Victory has to be earned
EPISODE RATING: 8/10 | IMPORTANCE IN SERIES ARC: 8/10
"SAY HER NAME!...YOU RAPED MY SISTER. YOU MURDERED HER. YOU KILLED
HER CHILDREN!"
Valar morghulis. Oberyn and the
Mountain sort out their differences, while Jorah and Daenerys don’t. Roose Bolton dismisses Bran as “unimportant…a cripple, a young boy”, while Lord Baelish later says “sickly little boys sometimes become powerful men”...hmm! Sansa
plays the Game and bails out Baelish, while Grey Worm gets some boob and says "I love you, sorry about not having a ding dong" in the longest way possible. Game of
Thrones is back and it's taking no prisoners. Oh, and yet another wild prediction from me. Dive in for the most intelligent and detailed Game of Thrones analysis you'll see on the interweb. (Read the first page for key points and the rest for more detailed stuff).
Rank of Thrones
THE MAIN STUFF
#CrushingDefeat
So George R R
Martin again illustrates his utter contempt for the twee morality shows that
permeate TV today – this is no NCIS, no 24 or even the venerable Walking Dead. There
are no heroes and the “good guys” don’t win…not easily, anyway – the good guys
have to really, really earn it. Nobody is safe - and you know what, you can’t
blame them. The tagline for this season is “valar morghulis”.
Game of Thrones is
entirely a different beast from those shows - it’s about narrative over individuals
and circumstance over heroism. This is no Walking Dead, where
a campaign to keep Daryl alive probably keeps the showrunners awake at night. A
Song of Ice & Fire is basically sado-masochism in poetry. The only way Oberyn’s
death could’ve been worse was if the Mountain had sexually assaulted him
afterwards and this being GoT, that’s a real relief. Now we'll see if really nobody is safe: next week is the dreaded penultimate episode of the season, with previous ones being Baelor (Ned Stark's death), Blackwater (Battle of Blackwater) and of course, Rains of Castamere (Red Wedding). So this season, will it be the death of Tyrion? His death might be
just too much for viewers and so I'd be surprised if he dies. I just hope this doesn’t get dragged into season 5.
Before I go any
further, I’d like to point out a cross-parallel: Roose Bolton dismissing Bran
as “unimportant…a cripple, a young boy” and Lord Baelish later saying “sickly
little boys sometimes become powerful men”…very much a “hmmm!” moment.
We also bade goodbye to another character, although only from a storyline: Ser Jorah and Daenerys. This was somehow even more heartbreaking, since we’ve followed these two for so long. Jorah lost his customary calm and bared everything, only for Daenerys to throw him out. In GoT, secrets don't stay buried forever. Now a wiser ruler might have looked beyond Jorah's indiscretion and accepted that he was crucial to the operation now, but Daenerys is increasingly becoming a short-sighted tyrant. No doubt we’ll see Ser Jorah again, maybe with a rival camp.
[In case anyone
is wondering why he needed a pardon, he was convicted of slave-trading, which
is forbidden in Westeros. He fled prosecution and so has lived in exile since
then. Why did he do this? To pay for an exorbitant lifestyle for his beautiful
wife, who left him anyway.]
Amongst other
notables, I love how Littlefinger tried to corral the troops at the Vale by
referencing Ned Stark’s death (“Do you support the Lannisters, the house that executed your
friend, Ned Stark?!”) as if he had nothing to do with it. As we now
know, he asked commanded Lysa to kill Jon Arryn AND turned the Kings
Landing City Watch against Ned Stark when he should have brought it to his
defence.
Generally, the
show has a massive ‘eunuchs’ motif: the opening scene in the tavern (“I thought you were
a eunuch!”) and Grey Worm and Theon, both castrated. The former believes
castration enhanced his power and dignity, whilst the latter had deposited all
his honour into his penis and so was devastated at its loss.
THE REST OF THE EPISODE
THE REST OF THE EPISODE
MOLESTOWN / CASTLE
BLACK
"Too bad you got a
hangnail for a cock”
Eddison: "Once I’m done with this world, I don’t want to come back"
I did think, in
my recap, that this and the Tyrion story were the most urgent storylines, and
so the episode show bookended this episode with those two stories. The plot wasn’t moved along in a meaningful way, so I won’t spend too much time
on this. In short, Ygritte can’t be all bad, because she refuses to kill babies
(never mind the hundreds of dead adults in her wake). Did she recognise Gilly
as a wildling as well? Wildling solidarity, y’all! I
presume we’ll now spend a whole season watching Gilly and Sam slowly inch towards
eachother.
Castle Black is really desperate, with 100ish against 100,000, although
we haven’t seen anywhere near the numbers they keep talking about. Jon Snow and
co. will have to come up with something truly extraordinary to get out of this.
Or maybe, just
maybe, and I’m giving you fair warning of a Fourth Wall prediction, just as the
wildlings are about to get stuck in at Castle Black (in a very literal sense),
maybe the White Walkers will attack! Suddenly the Wildlings and Night’s Watch
will find themselves fighting together! Now wouldn’t that be interesting…
Meereen / Essos
“If the masters
never cut me, I never am Unsullied, I never stand in the Plaza of Pride when Daenerys
Stormborn orders us to kill the masters. I never am chosen to lead the
unsullied, I never meet Missandei from the island of Naath”.
Greatest line in Game of Thrones. Ever. Grey Worm, you
silver-tongued devil, you.
.gif) |
| Cue Missandei saying "you had me at hello! Or whatever you said in Valyrian." |
Ironically, the GoT character who speaks the least "common tongue" is also the most poetic. This could very
easily have been a cornball speech in any other show, but here it comes off
quite sincerely and well earnt. Here is
a man (well…) who has known only military service, suddenly beginning to
understand humanity, affection and boobies. Dammit, I’m almost afraid to like
him lest he gets his face crushed in by [random bad guy], but right now,
he and Missandei are easily more interesting than Daenerys.
One more note: yet again, in Westeros, profanity
is used quite prodigiously (a mere 15mins ago, in fact), but in Essos we continue
to get polite euphemisms such as “pillar and stones”…
The North (south
of the Wall)
Roose: “Unimportant…a
cripple, a young boy”
Ramsay: “What are we
without our history?”
Kenning: “The
Ironborn will not surrender”
Oh, Theon. Oh,
Ramsay. Both of these guys are products of a system that desensitises men and
allows them to do shocking things, but with a key difference. Theon was brought
up by Starks, so he feels remorse and certainly started to feel a tinge of
disgust as he saw the burnt corpses of the two children (season 2), while Ramsay
Snow Bolton is turned on by torture and violence.
It’s hard to identify Theon's character arc now, except perhaps in the context of penance.
Unfortunately, Theon is doing penance for far fewer crimes than those committed
by Tywin, the Mountain or any of the long list of villains in GoT. Also, he’s become so
infantilised and traumatised, it’s actually more disgusting than the brutish
violence.
Anyway, this was
a vindication of sorts for Ramsay Snow Bolton, who saw his manoeuvre pay
off well, earning him a West-Wing-style “walk with me” moment
and the pride of place in the Bolton family. Having said
that, the fort looked like it was done for anyway. The map below shows why Moat Cailin was so important to
the Boltons: it opens up the whole North to them. As Roose says, “the North is
bigger than all the other Kingdoms combined”.
The scene of Kenning receiving an axe in his head shortly after a bombastic display of manhood was a bit like Theon’s triumphalist war cry at Winterfell, halfway through which he was smacked in the back of his head by one of his own men. The flaying was yet another example of why nobody in Westeros is worth their word. Finally - why do I get the feeling that Roose Bolton’s dismissal of Bran as a ‘cripple’ will come back to haunt him?
Vale of Arryn
Lord Yohn Royce: “And
when Jon Arryn named you Master of Coin, no-one cared. It’s always been a
grubby job, why not let a grubby man do it?”
Sansa Stark: “I have
been hostage in Kings Landing…a plaything for King Joffrey to torture or Queen Cersei
to torment”
Petyr Baelish: “Sickly
little boys sometimes become powerful men”
Lots of great lines here, including a very pointed Westerosian putdown by Royce. The way Royce was cross-examining Baelish came off like a House of Commons session or a
telling off at an English Public School! (FYI, in England a “public school” is
actually private and often upper-class). The Fourth Wall has often found
itself being told off by public school Headmasters.
So in a way, the
most quietly interesting storyline is the one where we follow Sansa finally
coming of age in a brutal, uncaring world. She finally has some power and the
will to use it, even making Baelish out to be a hero. We have yet another dysfunctional
GoT relationship in the making: Littlefinger loved Catelyn Stark but now she's dead, he's transferring this 'affection' to her daughter (yeah, that’s not weird at all) and she’s decided ‘better the devil you
know’. Hell, it’s Cersei all over again.
About being a grubby man: Littlefinger is FORCED to be grubby…in a nepotistic world where bloodlines
determine who will be King, backstabbing, betrayal and whispers are the only
way a commoner can grab power for himself.
We also get a
short edition of the Hound and Arya show – Arya seems to be going insane. Why do I get the feeling Arya and
Sansa won’t meet?!
Kings Landing
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"Deciding a man’s guilt
or innocence in the eyes of the gods by having two men hack eachother into
pieces…tells you something about the gods”
Tyrion has long
been the ‘viewer’ in Game of Thrones, making the same remarks as us, pointing
out Westeros’s fallacies, inconsistencies and just plain weirdness. That he
is just tickled by trial by combat (which he survived previously thanks to
Bronn) just masks his nervousness. He’s lost the fatalism and bravado he
displayed in the previous episode and is again worried about saving his own
bacon.
Tyrion then
starts bumbling about nepoticide and how there’s no family-killing that doesn’t have
its own word. The story about the cousin who kept killing beetles was
interesting in that it got Tyrion focused on something from his childhood, which
he was holding onto as comfort. It’s interesting to note that the Orson story
almost resembles a vengeful god who just “crushes the beetles” without having some
sort of grand plan or great redemption. In retrospect, it seems like Tyrion’s
voice was the Song of Ice and Fire warning us of what was to come.
So, onto the showpiece
of the episode: Oberyn to beat Mountain, avenge Elia Martell and save Tyrion’s dwarf
ass. Oh wait, this is Game of Thrones, and so naturally Oberyn dies in the
worst way possible – just after appearing to win, the Mountain crushes Oberyn’s
head and eyes (the internet is a bit cross because this wasn’t realistic, but atleast
dragons are ok).
 |
| Dammit Oberyn, always leave 2 armlengths of space when gloating! |
There's a parallel here: Arya’s lessons with the Hound. 'Water dancing' is out, brute force is
in. Oberyn’s prancing with the lance was ultimately pointless against the
Mountain’s sheer size. Ultimately Oberyn wasn't that interested in winning, but in forcing out the truth.
Emotions ran high: Ellaria was completely horrified by the end, but when Oberyn was winning, the look of excitement and utter joy on Jaime’s face was absolutely priceless. On the other hand, while Cersei continues to cement her reputation as Queen Bitch of Westeros, her own look of smug joy when the Mountain finally does win was quite repugnant. Tywin genuinely looked uncomfortable. But then as with so much in life, victory for the heroes was too good to be true. However, the crowd got to hear of what the Mountain did.
Emotions ran high: Ellaria was completely horrified by the end, but when Oberyn was winning, the look of excitement and utter joy on Jaime’s face was absolutely priceless. On the other hand, while Cersei continues to cement her reputation as Queen Bitch of Westeros, her own look of smug joy when the Mountain finally does win was quite repugnant. Tywin genuinely looked uncomfortable. But then as with so much in life, victory for the heroes was too good to be true. However, the crowd got to hear of what the Mountain did.
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#GameOfThrones fans, fancy a funny and intelligent review of the latest episode? #OberynVSTheMountain. Try http://t.co/Mx1w6U0zkA. C u soon!
— DukeOfLancasterVI (@DuchyLancaster) June 5, 2014
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