In honor of the faith of the Seven, and to pass the interminable wait for the conclusive episodes of Game Of Thrones, and not at all to scratch a compulsive itch that wouldn't go away once the idea occurred to me, I have decided to list my seven favorite moments from each of the first seven seasons. Videos will be embedded in the headings. Anyway, without further ado...
It takes very little time, and no words at
all, for the new order in the capital to become clear with Tywin’s return. Small Council meetings are always highlights,
regardless of the current state of the always-fluctuating roster. This one is the funniest of the lot, even as Tywin brings a heavier, more serious hand
to the proceedings.
How Varys became a eunuch was one of the
more minor mysteries in the first couple seasons. And the reveal is not something that has
stunning plot implications. It isn’t
tied to the identity of Jon Snow’s mother or crucial to the outcome of a war; it
simply gives us some insight into why he hates sorcery and thus why he would
support even the Lannisters against Stannis and his witch. The offhand way he launches into the story backfoots both us and Tyrion, but his nonchalance only underscores the horror of it. And the cold-blooded resolution reminds us
that the Spider, for all the chumminess he has shown our favored characters
over the last season, is still a dangerous player in his own right.
But in addition to informing us about Varys,
the scene is also, in a roundabout way, preparing us for the Red Wedding. Not that it is foreshadowing the event
directly, but it is telling us how justice works in this world, which is slowly
but brutally. If we stick it out long
enough, Varys promises, the survivors will receive their revenge. But it will take patience and a very strong
stomach (note that Varys endures even more horrors after the cut, before he
begins to attain the influence he will need to enact his vengeance) to get
there. What he is saying is,
fundamentally, not far of from that quote about the arc of the moral universe
being long, but tending toward justice.
I try to believe that is true of our world, but it certainly applies to
the moral universe created for this show.
For my money, the show never topped this
twist. And it’s not even an actual plot
twist, it’s a character twist, if there is such a thing. And I say there is, because like any good twist, it turns our conceptions on their head without actually contradicting
anything we’ve been told before. I’ve been beating this horse since Schwartzblog’s inception. But I remain of the same mind; a good twist doesn’t rewrite the story that has already been told. It’s easy to surprise the audience by doing that. It's harder, but much more satisfying, to add new information that completely rewires our outlook on what we already know. The best ones add information that we didn’t even realize was missing. It’s why I hate the much-lauded reveal in The Usual Suspects; of
course you can fool the audience by just showing them one thing and then
going “PSYCH!! Actually what happened was something completely different.”
Jaime’s retelling of the death of the Mad King is
brilliant not just because it’s emotionally wrenching, but because it does that
without refuting the previous accounts of Ned or anyone else on any factual
basis. It doesn’t tell us that what we
thought we knew was wrong, at least not exactly. It just tells us more about it, and the added
context changes our perception of events utterly.
Jaime Lannister is such a mess of contradictory motivations that he arguably shouldn't work at all as a character. But in an odd way, that makes him the best audience identification figure in the show at a certain point (it's doubly odd wen you think back to his entirely villainous introduction). As the show goes on, even the characters for which we feel more straightforward sympathy, like Dany and the Starks, retain a more blinkered view and straightforward goals that become increasingly divorced from our more omniscient perspective. But especially in the later seasons, Jaime is not even sure he wants his own house to win half the time, and that ambivalence becomes more akin to how we feel about these increasingly byzantine conflicts, where our love and hate for various characters refuse to align directly with the battle lines.
In the hands of clumsier writers or a less gifted actor, Jaime's characterization would be a schizoid mess. But Coster-Waldau grounds it with utter believability as the only sane reaction of a man who loves his brother as much as he respects the father that wants to murder him, who can never acknowledge the love of his life or their children while living steps away from them, whose life is defined by service to monarchs he loathes (even his own son turns out to be no better), and whose greatest act of heroism led the world at large to brand him a dishonest scumbag. How could he be anything but a house divided against himself?
As a dork for fantasy claptrap, a pet peeve
of mine is when the supernatural trappings that make things heightened and
exotic also have the incidental effect of solving the greatest mysteries of
human existence, and no one seems to notice.
Like how the Ghostbusters prove the existence of life after death, and remain
focused on what it means for their small business prospects, or how Lord Of The
Rings is so occupied with who will control Rohan or whatever, while ignoring
that everyone fighting over it lives in a world where if you sail to a particular island you will literally live forever.
I am also, by nature, a skeptic and so my
love of magical trappings in fiction can make for an uneasy pairing with natural
affinity for characters that are non-believers and antipathy for magical
thinking or supernatural solutions to any issue of substance. But at least for most of its run, Game Of Thrones thread this very
particular needle of mine very nimbly. It
keeps its magical elements mostly in the
shadows, their workings unclear and largely wielded by the baddies. The story of Thoros renewing his faith through
the miraculous resurrection of his friend is ostensibly an inspiring and
triumphant one, but then neither of them seem all that happy about it. It could understandably
have made wide-eyed evangelists of them both, but while it has made them
crusaders, the grizzled British character actors keep them grounded as soldiers
first and proselytizers second. And
decidedly fallible ones at that.
Thoros and Berric have seen for a fact that
the Red God is real, and wields power over life and death. But Berric’s shut down of Melisandre’s
question about the Other Side makes it clear just how little this miraculous
power does to actually solve the deeper questions of existence. Becoming functionally immortal should be a
comforting thing. But what have these
men learned? That there definitely is a God. That He is highly uncommunicative
about what He wants. But He absolutely
takes sides in the squabbles of his creations.
That idea is scarier to me than zombies and warlocks and Ramsay Bolton
combined.
This is a small moment in a season full of very big ones, but it always stuck with me.
Rose Leslie’s Ygritte brought spirited life to the Night’s Watch storyline
that had been defined by dourness. For a
full season she had been Jon’s mocking tutor, schooling him in the wilder
ways of the true North. But once on the
other side of the Wall, she is the one who knows nothing. About the difference between a palace and a
windmill, about the last six Kings Beyond The Wall, or about how seriously her
lover takes his old oaths. And while he is
actually somewhat flexible in his willingness to learn from his enemies, her side's adamance that there could be nothing useful worth learning about the men and
ways that stacked stones so high will wind up costing them.
Bran’s storyline has never been my favorite. But every once in a great while, it gets suddenly, severely awesome. This scene manages to be both one in a frustrating series of near-misses among the scattered Starks, and one of the pseudo-crossover events I talked about in the last post. Bran using his warg abilities in an action context for the first time has been a very slowly burning payoff, and his “upgrading” it to Hodor manages to feel momentous even though it's just a slightly different variation on the same arbitrary fantasy nonsense. The wolves bailing Jon out of a hopeless situation would feel like a complete deus ex machina if we had been following just his own story. But because we’ve seen how far Bran and Co. had come to reach this point, it feels more like an earned payoff than the enormous stroke of good luck that it is. And we need to see the good guys make some progress, because, well...
This is both the peak and the nadir of Game Of Thrones. It is the thing that people will bring up first when discussing the show with someone new. It is notorious for its cruelty, which is certainly extreme, don’t get me wrong. It is probably the most surprising development in the series, but even if it is more heavily foreshadowed than certain other developments (the deaths of Robert or Drogo are certainly not built up to at such length), the cruelty definitely has a hand in making it the most shocking, but that is only part of it.
Because hand in hand with the cruelty is the sheer scope of it. You could make the argument that Shireen's death is an even meaner turn, but it's not as sharp of one; it changes how we view a particular character perhaps, but does not upend the established narrative in such a seismic way. I'd known the series had a mean streak that was severe enough to kill its Stark heroes since Ned lost his head. But with some distance, that had became easier to rationalize, to place in a more familiar context. Ned was the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Mufasa character, who had to die in the first act to propel the real heroes into the rest of the story. It was a one-time thing, a jarring opening blow so that the series could fool people into thinking that it was actually telling a different kind of story where “anyone can die!”, when it was in fact a very traditional fantasy narrative.
All this is by way of saying that three seasons in, I knew that GOT was mean enough to kill Robb, or Cat. But I had grown accustomed enough to the War Of Five Kings as the status quo that I thought it was too big of a leg to take out from under the story right in the middle of its projected run. I believed that basic narrative necessities would provide some protection, where sentimentality would not. Even moreso than being mean, ending the war so suddenly felt reckless in a way I was not prepared for.
But there is also the cruelty. Ye gods, the
cruelty.
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