The Best TV of 2023

I’m not sure what this says about my state of mind (or society in general) but my four favorite TV series this year featured people creating unconventional families or communities in a heartless world. There’s a lot about surviving grief on these shows, but not a lot of victimization. These are about people who soldier on without a lot of whining.

Once again, I am amazed at how little traditional network TV I watched this year. I still DVR a few shows but except for Saturday Night Live (not ranked here) I usually end of watching them on Hulu anyway. And speaking of which, Hooray for Hulu, which has the best content. I subscribe to the ad-supported service so it’s a bargain despite all the ads for depression, hair loss, and ED. Maybe one of these years I really will cut the cord. But’s hard for us Boomers to let go.

One final observation. Many of the lower-ranked shows were series that once ranked much higher. It’s surprising how quickly we tire of TV shows today. Not too long ago, a series could go on for seven or eight years with no drop-off in quality. Part of the problem is that many popular contemporary series are based on a unique premise that delights us at first and then becomes tiresome with repetition. Plus each season has a story arc with a lot of plot and character development. The long-lasting shows (like Cheers
or Seinfeld) had no story arcs — just stand-along episodes that you could watch out of order and not miss much. Those were the days.

1. Reservation Dogs (Hulu)

This was the third and final season of the most affecting TV show in years. Four teens on an Indian reservation have mourned and matured after the suicide of a fifth friend. Now we see them launched into early adulthood, with the support of their extended community. A clear-eyed comedy that refuses to make these kids victims, although they seem to have about three parents among them. The genius of the season is that it digs deeply into intergenerational story-telling and shows how one generation flows into another.

2. The Bear (Hulu)

A super-intense show about a talented chef from a dysfunctional Chicago family trying to open his own fine dining restaurant, even as he deals with his own grief and longing for connection. There’s a lot of yelling and making up after fights, although some wounds cannot be healed. This show also has the most amazing cameo appearances of the season, with multiple Oscar winners showing up for short bits. And for what it’s worth, I think this is the most conservative show of the year because it celebrates the dignity of work, doing the job right, and serving others.

3. Somebody Somewhere (Max)

Sam is an overly self-aware but emotionally blocked daughter of Kansas, who returned to her small farming town to care for her dying daughter and didn’t leave after the funeral. She’s slowly making connections and making herself vulnerable again. The show is sweet and slow-moving but it packs a punch.

4. Welcome to Wrexham (Hulu)

Who would have thought that a documentary about two actors (Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney) buying a Welsh soccer team could be so emotional and inspiring? This show is for anyone who has ever loved anything enough to keep loving it when it disappoints you.

5. Succession (Max)

I hated myself for watching Succession. On the one hand, it was the funniest show of the year. On the other hand, all the characters were either very loathsome or just a little bit loathsome. And then there was all that voyeurism. Do the fantastically rich really live like that? Not all the plotlines made sense this year, especially where presidential politics was involved, but still — it was beautifully acted, hilariously written, and gorgeously shot.

6. White Lotus (Max)

Another show with a huge budget and beautiful locations about rich white people acting badly. It introduced the much needed phrase “high-end gays.”

7. Letterkenny (Hulu)

For twelve seasons Letterkenny was the most hilarious and politically incorrect show on TV. Who knew Canadians could be so funny? 

8. The Diplomat (Netflix)

Keri Russell plays the American ambassador to the UK, in a political thriller that that combines a lot of fast-paced, jargon-rich dialogue with some of the most ridiculous plot twists you could think of. But it’s very addicting.

9. The Crown (Netflix)

The final season of The Crown is by necessity kind of a downer, considering how badly those people messed up their lives, but it’s still an emotional rumination on influence, mortality, and duty. I’m glad it’s over, though, especially since Her Majesty has subsequently died.

10. Daisy and the Six (Amazon Prime)

Very loosely based on Fleetwood Mac, Daisy and the Six is a nostalgic recreation of the music scene in the 1970s, when sex, drugs and rock and roll ruled the world. The story is a weensy bit melodramatic but the really great music, all of which I downloaded, really saved the day.

11. Jury Duty (Amazon Prime)

Ronald Gladden, a regular schmo who doesn’t realize that everyone except him is an actor in a fake jury trial, is a true hero for our times. His deep decency and commitment to do the right thing, even as the circumstances become more and more outlandish, is legitimately heart-warming.

12. Abbott Elementary (ABC)

This is the only series from old-fashioned traditional TV (ABC) that I watched this year. Abbott Elementary is a real throw-back to the days when sitcoms were reliably funny and warm. Set in a low-income elementary school in Philadelphia, it features the usual combination of characters who would never be friends in real life but who somehow manage to bond in workplace comedies. It’s mildly funny but very sweet.

13. Fargo (Hulu)

I’m taking a risk here in listing the series so high since I haven’t seen the conclusion yet, but based on the track record of the show I am hoping it sticks the landing again. Each season of Fargo is set in Minnesota, with a very decent cop investigating deep depravity, and this is creepily no different.

14. Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)

A cute show that spoofs New York City, show business, and podcasts, although you have to wonder if the writers have any idea how podcasts actually work. After only three seasons, the series is beginning to show its seams, and I feel my interest waning. The murder mystery did work, though, and as usual I never did guess the killer.

15. Poker Face (Peacock)

Very good premise for a show. Natasha Lyonne has the power to tell when people are lying but the misfortune to make friends with people who are always being murdered. She’s also on the run from a gambling casino mob boss. Often compared to Columbo, in that we know who committed the murder and enjoy the pleasure of seeing her solve the case.

16. What We Do In the Shadows (Hulu)

Season five was a bit of comeback after a mildly depressing season four, but I don’t think it will ever feel as fresh and hilarious as it did in the first couple of seasons. The premise is still funny — four clueless vampires trying to adapt to life on Staten Island — but the show is on cruise control.

17. Justified City Primeval (Hulu)

The original Justified was one of the great TV shows of the 2010s. Timothy Olyphant played a US Marshall in his native Kentucky. But in City Primeval he’s a stranger in Chicago and the combination doesn’t quite click.

18. CB Strike (Amazon Prime)

The Cormoran Strike novels are the product of JK Rowlings’ capacious imagination, featuring a gritty London detective and his aspiring partner and would-be love interest teaming up to solve brutal murders. The BBC made five of the novels into short series and we watched three of them this year. All excellent. That JK Rowlings! She really does know how to spin a tale.

19. Beckham (Netflix)

A fascinating documentary about David Beckham, soccer star, media celebrity and obsessive-compulsive patient. Unless you followed soccer, he’s one of those guys that you heard about constantly but can’t remember why, so I was glad to get the lowdown. And it was amazing. His entire life is documented on video and the producers were able to follow him from a 14-year-old teen phenomenon to his crusty self today. (By the way, between this and The Crown, I can’t understand how any famous person ever survives the British media.)

20. Winning Time (Max)

Highly entertaining but historically questionable recounting of the early LA Lakers dynasty, with a heavy focus on Magic Johnson, who has to be happy that this was cancelled after two seasons. 

21. The White House Plumbers (Max)

I haven’t wallowed in Watergate for a long time, so I appreciated the opportunity to review some of the highlights (or, rather, lowlights) of that woeful saga. This version was told from the bottom up — from the perspective of Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the guys who planned the break-in and went to jail for their troubles. How well I remember the 70’s, may they rest in peace, and yet my mouth was agape at seeing some of the crazy things I had long forgotten about.

22. Trailer Park Boys (Netflix)

Again, who ever guessed that Canadians could be this funny? We’re just catching up with this 20-year-old series about the residents of a Canadian trailer park. I would rank this higher except I feel a little uncomfortable laughing at the pathos of poor white trash.

23. Jack Ryan (Amazon Prime)

I never thought that Jim Halpert could be an action figure but turns out he’s an Boston College-trained economist who can outfight terrorists and communists. The show has a lot of shooting, explosions, and emotions and is a perfectly fine way to spend several hours in front of the TV.

24. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Another series that lasted a little longer than it should have. Anything this quirky eventually begins to become annoying. So much talking, so many outfits, so much interpersonal drama! I will say this, though: the show ended with a lot of truth. Characters this self-absorbed are unlikely to have fairytale lives.

25. Yellowstone

I thought the first season was great TV. I started to get disenchanted in the second season and by the third season I’d given up completely. There’s only so much plot that any series can bear (and so many murders, in a series that is supposed to reflect real life). Like Succession, almost all the characters are reprehensible, but Yellowstone lacks the sharp dialogue that makes Succession watchable.

Quantantine Streaming

This has to be one of our most unusual national crises.  We are basically being told that it is our patriotic duty to stay at home and not be depressed.  Fortunately we are living in a Golden Age of streaming video so at least we have television to keep our spirits up.  I hope everyone will give me suggestions on what to watch, but if I’m going to make that request it only seems fair to offer my own recommendations.

Comedies

The sitcom has never been more necessary than now. And in one devestating week in April we experienced the end of “Modern Family,” “Schitt’s Creek” and possibly “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” (all of which are worth rewatching from the beginning.) Fear not, there are so many other commedies still worth streaming. Here are a few recommendations.

The Office

I wouldn’t both mentioning “The Office,”  which is an obvious go-to and still massively popular, except that Jenna Fisher and Angela Kinsey have launched a new podcast — The Office Ladies” in which they break down each episode from a behind-the-scenes perspective, in sequence and from the beginning.  This gives you a reason to rewatch a show that is, if anything, funnier than the first time around.  Listen to The Office Ladies” here.  “The Office” itself, now one of the most valuable properties is still available on Netflix, but not for long.

I’m Sorry

This is essentially a female version of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” featuring a comedy writer without a filter who is constantly trying to extricate herself from embarrassing situations of her own making.  It’s also a pretty good satire of the upper middle class, politically correct society. (On Amazon Prime)

Derry Girls

An unlikely comedy premise: a teenage comedy set in the Catholic section of Belfast during “The Troubles” of the 1990s.  To say this is irreverent is putting it mildly. Teens will be teens, even in a low-grade civil war.  Subtitles are a necessity as is an abondonment of dogma.  Available on Netflix.

Lovesick

I have been trying like crazy to get people to watch “Lovesick,” which is about three thirty-something British flatmates who are friends and possible lovers, but can’t get anyone to stick with it.  It’s remarkable storytelling, unfolding through a series of flashbacks.  The ostensible premise is that our confused hero is diagnosed with clamydia and needs to get in touch with his previous sexual partners to let them know. The show is an updated and more realistic version of “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” On Netflix.

BlackAF

If “I’m Sorry” is a Yuppie “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” this is a black “Curb.” The show is ostensibly about whether it’s possible for a wealthy (and I mean quite wealthy) black Hollywood success story to retain his black authenticity, but its really about a still-insecure guy who keeps trying to prove to the world and to himself that he deserves all his wealth and success.  And like many insecure people he’s got an all-purpose excuse — it’s all the fault of slavery, although no one else on the show seems to suffer from slavery-related insecurity. Despte the formula, it’s still very funny, and with each episode gifted a happy ending or moral, it’s not a stringent as “Curb.” (On Netflix)

Documentaries

The Internet seems obsessed with the freak show that is “Tiger King,” a show I watched in the same way I might eat salty buttered popcorn until I want to throw up.  There are much better documentaries to watch:

McMillions

Almost 20 years ago someone cheated on the McDonalds “Monopoly” game and stole most of the million dollar pieces.  The documentary explores how the FBI unravelled the sprawling scheme.  Like all good documentaries, this is really about human nature — in this case how we balance our dark and light sides, our greed and our morality.  The cast of characters is as wide and diverse as in “Tiger King,” but closer to the mainstream.  You can’t imagine yourself being caught up in the “Tger King” scandal but it’s not hard to see how, with a little moral compromise, you could end up in a fast food game fraud.  (On HBO Go)

Circus of Books

A nice Jewish middle class couple ran West Hollywood’s most important gay porn shop for 30 years and this is their story.  It’s a living!  On Netflix

Last Dance

When The Chicago Bulls attempted to win their sixth national championship in 1998, a film crew was given behind-the-scenes access but that footage has sat dormant and locked away for decades. Finally Michael Jordan agreed to let ESPN to make a documentary out of this buried treasure.  The result is a portrait of a very unhappy team and a grumpy G.O.A.T.  The docu-series is still unfurling on ESPN but if you need a sports fix, this is a good place to start.

Amazon Music Documentaries

Back in the old days, boys and girls, when you sat down to watch TV with nothing in mind you would do something called “channel surfing,” flipping TV channel after TV channel until something good enough popped up.  My streaming version of channel surfing when I am looking for something to watch that’s not too challenging is to go to Amazon and search for documentaries on musical acts and genres.  These are not the best documentaries in the world but they are definitely good enough to watch in a time of stress.  The documentary subjects range from the Beatles, Neil Young, The Beach Boys and the Blood Sweat and Tears to whole genres like jazz, country and hip hop.  Just start searching the let the algorithm take over from there.

Dramas

For some reason, most of the dramas I’m recommending are set outside the U.S., possibly because I find it more interesting to experience a different culture.  In any event, here are my recommendations:

Shtisel

As Israeli soap opera, in Hebrew, about the trials of an Orthodox family in Jeruselum.  It’s fascinating to see human nature at work in another culture.  Much is the same as in American culture, since humans are findamentally alike, but different traditions do have their own impact.

The Young Pope/The New Pope

Easily the most flipped out recommendation on the list, and definitely not for everybody, “The Young Pope” and “The New Pope” are seasons one and two of a hallucinatory series about a young, sexy-but-doctrinaire priest (Jude Law) who becomes Pontiff and tries to remake the church.  This is like “The Crown” for Catholics, with gorgeous sets and cinematography, full of mysticism, eroticism, and cynicism. This is the craziest thing I’ve seen on TV since the reboot of “Twin Peaks.”  Christianity is full of mystery and that’s on full display here.  On HBO Go.

The Bodyguard

“The Bodyguard” This has been out for a while but if you haven’t watched it yet, this is the perfect time to catch up. Richard Madden (aka, Robb Stark) is put in charge of protecting a British anti-terrorism minister and it’s one heart-pounding scene after another. On Netflix.

Killing Eve

Another British psychological thriller/spy series about a murderous psychopath and the MI16 agent who’s trying to track her down.  AMC is airing Season 3 now but to start at the beginning you need to catch up on Hulu or rent the two seasons on Amazon Prime

Other great dramas

If you haven’t watched “The Americans,” “Better Call Saul,” “Deadwood,” “Justified,” “Mad Men,” or “Six Feet Under,” well, you better get on that right away.

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.

“The Crown” Hates America

Princess Margaret and a corn pone LBJ 

“The Crown” is almost a perfect Netflix show.  It’s beautiful to watch, eminently streamable, smart enough not to insult your intelligence, but not so smart that you can’t figure out what’s going on.

It’s sometimes compared to “Downtown Abbey,” and while they do both come out of the same genre of aristo-porn and purport to dramatize a transitional era in British history, they are quite different shows.  “The Crown” is a serious show that takes its viewers seriously and “Downton Abbey” thinks its audiences are too stupid to figure anything out on their own, spelling out every theme and plot point at least three times.

As much as I like “The Crown,” though, I am uneasy by how the show depicts America and Americans.  This is the one area where “Downton Abbey” (and I can’t believe I’m making this concession) has a more nuanced view of the New World.  In “Downton,” Cora Crawley’s mother and uncle, played by Shirley MacLaine and Paul Giamatti, are vulgar, but they are also full of energy, forward-looking and optimistic.  The show is also frank about the possibility of upward mobility in the States.

Considering the huge audience that “The Crown” has in America, it’s surprising then that the show seems to go out of its way to take shots at our country.

The most egregious example is in the eighth episode of season 2 (“Dear Mr. President”), when President Kennedy is depicted as being physically and emotionally abusive to Jackie as well as an overall jerk.  The moral of the episode is that old admonition not to be jealous of other people because you don’t know what their lives are really like.  The show posits that Queen Elizabeth is so envious of the hugely popular American First Lady that she goes on a world tour to show off her own monarchical charisma, only to find out that Jackie is downright miserable and hopped up on pills because her husband is a miserable cheating dog.  I’m sure JFK was a serial cheater but abusive?  Only in an anti-American fever dream.

“The Crown” gets a little closer to the truth with JFK’s successor President Johnson, who this season is depicted as a coarse, corn pone, vain Foghorn Leghorn type with a grudge against Great Britain because of Vietnam.  All true, but it’s highly improbable that Princess Margaret was able to change his mind about financially bailing out the British by reciting a few dirty limericks.  It’s even less likely that LBJ would publicly trash JFK at a state dinner regardless of how he felt about him privately.  But it suits British vanity to think that a princess with no diplomatic training can twist an American president around her finger with a few compliments and lewd jokes.

The incident that made me really bristle, though, occurs in episode seven of season three (“Moondust”), when Prince Philip is smitten the heroic Apollo 11 astronauts who landed on the moon and wants to meet privately with them to learn what insights they gained from standing foot on a celestial body.  He’s dismayed to learn that they think like engineers, not poets, and are not prepared to dole out any profundities. He later complains to the Queen that they were “banal.”  Neil Armstrong banal?  Buzz Aldrin acting like a hayseed tourist in Buckingham Palace?  I think not.  I seriously doubt that the astronauts, products of a seriously religious society, were unaware of the spiritual aspects of their journey.  After all it was Frank Borman and the other crew members of Apollo 8 who delivered one of the most profound messages ever seen on TV when on Christmas Day, 1968, they read the opening verses of Genesis as they orbited the moon.

To be fair, not every American on “The Crown” is a yokel.  Prince Charles approvingly quotes Saul Bellow, and the Queen is so taken with the preaching of Billy Graham that she invites him over for a chat.  But on the whole, Americans act very déclassé and not quite worthy to wipe their feet on the palace rug.

“The Crown” is not the first British cultural product to look down its nose at America.  Particularly egregious is “Love Actually,” which regrettably raises its preposterous head every Christmas.  This movie, which purports to depict the various permutations of love, features an outlandish U.S. president played by a reptilian Billy Bob Thornton, who makes a pass at Prime Minister Hugh Grant’s assistant and is a hegemonic bully to boot.  To make matters worse, one “Love Actually” character, who’s essentially a British incel, goes to a college town in Wisconsin, where the American women are silly, beautiful and loose.

It is perhaps natural that the British, who once ruled over a quarter of the globe, would resent their diminishment as a world power and the ascension of the United States as a superpower.  And the show can’t help but project a Rule Britannia vibe in the early seasons even though UK has disposed of most of its colonies by the time Elizabeth ascended to the throne.  Not until the very end of Season Three, when a coal miners strike periodically shuts off the nation’s electricity, does it become apparent that the British economy is on the rocks.  The very sumptuousness of the production — the gorgeous palaces, estates, and dinners — make it seem like the Queen still governs over an empire instead of a small bankrupt island.

What’s strangely missing from “The Crown” is an understanding that even as England lost its economic and political power, it started really punching above its weight culturally, especially in the area of popular music, design, film, and fashion.  The British Invasion influenced generations of Americans and yet you never hear the Queen gratefully utter the words “John, Paul, Ringo George.”

The real problem with these potshots at America is that when an American sees how wrongly depicted our presidents and astronauts are, he begins to wonder about the accuracy of the British characters too.  Did Lord Mountbatten really act like a slightly more benign Tywyn Lannister?  And was Princess Margaret really an alcoholicly sexed up Bellatrix Lestrange?  I completely buy Olivia Coleman’s uncanny portrayal of the Queen but I wonder if she was really so cold to her oldest son.

Not that any of this would keep me away from the next three seasons.  Like most other viewers, I watch with one eye on the screen and one on Wikipedia to see if that seemingly astonishing plot twist really did occur.  Did Prince Charles’ sister sleep with his second wife’s first husband?  Apparently so.  Who needs to make things up when the truth is so weird.  That should go for “The Crown” depicts America too.

 

The “Downton Abbey” Movie

The thing to know about the new “Downton Abbey” movie is that if you liked the TV show you’ll like the movie twice as much because it’s twice as long as a regular episode.  Because make no mistake, this is a TV show that just happens to be projected on the screen.  Film purists would gag if they ever saw something like this referred to as “cinema.”

Not that it isn’t fun to see the thing in a movie theater full of fans.  The Dowager Countess’ quips go over so well with an audience predisposed to love them that the laughter persists so long you can’t hear the follow-up dialogue.  Overall, it’s a delightful experience.  It’s like drinking a fine white zinfandel on a warm summer afternoon.  On ice.  And with a couple of squirts of seltzer water.  It just takes the edge off reality without diving too deep.

The first clue that this is not what cinema snobs would call a real movie comes at the very beginning.  Instead of opening credits, we have a ten-minute “previously on” catch up reel, in which the actors playing Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes, appearing as their thespian selves (Jim Carter and Phyllis Logan) provide a brief recap of the six seasons of the show, complete with clips. Can you imagine Mark Hamill and Carrie Fischer doing that at the beginning of “The Return of the Jedi”?  Inconceivable!  This intro is clearly aimed at spouses and others being dragged to the movie, who need to be introduced to the twenty main characters; “Downton” auteur Julian Fellowes don’t want to strain the mental capacity of any viewer who might not immediately grasp who Tom Branson or Isabelle Crawley are.

All credit to Lord Fellowes for recognizing that the series evolved into a high-end, but silly soap opera over the years. This opening recap makes many wry nods to some of the most preposterous plot twists over the years, making it clear we’re all in on the joke.  But nothing in this recap is as funny as the moment when a glimpse of reckless driver and one-time heir Matthew Crawley first appears on screen and there’s an audible sigh of appreciation from the ladies in the audience.

As for the movie itself, the plot revolves around the upcoming visit of the King and Queen, who are taking a tour of the north country and want to use Downton as an AirBnB for one night.  This would be King George V and Queen Mary (the grandparents of the current monarch).  Now, if you’ve ever seen any movies or TV shows about British royalty, you’ll know that these two (especially her) are usually portrayed as formidable, scary, and humorless, but in the “Downtown” film they are basically good sorts who happen to be stuck in a tough but necessary job.

To the extent there’s a theme in the movie, it’s that the rich and titled have a rough life too so we should get off their backs.  Poor Lady Edith, now a marchioness, has to serve on a lot of committees that bore her, and Lady Mary is stressed about keeping the roof repaired.  But that’s nothing next to burden of the king’s daughter, Princess Mary, who is stuck in a loveless marriage that she cannot escape because of the call of duty.  But in case anyone is too dim to understand the benefits of a landed aristocracy,  it’s a servant (!!), Lady Mary’s maid, the sainted Anna, who explains it to her:  Downton is the glue that holds the county together by providing jobs, continuity and a way of life that might otherwise disappear without the Crawleys.  So Mary agrees to suck it up and continue to live her privileged existence.  (Phew, that was close.)

Like many Downton episodes, the movie seesaws between the immensely consequential (i.e., will an assassination attempt be thwarted?) and utterly inconsequential, such as who will cook for and serve Their Majesties, which is barely one level above the Denker-Spratt feud.  And both are treated with the same amount of gravitas.

Part of the problem is that “Downton Abbey” is positioned as an Upstairs/Downstairs-type drama, where the lives of both the staff and the toffs are given equal weight.  But Lord Fellowes’ heart is not really with the downstairs staff.  Their lives could not seem less interesting or important.  Many downstairs characters, like Mr. Bates and Mrs. Baxter, have nothing to do except serve as wallpaper. And the actual plots: Andy the footman is jealous because his fiancee is ogling a handsome boiler repair man; someone is pilfering nick nacks; Barrow gets his nose out of joint because Carson comes back to manage the Royal Visit; the royal staff is overbearing.  Wow, whose fertile imagination dreamed up all these fascinating stories?

Another sign that the deck is stacked in favor of the aristocracy is the character of the anti-Monarchists.  One’s an assassin, another is a thieving servant, and then there’s the nitwit Daisy, whose class consciousness is so jumbled that says she will cook for the aristocrats but declares she won’t cook for their servants.  Way to show solidarity!  In fact, the bitterest battles are between the Downton and Royal servants, who squabble among themselves over who gets the honor of changing the royal bed linen. (And as the New York Times noted in its review, the Downton servants are so committed to their betters that they fight bitterly to deny themselves a well-earned day off when the royal staff arrive.

And returning  to the King and Queen for a moment, they have a remarkable common touch that is completely a-historical.  He worries about his son, the Prince of Wales (as well he should, given that said prince will eventually marry Mrs. Simpson and abdicate).  She worries about her daughter in her loveless marriage.  They show remarkable sensitivity to the needs of Edith and her husband. They seem to know all the personal gossip about the peers of the realm. And at the ball, the King even walks up to Tom Branson to thank him for his services to the crown, which seems highly irregular.  I’m pretty sure that when His Majesty wants to talk to a commoner at a public event he gets a flunky to fetch him and doesn’t just go striding over to chat him up.

Anyway, there’s a lot more of this nonsense during the two-hour run time.  If you like nostalgia, the British nobility, soap operas, and beautiful clothes, this movie is for you.  And to make an industry-wide observation, what’s interesting about this situation is that turning a TV show into a movie is the antithesis of the Netflixication of entertainment, in which everything except blockbusters is aimed at home entertainment.  This is a film event to get fans off their couches to congregate in front of a big screen like they’ve been doing for over a hundred years.  Whether this will start a trend is unclear.  There’s a subtle hint, though, that this might be the beginning of a “Downton” series.  I assume all that will depend on the box office.  So if you want to see more “Downton” movies, be sure to turn out.

Stray Thoughts:

— To be fair, there is one personally significant story thread involving a servant — Thomas’ first experience at a gay hang-out — but even that has an air of unbelievability.  On the very night the King and Queen visit, Thomas takes off with a member of the King’s staff (who has remarkable gaydar — he recognizes Thomas as a kindred spirit with one glance).  Thomas is surprised to learn that there is not only a gay bar in Downton (or was it York?  Not clear) but an underground gay nightclub too. Not that anyone ever uses the words “gay,” “homosexual,” or “queer.” Thomas’ euphemism is “men like me.”  I think we’re supposed to assume that Thomas and the staffer have sex but it’s only gently implied with the decorum of 1940’s Hollywood censor.  As is the case in many “Downton” plots, Lord Fellowes wants to have his cake and eat it too:  he introduces a contemporary theme to get the credit for being woke but hides it under layers of gauze to avoid offending the older, sensitive members of the audience who didn’t sign up for, you know, actual man-on-man action beyond one chaste kiss, which seems to be the sole reason for the film’s PG rating.

— I have a feeling that Julian Fellowes believes that if they showed what life was really like back then, modern audiences would be repelled.  For example, I find it very hard to believe that the dinner with the King and Queen would be as informal as presented here.  There are only three footmen serving the dinner and everyone looks pretty relaxed and convivial.  Compare that to a regular family dinner from the original “Brideshead Revisited,” which was made only 40 years after the period in question and is much more likely to be historically accurate (see video below, starting at 0:50). For half as many guests the “brideshead” family has twice as many footmen and the whole atmosphere is stiff and formal.  No sane person would want to live like that today, yet that’s how the upper classes conducted themselves less than a century ago.

— I know we’re supposed to be sympathetic to Tom Branson, but boy, is he a guy who keeps failing upward.  He’s a crypto-socialist who enjoys the fruits of his in-law’s largesse, despite having no apparent occupation (and whatever happened to his auto partnership with Henry Talbot?)  He abandoned his wife in Ireland when the Irish police were after him; he allowed himself to get seduced by an avaricious maid, creating a blackmail scheme that Mrs. Hughes had to extract him from.  And yet somehow he manages to sniff out an heiress before anyone else does and it looks like he’ll soon have his own unearned fortune to complain about if the final scenes are any indication.

— Why is Matthew Goode even in this movie?  His Henry Talbot shows up for the very last scenes, having raced back from the USA to attend the King’s visit.  I can only assume that Goode was filming another movie and could only be spared for a day’s worth of shooting.

— There was one nice subtle touch about the relationship between the peers and the monarchy: Lord Grantham is unimpressed by the news that the King is coming for a visit.  “Oh him?” his shrug implies.  The villagers are losing they minds but Robert Crawley probably remembers when George V was just one of Queen Victoria’s prat grandsons.

— “Downtown” usually likes to spoon feed the plotlines but I was completely confused about Lady Maud Bagshaw, who is apparently both the Queen’s BFF and the Dowager Countess’s cousin.  I think I figured it out in the end but it was only after piecing together several elliptical and muffled lines of dialogue.

— Speaking of Lady Bagshaw, she is played by Imelda Staunton, who is the wife of the actor who plays Mr. Carson — the aforementioned Jim Carter (see below).  She’s also better known as Delores Umbridge in the “Harry Potter” movies.

— Julian Fellowes, who likes to sprinkle some historical references into his stories, is a little stingy with the broader historical context.  Except for the presence of cars, you get the impression that the movie could be set anytime between 1870 and 1930.   But there is one line to date it: the King asks the Dowager Countess about the region’s reaction to the recent general strike.    This happened in 1926, when the coal miners went on strike and much of the rest of the country also refused to work in sympathy with them.  The Dowager Countess’s response is classic — all she knows is that her maid was “curt” for few days — demonstrating once again how out of it she is.

— Completely preposterous?  The idea that Tom Branson could stumble across the King’s daughter, the Princess Mary, on a bench and not recognize her.  Then, as now, and even without social media, the Royal Family were the biggest celebrities in the realm.

And don’t forget — Machiavelli is frequently underrated!

 

 

 

 

 

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.