying that the knife in question was the one that almost killed Bran and started the whole battle between the Starks and Lannisters back in season one.  But still, I did feel a little let down at the storytelling conventionality at the heart of the episode, including this particular deus ex machina.

This is not to say there weren’t several glorious moments.  The beginning scenes were particularly thrilling.  The first sight of Sam rushing through the castle, quickly cut with our other heroes getting into place — Tyrian, Bran, Sansa and Arya — and others in formation on the battlefield — Brienne, Gendry, Podrick, Edd, — were an immediate reminder of what is at stake on a human scale.  (Although what the hell was Ghost doing in the front lines of the battle anyway?  His superpower is ripping out the throats of his enemies; that seems particularly unsuited to combating the undead.)

The one actual surprise of the episode was reappearance of Melisandre, although how she managed to make her way through an army of wights is a very good question — maybe she’s the one who taught Arya how to do it.  Melisandre has had many bad ideas over the years — Stannis, Shireen, not giving Gendry the full ride he deserved — and you can now add lighting the Dothraki swords on fire to the list.  This gets them all riled up and eager to charge the wights — a beautiful but futile gesture.

Granted, the way director Miguel Sapochnik filmed it — with a long silent shot of the horsemen charging out in the blackness and the lights being slowly extinguished — was eerie and unsettling, but it seems to have accomplished nothing.  If anything it was reminiscent of those World War I movies featuring the cavalry charging machine guns and getting mowed down.

And just like that, the Dothraki army that Dany spent years assembling is extinguished in the snow of the North.

The hyper-disciplined unsullied seem to do a little better.  They are in a defensive position anyway.  And even though they are outnumbered, it’s very satisfying to see them decapitating their share of wights.  (Although I’m not sure what they are actually accomplishing since regular steel doesn’t actually kill wights, correct?)  I appreciate seeing Grey Worm’s apparent fear and exhaustion, which makes his decision to lead Melisandre out to the trench even more heroic.  And sure, it takes the red witch numerous incantations to set the trench aflame, but when she does it’s a great moment, as is the wights’ eventual plan to throw their bodies on the flames and clamor over each other to get past the trench.

At this point, it’s clear nothing is working against these guys.  And as much as I hate to be a Monday morning quarterback, you have to wonder about that battle plan.  Why wasn’t the burning trench the first line of defense?  Why put all your men in front of the trench and sacrifice thousands before deploying your best weapon?  Wouldn’t it have been better to: 1) light the trench; 2) have your guys shooting flaming dragon glass arrows through the trench into the immobilized wights on the other side; and 3) then have the dragons swoop down and incinerate as many as possible.

In any event, this first stage of the battle — outside the castle — is the best part of the show.  Once the wights start climbing up the walls and breach the ramparts, the action becomes more complicated and confusing.  All the slashing and chopping is tough to follow, especially in the dark.  For example, at some point Dolorous Edd gets killed, but I didn’t even notice.

The hand-to-hand combat is interspersed with quieter and creepier moments inside the supposedly safer parts of the castle, including the crypt and the library.  I liked the nice rapprochement between Tyrian and Sansa, advancing my theory that they will end up as the other power couple in Westeros.  Although you would think Sansa would give her antipathy to Dany a rest when the Mother of Dragons is out there fighting to save humanity and she’s cowering in the crypt.

There’s not a lot of point of recapping everything that happens once the wights get inside the walls.  A lot of people almost get killed but don’t. Sam, in particular, spends practically the whole time lying on his back swarmed by wights but comes through unscathed.  Almost every time one character saves saves the life of another character the favor is returned (e.g., Arya saves the House and he saves her later).  Symmetry is good in architecture but quickly cliched in storytelling.  It also seems like every character has a moment of cowering before being re-energized.  This is most satisfyingly demonstrated when the Hound wants to give up, saying, “You can’t beat death,” only to have Beric respond by pointing to Arya and saying, “tell her that.”

Just about half-way through the episode I realized that the clock is not my friend.  It was 9:45 p.m. and I knew there was another 40 minutes to go.  Already it was desperately dire inside Winterfell, my blood pressure was sky-high, and I began to seriously wonder if the good guys might actually lose.  How would they fill out the rest of the episode?

Some dragon fights helped pass the time. The shot of the two dragons up where the air was clear and peaceful, was sublime, but less sublime was the dragon-on-dragon action.  It was hard to tell which dragon was which and in the end the whole thing didn’t matter because even after the Night King fell off Viserion, he somehow landed on his feet and was able to brush off a full blast of dragonfire.

Does anything matter?

And here’s where we get to the crux of my vague disappointment with the episode: nothing mattered.  That sounds as nihilistic as anything the Night King has to offer but in the end, all the dragon glass mining, Valaryian steel hording, fiery weapons-making, strategy-planning didn’t change anything.  The army of the undead was just too massive.  It was touching, sad, and inspiring when the pint-sized Lyanna Mormont died killing the reanimated giant, but would it have made any difference if she hadn’t?

In the end, it all comes down to Arya’s leap at the Night King as he’s approaching Bran.  If she kills him the world survives; if not, it doesn’t.  Everything that happened before that is a distraction.  You can make the argument that all the preceding action was necessary to lure the Night King in, and I suppose he was caught off guard because he’d supposedly defeated everyone, but that leads to another objection:  the Night King has literally been waiting for this moment for EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS and he couldn’t wait another fifteen minutes to mop up all the remaining humans?  What’s the rush?  Why expose yourself?  And again, what are his white walker aides-de-camp doing at this moment? How can they let Arya in?  I guess this comes from her training?

And while we’re at it — Bran, this is the best you’ve got?  There was a moment when I thought Bran was going to go back in time and change history again.  Instead he just warged into some ravens.  What was that all about?  Up until the very last minute I thought he had some super plan up his sleeve, but I guess not (unless he already knew the future and knew that Arya was coming).

Speaking of Arya — this has been a pretty good night for her — within hours she lost her virginity to the super hunky Gendry (who seems to have survived!) AND she saved humanity by accomplishing something that no one else has been able to do for EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS.

Not Enough Deaths?

When the episode was over the first twitter post I saw complained that the body count was a little skimpy, and yeah, I have to agree.

It’s not that I wanted more people to die but after all these seasons I expected a little more realism out of the series.  There were so many characters on the front lines and they were all constantly in mortal danger.  There were at least two times when I thought Brienne had bought the farm but then she popped up again.  Worse, in the last five to ten minutes of the battle we were cued to expect a slaughter through the use of sad slow music.  This is a trick I first noticed in the movie “Platoon,” which relied heavily on Samuel Barber’s “Adagio and Strings.”

Usually the sad music means someone will die; but not here (although Jorah does get stabbed).  The important deaths come before and after this sequence.  And while we’re complaining, I really didn’t like it that Arya killed the Night King just as Viserion was about to blast Jon and the wights were on the verge of wiping out the rest of our heroes.  That just-in-the-nick-of-time trope was tired even in the silent movie era.

As for the deaths themselves.  Here they are in order of importance.

Theon: There seemed to be some difference of opinion by commentators after the battle as to whether Theon deserved his redemption.  I was slightly moved, but not much, by Bran’s absolution: “Everything you did brought you where you belong — home,” and later, “You’re a good man.  Thank you.”  I know we feel sorry that he was tortured, but he did kill a few kids and grievously betray the Starks.  Also, apparently he had no choice but to rush at the Knight King with that spear, but what a futile gesture.  He gets swatted away like a fly.

Ser Jorah: This was slightly sadder, but he’s been such a stiff it was hard to care too much.  He died doing what he was committed to — defending his Khaleesi — so that was nice.  This leaves Dany without someone she trusts implicitly, so this will make her insecure going forward.

Melisandre: She said she would die in the North so her appearance shouldn’t have been a surprise, other than the fact that she showed up at exactly the right time.  I am not sure how we are supposed to think about the Lord of Light, the one true God.  This god does seem to have some powers, although this is a very Old Testament God, not the more forgiving God of the New Testament.

Lady Mormont:  We should have known she was doomed because the show does have a fixation on killing children. And sure enough, that pint of peanuts went down fighting, killing the biggest wight of them all.  Thematically, this prefigured the end, when the second-tiniest Warrior (Arya) killed an even larger monster.  This battle killed two Mormonts, though (see Ser Jorah above.  I wonder if there are any Mormonts left to lead that House.  Also, I wonder if Sam gets his sword back now.)

Beric: Supposedly, we learn from Melisandre, that the reason Beric kept returning from the dead is so that he could eventually save Arya.  Oh come on.  How deterministic is this universe?  I really don’t think she knows what she’s talking about have the time.  Her predictions are like me trying to read chicken entrails.

Edd:  I guess he died.  I didn’t notice, but that’s what Twitter said after the episode.

Not dead:  I don’t want to harp on this but how is Grey Worm still standing? Or Brienne, the Hound, Jaime, Ghost or anyone else who was fighting out on the open field in front of the castle walls?  Not that I wanted them to die but the cloak of invulnerability that seemed to cover them seems like a cheat.

Some Odds and Ends

Callbacks:  As the series wears on, there are numerous callbacks to earlier episodes and Arya gets two.  I don’t know how Milesandre knows to pull out this old chestnut, but when Arya’s feeling a little down she says, There is only one god, and His name is Death. And what do we say to death?”  Not today,” Arya responds, remembering the advice given to her by Syrio Forel, the master sword-fighter and instructor hired by Eddard Stark to train her.

And then, when Arya tells Sansa to go to the crypts and gives her a sword, her advice is, “Stick them with the pointy end,” a callback to the very sweet scene in the second episode when Jon gives her needle.”  The video below is more emotional than anything in this episode.

The Crypt:  After all the teasing about the dead Starks being reanimated from the crypt, I couldn’t really tell if it happened or not.  My wife says yes, but I thought the undead terrorizing Gilly and the others were wights from above who had broken through. And during that library scene was Arya fighting Stark undead or ones from the north?  Also, how is it that hardly anyone in the crypt was killed? They were all defenseless and yet I think even Shireen 2.0 survived.  Was there a point in Arya giving Sansa that weapon?  For a second I thought she and Tyrion were committed to a suicide pact.

Tyrian: His two scenes with Sansa were nice, but I was definitely expecting him to play a bigger role in solving the riddle to the battle — as did he.  And yet all he did was complain about being sidelined; he didn’t even fight the wights when they broke in.  I assume he will have a bigger, smarter role to play later in the season.

Clean-up.  How are they going to clean up the mess left behind by the battle? I don’t know if the wights just disappear but even the body count of dead humans looks pretty overwhelming.  I assume the ground is frozen and they can’t bury anyone.  On the positive side, there’s a lot fewer mouths to feed.

I assume the Winterfell grounds look something like this

Jon And Dany:  That was a classic, “let’s talk later” situation after last week’s big reveal about Jon’s parentage.  They barely exchanged two words but they did save each other’s life a few times so maybe that will smooth things over.

The independence of the North:  I am sick of Sansa’s continued complaining about how the North needs to remain independent. Her own father bent the knee to Robert Baratheon so I don’t see what the problem is with pledging allegiance to the woman who just sacrificed most of her armies to save Winterfell.

Climate change: The existential threat of the Night King has been compared to the real world challenge of climate change; i.e., something that could destroy humanity while we petty humans squabble over our small advantages.  Well now, does this mean we can stop worrying?  Maybe we can get our own Arya Stark to solve the problem with a flick of the wrist.  And while we’re at it, I suppose we won’t need to wall any longer, or the Night’s Watch either.  And have we heard the last of “Winter is coming” (except by unimaginative politicians).

The future:  I can’t even begin to speculate what will happen over the next three episodes.   I assume there’s a final showdown with Cersei coming but what happens before then?  I hope they don’t create unnecessary problems that they need to solve to stretch things out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Game of Thrones: “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” or, I Guess I’ve Changed

When I was growing up, television’s big concession to faith was to show  “The Robe,” every Easter Sunday.   This was a classic 1950’s sword and sandal Hollywood epic about the soldier who won Jesus’ robe after the crucifixion.  Television has long ago stopped catering to the religious impulses of its audiences and when I saw that “Game of Thrones” would be airing on Easter Sunday this year I feared that the usual carnage would spoil my holiday mood.

But lo and behold,  “Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” was completely devoid of violence, physical or emotional.  Suffused with melancholy, and anticipating their imminent deaths, the characters make noble gestures and ruminate at length on how they have evolved throughout the series.

Going into the episode we had two major plot questions: 1) how would the Winterfell gang react to Jaime’s sudden and solitary appearance inside their walls (and btw, who the heck is overseeing castle security, because he should be fired after allowing a Lannister to waltz in unmolested), and 2) would Jon tell Dany about his parentage and how would she take it?

As it turns out, these major plot points bookend the beginning and the end of the episode and are ironed out in less than five minutes each, leaving plenty of time in between for people to sit around and make heartfelt speeches to each other.

The Jaime “trial” is dispensed with quickly.  Dany makes some threats related to how he killed her father and then Sansa jumps in to bitch about how he helped kill HER father, so it looks dire, especially when Jamie’s primary advocate is the disgraced Tyrion.  But we know this is not how Jaime Lannister exits the series and sure enough Brienne speaks up and vouches for him as a man of honor, recounting how he lost his hand defending her and that moreover Sansa is alive because of him.  The logic, I guess is that Jaime saved Brienne’s life and four seasons later she saved Sansa’s life.  I’m not sure the cause and effect are that closely linked, but Sansa completely flips her opinion and Dany has to back down when Jon is “whatever. Let’s keep him.”

Except for the opening and closing scenes, Jon Snow is almost invisible in this episode because he’s avoiding Dany — the stereotypical shifty boyfriend who’s got bad news and doesn’t want to face the music.  But finally, Dany tracks him down in the crypt, because what else are you going to do on the night before you might die than look at subterranean statues?  Jon blurts out the news that his father is Dany’s older brother and that his mother is the woman he always thought was his aunt.  But now he has a new aunt, right?  Aunt Daenerys doesn’t reflect upon the incest part at all and is immediately “Wait, that makes you the heir to the Iron Throne. How convenient!” Given that the battle to save mankind is about to begin, maybe this wasn’t the best time for Jon to drop this on her.

Aside from these two plot advancements left over from last week, there’s really only one new narrative development for us to absorb: Bran’s revelation that the Night King is coming for HIM because what he’s really seeking is complete annihilation of everything.  Whaaaaat? If the Night King kills Bran the world will end?  And we’ll prevent that by having Bran sit quietly by a tree defended by Theon?  The whole future of humanity depends on Theon?

According to Bran, the Night King wants to erase this world and Bran himself is the world’s memory, like his brain contains all of Amazon’s cloud-based storage capacity.  I’m not sure how Bran morphed from a mere warg to being the linchpin of human existence but this revelation does result in an emotional outburst from Sam: “That’s what death is isn’t it?  Forgetting — being forgotten.  If we forget what we’ve been and what we’ve done we’re not men anymore.  Just animals. Your memories [i.e., Bran’s memories] don’t come from books.  Your stories aren’t just stories.  If I wanted to erase the race of men I’d start with you.”  This sounds deep, but does this mean that Bran has to live forever or else mankind comes to an end?  And does this just affect Westeros or are the folks in Esteros covered too?  Better not think too hard about this.

Some Themes

This episode is preoccupied with memories and by taking a pause in the action before the plot propels itself forward next week, the show gives us an opportunity to reflect on our own memories of the past seven seasons.  Most of us have, in reality, forgotten more than we can remember of this densely plotted show but the episode evokes some powerful memories through various narrative devices including:

• Brienne recapping how Jaime defended her;
• The vivid image of the little girl with the partially burned face, who looked so much like Stannis Baratheon’s daughter Shireen;
• Gendry revealing to Arya that he’s Robert Baratheon’s bastard;
• Jon, Sam and Dolorous Edd, on the wall, recalling Gren and Pyp, their dead friends from the Night’s Watch (“its just us three now”).
• Arya’s revealing her scars, a physical reminder of what she’s lived through.

If there’s an overarching theme to the episode it’s “I’ve changed.”  We hear that over and again, perhaps most explicitly when the Hound gibes Arya for not gabbing all the time like she used to and she responds: “I guess I’ve changed.”  But so many other characters have changed too, starting with The Hound himself, once a brutal killer and now practically a softy.  There’s also Jaime, who, as Bran says, became a different person because he pushed him out of a window, and his brother Tyrion, who’s no longer interested in whore-mongering.  And don’t forget Samwell Tarley, once a physical coward and now a killer of white walkers and defender of Gilly. And of course the two ladies calling the shots — Dany and Sansa — have changed most of all, from silly and/or timorous girls in the very first episode to hardened leaders now.

With no real plot to develop, the episode gives its characters plenty of time to meditate on their impending demise.  This is straight out of dozens of Hollywood war movies like “The Alamo,” where warriors and their camp followers become reflective on the eve of battle.  Winterfell has become “The Alamo” on steroids.  Three quarters of the show’s currently living characters are holed up there and they all get a few minutes to show off their acting chops.

Some Great Scenes

Here’s the trade-off for the “Game of Thrones” actors: we’ll give you an emotional scene in this episode that you can use for your Emmy nomination reel, but that means you have to die next week.

The clear emotional highlight of the episode was Jaime knighting Brienne (it’s interesting, though, that of all the characters on the show she has changed the least — she’s remains the honor-bound defender of whomever she’s pledged to defend).  The episode even gets its title from the moment when she becomes a knight of the seven kingdoms.  It’s triply emotional that Jaime is the one doing the deed even though Tormund lasciviously offers to knight her ten times, which sounds like an offer you can definitely refuse.  But you can’t help but feel that this is Brienne’s big send-off.

The knighting is the emotional climax of the scene that is the heart of the episode: Tyrion, Jaime, Brienne, Podrick, Tormund and Davos, sitting around the fireplace, drinking, reminiscing, and telling tall stories.  My guess is that out of this group, Brienne will not be the only one to perish in the Battle of Winterfell.  Tormund also gets an extended scene played mostly for laughs in which he claims that as a ten-year-old boy he killed a giant and then was suckled by the giant’s wife for three months.  Yeah, that sounds like Tormund’s last great moment.

Davos’ farewell moment doesn’t come in that fireplace scene but in the previously mentioned encounter with the young girl with the burned face.  Davos has just given the sailors under his command a rah rah talk that boosts their morale ahead of the battle.  But he is pulled up short by the appearance of Shireen.2, who wonders if she should go to battle or take safety in the crypt.  The poignancy of the burned-face-girl is heightened by what is not said.  When Gilly materializes, neither she nor Davos mention Shireen, even though both of them were taught to read by the girl with the greyscale and both are probably reeling at the memory.   And this emotional moment probably signs Davos’ death warrant.  That and being positioned in the front lines to hold off the army of the dead while Bran lures the Night King.

Also doomed: Grey Worm.  If you want to get yourself fated for a quick exit in popular culture the best way to do it is to make plans to retire to the beach with your girlfriend “when the war is over.”  Sweet scene, but obviously included to prepare us for Grey Worm’s departure.

Another significant moment in the episode is Arya’s sex scene, a phrase I never thought I would have to write.  Of course we all feel uncomfortable about this, having been introduced to Arya as an 11-year-old girl.  I’m happier making jokes about the Jon/Dany incest complication than I am about looking at Arya’s nude body, which make me feel like a perv.  Having said that, I have to admit that she does have the best idea of anyone in the castle.  At a time when everyone else is drinking, telling sob stories, giving away swords, and worrying about who’s bending the knee to whom, pre-battle sex does sound like the right option.  And it’s not exactly like they didn’t tease this.  For two episodes now she and Gendry have been shooting each smoldering looks as they flirt over spears.  According to my logic this must mean that either Gendry or Arya will die next episode but I just can’t believe GoT would heartless enough to kill either of them so I’m holding out hope for a little luck for Arya.

The final outstanding scene worth mentioning is the attempted rapprochement between Sansa and Dany.  Dany makes the first move at Ser Jorah’s suggestion  and this is about the first smart thing she’s done since coming north.  It almost makes me think she could be a good ruler again after all.  When Sansa says she doubts Jon’s judgment because he’s a man and men are easily manipulated (really, what does this guy need to do to get some respect?) Dany makes the excellent point that she’s up north with her armies and dragons defending Jon’s home, so who manipulated who?  This softens Sansa and they even bond over a joke about Jon’s height.  (While we’re at it can we cut out the Jon Snow height jokes? According to Wikipedia, Kit Harrington is the same height I am — 5’8″ — so he’s not exactly a shrimp.)  But then Sansa goes and ruins this nice girl-talk mood by asserting the North’s independence.   Again, is this the right time for this discussion?  Can we focus please on the immediate problem — like the potential destruction of all civilization — before arguing about who will be the nominal ruler of the seven kingdoms?

Some Random Observations

Am I the only one who was surprised at Sansa’s rapturous reception of Theon?  I know he helped her jump off the wall and escape from Ramsay Bolton, but his previous treachery resulted in the death of her mother and two brothers.  Yet she gives him a warmer welcome than she gave the legitimately heroic Jon.  Does the North really remember?

Podrick’s continues to amaze us with his previously undisclosed talents.  We’ve seen that he’s a lover, and apparently now he’s fighter. And he’s a singer? His rendition of “Jenny of Oldstones” is deeply affecting and yet another emotional highlight.  According to the Internet, the lyrics are meaningful to the future of the show (or maybe not, it could got either way).  The song describes a Targaryon prince — Duncan — who gave up his claim to the throne for love.  According to a piece in Vanity Fair: “In A Dance with Dragons, Barristan Selmy tells Daenerys: ‘The Prince of Dragonflies loved Jenny of Oldstones so much he cast aside a crown, and Westeros paid the price in corpses.’ Duncan, Jenny (probably), and a number of other famous names from Westerosi lore died in a huge fire called the Tragedy of Summerhall that is believed to be the result of Duncan’s father, King Aegon V, attempting to bring back dragons to Westeros. It was there, during the fire, that Daenerys’s brother and Jon’s father, Prince Rhaegar was born.”

Hmm, do we know another Targaryan prince who might give up power for love?  If so, I hope he doesn’t end up like Duncan.

We hear the song twice.  Once sung by Pod and the second time in the credits, performed by Florence and the Machine, the version of which was immediately released as a video.  Click below for an emotional wring-out.

Fantasy fans will of course recall that it is a trope of fantasy films to have a secondary character sing a sweet and sad Irishy tune before a major battle.  (See Pippin’s song from “The Lord of the Rings” below.)

Ghost is back!  Over the last two episodes we’ve seen every possible reunion except one that we really wanted — John and his direwolf.  Instead all we get is a brief glimpse of Jon sitting with Ghost.   Did the showrunners think we’ve been reunioned out?  Maybe, but they still found time for the Hound and Arya to be reunited with Beric Dondarrion, the guy who keeps getting killed and brought back to life.

This is the best we could do for Ghost? 

There’s a lot of chatter about who gets to fight and who goes to the crypt.  To the crypt go fire-face girl, Gilly, Gilly’s baby (unseen so far), and Tyrion.  To the battle go Lady Monmount and Sam.  And as mentioned last week, is the crypt really the safest place to be during an attack of white walkers?

As I also noted last week, Bran gets most of the laugh-out-loud lines.  When Jaime, at his trial, says he did it all for his family, Bran interjects “The things I do for love,” which is exactly what Jaime said just before cold-heartedly pushing Bran out the tower window.  As a bot, Bran doesn’t hold a grudge or have any other emotions, but he does retain a dry wit.

I’m pretty sure that neither Sam nor Jon will die in the impending battle.  Neither of them got an emotional send-off with their girlfriends.  As noted Jon was barely in the show this week so that all the other characters could have their final moments with us.  Jon is the heart of the show and they are not going to kill him (again) without some powerful and sad farewell.

This must have been the least-expensive episode to produce in GoT history.  One set and no action at all.  No CGI or other special effects until the white walkers appear.  You could turn this episode into a play and college drama classes would easily be able to replicate it on a minimal budget.

Speaking of CGI, we’ve neither seen hide nor hair of the Night King or his reanimated dragon.   Even during that last chilling scene with the mounted white walkers prepared to charge Winterfell, the Night King was nowhere to be seen.  Does that mean he’s taken some forces south and that the whole Winterfell attack is a diversion?  Ugh, I hope not.  The coming attractions and trailers haven’t offered one frame or clue beyond what happens in these first three episodes and I think they are saving their biggest surprises for the second half of the season — surprises that do not concern the undead.

Arya and Gendry’s getting it on fulfills King Robert’s dearest wish to unite the Stark and Baratheon families.  No one would have guessed it would come this way, though.

Will Tyrion ever get his mojo back?  All the women on the show have spent this season mocking him for his various missteps (interesting that the men seem more forgiving).  Tyrion is self-aware enough to realize his problem is that like other clever people he underestimated his opponents.  He’s always been smart but maybe with that insight he will finally become wise.

Do we really believe Gendry has been with three women before Arya?  I always thought he was a virgin before that incident with the Red Witch.  I assume Arya was looking for someone who was reasonably experienced in that area to make it worth her while if this turns out to be her last night on earth but she’s not really in the position to demand references, so I hoped this worked out for her.

Worst tweet of the night?  From Elizabeth Warren, who shows that among a certain class of people, everything needs to be filtered through an identity politics prism.  And what staffer do you suppose was commissioned to write her recap?: “Why do I love #GameOfThrones? It’s the women (duh!). Looking forward to tonight’s episode. In the meantime, you can read my review of the season premiere here. https://www.thecut.com/2019/04/elizabeth-warren-review-game-of-thrones-season-8.html …

Next week?

The coming attractions didn’t show us much that we already haven’t seen.  Again, no sign of dragons or the Night King but we do know from various media reports that the battle for Winterfell will be the longest filmed battle in cinema and television history, so we can assume next week’s show will be brutal.  Hope you enjoyed the respite.

 

 

Game of Thrones: “Winterfell,” or So Many Reunions

The last time I was this excited about a television event — chewing my fingernails, counting down the clock, anticipating an epic showdown, the whole nine yards — was, um, well actually, it was two months ago with the Super Bowl.

And just like that game between the Patriots and the Rams, the Season Eight premier of “Game of Thrones” (“Winterfell”) was a bit of a letdown.  Perhaps it was inevitable that this episode would consist almost entirely of setting up the rest of the season, putting everyone in place for when the real action starts.  But it was still kind of a downer.  (And no, scenes of a wight going up in flames or of Jon and Dany swooping through the canyons of the north — as scary and lovely as they were — are not really enough to make up for all those cranky reunions.)

Perhaps the biggest excitement of the episode was in the title sequence: whoa, there’s the fallen wall and we even see the crypt.  And what’s all this about the crypt, anyway?  The producers are clearly signaling that there’s something important down there but what?  I sure hope all those dead bodies aren’t going to turn into wights when the white walkers approach.  Or is the secret something magical?  Stay tuned because we won’t be finding out tonight.

The sequence immediately after the opening credits was also quite nice.  There’s an urchin scrambling to get a good look at the pageantry of the approaching Targaryen armies, which recalls the young Arya from the very first episode of the series also securing a good vantage point to witness the entry of King Robert’s procession.  And then, to drive the point home, there’s the fully-grown Arya in the crowd, a stand-in for the rest of us as we get reintroduced to the various characters.  There’s the regal Jon and Daenerys (yay!), the brutal Hound (boo), the brave Gendry (yay!), the squabbling Tyrion and Varys (meh), and the stoic Greyworm and Missandei (yay!)

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen these folks so there’s a certain throat-tightening to have them back in our lives.  And we’ve looked eagerly to their reunions — won’t they be as thrilled to see each otheras we are to see them?

Well, not exactly.  It was to be expected that the Jon/Bran reunion would not be everything we’d want, given that Braniac’s a super-warg.  Jon, at least, is emotional.  Bran-Bot not so much (I’m trying out various nicknames for Bran, in case you didn’t notice.)  But I had expected a warmer meeting between Tyrion and Sansa.  Both had been victimized by Tywin and Cersei and had behaved kindly towards each other when married back in Kings Landing but now they both act distant and aggrieved.

And so it goes.  This episode is full of the scowling and side-eyes you’d expect at a Murdoch family reunion.  And why not? When this gang gets together, everyone or everyone’s father has killed everyone else’s father or brother.

The reunion between Arya and Jon goes somewhat better and does moisten the eyes for a brief moment.  Arya still has Needle, which is nice, but instead of giving Jon her full support after he survived a sword in the heart, she gives him grief for bringing back a foreign Queen.

And here we get to the heart of the matter, in order to set the table for the rest of the season, the showrunners need to set up conflicts and obstacles for our heroes to overcome.  But we the eager viewers just want to move directly to the battles, confrontations, reconciliations and bittersweet ending.

So, Conflict One is the north’s resentment that Jon gave up his title as “King of the North” and bent the knee to a Targaryen.  As the extremely direct Lady Marmont says (and wouldn’t you hate to be her elementary school teacher?) “You left Winterfell a king and came back … I’m not sure what you are now? A lord?  Nothing at all?”  Boy toy is not the answer she was looking for.

Time and again we hear that the people of the North don’t like outsiders and Jon’s explanation that he’s really doing them a favor falls on deaf ears.  And this is Jon’s lot in life. To see the big picture before everyone else.  To be asked to lead and then to have everyone second guess him when he does.  To be betrayed by the people he’s trying to help. And frankly this is a drag after all these years.

Something else that’s a bit of a downer is trying to remember why we liked some of these characters in the first place.  There’s been a lot of critical commentary about how great it is that GoT has strong female characters, but in this episode at least they’re all a bit of a pill.  You expect it from the evil Cersei, but Sansa and Dany are so hung up on their own prerogatives — who’s bending that goddamn knee — that it’s actually unpleasant.

Dany’s attempts at diplomacy don’t really go so well either.  She tries to flatter Sansa with compliments about her beauty and hospitality, which get only a frosty response.  But that’s a lei-throwing-Hawaiian-style welcome compared to her interaction with Sam.  Now if I were Queen Daenerys, I would sure bitch about my staffing.  No one thought to tell her that the last name of her boyfriend’s best friend was Tarley?  She goes in to bestow her beneficence on the guy who cured Ser Jorah’s greyscale and end’s up having to admit, “yeah I burned up your father and brother.”  Awkward.

Sansa’s not much more likable.  When she’s not complaining about all the mouths she’s got to feed, or dissing Tyion’s intelligence, or implying that Jon sold them out because he’s in love with Dany, she’s sending poor Ned Umber off to his death in a vain attempt to bring bring the people of Last Hearth to Winterfell.

I think the odds of Sansa ending up Queen of the whole shebang increased considerably this episode.  She’s showing herself to be a capable administrator and good short-term strategist.  Arya goes so far as to say that she’s “The smartest person I know,” and Tyrion observes that “many underestimated you — many of them are dead now.”  Presumably she’ll warm up a bit in subsequent episodes.  But for now she’s acting like the responsible spouse who’s annoyed that the other spouse brought home so many free-loading friends on short notice.

Before we turn our attention South, we have to discuss two more Winterfell reunions.

First, Jon and Sam’s reunion is not as satisfying as it should have been because: a) “your girlfriend burned up my family;” and b) “your dad’s not your dad.”  It’s significant that this conversation takes place in the crypt, although why Jon is in the crypt is unclear since Ned Stark’s remains are not there.  But you know who IS down there, Jon?  Mom.  Oh, and by the way, you’re the real heir to the Iron Throne.

Of course Jon is staggered, not having had the benefit of the 600 days we’ve had to absorb this plot twist.  Having once been miserable as a bastard, he has now come to embrace it.  He does have Stark blood, just from the wrong side.  And as Jon shrinks from the prospect of displacing Daenerys as the legitimate ruler of Westeros, Sam sticks in the sword, leaving a wound of doubt — you could have executed men for disloyalty but you didn’t; you gave up the crown to save your people but would she?  Probably not and Jon knows it.

The other reunion worth mentioning happens in the concluding scene of the show.  My wife pointed out that when Sam stumbled upon Bran-Brain on his way to see Jon he asked what he was doing sitting outside and Bran said, “waiting for an old friend.”  Well, lo and behold, that friend is Jaime Lannister and the last time THEY were together Jaime pushed a pre-ward Bran out of a window.  I’m sure Jaime’s reaction is “Damn, THAT kid’s still alive?”  Of course now it’s a very different Jaime and a completely different Bran, but I can’t wait to hear what they say to each other.

Meanwhile in King’s Landing

The episode is titled “Winterfell,” but a few notable things do happen in Kings Landing.  For starters, there’s Cersei drinking wine, which prompts a few Internet geniuses to wonder if she’s really pregnant.  What these folks don’t know is that because it’s only been a few decades since we started obsessing about maternal health, almost every Baby Boomer survived a womb marinated in martinis, whisky sours, daiquiris and white Russians.   That unborn baby is lucky Cersei’s not also sucking away on Parliament cigarettes.

They big news down there is that Euron Greyjoy is back with the the Golden Company — 20,000 men and 2,000 horses but no elephants alas, because well, until now no one really thought through that elephants and boats don’t mix. (And man, is Cersei bummed that there are no pacyderms.  I guess she always wanted to go to the circus.)

I’m a little surprised that Euron was able to get across the sea and back in such a short time but I guess it’s a little late in the game to be be raising questions about how long it takes people to get from Place A to Place B.

In any event, along with the Golden Company is their commander, a Captain Strickland, who’s dressed like the most magnificent Roman centurion of all time.  Undoubtedly we will see a lot more of this guy but I do feel compelled to ask, is it really fair to be introducing new characters this late in the series?   Apparently the Golden Company have a long backstory in the books — feel free to Google them — and it seems like they could have surfaced sooner than this.

Strickland is presumably a good guy because he doesn’t look happy that Eruon killed a few of his men in a gambling argument.  The Golden Company are the gold standard of mercenaries and are famous for never breaking a contract, although we’ll have to see how that plays out when Strickland learns who his clients are.

Meanwhile, the real action is the romantic (not) banter between Cersei and Euron.  How are we supposed to weigh the question of whether the two worst people in the kingdom should do the deed?  My reaction was indifference, followed by repugnance when Euon asked how he measured up to her other bedmates (it’s one thing to wonder; it’s another to ask, for God’s sake!)  What this scene did tell me, though, is that Cersei’s next baby is not Euron’s after all, as I’d falsely suspected, which makes me think she’ll have a miscarriage because Jaime will never kill her (as we all assume he’ll do) while she’s pregnant with her child.

I hope Euron enjoyed that role in the hay because while he was demonstrating his swordsmanship, and decidedly NOT putting a prince in that belly, Theon and his crew somehow manage to slip onto his ship and rescue Yara.  Wow, that was easy!  And so much for my other theory that Theon was going to perish rescuing his sister.  Instead he’s headed back to Winterfell, where he can expect a Jaime Lannister-type reception, because even that’s preferable to another minute in the Iron Islands.  By the way, kudos to Yara for not getting hung up — like Cersei, Dany, and Sansa have been — on who owes deference to whom.  She senses that Theon wants to go to Winterfell so encourages him to go.

And what would “Game of Thrones” be without a gratuitous nude brothel scene.  Bronn’s about to have his way with three poxed-up whores when Qyburn interrupts the fun with a mission from Cersei.  For a minute I was excited that this might be a scene involving the former love-birds but now enmity-ridden actors who play Cersie and Bronn (supposedly they dislike each other in real life that they can’t be on the same set).  But no, Qyburn tells Bronn that the Queen wants him to kill her brothers with the very crossbow that Tyrion used to kill Tywin.  “This f—ing family,” Bronn responds.  Truer words were never spoken.

Some Other Observations

• “Winterfell” convinced me even more that Jon is a Christ-like figure.  There’s been a lot of critical speculation that he is the “prince who was promised,” which sounds suspiciously like a Messiah.  This prince apparently figures more prominently in the mythology of the novels, although he’s also the savior that Melisandre has been chasing all series.  Remember that Melisandre worships the “One True God,” (i.e., a monotheistic deity) while most of Westeros has a seven-deity religion.  Jon has already been resurrected once, but even more telling in this episode is all the second-guessing and doubting by the people of the north of someone who has only always sacrificed for them. This is what the Israelites constantly did to God in the Old Testament and what the Jews did to Jesus later on.  What have you done for me recently Jon Snow?

• The one truly horrifying scene in the episode occurred when Tormund and Beric happen upon the deserted Last Hearth castle and find the body of Ned Umber crucified in the middle of a giant pictograph that looked disturbingly like a swastika. And how shocking when Ned comes to life as a wight and is then burned and left writhing while pinned to the wall?  (btw, there has been a lot of valid griping about the gratuitous violence against women on the show, but by my count this is the fourth youth who has been charred beyond recognition, starting with the two boys Theon burned when he took over Winterfell, followed by Stannis’s daughter.)
• Where was Brienne?  I suppose they are saving her to vouch for Jaime, in one of the other highly-anticipated reunions.  We were also denied the reunion of Tyrion and Podrick, “the most loyal squire.”

Brienne and Podrick get about half a second of screen time in this episode in this scene

• The Night King also absented himself from “Winterfell.”  That’s fine, I guess, but what is that army of the dead doing?  Are they just wandering the countryside hoping they’ll stumble upon Winterfell eventually?  And are they after something in the crypt?
• Bran 2.0 has lost a lot of his personality but he does get off some of the most legitimately funny lines.  When Jon hugs him so sweetly and observes “You’re a man,” he responds dryly, “almost.” Compare this to the lame repartee between Sansa and Dany: “What do dragons eat anyway?” “Whatever they want.” Oh snap!
• What has happened to Tyrion?  Peter Dinklage gets top billing in the credits but his character has really lost his edge.  As Sansa says so dismissively, “I used to think you were the smartest person I ever met.”
• It’s a bad sign that the dragons aren’t eating.  Presumably they don’t like the cold after all and won’t turn out to be weapons of mass destruction when the Night King shows up.  Speaking of which, if that Night King had any strategic judgment he’d just wait everyone out.  There’s already not enough food to feed the armies of Winterfell; imagine what a six-month siege would do.
• In the brothel one of the whores says, “That boy Eddie?  The ginger?  Came back with his face burnt off.  He has no eyelids now.”  The great James Hibbard at Entertainment Weekly speculates that this is a reference to Ed Sheeran, who so preposterously appeared as a foot soldier last season.
• I suppose the scene of Jon and Dany flying those dragons was supposed to evoke the majesty and beauty of the north as well as their burgeoning new love but it left me cold.  It’s been done with “Dumbo” and Harry Potter.  That’s a lot of CGI at a time when we just want to advance the plot.
• About 75 percent of the scenes in the trailer were used up in this episode and most of them were in the first ten minutes.  That’s fair, but there’s almost no remaining hint about what’s coming up other than the much-discussed battle of Winterfell.

Death Toll

For all the talk about the impending massacre of our characters, the only personage to die this week was just about the most minor bannerman in Westeros, poor Ned Umber, last of his name.  You will recall that when his dad sided with Ramsey Bolton Sansa wanted to take the castle away from the Umbers but Jon Snow intervened to counsel mercy and not visit the sins of the father on the children.  I think Ned would have been happier if Jon had not won that argument.  So this means that there are now only five episodes left in which to wipe out half the cast.

RIP:

• Ned Umber

Next Time

Jaime’s trial. I hope they don’t prolong this because we all know that he’s not going to be executed by this group.

One Last Treat

Do yourself a favor and watch this 25-second clip.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1117611687950127106

Who Will Die on Game of Thrones and Other Pressing Questions

Game of Thrones debuted almost exactly eight years ago on April 21, 2011, and the intervening years have been an unrelenting period of murder, betrayal, death, and destruction.  And that’s just in Washington D.C.!

Ha Ha.  I jest.  No, seriously, all joking aside, Game of Thrones has been the most gruesome show in the history of TV, with a body count that can’t even be calculated (how many people were in the Citadel when Cersei blew it up anyway?)  And to make matters worse, some of the show’s most beloved characters have found themselves beheaded, mutilated, immolated, or poisoned along the way.

So it’s natural to ask, as one does with one’s favorite TV shows, who will be left standing at the end?

I am not among those who think most of the surviving characters will die.  Although the show exudes enough existential despair to make Jean-Paul Sartre weep, HBO needs to walk a fine line.  Intending to launch a GoT franchise with prequels and God knows what else, it can’t demoralize its viewers by killing TOO many of our favorites.  Unless they’re planning a theme park where you can see Ned Stark’s head on a post and patronize a Tyrion-branded brothel, there has to be a quasi-satisfying ending;  we the viewers can’t be so emotionally shredded that we’re turned off of Game of Thrones intellectual property forever.

Also, to be frank, there’s not enough time left for a major blood-letting of the good guys.  Whenever  an important “good” character dies on GoT the producers give us time to absorb the blow.  They didn’t follow up the Red Wedding with another massacre because they knew we couldn’t take it.  I’m sure they will kill a few of our favorites but not most of them.

Who will end up on the throne? 

But even if MOST of the characters won’t die, I think we can assume the Westeros casket-makers will be busy the next six weeks.  And to get at the question of who will survive we first need to ask who will end up on the Iron Throne?

In any ordinary TV show, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen would end up co-rulers.  Both heroically ascended from extreme vulnerability to great heights despite their many mistakes by learning from those mistakes, displaying great courage, evolving into charismatic leaders, and being sexy as hell.  They deserve to end up on top.  In a normal show there’d be some bumps along the way — as there would be in any incest-driven Rom-Com — but they’d work it out.  But Game of Thrones is no ordinary show and I don’t think they will give us what we so desperately want.

As much as it pains me to say this, I can’t imagine that Jon Snow (aka Aegon Targaryen) will be standing at the end.  Despite surviving enough hero’s journeys to make Joseph Campbell’s head spin, he seems destined to experience a sacrificial tragic death.  And why not? He’s made it clear enough that that’s what he really wants.  The guy is grim, grim, grim.  Even during that love boat ride to White Harbor he didn’t really seem to be enjoying his time in the sack with Aunt Dany.  And if I can really reach for a metaphor, Jon is a Christ-like figure, having been resurrected from the dead.  But when Jesus came back to his followers he only stayed for forty days.  By that measure, Jon has outlived his time back on earth.

As for the Mother of Dragons herself, I can’t imagine she’ll take it well that, after all she’s been through, she’s not the actual heir to the throne.  Whether she’ll let Jon hop on one her dragons to fight the White Walkers is an interesting question.  I say yes, we’ll see Jon Snow ride a dragon.  But will Khaleesi end up as Queen Daenerys?  My gut tells me no, that we won’t be rewarded with anything that obvious, even though she has earned it through her remarkable leadership.  Maybe she’s take her Unsullied and Dothrakis back to Esteros where they real belong, anyway.

So if both Jon and Dany are out of running for the Iron Throne, I’ll take a wild guess and put my money on another male/female team: Sansa and Tyrion.  Technically they are still legally married and uniting the Stark and Lannister houses could bring peace to Westeros.

With that as an admittedly long set-up, here’s some guesses on who will and will not survive Season Eight.

The Must-Dies

It’s been a given that the worst person in Westeros at any given time will eventually die (in order: Joffrey, Ramsay Bolton, and Littlefinger).  So I think we can expect the demise of these truly evil characters.

Cersei Lannister — Probably at the hands of Jaimie.

 Euron Greyjoy — All those Greyjoys are bad news but he’s the worst.

The Night King — the only reason to keep this guy alive is in case they need to have him available for sequels.  By the way, this is a good time to clarify that “White Walkers” are completely different from “Wights”.  The White Walkers are a race of creepy living creatures that go back to the beginning of the age of man.  The Wights are reanimated dead corpses.

The Mountain — Obviously The Hound is going to kill him (or die trying).

The Probably-Die-For-Their-Sins

This is a group of characters who have done A LOT of bad stuff but have repented of their evil ways and will probably find redemption in death.

The Hound — As noted above in the prediction about The Mountain, there will certainly be a confrontation between these two brutal brothers, one who has been humanized and another who has literally been dehumanized.  I don’t know if they’ll both be dead at the end of this fight, but almost certainly they will be by the end of the series.

Theon Greyjoy — There’s a scene in the final episode of Season Seven where Theon meets Jon Snow at Dragonstone and asks for his understanding and forgiveness.  Here we have two characters with similar backgrounds — semi-orphaned boys raised as brothers by their surrogate father Ned Stark.  With these two men George R.R. Martin is making a point about the essential immutability of human nature.  One of them is innately a hero and the other a weakling.  And after being one of the most harmful characters in the series, I think it’s extremely likely that Theon will redeem himself by dying while trying to rescue his sister Yara.

Jamie Lannister — No character has been as morally conflicted as The Kingslayer, who is reviled for breaking his oath to protect a mad king.  “So many oaths,” he sighs at one point, implicitly asking what you should do when loyalties contradict each other.  Jamie hasn’t acted as badly as some other GoT characters, but he seems more conscience-stricken than any.  On regular TV this usually means a heroic death, but on this show who knows?  He might survive.

Melisandre — No character has made as many mistakes as this gal.  If Stannis Baratheon had listened to Davos instead of her, he’d probably be king now and his daughter wouldn’t be a fricassee.  She definitely cannot survive the season, even if she did bring Jon Snow back from the dead.

The Must-Not-Dies

These are the characters who are frequently weak but nevertheless heroic. They have suffered at the hands of a brutal world and their deaths would provoke an uprising by Thrones fans everywhere.  In order of how intensely we don’t want them to die are:

Sansa — She started out as my least-favorite character on the show but she has both suffered and grown the most.  I’m as surprised as any at how protective I am of her.  She’s still not my favorite character but she most deserves to live.

Gilly’s baby Sam — Kill that kid and I’ll throw a shoe through the TV.

Gilly — Ditto

Samwell Tarley — He’s widely seen as a stand-in for George R.R. Martin, the loyal scholar who plods away and saves the world.  But he’s really a stand-in for us, all we ordinary folk who, not blessed by physical skill, need to get by on our wits and character.  Killing Sam would be like killing US.

Ghost — Jon’s direwolf is not exactly defenseless, but killing him would still be traumatic.

Tyrion — The most complicated character on this list and probably the smartest person in Westeros (although still prone to big mistakes), Tyrion has offed his share, including his former mistress and father, but he too has striven mightily to create a better world.  If he survives he may even convince the survivors to destroy the Iron Throne and rule Westeros as a confederation of independent realms — sort of like the European Union with swords and torture.

Podrick — So loyal and so good in the sack.  He deserves to live.

Gendry — Robert Baratheon’s bastard son and last survivor of that gene pool has acted with native nobility and humility, rising from obscurity in a blacksmith’s forge to a trusted warrior. And it looks like he’s going to be in charge of forging dragonglass into the only weapons that can kill White Walkers and Wights. It would be heartbreaking if didn’t survive after all this.

Arya — Arya is the one person on this list who is neither defenseless or innocent, but we are as emotionally attached to her as any other character and she cannot die.

Vulnerable During the Battle of Winterfell

The Battle of Winterfell, is already being touted as the longest-lasting cinematic battle ever to appear on TV or film, and we can assume it will occur in Episode Three on April 28.    Even in The Battle of Hogwarts, at the end of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling killed off many important characters (although none that we cared passionately about) so we can assume the bloodthirsty HBO crew will outdo her.  (There are a lot of clues in the trailer below).  On the other hand, there will be three more episodes after The Battle of Winterfall and someone has to be alive to kill Cersei, Euron and The Mountain, so we can’t expect everyone to die up there.

Warriors at risk — Brienne of Tarth; Davos; Ser Jorah; Tormund; Grey Worm; and the two living dragons Drogon and Rhaegal.  Parenthetically, I can’t imagine that the Dothracki or Unsullied, so acclimated to the warmer weather of Esteros, are going to be effective in the snow.

Innocents and non-warriors at risk — In addition to everyone mentioned in the “Must-Not-Die” category listed above: Missandei, Varys and Bran.  And I don’t see Bran dying here unless he does some Super-Warg thing that sacrificially allows him to connect with the Night King or that reanimated dragon, which then exhausts his life force.

Other Random Characters 

Some people who don’t fit in the categories above:

Yara — Taken prisoner by her evil uncle Euron, she might not even be alive, but unless we have seen people die in front of our eyes (remember when we thought The Hound was dead?  Won’t get fooled again!) we should assume that they are alive.  I also assume she will live to rule the Iron Islands, although if it were up to me, I’d go in and wipe out that whole population since all they do is rape and pillage.

Qyburn — The Dr. Frankenstein of Kings Landing has to go, after all he’s done in the service of Cersei.

Bronn — Supposedly the actor who plays Bronn had a real-life romantic entanglement with the actress who plays Cersei; and apparently this affair ended so poorly that these two can’t be filmed in the same scene, which explains why Bronn didn’t attend the “Dragon Pit summit,” at the end of last season.  And yet here they are, both stranded in Kings Landing, with Bronn in charge of the King’s Guard.  Bronn is the lovable scoundrel who provides comic relief and almost always survives even the bloodthirstiest TV shows. My guess is he will get his pay-off and finally retire to his castle with his wife.

OK, so there are my predictions.  Feel free to ridicule me if I’m wrong.

And while we’re waiting for Sunday, enjoy Kit Harrington’s monologue on Saturday Night Live.