GAME OF THRONES 3.09 - "THE RAINS OF CASTAMERE"

Okay.  Okay.  Okay. 

Jesus, it’s not okay.  Nothing will ever be okay and no one will ever smile again.  God damn.

So, anyway, for the first time ever that I recall we have an entire episode with no time at all spent in King’s Landing, and it’s…oh, fucking hell…

 

 Come on man, you can do this

But so things are really moving in the Jon Snow storyline now, with his loyalties revealed and Gareth gutted and coming this close to reuniting with Bran.  Bran, who it turns out is not just a warg but some sort of wereHodor, and, andandand ohfuckme that was just, just brutal…

 

 Keep it together, man, keep it together

Ahem.  Arya also comes within a hair’s breadth of…of reuniting with her…ah Jesus, that poor girl…

The goddamn wolf too?  Ugh.

 

 Come on, Schwartz, you just gotta hack it

And, uh, Dany freed some more slaves!  That’s nice, right?  Sure, the parts of your brain that process positive feelings are currently offline, but slavery is bad, you definitely remember that being a thing.  So Dany making less slavery must be good. Well, she didn’t do it so much as sit back and let her trio of admirers do the actual work, but there was some…ah Christ…some pretty nifty action, even if it’s not on the level of Blackwater, or…or…

 

 Fuck it.  Fuck all of it.

Yeah, you know what, fuck it.  It was probably a waste to even spend the money to choreograph the action scene we got in Yunkai, because it could have depicted the conquest of the city on twice the scale of Blackwater and no one would remember this episode for anything but the sickeningly, viciously dark Red Wedding sequence.  

I’m a guy who appreciates darkness in my fiction, particularly in genre fare that constantly has to contend with the inherent goofiness of most sci-fi/fantasy worlds.  I also highly value (too highly, folks annoyed by my anti-spoiler pathologies might say) the ability of a work to genuinely surprise, to upend its status quo and commit to following through with serious repercussions to its world.  To that end, I also generally celebrate creators who are ruthless with their own creations, and are willing to hurt them or kill them off in unusual places or ways (and indeed, this has been a consistent source of my praise for the show in the past).  I’ve never understood fans who criticize folks like Joss Whedon or Ron Moore for raining misery upon their heroes at every turn.  Drama does not spring naturally from happy coincidences or stable relationships, and to some extent I wonder what the point of even creating fictional characters is if you are not going to push them to their absolute breaking points.

But this episode, man, was a rare case where the abuse of fictional characters felt tantamount to actual sadism.  It wasn’t shock or outrage, really; part of the reason I love being surprised by TV shows so much is that I spend so much time watching, reading about, talking about and otherwise analyzing shows that I can usually see at least the general shape of a season or episode from the early going.  Most of the people I talked to seemed convinced that Robb was going to meet a bad end soon (to the point where my pathological parts started to wonder if some of the ostensibly unspoiled ones didn’t know more than they were letting on), so it wasn’t like it caught me completely off guard.  I definitely knew that something bad was going to go down at that wedding, as Frey appeared way too eager to accept uncle Edmure as a consolation prize.  So I was sitting there on the couch, joking with my friend at the 32 minute mark that we had about 15 minutes left until something really, truly awful happened.

So I should have been ready for this, but holy sloppy shit, I was not.  I knew it was a trap, but had predicted that Talisa would get it before Robb (cue friend: “Well, technically…”), and figured that he might be captured or Catelyn killed, but I did not think the entire war for the North could come crashing down in one fell swoop like that.  I’m not sure what the primary conflict of the show will be now that the war is done.  I’d be more excited by that question if I wasn’t so emotionally drained right now.  Stannis doesn’t seem ready to mount a full comeback and the Greyjoys don’t seem like they’re up to the challenge of conquering more than a town or two. I doubt Blackfish could rally the whole of the North in his grand-nephew’s name, and Bran needs to complete his spirit quest beyond the Wall before he can muster any sort of resurgence. I guess Dany or Mance (or both) need to hurry along their plans in order to give things more of a focus now that there’s such a gaping hole in the center of the plot.

But man, those Starks.  When they lose, it is not in a squeaker.  No coach’s challenge necessary to review the call on the field for this one. They are decimated in truly, utterly horrendous fashion.  Even being sure that something bad was looming did not prepare me for just how many little twists of the knife they packed in to the massacre sequence. The talk about baby Ned, the lingering on Cat’s dawning realization when “The Rains Of Castamere” started playing, Bolton’s kiss off line, shooting the wolf, Arya being so close to reuniting with her family before it is snatched away from her forever…

In fact, things may have veered a little too close to repeating Ned’s demise beat for beat.  It’s episode 9, the head of the Stark family humbles himself before an adversary who repays it by murdering him in front of a loved one, Arya is right there before being dragged off by a hard-edged protector, even the smash cut to black on the snipping of the neck.  This was all very familiar, which made it even more maddening.

But the cruelest thing the episode does is something Game Of Thrones has proven particularly adept at; it offers a sliver of hope, an escape hatch that seems just plausible enough to fool you for a moment into thinking that it might be a viable way for the story to continue without the worst happening, right before it does.  I’m thinking of things big and small, like how Ned and Theon both had the possibility of joining the Watch dangled in front of them as a way of escaping execution, or Lord Mormont seemed like he might shrug off the backstab for a minute before realizing he was dead, or the alternative Robb’s advisors concocted for dealing with Lord Karstark that he declined to accept, or how it looked like Jaime might have saved Brienne from violation without paying a price, or even down to the moment where it looked like the price might be an eye, the loss of which a great swordsman could more easily recover from than a hand. 

Cat’s desperate play to stop the massacre was never going to work once you gave it the slightest bit of thought (Michelle Fairley acts the living shit out of it, though), but in the moment you so want to believe that she and her son could recover from their seemingly non-fatal wounds that you almost do, mere moments after you almost believed that Arya could release Robb’s wolf and that would make some sort of difference.  This sort of thing is the real strength of Martin’s writing, from what I can tell.  I’ve heard his prose style is not the most impressive, but he clearly puts thought into all the roads that could potentially be traveled, and doesn’t tip his hand by only bothering to examine the one that will be taken.  Which feeds into the two greatest strengths of the series; the way that there is no one protagonist that we are manipulated to sympathize with above all others, and the genuine unpredictability that comes along with that.

On the micro scale, this amounts to managing red herrings that keep us off balance from moment to moment.  In a larger sense, allowing each character the time and attention to weigh their long term options, regardless of which route they will take or even whether they will be around to take any of them, keeps us from intuiting who is going to be more important than who.  When a new character pops up a couple years in to the show’s run, we don’t know whether they will be dead by the end of the episode like the Titan’s Bastard, or stick around for a multi-year arc like Ygritte, because the show does not treat one as more immediately disposable than the other. 

A more “focused” show might not spend the time on scenes outlining Sallador Sahn’s plans for the queen, or Stannis’s intention to make the low-born Davos the Hand of the King, knowing that those plans will not come to fruition.  Such scenes are not strictly necessary to the plot, but including them makes it harder for us to dismiss Stannis’s chances, since we expect everything we are shown to matter.  Or to bring it back to this (miserable) episode, we have spent enough time on Robb’s grand plan to take Casterly Rock that it does make it subtly harder to accept that his rebellion could really end this ignobly. 

But Jesus, ignoble doesn’t even cover it, does it?  It would be one thing if any of the Starks had been allowed a slightly heroic death.  But it’s that they’ve all been so thoroughly defeated, and died with utter despair in their hearts, that pushes things into the sadistic territory.  I was genuinely left feeling like these characters’ creator somehow despised them.  And it’s a complete fucking bummer.  I genuinely did not sleep well after this episode. 

So, congratulations, Martin/Benioff/Weiss?  You shitheads.

Is it next week yet?  That’s…okay, actually.  I could use a little break right now.

GAME OF THRONES 3.08 - "SECOND SONS"

“Second Sons” is an unusually focused episode of Game Of Thrones, spending almost all of its time focusing on the stories of Dany, Stannis, and Tyrion at the expense of other plotlines that are working like gangbusters (Jaime and Brienne), barely puttering along (Theon or Bran), or falling somewhere in the in-between (Robb or Jon Snow).  While I’m as ever more interested in what’s going on in Westeros than Dany continuing to walk over dickheads in the east, and I doubt I’ll remember this as a particular favorite episode at any point in the future, this was still the shortest hour of my week.  And if it were to win an Emmy for Peter Dinklage, why that would be just fine by me.

Other than the primary three stories, we only have bookends featuring Arya failing to kill the Hound and Sam succeeding in killing a White Walker.  It seems a bit unlike Arya to lose her nerve when offered a free shot at her captor, but I suppose we have to remember sometimes that she is still a 10 year-old girl, even if she is the most badass ten year-old girl that could conceivably be.  What’s more surprising is that Sam does not lose his nerve when his sweetheart and her little brotherson are threatened by a Walker.

 

 Does eat babies, but dreamy eyes, right?

At least I think it’s a Walker, technically.  It’s definitely not one of the seemingly mindless zombies that Jon killed in season 1, or attacked Sam in the premier.  No, this guy is familiar-looking, as a sort of supervisory figure that probably spent his last few moments in Westeros wishing he’d taken a moment to actually kill Sam in the closing seconds of season 2 instead of focusing on creating an appropriately epic cinematic tableau.  Finding out that Walkers are allergic to obsidian does take the wind out of their sails a bit in terms of monstrousness, but I suppose it’s nice for Sam to get a hero moment after three years.  Not that I expect him to be in competition for anyone’s favorite character all of a sudden.

Meanwhile, over in Yunkai, Dany does jack shit and gets another new army for it. 

Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one really.  She meets a new guy (who is, improbably, as pretty as she is), he puts hoes emphatically before bros by decapitating his mates on the off chance it will impress her, it does and they’re in the express lane to the bonezone.  I’m about as non-plussed by this development as Jorah is sure to be; some folks on the message boards have been commenting that Dany seems to be “playing the game on Easy Mode,” which hits it pretty square, in my opinion.  Everything’s been coming up Khaleesi all year, and the adversaries she’s faced are so cartoonishly douchey (and this on a show packed with Littlefingers and Greyjoys) that they never seem like real people or real threats.  She needs to experience some setbacks soon if I’m to continue sympathizing with her; I’ve never necessarily wanted her to take the Iron Throne, but it’s getting to the point where I kind of want her to fail to take Yunkai just so she has to try her hardest next year.  

 

 STOP MAKING YOUR T-SHIRTS LIE TO ME, SHOW

Stannis is another character that is more interesting when he’s on the ropes.  When he’s winning, his righteous air is insufferable, but watching him try to maintain it in defeat is much more appealing to me.  My favorite Stannis bit so far is the tiny moment of hesitation before telling his daughter that no, he didn’t win the battle, though the conversation when he came to free Davos was a close second.  Having him sidelined for so long kept the Stannis material from really popping the majority of the year, but there’s a lot that interesting about it in general, and I’m not just talking about pagan bloodletting ceremonies and Carice Van Houten’s utter dearth of modesty.   

What’s interesting to me about Stannis is that on one hand, he is the prophesied savior of a fantasy kingdom, which is basically the oldest archetype in the oldest book there is.  But he’s not the protagonist of this story, and convention dictates that such role is reserved for teenagers, so between watching a middle-aged man wrestle with that weight and the sinister portrayal of Melisandre as his Merlin/Obi-wan figure, it puts enough of a spin on the trope to keep it from feeling too hoary.

 

The real festivities (dick-leech parties aside) are taking place in King’s Landing, though, as Tyrion and Sansa tie the knot with all the Lannisters and Tyrells looking on with varying degrees of disgust, bitterness and sadistic glee.  I would never describe Game Of Thrones as an especially funny show, but between Joffrey’s exquisitely shitty move during the ceremony, Olenna’s attempts to parse the web of familial connections the pending nuptials will create, to Tyrion deifying himself as the patron of tits and wine, and Cersei’s utter dismissal of Loras’s attempt to reach out, this extended sequence pulled as many laughs out of me as any previous episode in its entirety.  That it also managed to pivot in and out of legitimate tension whenever Joffrey re-entered the scene is a mean feat of tonal balancing, one that director Michelle MacLaren obviously honed on Breaking Bad, a show that manages to be consistently hilarious despite a generally grim tone and not having much in the way of characters that are intentionally funny.  Hopefully Thrones will bring her back regularly, as the occasional lighter touch is always welcome (not for nothing is Tyrion the breakout character of an overcrowded show).

Tyrion’s outburst is definitely the highlight of the season for him, and seems likely to accelerate whatever plans his nephew has to have him killed.  But it’s Tywin’s reaction, both to the threat to the royal prick and failure to knock up Sansa, that I’m more immediately interested to see.  We only have two episodes left in the season, and the penultimate episode is generally where the climax (prior seasons gave us “Baelor” and “Blackwater” respectively) falls, with the finale being more of a transitional piece.   However, with this season only covering half a book for the first time, it’s possible that this one won’t have quite the same fireworks on deck.   The big events on deck seem to be more weddings, both at Kings Landing and the Twins, but hopefully Dany will finish up in Yunkai and Bran and Jon will make it to Castle Black as well.  The sad part is that it will take us two weeks to see what’s next, since HBO has decided not to air a new episode over Memorial Day.  

Two weeks?  Oh, c’mon!

GAME OF THRONES 3.07 - "THE BEAR AND THE MAIDEN FAIR"

 

I’m not sure why George R.R. Martin chose this week to pen his annual episode, as outside of the thrilling final sequence, it’s very much a moving-pieces-into-place installment with little in the way of real story meat.  But uneventful Game Of Thrones is still pretty great Game Of Thrones, at least to me.

Starting with the bad part, though, Theon…yikes.  There was no point in the T&A session where it wasn’t clear the this was just a different type of torment and that the Horn-y Toad would be interrupting at some point to start cutting him up again.  My gripe with this stuff so far has been that we keep coming back to it without any new developments or information coming to light.  I guess I should have been careful what I wished for, though, since despite not carrying any great love of Theon, there is pretty much no context in which I can enjoy a castration scene.  Having Varys describe his gelding at several decades remove (and with retribution at hand) is one thing, but witnessing it firsthand is much more disconcerting, as disturbing a scene as the show has served up since Joffrey decided he didn’t like his birthday present.  That scene too cut away without showing us anything graphic, but was all the more disturbing for walking us right up to the line and leaving the worst to our imaginations.

Okay, shaking that off, let’s also check in with Bran, who is…still camping without learning any useful information about his visions.  I thought the Reed siblings had potential to be interesting at first, but Jojen is on the verge of becoming that most tedious sort of character, the “I know more than you about the mysterious goings-on that are driving the story than you do, and I’d totally tell you if I could, but Mystery…” guy (alternately known as “every single character introduced after the pilot of Lost” guy).  The scene is still worth it, though, for providing Natalie Tena a meaty monologue and especially for the long, thoughtful pause before Hodor gives before he answers her indignant line of questioning with his signature catch-phrase.

 

 “As Pablo Neruda once said...”
(studio audience goes nuts)

Bran’s little sister does a better job of treading water, at least.  Sure, Arya has just been bouncing from hostage situation to hostage situation for a long time now, but having the Hound to bounce off is very promising.  And I liked the little note that she has not forgotten her old dancing master’s theology lessons.

Plus she’s about to be an aunty!  I think we’re all pretty much in agreement that things looks far too happy with Robb and Talisa for something horrible not to be on the horizon.  Making plans for foreign honeymoons and introducing the in-laws to the little hard-headed Starkling just has to be a portent of impending doom, right?  A lot of folks on the boards have been predicting Robb as this season’s major casualty since the beginning.  I’m still not sure I see it, if only because there’s no one else ready to continue the war in his place and ending it would bring a giant portion of the narrative crashing down.  Which only makes prospects for his queen look even more grim.

 

 And did I mention Yowza? Because, you know, Yowza.

Jon Snow’s romantic bliss is similarly doomed, but he knows it.  Which may be the biggest revelation of the episode: Jon actually does know something!  Specifically, he knows the history of the North, which strongly suggests that Mance’s army will rapidly unravel once they get past the Wall.  Gareth the warg tries to drop some knowledge on our bastard about the opportunistic nature of human relationships, but we’ve been able to see that waving banners and banging drums does actually work to instill discipline in fighting men.  Sure, alliances between houses fall apart due to disagreements and decapitations between their lords, but how many rank and file soldiers have we seen abandon their masters when shit goes down?  The wildlings fiercely independent nature does seem likely limit their long term effectiveness as a military force; as Robert explained to us back in the first season, one closed fist is a more effective weapon than five individual fingers.

Contrast that with the nearly featureless Unsullied, a closed fist if ever there was one. These guys don’t need a drumbeat to march in unison, and as a result their mistress is as secure in her power as we’ve ever seen, downright haughty while making sweeping demands of the slavers of Yunkai.  In her confidence she is becoming more or a crusader than a conqueror, intentionally picking a fight that won’t get her any closer to the Iron Throne.  But she’s got her army and dragons (and a surprising FX budget for a scene that doesn’t strictly require using them so heavily), so why not kick back and talk shit to the lords of this city?  It’s not like there’s a character within 1000 miles that is well developed enough to constitute a real threat to her.  The guy mumbles something about having friends he’s going to call, but Dany’s already handed the warlocks of Qarth their asses once, and who else could it be?  The remnants of Drogo’s old khalessar?  What could even be a threat to her dragons?

 

Unless...it's McCounaughey, isn't it? Please be McConaughey

But the best parts of the episode, as has been the case all year, revolve around the Lannisters.  Tyrion’s scenes with Shae have become a drag, but put him with Bronn even briefly and you have still have automatic awesomeness.  I’m sure the Imp will get his mojo back at some point, but sooner would be better than later.

Tywin’s mojo, on the other hand, is still in full effect.  He extends his Family Devastation Tour to his grandchildren, strolling into the Red Keep to tell “his grace” that his own time is more valuable than the king’s, which is certainly true, and that Dany’s dragons are of no concern to them, which is more questionable.  It’s a terrifically staged scene, with Charles Dance bringing his full authoritative weight to bear without raising his voice the slightest tic or making the smallest gesture, beyond climbing a couple stairs.  The old man dominates the exchange, but given how the little prick bristles at it, it does little to allay my fears of what he’ll do when grandpa oversteps in front of an audience.  As with the Robb situation, everything coming up Tywin for the whole season seems like it has to bode ill.

But the funnest parts of the episode involve my new favorite Lannister, Jaime.  Yeah, he’s a sisterfucking child-killer, but he’s just such a dashing sisterfucking child-killer.  We’ve been steadily exposed to the more heroic side of the character all year, and this week he gets a full blown Han Solo moment, leaping into a pit where Brienne is fighting a GODDAMN FULL GROWN GRIZZLY BEAR with a wooden stick. This is all the sweeter since Game Of Thrones doesn’t generally go in for this kind of straightforward fantasy derring-do.  Would it have been even sweeter if he had ended the whole thing by shoving Locke into the bear pit himself?  Oh, don’t be greedy, you pricks.  Brienne fought off a bear with a wooden stick!  And now her and Jaime are hitting the road together, hopefully to exchange flirtatious banter and stuff bananas in the tailpipes of Stannis’s siege engines and maybe they adopt a chimpanzee to be their servant, but he’s a cheeky little bugger and is always getting into their wineskins?

 

 SPRINKLES!!! Why I oughta...

Is it next Sunday yet?  Oh, come on!

GAME OF THRONES 3.06 - "THE CLIMB"

“The Climb” opens and closes on scenes of our (nominally celibate) Crows making time with their best gals, which should make for one of the sweetest episodes of this generally unsentimental series.  Unfortunately, Joffrey exists.  And so even though he’s only on screen for five total seconds, it actually winds up being one of the more disturbing hours of a show that has heaped abuse and despair upon its characters from the opening episode.  Fucking Joffrey.

 

I am a rational adult who understands the difference 

between an actor and the character, but if I ever see 

this guy on the street I will literally shit in my 

hand and mash his face with it 

But we’ll come back to that.  This is possibly the first time since…ever, probably, that Jon Snow material wound up being the most memorable parts of an episode, mostly due to how spectacular the Wall climbing scenes are.  HBO has budgets that most cable shows would kill for, but we only get a couple of these epic sequences each year, and I didn’t expect to get one so close on the heels of the destruction of Astapor.  But the scenes aren’t just spectacle, they also develop the relationship with Ygritte into something more real than before.  It’s good to get some clarity on where exactly she really stands when it comes to Jon, and it helps that while her feelings are sincere, she is not foolish about any of it.  She’s not dumb enough to think that the boy completely flipped sides the moment he was captured, but she’s also pragmatic enough to see that loyalty to Mance isn’t necessarily in her interests either, so what the hell.  She sits the know-nothing down and basically spells out to him that they’re going steady now, and certain pretenses can be dropped.  And also threatens to chop off his manhood and wear it as jewelry, lest we think she’s gone soft.  It’s kind of sweet all the same.
While Jon and Ygritte are climbing the Wall, Sam and Bran are heading towards it from different sides.  Sam just appears long enough to wave a piece of dragonglass at the camera and tell us to remember for later that he’s got it, while  Bran has to broker peace between Osha and Meera, who are on the verge of either murdering each other or sleeping together (with this show, it could really go either way).  We also learn that the magical visions he is developing come with seizures sometimes, though that doesn’t seem terribly significant to anything yet.  I just want something to happen in this plotline already.  It feels weird that we’re over halfway through the season and they are still just somewhere in some woods, and we’ve learned practically nothing  new about the characters since their introduction five hours ago.

But somehow that does not even qualify as the slowest-moving storyline.  Theon is still being tortured, and he/we still don’t know why or by whom.  Sure, it’s looking increasingly obvious that Iwan Rheon is Lord Bolton’s bastard, what with literally flaying him on an X in an exact replica of their sigil. But it really is starting to feel like sadism for sadism’s sake, which is of course precisely how he presents it to Theon.  Still, it’s getting draining to watch.

 

When his torturer is feeling really sadistic, he forces him to

 watch the seasons of Misfits after Nathan was written out

But I’m not turning on the show or anything, because these two sluggish plots only take up two scenes between them, and the rest of the episode is pretty great.  We only get a brief look in on Jaime and Brienne, but just seeing her scowling in a frilly dress would’ve made up for a lot of filler.  It also appears that Roose Bolton has lost faith in Robb’s war, as he is hedging his bets and preparing to deliver Jaime back to his father.  I do wonder if there is more to this play, though, as he never struck me as the sort whose allegiances swayed in the wind.  Not like Walder Frey, who comes back to Robb’s side a little too easily at the promise of Lord Edmure (who appears to be pushing 40 as nobleman bachelor, though no one seems to find that unusual) marrying one of his daughters.  Something tells me there’s more complications in store on that front too.

Back in King’s Landing, Tywin and Olenna haggle over their families’ marital destinies, and it as delicious as we could hope that watching the two legendary Brits face off would be.  Between cheerfully acknowledging that her grandson is a “sword-swallower”, needling Tywin about his own sexual history, and the old man backing her into a corner by threatening to do to Loras what the Mad King did to Jaime (appointing him to the “honored” Kingsguard, and denying him children and inheritance in the process), this was a real treat.  Even the old lady seemed happy to find someone who could actually keep up with her.

 Whoever you are, whatever you’ve done, you do 

NOT want to see a quilled pen in this man’s hand

Less thrilled with the proceedings are any of the four new fiancees.  Tyrion and Cersei ponder who has it worst of them, but the answer is pretty clearly Sansa, who finds herself cruelly thrust back into the Lannister fold after so nearly escaping Joffrey and the capital.  She even cries to see Littlefinger sailing off, though we have just seen that she is immensely better off with Tyrion than that vicious twat.  I mean, yes, any of the players of the Game would punish a betrayal like Roz’s with murder, but he takes a relish in informing Varys about it, and we see from the aftermath how hellish her last minutes must have been.  Baelish has never been a sympathetic character, but this is a new level of villainy for the little rodent.  Which on this show probably means he’s about to become king for the next 3 years.

On a…well, not pleasant but at least less stomach-churning note, we also get some time with Arya and the Brotherhood.  A Melisandre/Arya confrontation is something I never thought to wish for, but is great to see, even without the tantalizing hints as to the corpses she will make in her future.  The witch has, as expected, come for Gendry, in order to use his Baratheon blood to somehow raise Stannis’s stock back up.  Seeing as how there’s been nothing in the least bit nasty or ominous about her and the Lord of Light thus far, I’m sure that will go perfectly well for the smith.

 

  No, really, “the night is dark and full of terrors” 

is a perfectly non-creepy alternative to “amen”

What I like about these scenes is that there’s a cutting-through-the-bullshit vibe to them, even as they are neck deep in the most mystical bullshit of the series.  Arya won’t let the Brotherhood pretend that their motives for handing over Gendry are religious rather than financial, Thoros won’t pretend that he understands the power he wields over life and death or what he could’ve done to merit it, and Berric is quick to disabuse Melisandre of the notion that the Lord of Light draws his followers to his bosom upon their death.

Part of what I like about this is that it doesn’t run too far afoul of my own less than spiritual nature, but I also think it’s important that the fantastical bits, as they ramp up, are not allowed to completely drown out the human element.  Westeros is a more compelling place because it is closer to medieval England than it is to Narnia, and as much as I’d like to see dragons going at it with giants and zombies, I’m much more interested to see Tyrion butt heads with his father, or Arya lay bloody siege to Stannis’s castle to free Gendry, or Jaime and Brienne figure out what they are to each other, or how Marge is going to try to bring her shithead husband to heel, or how Varys’s next move against Littlefinger will go, or what Olenna…

Jesus, is it next Sunday yet?  Oh, come on!

GAME OF THRONES 3.05 - "KISSED BY FIRE"

Game Of Thrones has always been about notions of honor, and how they both make a medieval society possible, and navigating it impossible.  But it hasn’t been as bald and emphatic about that since it chopped the head off its Paragon Of Honor, Ned Stark (referenced overtly here more than once).  That was a pivotal moment, both a thematic statement of purpose and a major destabilization of the show’s structure.  Things were complex before then, but have gotten even more fragmented since.  Tyrion has certainly taken on a more central role, but the show has never felt like it revolved around him as much as it did Ned in his capitated prime.

So this episode is highly focused thematically for a show that’s enormous sprawl generally dictates that it be organized according to which machinations of the byzantine plot have to occur before a particular storyline can progress.  So let’s make the rounds and see which vows everyone is honoring and which duties they are shucking aside.

Jon Snow is still gearing up to attack Castle Black with the Wildings, and has to make some strategic decisions as to how much betrayal of the Watch is acceptable in service of a vague plan to help their greater interests.  He starts out by putting on the worst poker face west of the Shivering Sea and stalling way, way too long to even name which castles are manned. Luckily for him, Tormund Giantsbane must be a truly horrendous card player, because somehow the big guy knows exactly what he is looking for but does not piece together that there is no reason for any hesitation at all if kid is on the level.

Jon then has to make the easiest sacrifice in the history of lucky bastards by breaking his vow of chastity with Ygritte in the cover of a Harlequin novel.  Yeah, I think we were all shocked by that twist.

 

 Sorry, Words Recited To A Treeface,

but it was not a fair fight

Robb meanwhile finds himself in a position where his entire war effort is jeopardized by sticking to the letter of his law, and the only way he can keep it alive it is to go crawling back to the only man he’s ever broken an oath to.  The specter of his father (who you might recall was introduced by beheading another oathbreaker and ultimately broken by the refusal to bend) hangs heavy over these scenes, as Robb sticks to his professed principles, at great cost to himself and benefit to the thoroughly unprincipled Lannisters.

Those Lannisters are so unconcerned with the diminishing threat of the King In The North that they spend the hour plotting against their greatest allies, the Tyrells.  The scene where Olenna effortlessly puts Tyrion on his heels shows just how much Dianna Rigg can do with a speck of screentime and cements her as the best casting the show has pulled off since Charles Dance.  Who ends the episode by relentlessly paving over two of the strongest characters on the show without breaking a sweat.  He’s done this to both of them individually in recent episodes, but now seems to be upping the difficulty just to keep himself amused.  If destroying your children’s chance at happiness were a game of Mortal Kombat, Tywin has progressed to the Endurance Matches and is still scoring a Flawless Victory.

I would totally be looking forward to Tywin’s comeuppance, if I thought it was likely to come from anyone but Joffrey.  But I’ll admit that his plan is tactically sound, effectively blocking the Tyrells from extending their influence in a manner they can’t publicly oppose, while simultaneously creating inroads for the Lannisters in both Winterfell and Highgarden.  Heartless, but devious.

Across the Sea, we have a single sequence, the crux of which is Selmy expressing his regrets at spending his life in sworn, technically honorable service to a madman and a drunken lout.  He made the wrong choices, but stayed within the accepted framework of this society while propping up terrible regimes, so he avoided direct punishment for it.

 

 Just pretend I inserted a picture of your least

favorite member of the Clinton/Bush/Obama

administration here

On the opposite end of the spectrum from Selmy, Jaime Lannister is a man whose life has been defined by achieving an honorable end in a “dishonorable” fashion.  His murder of the Mad King is exactly what Robert and Ned intended to do, what they are in fact celebrated for bringing about, but because he’d previously taken an oath to serve a lunatic his reputation is forever tarnished.  In a blistering monologue by Nicolaj Coster-Waldau, we learn the full story of how he got his nickname.  And that, in fact, it was not simple opportunism but necessity that led him to act, as the Mad King had given orders to torch all of King’s Landing with Wildfire.  Coster-Waldau should officially be a movie star after that, and along with the scene where he has the gangrene cut and burned from his stump without  opiates, should be enough to make even the most Lannister-hating fans to feel at least slightly bad for him.  Brienne sure seems have been won over, and she’s a harder sell than most.
Over at Dragonstone, we meet Stannis’s family for the first time, and see him wrestle with whether it is truly okay to break your vows if it’s in service to God.  If that is true, then it would follow that Davos’s punishment for a crime that was an honest attempt service to his king is forgivable.  But then, Stannis keeps his crazy wife and disfigured daughter locked away in cells for their entire lives; he’s not the most reasonable of sorts, when you get down to it, and the Onion Knight is running short on digits he can take as symbolic punishment. Perhaps with Melisandre gone for a bit, he might come to some sort of sense, but I’m not counting on it.

The Red Woman is presumably on her way to rendezvous with the fellow fire-worshippers in the Brotherhood, where Gendry has conveniently placed himself for whatever nefarious ends she has in store for him.  His goodbye to Arya was a touching moment (Maisie Williams is routinely brilliant in all her brief bits) overshadowed by the crazy developments of the opening.  Following a terrific duel, we learn that bleeding his sword on fire is the least of the magic that Baric and Thoros can conjure.  This was a terrific shock for us non-readers.  I was sure someone as important as The Hound wouldn’t be killed by someone in that character’s second scene (it’s an unconventional show in many ways, but it is still a TV show), but I certainly didn’t expect things to play out as they did.

 

 Still – you can get The National and Hold Steady to 

record new material for the credits, but not license 

one Queen song for this? I call bullshit, HBO.

What makes it so surprising is that while we’ve seen pretty extensive magic before, it was from Melisandre and the warlocks. Traditional witch-y types, in other words.  The Brotherhood just seem like a bunch of blokes, even in the scenes afterward.  But I always like when magic has a real cost, so I dug the stuff about how this is not a complete cheat code and Baric comes back a little more diminished each time Lord Of Light has to pull the Fenix Down out of his inventory.  It keeps it just grounded enough not to completely throw world the show has built off kilter, while still feeling eerie and fantastical.  It also helps that its introduced resurrecting such a minor character.  If they had killed Arya and brought her back with some juju we had never heard of, I would totally be calling bullshit on it.

But they didn’t do it that way.  They did it the way that the show has done some much else:  the completely bitchin way.

So, is it next Sunday yet?  Oh, come on!

WHAT THE F%#& IS WRONG WITH THE FOLLOWING?

(This piece was originally published on Chud.com)

Here’s what you need to know:  Fox’s The Following follows Kevin Bacon as retired FBI agent Ryan Hardy, called back to duty to pursue escaped (more than once) serial killer James Purefoy, and his cadre of homicidal followers who have formed a cult based around the writings of Edgar Allen Poe (sorta).

Also, it’s terrible.  In almost every conceivable way.  But punishment gluttons Al Schwartz and Justin Waddell have been unable to miss a single episode of this ongoing creative trainwreck/ratings hit.  Whilst steeling ourselves for tonight’s STUNNING SEASON FINALE, we decided to make like Laura Dern in Jurassic Park and sift through the mound to try to determine where this ship went off course and if there is any hope of righting it.

 

 “Did he tell you about his Deathcurse?”
- ACTUAL DIALOGUE FROM SHOW

AL:  Let’s start with Ryan Hardy.  He’s our hero, and I hate him more than a little bit.  He’s not charming, he’s not funny, he’s not empathetic with either victims or co-workers, he’s not actually good at his job (like, at all), but somehow acts like that’s everyone else’s fault.  Because it’s not like FBI bureaucracy has screwed up any of his great plans for catching Joe; it’s his chronic inability to take backup with him that has caused most of the trainwrecks that have ensued any time he steps out of the computer room.

 

We all like Kevin Bacon.  But the season is basically over; shouldn’t the protagonist have displayed some sort of sympathetic trait by now?

JUSTIN:  Kevin Bacon is a picky actor – at least it seems that way. If you look at his filmography, he seems like somene who has really thought deeply about the roles he takes.  So, I imagine, it must be hell to be stuck in the role of Ryan Hardy.  It’s an awful show, for sure.  But it also hasn’t given Bacon much to do other than be overconfident for no reason and grab a bottle every now and again to remind us that he has a drinking problem.  Oh, and to breathe hard every once in a while to remind us that he has a damaged heart. 

 

Leading into the final, it’s hard to understand anything presented by the show.  You have to just accept that Joe Carroll has a mysterious hold over people.  We haven’t seen how he is effortlessly able to brainwash his loyal subjects.  In place of a grand plan, he sacrifices (and some times just plain kills) these folks in the pursuit of annoying Hardy or having a romantic dinner with his ex-wife.  Finally, in the penultimate show, there was a character that wondered what it all meant (the confoundingly sympathetic Jacob Wells).  But he was responding to the danger of the Carroll’s plan, not the actual plan – which he seemed cool enough with.  Anyway, he is inevitably dispatched.  So, not to worry, the Carroll ranks have been righted!  So, where does this leave us?  With Carroll on a boat with his ex-wife and one of Hardy’s partners (cult expert/idiot Debra Parker) buried alive in coffin.  Both of these women could potentially be saved, but would stand a better chance if Hardy’s crew wasn’t so unable to understand the idea of not going off alone in the pursuit of could-be-anybody, suicidally-fanatical bad guys.

 

 

“He’s speaking to people through Gothic Romanticism!” 

– ACTUAL DIALOGUE FROM THE SHOW

AL;  You’ve hit on my biggest issue: there is absolutely no character with whom I sympathize.  Ryan is unambiguously our hero, but he has that tremendously unappealing blend of being kind of pathetic and kind of cocky about it.  Even Bacon can’t rise above it.  So who else might I want to spend time with?  The show serves up several options, each complete with an insurmountable barrier to empathy that the plot and the ludicrous premise demand.

 

Early on, I occasionally felt bad for Claire, which was largely a residual of completely falling in love with Natalie Zea on Justified.  And she should be a sympathetic hero in most respects, as she is a victim of circumstance and has proven tough and fierce enough to avoid being an utterly typical damsel in distress.  The problem is, she is constantly making decisions that, while not nearly the dumbest thing in a given episode, are simply not ones that we would make in her position.  She ditches her FBI protection to volunteer to be the cultists hostage after she has escaped from having ditched her FBI protection and volunteered to be the cultist’s hostage.  She keeps stabbing Joe, but apparently just because she likes how it feels, because she won’t finish the job.  Plus she’s in love with Ryan, who sucks at everything, and married Joe, who was a smarmy douchebag on a good day, when he was hiding that he was actually Jack The Ripper.

 

And let’s have a hand for the Following Bureau of Investigation.  They may not accomplish much, but they sure try their hardest, don’t they?  Honestly, the presentation of law enforcement on this show feels like someone trying to make a gritty drama based on this classic Onion article.  They are epically, tragically inept at every turn.  Recent events have shone a harsh light on just how fucking ridiculous it is that the world’s most famous serial killer has broken out of jail twice in a matter of weeks (once in a helicopter), and that the Feds can’t find three agents to rub together for a raid no matter how many people get murdered on national TV.  There was a sting on a 10th grade pot dealer in Little Rock last week with more manpower devoted to it than Bacon’s foray into the cult’s paramilitary militia training facility.  But of course, they have to be incompetent, because they have the combined resources of the federal government of the world’s greatest superpower behind them, and the cult has kitchen knives and a few copies of  The Purloined Letter.  We are instinctively drawn to people who are good at their jobs, and want to root for the underdog.  This premise will not allow for the good guys to be either.

 

Finally, we have the cultists themselves, and the show’s baffling request that we invest in their romantic and interpersonal entanglements.  They are definitely the underdogs in this situation, as it is literally them against the world, and as the characters in the tightest corners, they could potentially have the wildest problems to deal with.  But there is just the little issue that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM JOINED UP FOR THE EXPRESS PUPOSE OF  TORTURING AND KILLING INNOCENT PEOPLE FOR KICKS.   Including Jacob, the “sympathetic” one. 

 

 

 “Is that negotiator-talk? It won’t work, lady!” 

– MORE ACTUAL DIALOGUE FROM THE SHOW

 

JUSTIN:  I guess I like Claire. You almost have to feel for her a little because she’s 2 for 2 in the don’t date that guy department. She’s focused on getting her son back, and no one is helping her accomplish that task, so you have to forgive her for her crazy gambles.  The FBI certainly can’t protect her.  After years of no communication, Hardy is trying to half-patch things up WHILE her son is kidnapped.  After trying to make sense of the law enforcement side of the show, the cult has to look somewhat normal to her.  Who else?  Cult expert Debra Parker has an interesting background that ties into the show.  But they’ve done nothing with it.  I like the actress though.  Shrugs. 

 

Anyway, the show can’t really make any character compelling.  They want you to sort of care about the main individual cult members….but, like you said, they are super weird and crazy murderers.  They only reason I imagine that they focus on side characters so much is that Kevin Bacon, before he signed on to the show, put it in his contract that he didn’t want to appear in every scene. 

 

That’s my theory, at least. 

 

“He had a sense of honor about him. Like he was living up to some code of conduct.”

– STILL ACTUAL DIALOGUE FROM THE SHOW 

 

It is (somehow) going to get a season two, so it will be interesting to see what problems the show’s staff attempt to resolve.  I don’t know if Joe Carroll and his countless minions will continue into season two or not, but the show would  certainly be better off burning everything to the ground and introducing a new threat.  They also really need to discover what makes Ryan Hardy a compelling character.  He is arrogant for no reason.  None.  He is constantly failing – and they don’t even make that interesting. His “death curse” theory comes across as nothing more than a woe is me complaint.  He needs to have a little success so we can believe him as a sharper-than-the-rest investigator. Rather than a disheveled dumbass whose main characteristic is that he doesn’t like authority.

 

There are critics that suspect that Kevin Williamson is using this show to not so subtly poke fun at the murderTV genre. I don’t believe it for a second. But I can see why people are throwing that excuse at the show. How else can you explain some of the dumb shit they throw in there?

[

AL:  The thing is, which explains most of the dumb shit and bodes ill for a second season surge in quality, is that this is a fundamentally broken foundation for an ongoing series.  This concept could maybe work as a 2 hour movie, where we followed Hardy and the FBI exclusively, allowing the paranoia of anyone possibly being a cultist to drive the tension. To fill runtime of a series, though, we have to spend some time with the cult, which is just awful.  We can’t sympathize with them, and seeing their inner workings just highlights the absurdity of the scenario on every level.  If we were only ever with Ryan while he received untraceable calls from Joe and killers popped up and disappeared, we could just marvel along with him (our identification character) at how they are managing to pull this off.  When we can see behind the curtain, that it’s just a house full of weirdo fucks with one IT guy, it diminishes their threat and makes us lose respect for the FBI in the process for not being able to counter them.  And it’s not like we have an abundance of respect for the FBI to start with.  Even our hero Captain Failure spends half his time sneering at how stupid they are.

 

The other thing about spending time with the killers is that it puts the onus on the writers to portray Joe as a legitimately compelling figure who could attract such a cult of personality.  And they are clearly not up to that task.  Joe’s characterization feels like a dumb person’s idea of a genius.  He’s running this impossibly elaborate operation, fueled by the blood of followers that volunteer for suicide just to be a small part of some dumb book they’ve never even glimpsed, and all he has to offer them for their service are shallow literary allusions and arbitrarily tortured sentence constructions

 

 “Claire was crafty with that bloody knife. But I remain undaunted!” 

–  TOTALLY ACTUAL DIALOGUE

 

In terms of fixing it, I don’t think there’s any way to do it.  You could completely change the characterization of both the hero and the villain, to make the former actually likeable and the latter actually threatening, but even that wouldn’t get you in the clear.  Would an embrace of camp help?  I don’t think so;  the only thing making this amusing now is how much conviction it has in its own stupidity.  If it’s still stupid and lacks conviction it will just be tedious instead of mind-boggling.  Can they replace Joe and introduce a new killer?  That might be the best option, but the title implies that we will be dealing with this cult for the duration.

JUSTIN:  Well, I think they can probably fix it. They have good actors, obviously.  And they have a seasoned writing staff that, it seems, is pinned down under an impossible premise.  I don’t know, maybe Kevin Williamson has a The Following book of rules that the writing staff is not allowed to break a commandment or else.  At least that’s how I like to imagine it.  I think one thing that would help the show is to have it comment on itself more.  The world of The Following is so crazy and so dumb, the characters – like the audience certainly does – need to call things out.  The absolute ineptness of the FBI needs to be addressed.  Joe needs to have some followers asking themselves why they are latched onto to someone who has no plan other than to have a candlelit dinner with his ex.  Hardy needs to actually be drunk at some point.  So far, he just looks like a guy that collects empty vodka bottles for laughs.  The show just needs to make fun of itself more.  Even once would be nice, actually.  The world that Williamson and his staff have created is so ridiculous (press conferences where Poe passages are read, for one) that the audience needs to know the creators are fully in on it.  

Beyond all that, I’d be really surprised if they killed Joe Carroll off in the finale.  And it maybe isn’t a good idea to kill him off. The character is not compelling.  But James Purefoy is a pretty decent actor.  And this show needs good actors to hang its bullshit on.  Like I said earlier, critics are guessing that Williamson is goofing on murder of the week shows.  He’s not.  But it would not be a bad idea to course correct and do just that.  Or, well, do ANYTHING other than what they are doing now.  Make Bacon the maniac next season.  Clone Claire.  Hire Peter Sarsgaard to play a crazed killer.  Oh, wait. That’s how they are patching up The Killing. 

AL:  What’s funny is that the show has a built in method of commenting on itself, with Joe’s big stupid book, but it doesn’t even register as such because everything around it is so insane and bad that it just feels like more of the same.

 

 

“We didn’t date! We flogged each other.”

- EVEN MORE ACTUAL DIALOGUE

But in any case, I don’t agree with you here.  For me, the fact that it’s so po-faced about its own stupidity is a big part of what makes it (inadvertently) watchable.  I think we have more than enough genre pieces that aren’t actually good on their merits but also try to wink at the audience and force you to laugh with them instead of at them (which any 4th grader can tell you is not as fun).  You only get into so-bad-it’s-good territory when you’re genuinely trying to be good.  When you’re being bad but also sort of trying to be in on the joke, you’re Snakes On A Plane.  And nobody likes Snakes On A Plane.

The problem is definitely not the actors, or at least not the core cast.  It’s that this story is built in such a way that there is really only one twist in its arsenal, which it is forced to repeat ad nauseum, and the heroes have to be blitheringly incompetent in order to keep it going.    I thought maybe they could pull off some wild status quo change like having Claire get brainwashed into joining the cult or for Roderick to kill Joe and take over, but they’ve closed the door on those possibilities.  

 

Do you have a particular favorite quote from the show?  Or example of staggering FBI incompetence?  For me I think I have to go with “What the hell, man?  Were you beaten as a kid or something?  I was just looking for a new friend.  DAMN.”   Basically, any time one cult member asks another what’s wrong with them or why they’re acting this way, it’s gold.  Yes, Vince the Constitutional Extremist, you’re in the secret lair of the deathcult founded by the world’s most notorious serial killer.  I’m going to go ahead and say every single person here was either beaten as a child, or something.

 

“Looks like I drank the Ryan Hardy Juice too.”
- YES ACTUAL DIALOGUE AND NO THEY DIDN’T HAVE 

THE RIGHTS TO SAY “KOOL-AID” AND NO THAT 

DID NOT WARRANT A REWRITE

JUSTIN:  The all time quote happened last episode. When Carroll was watching surveillance footage of Hardy having sex. After the deed, Hardy reaches for a bottle. And his lover (also a secret cult plant) suggests that his drinking habit will eventually kill him. 

 

Hardy, without missing a beat, says, “Can’t kill me. I’m already dead.” 

 

I mean, that’s just an awful line.  We already know that Hardy is depressed and self-obsessed.  So when he says shit like that, it’s just hilarious overkill. 

 

As far as the FBI’s stupidity, there are so many instances.  It’s a really strange show.  Joe’s cult is better organized, and have success after success.  Even when Hardy dispatches a member, even a key member, it doesn’t even upset their goal.  Well, to the extent that there is a goal .  But the FBI has produced nothing but consistent and hilarious failures in the pursuit of the escaped madman. 

 

Anyway, you say the book Joe is writing is commenting on the show.  I don’t buy that.  I think the creators just want to give Joe some kind of purpose.  He really has none. I think that it would have been interesting  – well, sort of – to see Joe Carroll’s army of loyal murderers wedded to some kind of insane, overarching evil plot.  But the writers don’t give us anything close to that. Joe’s is toying with Hardy.  He wants his family back . There are Poe masks and a now exposed training facility.  Every now and again he kills one of the cult members or asks one to kill themselves. But to what end?  Both Carroll and the writers don’t have much of a reason to even have a gaggle of psychos at the ready.  It’s like Williamson came up with a premise, sold it, and then figured out quickly that it didn’t work.  But, shit, scripts were due.

 

It’s actually not that fun to pick on this show. A show like The Walking Dead, which balances its weaknesses with strengths, is more interesting to pick apart. The Following doesn’t really do anything right, so I just kind of feel bad for it. I guess it’s a somewhat popular show. Maybe they will figure, “Hey, people are watching it. We don’t have to fix anything.” (The same attitude they have onThe Walking Dead, unfortunately.) And the second season will be just a continuation of the first. Ugh.

 

Anyway, at least Comedy Central renewed Nathan for You.  There is good renewal news out there, Al.  Joe Carroll can’t take that from me.  

     

“I know you’re upset.”
“Yes, and I am processing those feelings through the therapy of words!”
- FUCKS SAKE

 

AL:  I wasn’t saying the book is really successful in commenting on the show, but that it’s a perfect device for it that is just sitting there, untapped.  Though I also understand why they’ve been dialing back the Poe stuff as the season goes on, as it’s the biggest dumb-person’s-idea-of-a-smart-person aspect of Joe’s character.  The more we see him as a fanboy in his own right, the less believable he is as a cult leader on his own.

 

But ultimately, The Following is too successful, and also too unrelentingly ugly, nihilistic, and cynical in its violence for me to take pity upon it.  I am a great fan of violent TV; my favorite shows are Game Of Thrones and Breaking Bad, both of which have more disturbing and certainly more grisly sequencese, but which also treat those developments with a respect and gravity that The Following seems completely incapable of.  Here it’s all hollow, sensationalist depravity for no greater purpose than to try to goose the audience enough to stick around through another commercial break.  Everything that pearl-clutching scolds claim that violent TV is, in other words.  Even if comparing it to cable drama heavyweights like that is unfair, NBC is currently airing a new Hannibal Lecter show that manages to be more gory, more disturbing, and more thoughtful about the lasting effect of such acts than The Following, which loves to throw to commercial on Bacon agonizing over another murder laid at his feet only to come back with him ineffectually quipping along like before.  By the way, Hannibal is also gorgeously shot for a network show, in stark contrast to this show’s signature sequence, “Kevin Bacon chases and shoots cultists in a completely unlit tunnel/basement”.  I recommend it.

But while trotting out these comparisons, an idea struck me that may be the best route for change in the second year.  I was thinking of Sons of Anarchy, a show I quite enjoy for being hyper-violent without the meditative quality I ascribed to those others.  But there is a gleefulness to that show’s most bonkers sequences, when severed heads are popping up in chili pots or whatever, that The Following‘s dour tone suppresses.  So maybe what they should be shooting for is more pulp than camp.  The latter is a bit more self-aware, which I don’t think does this show many favors, but perhaps a bit more enthusiasm for what makes it such a special little turdflake would make things go down smoother. 

 

As it is, you’re right, almost anything would be better.  It’s a stupid, ugly, empty show that wastes the talent it has and gives serial killer porn a bad name.  So let’s just conclude with an agreement of how incredible The Claw Of Shame is.

 

 

 "Seriously, did he tell you about his Deathcurse?"

GAME OF THRONES 3.04 - "AND NOW HIS WATCH IS ENDED"

Lots of people were looking for retribution this week, and a few of them even got it.  Game Of Thrones is a series where it often seems like assholes thrive and in young Sansa’s words “the worst never die,” so getting to see some of the most unpleasant customers get what’s coming to them made for the best and most satisfying episode since “Blackwater”.

In King’s Landing, Tyrion seeks Varys’s help in pursuing revenge against his would-be killers, a pursuit that is complicated by his currently low standing and the fact that he couldn’t simply lay waste to his own family even if he had the means. Varys advises patience, providing as a handy visual aid the trussed up body of the sorcerer who castrated him as a boy, delivered to him in a crate for a heaping plate of very, very cold revenge.  Dinklage and Conleth Hill always play well off each other, but this is a particularly good scene, as we get some backstory that had been teased to  us for years and provides one of those rare opportunities to revel in a nasty customer (even if we didn’t know he existed prior to the scene) getting what’s coming to him.

But that’s not even Varys’s best scene of the night.  Diane Rigg absolutely dominates her screentime, delivering one of the most memorable lines of the series when she muses about what would happen when “the non-existent bumps against the decrepit” (Hill’s exaggerated, practically vaudevillian look to his own crotch at this is as amusing as it is ridiculous).  I also particularly liked the her dismissive acknowledgment that Sansa is not particularly interesting in her own right, but has led an interesting life.  It’s a spot on assessment, nicely meta without putting any strain on the fourth wall.

 

 “You mean I’m a eunuch? Wow, that really seems

 like something someone would have mentioned

 in every scene I’ve ever been in.”

Oleana is the ultimate pragmatist, though, so she quickly gets on board with Varys’s plan to head off Littlefinger’s designs on Sansa, and the northern armies such a union would put within his grasp.  It falls to granddaughter Marge to seduce Sansa into agreeing to be her brother’s beard, which doesn’t seem likely to be the most fulfilling marriage for either party but has to be a step up from her current situation all the same.  But then seduction appears to be Marge’s primary mode of communication; if watching her put on the pretense of friendliness to Sansa is upsetting, watching her manipulate Joffrey is downright nauseating, as he regales her with giddy descriptions of the sadistic acts and ends of former royalty.  It gets even more unsettling when she convinces him to greet the crowd she has managed to turn (at least a bit) in his favor; as disgusting and dangerous as Joffrey is now, one shudders to imagine what he could do with even a speck of political acumen in his tiny, inbred skull.

 

 2/3 of the easiest Marry/F***/Kill round that could ever exist

 

Cersei is threatened enough by the Tyrell ascendance that she volunteers for her own round of “Charles Dance devastates your entire life and character without looking up from his letter writing” theater.  He is every bit as withering in his estimation of her as he was of Tyrion, telling her flat out “I don’t distrust you because you’re a woman, I distrust you because you are not as smart as you think you are,” and blaming her for not controlling Joffrey.  This prompts her to dare him to try to bring the kid to heel, which he tantalizingly promises he to do.  I don’t see this ending well for the old man, as Joffrey is too big an idiot to realize that how badly he needs people like his grandfather to prop him up.  But it should be great to watch.

Another Lannister contemplates revenge in Jaime’s storyline, where he is understandably distraught, as his swordhand was the only thing about him to which the world assigned any value outside of his name.  And going way back to the second episode of the series, he opined of Bran’s injuries that “even if he lives, the boy will be a cripple, a grotesque.  Give me a quick, clean death any day.”  He certainly had other reasons to believe Bran specifically was better off dead, but it seemed to be a genuinely held sentiment.  And there is nothing clean about the ongoing abuse he is receiving from his captors.

Jaime professes not to care about revenge, but I don’t think we’ll be stuck for long with a morose, resigned Kingslayer.  Brienne gives him a swift verbal kick in the seat, and while she may lack some of the oratory verve of Al Swearengen, the message seems to sink in.  These two are more bound together than ever, with her recognition that it was only his intervention that saved her from a nasty fate last episode.  It makes me really want to see what happens between them once they are inevitably freed from Locke and his men.

Oh, and what the fuck is going on with Pod?  Apparently he really does just have Magicwang.  This is too arbitrary a thing for the show to keep returning to for simple comic relief, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how it could possibly pay off.

Anyhow, back to REEEEEEEVENNNGE!!!  The Brotherhood Without Banners appear to be a band of merry men intent on making the noble houses of Westeros pay for the collateral damage their squabbling has caused.  Which is all well and good, and The Hound certainly deserves execution for the atrocities he’s committed in service to the Crown (including murdering Arya’s friend following her spat with Joffrey), even if the Brotherhood is mostly holding him responsible for things his brother did.  But they are also, we learn, devotees of Melisandre’s Lord of Light, which is disconcerting.  And does not bode well for Gendry, if they are connected to her, since she’s out looking for Baratheon blood.  But he’ll have some entertainment in the meantime, as the Brotherhood’s leader, an errant knight charged with bringing down the Mountain by Ned back in the first season, sentences the Hound to trial by combat against his own self, in what seems a thoroughly questionable decision.

 

 Trial by combat: deeply, resolutely fucking stupid as

 a system of justice, but where would our fantasy 

series/video games be without it?

Theon, meanwhile, isn’t even sure who is taking vengeance on him, but an emotional monologue from Alfie Allen indicates that he knows he deserves it on some level.  His storyline hasn’t amounted to much so far, to the point where it doesn’t seem like there was much reason not to just kill him off at the end of last season.  I think we can presume that the creepy janitor who freed him and recaptured him is Roose Bolton’s bastard, due to a lack of any other viable suspects, but there’s something very off about the whole situation all the same.  Did he really need to murder several of his own men to lull Theon into his confidence after he had freed him?  If he’s in charge, why does he seem to be hiding that from the other torturers?  Was he trying to get information about the Stark boys from Theon, or just messing with his head to make it even worse when he’s strapped back on the rack?  When are we going to get some more time with Yara anyway?

But if there is not enough progress with Theon, “And Now His Watch Is Ended” more than makes up for it with explosive developments on the two fronts that have always been the slowest-burning, the action across the sea and north of The Wall.  These are the types of developments that you expect to be seen in a season finale (and in fact, made me wonder if they could’ve been packed into last season, which saw very little forward motion in either plot), but there is something exhilarating about seeing them come less than halfway through a season that I know to be covering only one half of the source book.  If this is still the set-up…I can’t even imagine what the pay off will be.

 

 Oh right, with the blood and the fire

This stuff is even more satisfying because, as mentioned earlier , it involves the comeuppance of two of the more one-dimensional black hats on the show. Sure, seeing the Night’s Watch tear itself apart is a bad development, but any sadness at seeing Lord Commander Mormont reach the end of his watch is counterbalanced by getting to see Craster the daughter-fucking, child-murdering shithead get stabbed right in his (shitty) head.  It will be interesting to see how Jon Snow’s undercover mission is affected when he learns of the mutiny.  Improvising doesn’t seem like a real strength of his, does it?

Finally, Dany does exactly what we all expected her to do, and immediately roasts Master Hostiledouche alive and frees the slaves of Astapor once he gave her uncontested dominion over an army of fearless, remorseless killers.  Well played, Hostiledouche, well played.

 

 I believe the word you're looking for is "derp"

I kid, because being predictable doesn’t make the sequence any less awesome.  Dany is well on her way to crashing the party in Westeros, and we’re only 4 episodes into the season.  I’m sure there will be some speed bumps in her way that will prevent her from making landfall until at least the season finale, but damn if this episode didn’t get the blood pumping and leave me reeling heading into the closing credits.  Not that any particular plot point happened, but that it was all happening so quickly.  With so many shows that can be described as “slow burning”, the pace is a result of not having a firm enough grasp on their own mythology and longterm plans to know when it’s safe to move things forward.  That’s not an issue with Thrones (one of the benefits of having strong source material in place), so it can burn as slowly as it wants before exploding multiple storylines in a single episode.


Is it Sunday yet?   Oh, c’mon!