Miguel Sapochnik – Memphis Flyer

Drogon is silently judging you.

Game of Thrones was a great show that grew to love the wrong thing. Its early adopters worshipped how it fully realized its alternate universe. Its increasing budget to film battle sequences (off-screen in the manner of a stage play at first) became what its makers thought its true worth. Seduced by the dark side of their production schedule, spectacle became their master, writing their afterthought. Details grew fuzzy, their beautifully constructed dollhouse fell apart, as its audience watched not with desire but light hatred, not in fire but ice.

But even in its death throes, the penultimate episode took time to be true to itself and deflate its heroes. It numbed the viewer with endless shots of medieval civilians running from dragon firebombing by former savior, Daenerys Targaryen. Innocents ran down corridors, caught on fire, and turned to ash. Modeled after U.S. and British massacre of German civilians in Dresden during World War II, it was disgusting. All-powerful ninja Arya and stern-faced warrior Jon Snow ran around helplessly while Daenerys and lieutenant Grey Worm went mad. It may be garbled Cliff Notes for an ending George R.R. Martin may never write, but I’ll hold onto it the way a housecat does a dead mouse: long past the point of usefulness. I loved this show.
[pullquote-1] It is not normal for TV shows to end well, especially sci-fi fantasy. Lost and Battlestar Galactica adopted religious smokescreens for their inability to come up with secular answers to long-posed riddles. Game of Thrones didn’t, completely abandoning the lore of its competing in-universe faiths. Instead, it built to tough-guy nihilism, followed by happy outcomes for the majority of its action heroes and some light Tolkien-style epiloguing. Bran is king, for some reason.

There are many popular theories about why, outside of outpacing their source material, the writing quality of showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss has gone from more thoughtful than most fantasy to exactly as loose and empty as much of it. Cocaine and burnout are solid options, as is a desire to move onto their recently-announced Star Wars trilogy, or the cosmic injustice of a cruel god. I think that, just as they relied on assistant-turned-writer Bryan Cogman for heavy lore lifting in the first seasons, they are relying on a different one now, Dave Hill (who helped elevate the character of Olly), and he’s just not as skilled at helping them craft sturdy plots.

A victorious Daenerys Targaryen addresses her troops in the ruins of King’s Landing.

As many have pointed out, the series dilutes the antiwar message of the novels by its sometimes glorification of the hard-bitten warrior. How cool the Hound looks fighting the Mountain with a dragon flying behind them registered more strongly than his late assertion to mass-murderer Arya that revenge is hollow. (Likewise the online cry of “Cleganebowl!” was initially ironic: people mocked treating a death fight between brothers like an organized sport, until repetition made them sincere). The point shouldn’t be that Daenerys went crazy and killed civilians: it should be that all mass violence leads to noncombatant death, and warriors and states use it far too freely, with increasingly meaningless justification.

Director Miguel Sapochnik and Emilia Clarke did excellent work selling that slaughter. But the lack of characterization in Dany’s turn from a protector of the common people to their mass murderer made the moment nonsensical. Her reasons work when written out: a need to rule by fear, losing advisors and dragons, and numerous surrender bells frustrating or stimulating her bloodlust. Onscreen it creates a disconnect, that does clumsily get the nature of being bombed right. One minute you’re following the propaganda of a government at war, the next you’re being indiscriminately killed. Violence does not resolve character arcs. It just ends you.

Iron Throne? Not so much.

Martin’s ongoing suggestion is that this would happen with any king or queen in the right circumstances. The show’s unfortunate implication is that Dany is worse than her formerly gray, also-murderer co-heroes because she is female, from a foreign land and rides magic lizards. It’s special pleading that the other warriors suddenly care so much about collateral damage.

For the American audience, the use of Dresden as source material is a quiet self-indictment. Your tax dollars prop up one of the most powerful militaries in the world. My favorite show is saying that all war is immoral. If only the comfort and catharsis its audience found in that message could translate into peaceful action by us.

courtesy HBO

The Night King (Vladimír Furdík) rides Viserion into battle.

How I feel about my longtime favorite show, Game of Thrones, crystallized recently when I saw a behind-the-scenes promotional video featuring George Lucas’ visit to the set. The show has journeyed from Star Trek to Star Wars, from science fiction carefulness about its worldbuilding to fully realized mythic fantasy. And within that, another movement: from the revelatory appeal of the original trilogy to the bloated nature of the prequels. Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were adept at adapting George R.R. Martin’s novels, cutting the excess and creating momentum from the morass of detail. But having run out of novels to adapt, they now make up material whole cloth. They favor sudden reveals of plot and character development, twists which pay off simultaneously with half-convincing explanations of how they occurred.

Game Of Thrones Lives To Fight Another Day

Now it’s unclear where characters’ foibles end and where their stupidly for the sake of plot movement begins. The political bickering is nonsensical, the speech less thoughtful and more modern. The pleasures of the show are that of any well-made spectacle. Dragonriders Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) have fallen in love with the all the conviction of bored real estate attorneys in a late afternoon deposition. Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) gets chided for his lack of cleverness, in a retcon of how TV has softened him from the novels, where he is a more murderous and angry drunk. A long-awaited battle has come and gone.
courtesy HBO

Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Wildu) and Ser Brianne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) prepare for the undead onslaught during the Battle of Winterfell.

Because the second half of this season is yet to air, I cannot say whether these storylines will pull together into a beautiful meditation on all that comes before (online spoilers work like prophecies in the books—vaguely and inconsistently). They still could. I still worship the show even as I criticize it, and spend free time discussing and studying it. But always at my back, I hear my snobbery toward sports. How am I different from a casual football fan? Where the avid sports watcher admires the skill of athlete, I admire the production craftsmen who make this extravaganza. Both are fundamentally passive relationships. The only difference is when the show was better, I was using my brain to work out the mechanics of a fictional world. Now I just receive it, like dictates from the Pope.

The battle between the living and the dead in episode 3 of this season was wonderfully tense. I like director Miguel Sapochnik’s continual stress on the confusion of violence, and how one’s personal narrative gets lost in the chaos of battle. Jon Snow again unheroically flounders through combat. His dragon collides with his lover/aunt’s, foreshadowing what I suspect will be the real conflict post-White Walker. However, that the series’ demonic threat would be defeated in one moment after a single battle with many survivors, felt like a cheat and a mistake.

Criticisms of the episode’s lack of battle geography and dark cinematography miss Game of Thrones’ current strengths. In large setpieces, it gets the feeling of small horrific or supernatural details right. Commenters pointed out that it was an incorrect use of cavalry for the mounted Dothraki to charge into blind darkness and a zombie horde from an opening defensive position, but the visual of soldiers watching their comrades’ fiery swords go out in faraway silence communicated the ebb and flow of hope in a battle. You get the sense of how it feels to be an individual swept up in a mass event.
courtesy HBO

Maisie Williams as Arya Stark

As a fan of this one, sometimes my only recourse to imaginatively engage with a story is to criticize how it fails my expectations. At worst this can be criticism similar to a shoe-buyer complaining about a tight fit: the consumer and his product, in a swan song as their life goes by. But at best the simple act of discussion can engage with communal storytelling, and the ideas stories communicate. Two here are that might makes right, not honor, and that the upper classes focus on increasing their power instead of dealing with threats to the lower classes. I would say this is a general condition of humanity. How can the majority of us be truly free when the powerful always corrupt whatever structure contains them?

Where before describing these ideas was exciting, the show is now something like America’s Most Photographed Barn in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. I can feel the meaninglessness of my voice among the din. But the ritual is a balm, and the central allegory is still there, and still important.