GAME OF THRONES 7.06 - "BEYOND THE WALL"

"Cool as fuck, dumb as shit."

That seems to be the consensus about “Beyond The Wall” (which my cable guide calls “Death Is The Enemy", but I’ll go with HBO's website on it) amongst all the Thrones fans I have spoken to today.  And while I had not been especially bothered by the season’s hyperspeed pacing to this point, this week did seem to push it to the level of parody.  The episode pares things down to essentially two storylines, neither of which really works at a basic level.  Let’s start with Winterfell, where at least the logistics are clear, even as the characterization gets wonkier.  I buy the basic premise of the reignited tension between the Stark sisters.  They have always been very different people, and now they have very different experiences that have left them both aggrieved and paranoid in very different ways.

But as is this season’s wont, they push it too far, too fast.  I think the key to Arya’s motivation is supposed to be last week’s eavesdropping on Littlefinger thanking the maester on Sansa’s behalf.  We know that she has been keeping him at arm’s length, but to Arya it appears she’s still keeping him closer than her own siblings.  Which as I am typing it out actually makes more sense than it does on screen. But still not enough that I buy Arya threatening to cut off her sister’s face and wear it around.  I mean, god damn, show.  You need to put in some more work to earn a turn that sharp.  Because there is a strong sense in which this is all just what writers call "schmuck bait", the tease of a major bombshell that only a schmuck would believe could actually happen, because it would be show-ending.  The classic example would be any time an episode ends with a main character shot in the torso – if you doubt that person is going to survive, you’re a schmuck.

"For Outstanding Achivements In The Field Of Obliviousness 

There is an extent to which GOT has made its name by actually detonating the types of bombshells that other series would back away from, and only the worst kind of hindsight could claim the storytelling has been actually toothless.  Of course the likes of Ned, Cat, Robb, Oberyn and Margaery can vouch for this, but other shows might have, say, raised the specter of Stannis sacrificing his daughter for his ambitions but never let him actually go through with it.  And on occasion, the show has seemed to use an awareness of these meta issues to surprise us with “obvious” developments of lesser import.  Mance Rayder, Thorne, and the Tarlys could all have told themselves that if the “gods” didn’t see fit to kill them dramatically in the big climactic battle scene, they probably were safe from being summarily executed in the following episode.  But no such luck.  Or, I remember being actually surprised by Renly's death, because I thought ending an episode on the birth of Melisandre’s shadow baby meant that it would probably fail.  If only because I expected that if a major character was going to die, it would more properly happen just before the end credits roll rather than right after the opening ones.

"Your mistake was thinking I was major."

There’s a further sense that with the series actually reaching its end, there is more freedom to deploy bombs that have the potential to break the show in half.  Even on shows that were much less ruthless in dispatching core cast members than this one (I’m thinking of Breaking Bad, or The Shield), you start to see Plot Armor fall away as the finale approaches.  Whatever you’ve been saving these characters for, there is nothing left to save for.  Which has made it extra frustrating that as the end has come into sight, this season has indulged in the most blatant schmuck bait of the entire run.  While the show is freer than ever before to actually kill Jaime off, only a true schmuck would believe that they would do so by having his climactic suicidal charge into the maw of a dragon be interrupted just so he could drown in a river between episodes.  Or that essentially the same scenario with Jon this week had a chance of actually ending him.

But those are classic examples of the trope, the type that tries to convince you of mortal peril to a character that any cursory experience with the medium tells you can't be dispatched, at least not in this way or this place.  And while the Arya/Sansa split does actually try, briefly, to go to that place, I’m also calling BS on the entire conflict in general.  Sansa being frightened of Arya and her bag of creepy Halloween masks makes sense, sure.  Her being convinced to send Brienne away as an emissary at the upcoming peace summit, but also because her oath makes a conflict with Arya the only circumstance where she can’t be relied upon to take Sansa’s side?  Fine.  Actually, pretty much everything on Sansa’s side passes the smell test.  It’s Arya who comes off as a belligerent whack job.  She is scornful of Sansa’s experience as a prisoner of the Lannisters, but Arya herself was their prisoner at Harrenhall, and as Sansa points out, she didn’t get herself killed trying to stop Ned’s execution either.  Also, the inciting issue is a letter written under duress that surely wouldn’t impress any of the northern lords, but also doesn’t contain any breaking news.  It’s common knowledge that Sansa was married to the Imp against her will, and even Robb Stark was able to instantly recognize Cersei’s words in his sister’s penmanship.  And he was supposed to be the basic apple that fell closest to Ned’s imperceptive tree. 

For a schmuck, he sure was purdy

But it’s not plot mechanics that make this whole storyline feel off, it is character and thematic issues.  There is simply no way, no how, that this plotline ends with anything but the Stark kids taking out Littlefinger together.  Yes, Arya’s encounter with her wolf gone wild did foreshadow that she is not going to stick around forever to be BFFs with her sister, but at worst I think that means she leaves to resume her mission to kill Cersei with a few mixed feelings.  For all the series’ willingness to traffic in tragedy, there is simply no way that the story of the Stark family has them enduring years upon years scattered and surviving such incredible hardship, only to tear out each others’ throats once they are reunited and back in power.  Even if you were going for such a horribly depressing outcome, you wouldn’t go there this abruptly. You would take more than one episode to rebuild that relationship if its dissolution was going to be the final emotional stamp on the whole thing.  On the other hand, if I were a truncuated season that had been known for doing too much, too fast in service of setting up big moments and twist endings, this is exactly how I would rush to set up a dramatic turning of the table on Littlefinger in next week’s finale.

The rest of the episode is all exactly that – rushing way the hell through a bunch of things that don’t make a lick of sense, to get to the Big Moments they make possible.  There are some great character beats amongst Snowcean’s 11 as they make their way through the stunningly beautiful natural landscapes (Iceland, I seen you, gurl) to complete their stunningly stupid task.  In another week, I might put more focus on the pleasures of seeing Tormund meet the Hound, or Thoros admitting to Jorah that he was blacked out when he made his glorious charge to end the Greyjoy Rebellion.  In an episode with a sturdier foundation, I might focus more on the questions about succession that recur in the different threads –  Jorah and Jon discuss their fathers, and Jorah tells him to pass Longclaw on to his sons, Tyrion is rebuffed when he addresses Dany’s plans for her apparent non-starter of a dynasty, Cersei’s hold on Jaime is now predicated on her possibly-fabricated pregnancy.  Arya and Sansa discuss their father and Jon’s rule.  Even Tormund waxes romantic about his plan to breed a new race of giants with Brienne. 

"Really, bro.  She lives in Canada Winterfell, and she is totes hot
and she loves swords and shit and she is just so, so real..." 

But there are just too many fractures in the bedrock logic of this story, and so many of the errors feel unforced, that I can’t help but focus on them.  The plan to kidnap a zombie was already severely undercooked, requiring a roundtrip, transcontinental journey just to undertake a stupidly dangerous mission for a highly nebulous return.  Since Dany was just killing time until they came back anyway, why is she even at Dragonstone at all this episode?  May as well have her fly the crew to Eastwatch and be awaiting their return there.  It changes nothing except the setting of her scenes with Tyrion, places her a thousand miles closer to the action, and makes Jon’s orders to Gendry make something that approaches a lick of sense.  He tells him to run and send a raven to tell Dany what happened, but…nothing has happened yet.  They hadn’t figured out that they were going to be trapped on a frozen lake while the Walkers idle around waiting for them to die of exposure.  And while that is a fairly clever way to set up the siege scenario, it takes several insane leaps of logic to not assume they are overrun and killed 3 minutes after Gendry books it. Or that if they did somehow survive, they would still be where he left them a week later rather than racing back to the Wall on his heels. On top of which, how is it that the whole idea was to go find the army of the dead, and then the second they find it, Jon’s like “fuck, run tell Dany she needs to bail us out!”  Heck, here’s an idea: maybe the plan all along is for the guys to go find some Walkers, send back word to her, and then she brings the dragons in for a surprise attack, and they grab a straggler and book it in the chaos.  You can play it as a twist even, with the Night King’s counterattack a further turning of the screw.

Anyway, in the dumb world this episode actually inhabits, the implication is that the guys must have been sitting in that lake for a week or so, but it certainly doesn’t feel like more than one night.  I have been happy to handwave away the iffier timeframe of this season for the most part, but at a certain point I run out of hands.  It helps nothing that even after waving away Gendry’s arctic marathon, supersonic ravens carrying a message that has no basis to be anything but “he dead, khaleesi” and Dany teleporting to the other end of the world, Jon still requires a second deus ex machina 5 minutes after she's brought in the cavalry.  And then there’s all the “little” stuff, that might be easy to ignore in a more solidly constructed episode.  Before the Night King introduces javelin to the Winter Olympics, when Dany’s dragons are making such quick work of the army of the dead, why is she even focused on picking the guys up instead of continuing the cookout?  Why does he target the smaller dragon in flight rather than the larger one lying directly in front of him with all his enemies on its back? How come the Walkers aren’t throwing spears at the guys when they’re exposed and surrounded?  Why do zombies still know how to use swords, but can’t figure out how to throw rocks?

"Are we to believe these are (snort) magic zombies of some sort?"

I didn’t mind the accelerated pace in the first few episodes, but it really seems like a regular season order would have done so much to allow these last two to breath and complete coherent thoughts.  End one episode on the guys getting stuck on the island, and an indeterminate time gap would be more heavily implied when we return to them a few days of "real time" later.  Some extra room for the Winterfell story  would also help what is going on there.  Maybe it allows some time to show Bran observing what is happening from afar, which would provide a bit of explanation for what is preoccupying him while his sisters threaten each other and provide some context for that laughably abrupt Benjen ex machina. And if you can’t get more episodes to work with, you could carve out some more time within the episode itself; the zombie bear attack is a really fun action sequence, but it accomplishes nothing of real use.  There is plenty of zombie action to come, it doesn’t even kill Thoros when he gets mauled so you could have him take that injury in the initial flight to the lake.  And I would argue that reminding us that the Walkers can turn animals as well as humans only undercuts the impact of seeing the dragon’s eye turn blue at the end. I actually think that there was a missed opportunity for an even better final shot, where instead of hauling it out, the Night King just walks up to the hole and raises his hands, the water starts churning, and then the dragon busts through all blue-eyed and roaring and shit.  It would be a more expensive effects shot, surely, but if you weren’t rendering a superfluous zombie bear fight there would be more in the budget.

"We actually prefer Reanimated Ursine Americans.."

I do try to take the shows I’m recapping here as they are, and not to get too deep into the weeds ghost-writing my preferred version, but all the shortcuts this episode takes just scream “BUT WHY???” at every turn. And when even a drunken dolt like me can think of 4-5 offhand improvements to reach the same narrative ends in a more sensible manner, that’s a bad sign.  Don’t get me wrong, there was some first-rate spectacle here, but spectacle should be in service to story, not the other way around.  And this season has had too much story, so many paces it needed to put Jon and Dany through, that apparently it had to decide between maintaining tension/momentum and straining the suspension of disbelief.  I hope the people calling these shots realize that the former only works with the latter intact, and it is hanging by a thread.  And that maybe the wrinkles in Jon’s kidnapping jaunt was never entirely ironed out because so much focus had been put on making sure Cersei’s grand trap next week is airtight and amazing. 

What’s the harm in hoping, right?   It’s only Game Of Thrones.

SUBPLOT REPORT CARD:

Everyone gets a C this week.  I just want all of you storylines to know that the only reason I’m disappointed in you is because I know you can do better.

Season Morghulis:  House Frey, Obara Sand, Nymeria Sand, Tyene Sand, Ellaria Sand(?), Olenna Tyrell, Randyll Tarly, Dickon Tarly, Thoros Of Myr, Viserion, Benjen Stark

Death Watch:  I’m guessing all the blokes that survived this week will make it through the next, so I’m going with Littlefinger, and one or both of Missandei/Grey Worm.  I’d also mark Varys and Euron as “maybe-s”.