GAME OF THRONES 6.06 - "BLOOD OF MY BLOOD"

If season 6 had a subtitle, it would be the Greyjoys’ daily affirmation that “what is dead may never die”.  Not only are characters resurrecting, but plotlines that had seemingly flatlined are returning left and right.  This week, Benjen Stark resurfaces after a full 5 years.  Walder Frey and Edmure Tully pop up for the first time since the Red Wedding, with the Blackfish to follow. Bronn and the Brotherhood Without Banners are name-checked, Drogon comes back to Dany, and the return of Needle indicates that A Girl may not be dead, but Arya Stark will rise again, harder and stronger.
There were some that predicted Benjen’s return after last week, since Bran was going to need some saving pronto. The more surprising aspect is that he has apparently gone through the vegan version of Frankenmountain’s high fructose zombifying, courtesy of the kiddos of the forest.  They have apparently worked out the kinks in the process that created the Night King, and it’s hard to argue the results as he smashes zombies with his flaming flail.  But I would like some context as to why they are still shoving obsidian into men’s hearts and hoping for the best, when it seems like they are still dealing with the fallout of the first time they tried it 2000 years later.

If at first you don’t succeed, just keep creating potentially apocalyptic threats

What made me more curious, though, was Bran’s quick-fire visions, which showed us a glimpse of the Mad King and his assassination, which suggests that we have another set of flashbacks coming up to illuminate another corner of the backstory.  And it also includes a shot of the underground stores of wildfire going up in green flames.  We know that thanks to Jaime, the palace and capitol did not burn down in the rebellion, so this could be a glimpse of the future mixed in with scenes of the past.

Across the sea, Bran’s sister is getting glimpses of the past in the form of the play she takes in again, before having a last minute change of heart about poisoning Lady Crane.  Her decision to “change the writing” of her assignment was inevitable, but I did not think it would come this early.  If she decides to join the traveling acting troupe, she could end up performing for the royal court of Mereen before long.  That would be good because it would connect another major character with a conflicting agenda to the Mereen storyline, but bad because extended subplots about actors or characters dabbling in the creative arts made up some of the worst parts of great HBO shows like Deadwood and The Sopranos, but also maybe good just because it will be amusing to see how Tyrion and Joffrey’s depictions are tweaked when performed in front of the dwarf and his boss.

Also, I could probably watch another dozen or so reenactments

 of Joffrey’s death before I stopped giggling in delight each time

But before we get to any of that, she has to reckon with the House of Black and White.  The waif is (relatively) ecstatic about Arya’s failure to complete her task, as it allows her to get the green light to murder the little lady. But our girl has some surprises in store.  Firstly, the waif doesn’t know she still has Needle and is apt to bring a stick to a swordfight, and secondly Arya has cannily chosen to wait for the blowback in a pitch black crypt, and only one of them has experience fighting blind.  There will still be Jaqen to deal with, of course, but A Girl has stolen faces before.  And A Man may not be wary enough to ask for two forms of ID when the waif comes back reporting that of course I killed that little nuisance, yes sir, I have the body right here, why don’t you bend down and take a closer look?

If Arya turning against the Faceless happened sooner than expected, the promised showdown with the Sparrows is deferred in highly frustrating fashion.  Instead of seeing the Tyrells storming the sept and Frankemountain unleashed, Marge acts unilaterally to convince Tommen to capitulate to the Faith even more expressly than he has been previously.  The show seems to be teasing the possibility that Marge’s conversion is sincere, but I’m not biting.  She has always been adept at transforming into what the men around her need to see, it’s just taken her awhile to triangulate something that would work for the Sparrow, the king and her brother.  And that means playing temporarily devout in order to free herself and Loras, even to Tommen, because he is too simple to maintain the deception on his own.  This cuts the knees out from under her family’s rescue attempt, though, further legitimizing the Sparrows, and getting Jaime ejected from the Kingsguard in the process, in a scene that recalls Joffrey’s dismissal of Baristan Selmy way back when.  Cersei is surprisingly sanguine about all this, convinced that her upcoming trial by combat is a cinch with the Mountain as her champion (gods, that is going to go so very wrong for her) and that Jaime will cut a more impressive figure at the head of an army than a one-armed bodyguard.

You got lucky, twerp, but your time will come

Jaime’s new assignment will take him to the Riverlands, where Walder Frey is apoplectic at losing Riverrun to the stubbornly surviving Blackfish.  I am so excited to have these characters back in the mix after so long, and the potential for a Jaime/Brienne reunion, that I don’t even mind that it appears to be exactly the same circumstances that Jon and Sansa are facing in the North.  Both the Freys and Boltons are in danger of losing the castles and titles they gained via the Red Wedding to the surviving members of the families they usurped, because they failed to command the loyalty of the minor houses.  But both villains have an important hostage as a trump card (being Edmure and Rickon).  I do not see both of these extremely similar scenarios working out such that the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and no Red Women have made any prophecies about the Freys losing Riverrun, so I think things will wind up poorly for the Tullys.  The alternative is too rough to bear, though I haven’t been able to avoid imagining scenarios wherein the prophecies could come true without the Starks actually winning.  Maybe Jon’s army is repulsed, but Ramsay is backstabbed by the Umbers, and they take over Winterfell?

But let’s close out by talking of more positive things, like Gilly and Sam’s Meet The Parents adventure.  It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t get Hornhill added to the credits, particularly since The Wall and Mereen didn’t even appear, but oh well.  Randall Tarly lives up to his stern reputation, as Sam’s old man seems like he would have gotten along famously with Tywin Lannister or Roose Bolton.  But Gilly is no stranger to horrible fathers, and she’s got steel in her that no frilly dress can obscure.  She touts Sam’s not-inconsiderable achievements as a warrior, but papa Tarly is more interesting in body-shaming than hearing about how never mind the mythical creatures he’s killed, Sam also helped fight off a hundred thousand wildlings.

“They told me killing wildlings was good cardio.”

But while he is a raging asshole, Randall is right in that Sam becoming lord of Hornhill would probably have meant the end of the their house.  Sam has many good qualities, but he is not built to be a ruler, much less one for winter or wartime.  That isn’t the entire story, of course.  He may be too cowardly (or practical, or an inseparable mixture of both) to defy him to his face, but he will disobey his father’s edicts and steal a family heirloom if he deems it will be more use in the wars to the North.  The Night’s Watch did make a man out of him, it’s just not the sort of man his father always envisaged.

Subplot Report Card:

Braavos: A-

Wargin’: B

King’s Landing: B (great acting from the Lannisters, as usual, but balls are getting dangerously blue at this point)

Sam: B+

Dany: C (Shouting in fictional languages is Emilia Clarke’s best look, but for my money the image of the Dothraki kneeling that closed last week established her dominion over the horde more effectively and economically. Don’t do stuff just to do it, show.)

Season Morgulis: Doran Martell, Trystane Martell, Areo Hotah, Roose Bolton, Walda Bolton, Balon Greyjoy, (-Jon Snow), Shaggydog, Bowen Marsh, Othell Yarwyck, Alister Thorne, Olly, Osha, Khal Moro, Euron Greyjoy (-Euron Greyjoy), Summer, Leaf The Child Of The Forest, The Wargist Formerly Known As The Three Eyed Raven, HODOR

MIA: I think I’m going to retire this bit, as with the return of Walder Frey, the Blackfish, Edmure and even longlost Benjen, it’s really only Gendry and Arya’s wolf that still seem genuinely forgotten.  So I will just say that I have appreciated the respite from Ramsay these last 2 weeks.

Death Watch: I’m fucking horrible at this, obviously.  I would’ve bet the farm that this episode would have the highest body count of the season, with at least 3 named characters going down.  Instead, this may be the first episode where no one, not even an extra, is killed.  In any case, it seems like the King’s Landing situation has been taken down to a low boil for the moment, so I’m going to switch it up and say…Grey Worm, but only because the waif seems like too much of a gimme.

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GAME OF THRONES 6.05 - "THE DOOR"

When I’m writing these recaps, I generally try to find a thematic throughline, some common thread that ties the far-flung subplots together.  But I honestly think Game Of Thrones, more than any other show I’ve seen save perhaps The Wire, does not intentionally build episodes around theme.  Which is not to say that theme is not deliberately and carefully crafted into these narratives, just that those narratives are constructed with the season as the basic unit of storytelling, rather than as a collection of individually complete episodes.  The writers are very aware of what their story is saying, on both the explicit and subtextual levels, I am sure. I just think they choose what scenes to group together on any given week based more on plot and pacing concerns than for any particular commonality between the incidents portrayed.

So when I identify a motif that pops up in multiple corners of Westeros in a given week, its always with the suspicion that it is purely incidental, but I tend to go with it because I subscribe to the Death Of The Author as a general principle (not that considering the author’s POV can’t be an interesting exercise), and because any organizing principle is too useful to pass up when addressing such a many-headed beast as this show.  But given all that, I think that “The Door” is more consistent than most episodes about history coming alive to confront multiple characters in the (more or less) flesh.  The exception would be the Iron Islands, where any discussion of Ironborn’s, and specifically Theon’s, ignoble recent history is secondary to scheming about building new fleets and forging forward-looking alliances with Dany, mother of dragons, breaker of chains…all that…

 

These developments are interesting, but I think the season’s accelerated pace, which most everyone seems to agree is a positive development, hurts it in this particular case.  There is a “be careful what you wish for” element to all this, because comments from book readers have lead me to believe that the kingsmoot stuff eats up a lot of pages of source material, said pages being no one’s favorite (and this is a friendly reminder that we do not discuss said books in these review or comments, though we’re aware that the show has surpassed most of their story points).  And I’m glad that they didn’t stretch it across the entire season, particularly since there’s really no question that Euron is going to wind up with the throne – our sympathies lie too squarely with Theon and Yara for GOT to let them just win.  But I do think that the process would’ve been better broken up across at least 2 sequences, if not episodes.  To cut directly form the kingsmoot to Euron’s coronation-tism and Yara/Theon’s escape was very confusing.  It made it seem like they were fleeing directly from the cliffside gathering, but that can’t be right since Euron was expecting them at his inaugural hyper-swirly, and they apparently had time to organize the bulk of the fleet into defecting with them.  Making this into two distinct sequences could’ve made these relatively straightforward matters more coherent.

These compression issues are also rearing their head on the macro level, unfortunately.  I’m usually willing to make allowances that the broad scope of the narrative means subplots will disappear for extended stretches, and return with different respective time lapses from week to week or scene to scene.  So when Bran or Yara disappear for an entire season, I accept that it doesn’t mean they are sitting idle while other characters criss-cross entire continents.  In general, I want pacing to take precedence over chronological consistency.  But these inconsistencies are getting wider and more frequent.  So now we can have a violent coup in Dorne, undertaken specifically to make war on the Lannisters, and then not hear a peep from them for 4 episodes, while Littlefinger can muster and entire army and employ his warp whistle to teleport it from the Vale to the North (and himself to the opposite end of the North) in the span of a single episode.  The Iron Islands can cut directly between scenes that must take place hours if not days apart, while Jon’s loyalists sit shiva for a night that extends across a third of the season.  Or this episode can tell us specifically that 2 weeks have passed since last episode’s Mereen scenes, while Dany’s scene clearly takes place the following day.

But I was going to talk about history lessons, wasn’t I?  In Mereen, Tyrion turns to religious fanatics to solve a political problem, because apparently no one has told him how that worked out for the last Lannister who tried it.  And it goes remarkably smooth, as Dany fits the bill for the fire warrior the Red Women have recast more times than the show has replaced Gregor Cleganes, until Varys butts in to rub the witch’s nose in her representatives’ prior missteps and defeats.  She fires back by reciting bits of his most intimate personal history (and demonstrating incidental but creepy knowledge of Tyrion’s experiences last season), taunting him with knowledge she should not have.  Knowing his history gives Kirvana power over Varys, who we have never seen more confused or afraid.  We don’t learn anything new about the manner in which Varys was maimed, but we do see for the first time just how much control his past exerts over him even after he took revenge on the perpetrator.  He crossed the world and committed treason to join up with Dany, but if that means consorting with witches, whose to say he won’t turn on this savior too?

Brienne would sympathize with his conundrum, as she also bristles at having sworn herself to a noblewoman who has de facto allied her with the Lord of Light despite her all-encompassing distaste for his servants and sorcery.  She tries to warn Sansa off such alliances, but the girl has a justifiably one-track mind these days.  Her sister may have pruned her kill list down to a tight group of all-stars, but the elder Stark girl is ready to cross off entire houses, as well recent allies if Littlefinger doesn’t watch his step.  She agrees to meet him (in a destroyed brothel, apparently his preferred location to get reamed by disgruntled female co-conspirators), but only long enough to tell him to get tae fuck, and to cross Blackfish off my MIA list.  Apparently Cat’s uncle has been busy rallying the battered remnants of the Riverlands’ armies and ousting the Freys from his family’s seat of power.  That is quite a lot of drama to be going on completely off-screen, and I might even be bold enough to suggest that we could have perhaps sped through a couple of scenes of Ramsay being a total shithead in order to make time for some of it.

That’s assuming it actually happened, of course.  Some are theorizing that Littlefinger is making it up, but I hope that’s not the case.  Not only because I want to see the villainous Freys taken down a peg, but I don’t think it makes a lot of sense for Littlefinger to throw up an even bigger Hail Mary immediately after his gamble placing Sansa with the Boltons blew up in his face.  He can’t just assume that she will send a rider instead of a raven to confirm it, can he?  And even then, what does it help him to deceive her like this?  I can’t believe he’s given up on possessing Cat’s daughter so quickly and thoroughly as to flip directly to sabotaging her (and to whose benefti? Ramsay, who just made a fool of him?).  But then, perhaps being subjected to the worst pop quiz ever about her marital history with Ramsay convinced him that playing white knight coming to rescue her from a horrendous situation he put her in would not work.  If he did flip immediately, I would have liked the show to linger with him a little as he leaves, to give us some sense of whether it was all an act.  I understand that they want to keep him as something of a wild card, and I wouldn’t want to be tipped off as to the specifics of his plan straight away, but I think we’ve already spent too much time too close to his point of view not to be given a better sense of whether he has already put it in motion or is still computing his next move.

Meanwhile, across the sea, the other Stark sister gets two distinct history lessons, as Jaqen downloads to her on the origins of the Faceless Men and their role in founding Braavos, and then assigns her to kill an actor starring in a farcical recounting of the first season’s main plot.  Then there’s a really direct, utterly superfluous shot of an uncircumcised penis.  This felt like a really blunt attempt to address accusations about the show’s exploitative use of nudity in seasons’ past, but someone who is more invested in such things will have to do the calculations of how many female nipples this cock shot balances out.  I’d kind of prefer if the show didn’t suddenly grow a conscience about such things 6 years in, simply because it sticks out as as an intrusion of real world sensibilities, a moment where I can see the boom mike dip into this fantasy realm.  But also…eh, it’s just a dick, and tweaking our general prudishness about putting them on screen is somewhat amusing in its own right.  And they did forego showing us actual genital warts, which is either a moderate sop to good taste or offensive in its own right, or both, as the Lords Of Twitter shalt decree.

This has been Half-Assed Moralizin’, brought to you by Papa Johns

But I digress (about penises, as usual).  With her suppressed identity stimulated by being forced to essentially watch the Wikipedia entry on her family that she is not allowed to edit, Arya worms her way backstage. But the actress seems a decent enough sort, and Arya is still having doubts about the Faceless’s dissonant way of sanctifying death as the great gift to the Many-Faced God while also appearing completely indifferent to how or who it is dealt out to.  If the MFG is really so blase about the identity or blameworthiness of the offering, why can’t A Girl decide to come only for the wicked, and leave the decent behind?  This issue may not come to head in time to help Lady Crane, but Arya can’t stay in Braavos forever, so she has to reach a breaking point.  With Jaqen so adamant about the fatal consequences of failure, I’m thinking more and more that Arya will only be able to leave by offering the MFG his own servants.  In fact, if the finale doesn’t have her leaving the entire House Of B&W in ashes with “Not today” as a kiss-off line, I will be shocked.

Full disclosure: I’m currently batting .115 lifetime

 in terms of predictions in this column. So…

But the main event this week is Hodor’s secret origin story and dramatic sacrifice, which is a sentence I can’t believe I actually get to type.  Before we get there, Bran gets his own history download about the origin of the White Walkers and the Night’s King, which frankly comes off as rather perfunctory for such a large piece of the mythos.  This is another area where I don’t want to spend an entire season watching Bran passively take in backstory, but I’m thinking that maybe the elaborate 5 minute swordfight sequence ( you remember, the one with the foregone conclusion?) could’ve been trimmed to accommodate one other brief flashback establishing the ancient conflict between the Children Of The Forest and The First Men that lead to the kiddos creating the Walkers.  As it is, the only reason I had any context for what was going on there was from watching the animated History And Lore supplements from the DVD releases.

But in any case, once Bran draws the attention of the Night’s King, shit gets real.  Losing the Childrenz and Raven is no big surprise or deal (points for managing to homage Aliens, of all things, with Leaf the head kiddo’s death), but the abrupt and brutal offing of Summer the wolf is still just setting the stage for the main event, which is one of the best executed time-travel shenanigans I’ve seen, for a story that is not all about time travel.  Bran realizing too late that he has inadvertently doomed Hodor to not just a grisly death, but an entire life of semi-mute service is a real gutpunch for him and for us, and serves as the best type of twist – a reveal that is all the more surprising because it answers a question that the audience wasn’t necessarily asking.  Part of the reason “I am your father” hit so much harder in 1980 than it will when Luke parrots the line at Rey in 2018 is because his father’s identity hadn’t been a puzzle that audiences had spent the last 3 years trying to figure out. If they had, they would have gone down the very short list of suspects and realized that it had to be either this guy or the other guy.

It really could’ve gone either way

It’s more possible to avoid the “Called It” reaction in a movie these days, simply because unfolding in a single sitting means you don’t have to give the audience time to unpack up the information you’re feeding them.  But paying off a long-term mystery in a genuinely shocking way is practically impossible in a post-LOST television series.  A writer’s room, no matter how clever, simply can’t play fair with clues and stay ahead of a million people with a week between each episode to play detective and compare notes on social media, which will in turn immediately spread the answer to everyone as soon as a single individual hits on it.  You have to fool all the people all the time, and with the internet it really is all the people now.  And the really irritating thing is that once the answer is out there, all the people will act as though they personally outsmarted the show by reading the answer online before they could be shown it on TV. I’m not exempting myself  from that, either; I find myself getting impatient with the show for not “officially” confirming the big fan theory out there, even weeks after they introduced a sub-subplot that really couldn’t have any purpose beyond doing that.  If the internet didn’t exist, would I have twigged onto that theory on my own? Maybe not, but it’s been so long since I was exposed to the idea that I can’t help but feel somewhat slighted that the show doesn’t display more respect for my powers of deduction, never mind that said powers are 90% borrowed from smarter people.

Which is all by way of saying that the Hodor reveal works, because it savvily relies on Hodor’s origin being a minor enough bit of business that it didn’t seem to warrant obsessive decrypting. Not that it didn’t get some anyway; I read a surprisingly cogent theory a few weeks ago that the former stablehand became simple via unsuccessfully/too successfully warging into a horse, which seemed to gibe with his skittishness in thunderstorms, affinity for carrying people on his back, and even…certain anatomical features…

Again, I pegress.  Digress. Digress.

It also works on an emotional level, which not really separate from, but enhanced by, the element of surprise. And the method of preserving that surprise also serves to underline the thematic and emotional wallop of Hodor’s story, because the tragedy here is that it is such a minor point in the grander scheme of things.  He is forced not just to die, but to live for decades solely to serve as a tiny but crucial cog in the great wheel of a larger story.  We know that everyone must Morghulis very well at this point (see below), but no one has Dohaeris’d more than Hodor.

What’s interesting is that I’ve seen several different interpretations of what is actually going on in the scene.  Some people think that Hodor spent his entire adult life knowing it was all leading to this, but I don’t think gibes with his portrayal.  I think it’s clear that his disabilities extended beyond a speech impediment; if he still was capable of complex thought, he could’ve learned to write or devised some more effective method of communication over the decades.  And I don’t think he really chose to hold the door.  That choice would make him an utterly beatific martyr figure, but I think the alternative is just as sad, but more in keeping with the GOT ethos. I think Bran remained conscious in present day Hodor’s body, as we never saw him wake up on the sled, or heard Hodor cry out his catch phrase to mirror his past self learning it.  I thought that, knowing that there is no fleeing for the big guy even if he abandons the door, Bran shows the only bit of kindness he can by not allowing Hodor’s consciousness to return to his body.  That way he essentially gets to die in his sleep, while Bran has to feel “himself” be ripped apart by zombies. I imagine we’ll hear about it if that is the case, but the brilliant thing is that is packs a wallop either way.

Subplot Report Card:

Braavos: B (the scenes at the theater, both on and back stage, go on for quite awhile, which stands out in an episode that could have really used another minute or two for the Iron Islands)

Wargin’: A (let’s hope that the Childrenz have a getway boat stashed near the back door, or else it won’t make much sense for Meera and Bran to get very far)

Castle Black: A (I complained a bit about Littlefinger’s opacity in the Mole’s Town scene, but it still allowed Aidan Gillen to do more than simply moustache twirl, and Sophie Turner to nail her icy, contained anger. Sansa has never felt more a Stark than in that scene.)

Iron Islands: B- (the great work of Gemma Whelan and Alfie Allen is struggling against confusing editing and the miscasting of Euron)

Dany: A- (Ian Glenn is always an MVP, and Emilia Clarke got to show some actual emotion behind the wall of implacability that has become the character. Her “plan” for him to sort that shit out on his own isn’t much of one, but sweet and straight-to-the-point are rare accolades to be be able to give this subplot)

Mereen: A  (Great dramatic work from Conleth Hill, comedic work from Dinklage, and an interesting new dynamic with the Red Faith)

Season Morgulis: Doran Martell, Trystane Martell, Areo Hotah, Roose Bolton, Walda Bolton, Balon Greyjoy, (-Jon Snow), Shaggydog, Bowen Marsh, Othell Yarwyck, Alister Thorne, Olly, Osha, Khal Moro, Euron Greyjoy (-Euron Greyjoy), Summer, Leaf, The Wargist Formerly Known As The Three Eyed Raven, HODOR

MIA: The Sand Snakes, Bronn, all the Lannisters, all the Tyrells, Frankenmountain/Qyburn (this is the rare episode not to feature any glimpse of King’s Landing), Sam/Gilly, Gendry, Ramsay, Rickon, Walder Frey, Edmure Tully,

Death Watch: I should probably start watching the Next On promos to at least get a sense of what storylines will be focused upon, because I keep picking characters that don’t appear at all. Regardless, I’m sticking with Olenna and/or Loras to go down in the chaos of the Tyrell jailbreak.

GAME OF THRONES 6.04 - "THE BOOK OF THE STRANGER"

“The Book Of The Stranger” features a trio of brother/sister reunions, and in each case the sister finds the brother broken and diminished.  In the Iron Islands, Yara is still sore that Theon spurned her rescue attempt way back in the mists of Season 4.  He offers to help her take control of the Islands at the upcoming Kingsmoot, though its unclear what sway this a shell of a man could hold over the Ironborn, who don’t appear particularly bound to heredity when it comes to choosing leaders.  But at least he is trying to prop his sister up, unlike Loras, who has gone a big blubbery mess in the dungeons.  It appears that Margaery is moved enough to help him the only way she can, by confessing and subjecting herself to the same Walk Of Atonement that Cersei endured last year.

Both her own family and her in-laws (led by another recently reunited brother-sister pair) are in agreement that measures must be taken to prevent this, and so the Tyrell army is mobilizing to put down the Faith Militant for good. This is going to prove to be a big mistake and get very, very messy.  As there is no way that the High Sparrow just told Tommen about his plan to publicly humiliate the queen and expected the kid to keep it under his hat. But it should involve a lot of blood and an unleashed Frankenmountain, and carries the potential to end the High Sparrow’s sanctimonious speechifying for good, so I say bring it on.

“Hello Darkness, my old friend…”

The most joyous reunion is of course at Castle Black, where Jon and Sansa share their first scene since…well, ever, I think.  Back in the opening episodes, Jon had farewells with Ned, Robb, Bran, and Arya, plus a less amicable one from Cat, but I don’t think Kit Harrington and Sophie Turner have ever exchanged dialogue until this episode.  You don’t really think about that in the moment, though, as seeing these two characters who have had arguably the roughest go’s of anyone on this exceedingly rough show embrace feels so good.  And then to see them actually enjoying each other’s company, and get almost meta in discussing how much they sucked as characters in the pilot. When Jon was running down his mopey old self, I half-expected him to add “with my mouth always half-open” to it.

You close nothing, Jon Snow

Unfortunately, this self-awareness is purely backward facing, as he’s in a particularly mopey mood after hanging the mutineers.  Even at Sansa’s urging, he can’t even get it up to take back his family’s home and restore some of their honor.  Ramsay has to call him out specifically, like a WWF heel, and threaten Sansa in the process, and Rickon, and the Wildlings….look, it’s a very thorough letter, and as thoroughly odious as one would expect from Ramsay. But credit where it’s due, it does have a certain musicality via the repetition of the “come and see” taunt.  Anyway, Bastard Bowl ’16 is on, and the tale of the tape is not looking good, with Jon starting at a 5-2 disadvantage, with his troops less disciplined, and not even knowing that he’s got the Karstarks and Umbers to worry about as well.  Luckily for him, the knights of the Vale are also on the move, thanks to Littlefinger’s machinations. That, plus a Wun Wun, should help to even the odds some.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Sansa’s arrival at the Wall is good for more than just the Stark reunion.  It also introduces Brienne to the mix, and she is only too happy to tell Stannis’s followers that she killed him, and does not abide witches.  Having the Starks’ allies at each others’ throats is bad for business but great for drama, and I haven’t even touched on Tormund’s instant crush on Brienne the Beauty.  This may be Kristopher Hivju’s best episode ever, and he doesn’t say a single word.

Over in Essos, Dany has retaken command of the Dothraki, as we all knew she would.  But she does it in fairly stylish fashion, and without using her dragon cheat code, so I can’t complain. I also like that she should be bringing the horde down to Slaver’s Bay with promises of cities to plunder, only to find that Tyrion has made peace with those cities in her name.  How she navigates that snafu should be interesting, as it’s not something she can get out of just by shouting her titles.  Tyrion’s peace is not entirely honorable, as it allows slavery to continue to exist for years, but he makes the case that it is preferable to war.  A notion that might go down better if he didn’t offer the slavers women he bought himself to seal the deal.

More than anything, this episode seems to take us out of the table-setting portion of the season. Jon Snow is back and finally ready to leave the Wall.  Dany is free from the Dothraki that never stood a chance anyway.  Sansa and Brienne have found their way to their destination.  The royals are finally done biding their time against the High Sparrow.  And armies are moving everywhere.  The Tyrells are marching on the Faith.  The Dornish are marching on the Lannisters.  The Boltons are marching on the Wall.  The Vale is marching on the Boltons.  The Dothraki are back in the mix.  I think there’s also a bunch of zombies somewhere or something. And then there’s Tormund. Just chewing.  And looking.

Subplot Report Card:

The North: B+ (As sad as it was to see Osha go, at least it was relatively quick. And while Ramsay did toy with her as is his wont, she was working her own angle rather than just passively enduring his torments the way Theon, Sansa, or Lady Walda so frequently did.)

Castle Black: A- (So much of this was perfect, but I’m taking off half a point because Jon’s reluctance to fight was rather pointless – we know he doesn’t have a choice, but even after Sansa points that out, he’s still playing hard to get?)

The Vale: B (Lord Royce hasn’t been enough of a presence to make Littlefinger outfoxing him have much impact)

Iron Islands: B+

Dany: A-

King’s Landin': B+ (Love everything with the Lannisters and Tyrells, but the Sparrow is at his least interesting when lecturing a captive audience)

Mereen: B+

Season Morgulis: Doran Martell, Trystane Martell, Areo Hotah, Roose Bolton, Walda Bolton, Balon Greyjoy, (-Jon Snow), Shaggydog, Bowen Marsh, Othell Yarwyck, Alister Thorne, Olly, Osha, Khal Moro

MIA: The Sand Snakes, the Greyjoys, Bronn, Bran, Frankenmountain/Qyburn, Arya, Gendry, the Blackfish, Walder Frey, Edmure Tully

Death Watch: It’s pretty much a cert that we lose a Tyrell next week, but I’m switching my bet from Olenna to Loras. It could be both, I suppose.

GAME OF THRONES 6.03 - "OATHBREAKER"

“Oathbreaker” begins and ends at Castle Black, where Jon Snow has returned as much himself, but with a heavier heart and a hitch in his step. The latter is a nice little touch, as bearing painful physical wounds from his betrayal underlines the psychological scars being murdered has left on him. The latter manifests in his disavowing the Night’s Watch, after taking a particularly cold bit of comfort by executing his assassins.  Many had predicted that Jon’s resurrection would serve to provide a loophole to release him from a Watch that “shall not end until my death”, but I get the sense that he’s not particularly bothered with the legal sufficiency of this interpretation of the oath in any case.  He came out and swung the executioner’s sword wearing the heavy cloak of the Lord Commander, before pointedly taking it off to deliver his kiss off line (to no one in particular, which I found amusing).

He leaves Castle Black in Edd’s hands, but he will presumably be taking Tormund, Wun Wun, Davos and Melisandre with him when he heads southward.  The dynamic between the latter two should be interesting, as the Red Woman appears oddly deferential to Davos since Stannis’s death.  While he remains doggedly pragmatic in the face of overt miracles, she wastes little time transferring her messianic expectations from the Mannis to the gentleman bastard.  But the revenant also gives her the same non-answer as Berric Dondarrion when she asked him what he saw on the other side.  It’s hard to know what to make of her at this point.  Is she even more fanatical now that she has the power to raise the dead?  Or will she become warier of the capriciousness with which the Lord Of Light seems to dole out his miraculous favor?  Does her unwillingness to accept the dead’s reports on the lack of an afterlife indicate that she has been promised something more?

“What did you see? Were there apps? Were the drinks free? WHAT WAS THE TUNEAGE SITCH??”

Jon 2.Snow’s coalition is going to have immediate difficulties, as apparently Greatjon Umber died offscreen in the years since he was following Robb around, and was succeeded by the latest in a line of total dickholes to take over the great Northern Houses. Badjon Umber is no peach (he killed Shaggydog!), but there is still something almost admirable in the way he refuses to swear oaths he has no intention of keeping.  He’s almost like Thorne in how straight up he is about being an asshole.  Or maybe I’m just inclined to go easy on him because he doesn’t let Ramsay walk right over him. Even if he does provide the bastard with a fresh set of sympathetic characters to interminably victimize.

This bodes exceptionally ill for Rickon, who has always been the spare Stark. He’s never felt particularly vital to the endgame, and his death could provide the necessary component to make Jon and Sansa retaking Winterfell feel soul-crushing enough for a “victory” in the Game Of Thrones world.  I don’t trust this series to allow the dashing hero and exiled princess to just ride in and defeat the evil tyrant without having their hearts carved up in the process.  And if we needed a reminder that this is not the type of fantasy story where the noble heroes defeat the wicked baddies in honorable combat, Bran takes a flashback tour to the end of Robert’s Rebellion, to see that his father’s most famous feat of combat was a less glorious victory than the stories made out.  This is more earth-shattering for Bran than us, who are more accustomed to the harsh realities of Westeros.  On the one hand, I like that the show isn’t dicking around with these flashbacks the entire season before getting to the point, but that also makes it feel a bit unnecessary for them to play coy with the “that’s enough for one day” stuff.  Sure, Arthur Dayne looked cool twirling those two broadswords around, but it’s not like we knew enough about him to really care about this fight between dead men.  And for those of us that know about the big fan theory that I’ve tried to only address in passing (which is admittedly a smaller portion of the audience than the internet can make it seem), you just dilute the impact by essentially providing confirmation while withholding the actual reveal.

Arya’s storyline is another area where I’m pleased with the degree of Movement on general principle, but there is a difference between the right pace for the season and the right pace for the individual episode. What is the point of training her to duel blind, only to return her sight after 2 scenes and a montage?  I can’t believe I’m saying this, but they may have needed to stretch this out longer.  I don’t necessarily want her to stay in the House of Black and White any longer, but the thing that got me hooked on Game Of Thrones, the thing that separates it from so much of longform and particularly genre storytelling, was not the tits or the skull smushings (though I do find tits delightful and head smushings get me hard as granite).  It was the commitment to real consequences to the story decisions, the sense that despite all the magical trappings, everyone was only one false move from getting themselves killed and staying that way.  I was willing to grant a one-off Jon Snow fakeout, but backing off of the consequence of Arya’s transgression against the Many-Faced God so quickly is a worrying sign.  If that shit with Ned being able to hear Bran in the past leads to some sort of time-travel shenanigans where he starts reversing Red Weddings or whatever Ramsay is about to do to Rickon, I’m going to turn on this show the way Lannisters turn on their own when the chips are down.

Speaking of that (segues!), I’m really digging having both Lannister twins in Kings Landing again.  They still can’t get cranky uncle Kevan to give them the time of day, but they are enjoying playing with their Frankenmountain about as much as I am seeing people react to it in terror and disgust.  Coster-Waldau’s face when the thing reacts to his crack about Gregor’s prior intelligence was my biggest laugh of the episode. I found it funnier than Tyrion banging his head against the boring wall that is Grey Worm and Missandei, anyway.  The Imp and the Spider bring some personality to Mereen, but when they are separated, the best the actors can do is make their scenes generally watchable by sheer Dink of charisma.

Not a typo. Not an apology.  It’s just how I roll.

What they really need is a creepy Qyburn, or a salty Queen Of Thorns, or an antagonistic figurehead like the High Sparrow to bounce off, like the Lannisters still in Westeros have.  Right now, they can only contemplate what to do about off-screen slavers’ plots to run a proxy uprising in a city that, I’m sorry, we still just don’t care about that much.  Maybe there would be more urgency to this plot if it wasn’t such a foregone conclusion that the war Tyrion is getting unwillingly pulled toward is going to be resolved by Dany returning with a new khalasar at her back.  But it is, so there isn’t.

This is starting to sound like I disliked the episode, which I didn’t.  It flew by as Game Of Thrones always does, and the stuff at Castle Black and Kings Landing was aces, but Essos and the other subplots can’t keep up, which is also not unusual at this stage.  But we’ll have a whole new batches of subplots struggling to match the center of the storylines next week, and gods willing, the triumphant return of Who Smushed It Better?

Subplot Report Card:

The North: B+ (having Greatjon die offscreen and replaced with a huge cunt of a young lord is serendipitous for Ramsay, like so much else tend to be, but the guy is such a salty piece of work that it is fairly entertaining)

Castle Black: A-

Oldtown: B (not much to say here, except that I’m wondering if Ian McShane was cast as Sam’s father Randall – I heard about the casting but never bothered to look for the same reason I try to avoid the “Next Time On” teasers)

Wargin‘: B- (great sword choreography but I was not a fan of the casting of young Ned – he looked more a child than Bran at this point, and also they did the annoying prequel thing of putting him in the exact wardrobe that we are familiar with, giving off the impression that he didn’t change clothes or hairstyles for 20 years. That’s almost believable for a stick-in-the-mud like Ned, actually, but it still feels really basic)

Dany: C (there is just not a scrap of new information here – Dany arrives at where they told her she was going last week, and is told in slightly more detail that she can’t leave)

King’s Landin': A (I love Qyburnstein and his monster’s mad scientist dynamic, and Small Council meetings are my jam)

Mereen: B

Braavos: B- (like the flashback, this had some pretty cool action stuff with Arya going all Zatoichi, but the cop out could turn out to be a major ill omen)

Season Morgulis: Doran Martell, Trystane Martell, Areo Hotah, Roose Bolton, Walda Bolton, Balon Greyjoy, (-Jon Snow), Shaggydog, Alister Thorne, Olly

MIA: The Sand Snakes, Littlefinger, the Greyjoys, Bronn, Margaery, Loras, Sansa, Brienne, Daario, Jorah, Gendry, the Blackfish, Walder Frey, Edmure Tully

Death Watch: Things are looking mighty grim for Rickon, but Ramsay likes to play with his food too much to off him immediately, so I’m sticking with the Queen Of Thorns.

GAME OF THRONES 6.02 - "HOME"

Well, that was eventful.

“Home” opens with some unfamiliar sights.  Revisiting Bran and Meera after so long was never going to be completely smooth, but both actors looking like post-grads instead of the adolescents they were 2 years ago is fairly jarring. Along with the redesign/recasting of the Child of the Forest and the Three-Eyed Raven, it leaves Hodor as the only part of this corner of the world that actually looks the same as when we left it.  I’m not holding this against the show, of course, as its just a niggling reality of mounting such a sprawling production over a timeframe that is more extended in our world than storytime.  At the end of the day, the GOT creators can always go commiserate with the showrunners of LOST and Breaking Bad about the illegality of feeding child actors drugs to retard growth spurts. Nor am I against recasting a role that appeared as briefly as the 3-eyed raven, particularly if it gives us a Von Sydow in the exchange. It’s more jarring that they ditched the decrepit overgrown hair and nails look, and he now appears to be just a clean shaven old man sitting in a tree. They seem to have normal-ed him out while making the Child of the Forest look more fantastical, which is an oddly split decision.  It could just be that Von Sydow wouldn’t deign to undergo elaborate make up or prosthetics, but I also noted that he and Bran appear to be wearing the cloak and black leather jerkin that Lord Commander Mormont and Jon, respectively, wore in seasons past. Which makes me wonder if in his pre-immortal-warg-treehouse days, he began as a man of the Night’s Watch – perhaps even the first Lord Commander?

Anyway, the Bran sequence presents us with unfamiliarity that goes beyond faces. It also features a flashback, which we’ve only ever seen in the S5 cold open, and that flashback contains…happy people? This is a very strange look for GOT, but it must be said that the casting on young Hodor (and muttonchopping on young Rodrick) is on fricking point. To the fanatics, this is significant less because it gives us Hodor backstory than because it provides a method for learning the truth about Jon’s parentage, should fan theories on that score prove true (they totally are, by the way).

CHOPS/chops

“Home” was on more familiar ground as a Lannister acting showcase across two continents. In Essos, Dinklage reaffirms his star status, with his charm selling the deference of Dany’s senior cabinet members (never hugely formidable as a braintrust, but still) to a dwarf who had only shown up on the scene one episode prior to the khaleesi disappearing.  He also holds his own ably opposite dragons that are bigger and better looking than ever, his voice and face doing as much as the CGI to renew a sense of awe and respect for these creatures that we have been watching for 5 years now. The only thing he can’t sell is pantomiming the removal of giant steel pins that should weigh about 40 pounds, which fall away at the lightest brush, as though he was entering a command on a touchscreen. That’s a nitpickers’ nitpick, but they rendered the dragons in such exquisite detail, would it have been so hard to have him yank twice and drop in a rusty sound effect?

Anyhow, back in King’s Landing, Cersei bides time while sending her attack dog out on field trips to grotesquely/hilariously silence the loudest mouths keeping her humiliation trending among the hoi polloil.  It shouldn’t be technically possible to simmer icily, but Headey has somehow invented and mastered it in her portrayal of the queen/regent/whatever.  Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, meanwhile, is immediately handed better material than he received in Dorne all last year, as Jaime takes his turn threatening the High Sparrow, only to be brushed back by his populist support.  Coster-Waldau and Jonathan Pryce’s back and forth is prime Game Of Thrones threatneuvering, somewhat reminiscent of the (initially) reserved antagonism between Jaime and Ned way back when. But Jaime also does a surprisingly credible impersonation of his father while advising Tommen at the bierside of his other sibling that was poisoned by the matriarch of a powerful Southern house they were to marry into.

“Once is a fluke. Two is mere slapdickery.”

Things are somehow even more fraught at Jon Snow’s wake, where Davos, Ghost and Associates are braced for Thorne’s assault, which is underway when Wun, Wun, and Wildlings come to bail them out.  We knew this was coming, but no amount of predictability can make the giant smushing the archer against the wall less awesome.  And the fact that this is only the second most awesome skull/wall smooshing is even more awesome.

God, please let “who smushed it better?” become a recurring feature of these recaps

Nor does it make Tormund’s “until you” a less sick burn on Thorne.  It’s sick because Tormund is a badass of few words, but it’s also on total point as to the failure of the coup. Because when it you get to brass tacks, Jon “soft on the Wildlings” Snow held the Wall against the largest assault they ever launched, whereas it was Thorne’s hardline that prompted them to breach the fortress for good.  That has to sting Ser Allister at least as much as being locked in a cell or watching Wun Wun paint the wall with his bravest soldier.

Predictability is a larger issue when it comes to Jon’s resurrection. Many if not most of us have been predicting this since last year, in the exact manner in which it occurred. But if I’m being honest, I did start to get nervous when Davos just started point blank asking Melisandre to bring Jon back (wait a minute, Game Of Thrones is never this straightforward…what is going to go wrong???). I  was most relieved to see our favorite bastard start breathing again, and while I want to be annoyed that they drew out such a non-mystery for two out of a scant ten episodes, I enjoyed all the Castle Black material while he lay in state so much that I never really got around to getting upset. But I also never really understood the people that took it personally that the showrunners played coy about this development, or Harrington’s continued participation over the hiatus. No, it wasn’t particularly convincing misdirection, but what were they supposed to do? Come out the night of last year’s finale and say “don’t worry, he’s definitely coming back?” Move the murder and resurrection to both be in the opening of a season, where the impact would be even duller?

Just smush 20 more heads?

I’ll have more to say about Jon when he starts saying more, I’m sure. But a few moments of paranoid doubt aside, I’ve spent so long assuming this was coming that it actually feels less momentous than the coups that upend some of the less prominent houses in this episode. Ramsay’s patricide has been set up for a long time, but still feels a bit abrupt when it comes. And a bit disappointing, really as I perversely enjoyed Michael McElhatton’s chilly, calculated evil as Roose Bolton and thought he had earned more than a mid-episode stabbing while the season is still setting the table.  Plus, removing the cooler head actually serves to make Ramsay feel less dangerous in a way. I’m sure he will continue to enjoy a certain degree of the narrative privilege that makes him a ninja mastermind with preternaturally good luck, but Roose’s warning about mad dogs was no doubt correct. This is not a world that allows even the most powerful to indulge their whims without repercussions, and Ramsay acts so cavalierly that it’s only a matter of time before the worm turns.

But did you think that we were going to move on to other storylines now? That it was enough that we saw him kill his father and send for his mother-in-law and newborn brother, with his character and murderous intentions beyond established? Then you underestimated Benioff and Weiss’s looooooove of Iwan Rheon, because of course we get another several minutes to luxuriate in another drawn out sequence of elaborate sadism. I’m trying not to be repetitive and one note in my complaints about Ramsay’s scenes, but repetitive and one note is exactly how those scenes are, so it’s kind of hard to come up with new ways to take note of it. Even if all of this is laying the groundwork for him to lose horrendously to Jon in the brewing Bastard Bowl, there is no way I needed to spend quite so many minutes (a precious resource in this sprawling show, as the list of characters at the bottom of the page can attest) watching him slowly open kennel doors, or eat, or bathe, or shave.

“Even I keep expecting them to say ‘cut’, but they. just. never. do.”

General Ramsay fatigue aside, this episode does represent a significant leap forward in his story. Which is mirrored very directly in the Iron Islands, where essentially the same narrative development is even more whiplash-inducing. Balon is similar to Roose in that he is a total asshole, but I was not in a big hurry to see him get his comeuppance due to a strong, distinctive performance. It also struck me that these assassination scenes were presented in the wrong order. Maybe the rationale is that the Boltons’ rule of the North never included the pretense of being an independent kingdom, and so offing the last of the “Five Kings” is the more significant development to the overall story. But the North and Roose have been much more of a presence on the show than Pyke and Balon, and Ramsay has for damn sure been more of one than Euron Crow-Eye, so it still feels slightly anticlimactic to go from the one to the other.

Having essentially no screentime since early season 2, and the extremely sudden introduction of his brother/killer, makes it hard to feel any particular way when Balon gets literally overthrown. I guess this is good because he was a hateful old shithead? But it’s kind of bad because it interferes with Yara’s ability to take control of the Iron Islands and put the brakes to a pointless, hopeless war? I’m certainly interested to see the Ironborn version of succession-based intrigue, which I imagine involves more sanctioned hatchet fights than in the other kingdoms.  Yara seems like the most reasonable leader the Ironborn could hope to choose at their upcoming kingsmoot, but she’s got her work cut out for her. With her relation to a prior ruler counterbalancing the difficulty of breaking the glass ceiling to the nation’s highest executive office, not to mention trouble courting the evangelical vote, she is basically the Hilary Clinton of the Iron Islands. And she’s going up against a crazy, orange-haired political outsider with delusions of grandeur who is most famous for captaining commercial enterprises to disastrous results, and who unceremoniously offed the establishment figurehead standing between him and the Big Seat.

“I AM THE STORM.”

With these two murders, we’re pretty much down to Walder Frey as the last Old Treacherous Goon standing. After that, it’s just Littlefinger and Ramsay on the Fuck That Guy front. Everyone else has some sympathetic shading, however light, worked into their characterization. But I’d also note that as of now, the Tyrells are the only faction whose patriarch has not been murdered since the start of the show. The Starks and the Baratheons have both had their families decapitated multiple times over, but at this point the Lannisters, Martells, Targaryeans, Boltons, Ironborn, Wildling army, Night’s Watch, and Dothraki have all had their leaders violently dispatched as well (meanwhile the Tully’s had one lord die of natural causes and another deposed and imprisoned). I’ve mentioned this in passing before, but “Home” really cements that the surest way to get offed in the world of Ice and Fire is to find yourself as the strong, steady hand at the head of a significant armed force.

That Martin, who is still calling these major narrative shots even if the show has mostly surpassed the books in terms of plot, is still so devoted to this sense of narrative entropy this late in the game is impressive but also a bit worrisome. We’re all pretty much assuming that some relatively sane people (a combination of Jon, Dany, Bran, Sansa, and Tyrion, presumably) will eventually come through all this tumult and tragedy to start putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, but then again nothing about the manner in which the story has been told thus far dictates that has to happen.  That we still presume, after 6 years of stabbings in so many hearts, that things have to correct themselves for the end, is a testament to how deeply these narrative preconceptions are ingrained. Game Of Thrones keeps zigging and zigging and fucking us over, and we keep telling ourselves that it’s all just bumps in the road before the final zag rights the ship.  The resurrection of Jon Snow is about the first time the series has gone for a broadly predictable crowd-pleasing moment.  I wonder, though, if we should be quick to let that convince us that Sansa and Bran are going to promptly join up with him to beat back the White Walkers, feed Ramsay to Ghost and live happily ever after.  At some point, should we start taking the lessons that Game Of Thrones has taught us about how Game Of Thrones operates more seriously than a few centuries of narrative tradition have taught us that it must operate?  I’m starting to wonder if that’s even possible.

Because really, that has to be where things end up with Ramsay, right? All this crap with his dogs has to be setting it up, right? RIGHT???

“Nah, I’m going to live forever!!!

Subplot Report Card:

Wargin’ – B+

The North: B (Sansa and Theon’s farewell counteracts my disappointment at Roose going out so perfunctorily, but not another needlessly long sequence of Ramsay being Ramsay)

Castle Black: A+ (Wun Wun, mother*****s)

King’s Landin': A (this grade was guaranteed just between the head smush and Coster-Waldau’s face after Tommen insists that, yes, his mother would totally have the prince of Dorne killed if she felt like it)

Mereen: B+

Braavos – B (I haven’t talked about Arya’s scenes in the body of either recap this year, because there’s not much to sift through yet. It’s promising that her assassin training is starting to include a practical element after a season spent on a survey of Faceless theory, but it’s still moving at the characteristically languid pace of an Essos storyline, compared to all the tumult across the Narrow Sea)

Iron Islands – B (the wonderfully gothic atmosphere of Pyke deserved better, but misplacement within the episode hurts, and I’m not sure about the casting for Euron)

Season Morghulis: Doran Martell, Trystane Martell, Areo Hotah, Roose Bolton, Walda Bolton, Balon Greyjoy, (-Jon Snow)

MIA: Dany, The Sand Snakes, Osha, Rickon, Littlefinger, Olenna, Bronn, Grey Worm, Margaery, Loras, Sam, Gilly, Pycelle, Kevan Lannister, Gendry, the Blackfish, Walder Frey, Edmure Tully

Death Watch: By the steady-hands-must-die logic outlined above, Olenna Tyrell would seem to be next on the block.  But also, now that she has demonstrated an ability to destroy the fundamental stakes of the show, Melisandre needs to be either taken off the board pronto or some serious limits need to be placed on her ability to do this again and again and again.  Since she still needs to walk the walls of Winterfell to fulfill her vision, I’m guessing the Queen Of Thorns goes first.