Tonight’s
Game Of Thrones contains one of the most
difficult to stomach deaths in the history of a series known for
particularly brutal demises. A character that we did not know all that
well, but everyone had to like, an innocent who did nothing to deserve
their horrific fate.
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Save Tonight, Sweet Prince
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I’m actually speaking of the princess Shireen of the House Baratheon,
of course, who is horribly and publicly burned at the stake by her own
parents, for reasons that no one, least of all her, will understand.
Davos certainly won’t, and while I don’t see him throwing in with the
despicable Boltons (sidebar: I’m half convinced Ramsay is as magical as
Melisandre at this point, with his ability to teleport in and out unseen
while setting 2 dozen perfectly timed fires in freezing, wet and windy
conditions), I could see him despairing over it to the point that he
would start wearing black. Furthermore, it seems that it may have been
too much for Stannis’s wife, of all people, whose faith seems to have
reached a breaking point that not even she knew it had. What remains to
be seen is whether watching their “king” act so monstrously will have a
significant effect on his bannermen. By which I mean both his soldiers
on the show and those in our world that identify(ied) as Team Stannis.
I’ve never been on board that train, but I admit that even I doubted he
would stoop so low.
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To that end, I wonder if this will drive some viewers away from sheer
brutality fatigue. On the one hand, I’d kind of think that by its fifth
year the show would’ve shed most anyone who wasn’t pretty hard-hearted
about such things, but on the other this has to be particularly
traumatic for any parents in the audience. I suppose it has a silver
lining in that the Red Woman should have a full store of mana for
raining terror down on the Boltons, but even though I half-jokingly said
otherwise last week, I’m no longer sure that giving Ramsay the same
treatment would make up for having to hear the girl’s screams as she
burned.
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Look, I don’t have a joke ready, and I think we all deserve something like this.
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What makes this arguably bleaker than even the Red Wedding is that
despite our not being as attached to Shireen, this is not a “twist” in a
plotting sense, and thus lacks any charge of roller-coaster excitement
that those tragedies carried. Where those deaths dropped your jaw, here
your stomach just sinks. Because this is not set to have the same
immediate, seismic narrative consequences that offing the nominal
hero(s) carries; there is no violation of storytelling rules at work
here, only of human decency at its basest level. After all, even Cersei
loves her children, as even her enemies acknowledge. Hell, the Boltons
suddenly seem a reasonable alternative in light of this;they at least
stick mostly to “throwing stones at cripples”, rather than killing those
devoted to them (not that Ramsay is above offing a servant or two for
his amusement).
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As if I could forget, show
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That arena scene just keeps ramping up the action, giving us the most
intensive dragon work of the entire series, and the biggest spectacle
since…well, last week. And kudos to HBO for not blowing their spectacle
load for these sequences in their season promos, but this is nowhere
near as exciting as Hardhome, for a few reasons. A minor one is that
Emilia Clarke is misdirected in the flying sequence at the end. It
seems like she should be either exuberant or terrified climbing on to
the dragon, but apparently they were going for serene (maybe?) and ended
up on….just kind of there. More significantly, the Sons of the Harpy
are so clearly placeholder antagonists, compared to the Walkers’ Final
Boss status, so I didn’t buy for a second that either Dany or Tyrion
would die at their hands. Plus I’d spent the whole sequence thinking
about how they wouldn’t have bothered to set up Jorah getting greyscale
only to have him fall in battle before anyone finds out. Since I’ve
never given a shit for Daario, the worst possible casualty left was
Missandei. And as pleasant a presence as Nathalie Emmanuel is, I’d just
listened to a young girl scream as she was roasted alive by her
parents. I had just about no shit left to lose at that point.
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I find this one especially soothing because neither of them are burning alive
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And I do think the triumphant ending was intentionally placed there
to counteract that giant downer, but for me and quite a few others it
was nearly completely overpowered by it. And so I think it might’ve
been better if the finales of the last two episodes were swapped.
Hardhome is even less of a victory than the dragon flight, but that
means the tonal shift might not clash quite as hard, and besides that it
would’ve kept the focus in the North and served as a timely reminder
that Melisandre’s horrors are in service of more than Stannis’s personal
vindication. Or maybe it would just cater to my personal preference
for the Wall storyline getting more prominence than the Essos one.
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Or maybe it would’ve soured one of my favorite sequences in the show’s
history by proximity to such a nauseating development. Because I can’t
even muster any real attention for the Dorne, Braavos or Castle Black
scenes from this week. So I’ll throw out a few predictions for the
finale before check out:
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Arya steals a face to take out Meryn and is tossed out of the House Of
Black And White. Nothing much happens in Mereen. The FrankenMountain
tears through the Faith Militant to free the captives, which leaves
Cersei free but completely on the outs from the regime. Ellaria sends a
Sand Snake back in the Prince’s entourage to kill Cersei. Olly does
something terrible to sabotage the Wildling alliance, and I’m going to
say it’s Sam that takes the loss.
So is it Sunday yet?
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