Game of Thrones, “The Iron Throne”

This week on Dear Television:

Let Aaron Bady and Sarah Mesle sing you a song of love and war, friendship and betrayal, ICE and FIRE. In association with Home Box Office Productions, we bring you a saga like no other. Travel with us to the mysterious, ancient land of Westeros, where nothing is as it seems. THRILL as beloved characters disappear before your eyes! CHILL as your worst nightmares come true! TWEET whenever you see continuity errors! TEXT YOUR FRIENDS when these dudes yet again blow it with their garbage gender politics! Unsullied beware: many of the deepest secrets of the Seven Kingdoms and the dramatic conclusion of this song of ice and fire will be revealed in these essays. As the world turns, we know the bleakness of winter, the promise of spring, the fullness of summer and the harvest of autumn — the game of thrones is complete.

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Previous episode: Season Eight, Episode Five, “The Bells”

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But Why, Though?

by Aaron Bady

Dear Television,

This show long ago backed itself into a corner in terms of how it could end, and, last night, smashed its face in the corner, smiling. Someone had selected Jon kills Daenerys, the dragon melts the Iron Throne, and Bran is the new king on their bingo card: congratulations, you won the prize!

If you strain, there’s an underlying logic to it: even enlightened despots are bad, we’ve decided, and democracy is hilarious, obviously, but since all the real power-brokers are dead, the remaining half-assed aristocracy has decided to shift power a rung down the ladder (with a place-holder semi-king), which gets something like the status quo ante back, though it’s unclear why this outcome would be better or worse than a variety of alternatives. It requires a very generous reading even to deduce that that is what’s happening. But it could have gone a half-dozen ways just as easily, and nothing about how it actually went last night felt more surprising, inevitable, or satisfying than the multitude of scenarios that people had dreamed up. Ideally, a good climax would have taken you by surprise in the moment, but as it sank in, you would have realized how it had been earned by what came before; and after the show was over, you’d have been satisfied by what it all added up to and meant.

The show has pulled that off before: Ned Stark’s death and the Red Wedding (and Cersei’s big victory) are obvious examples of successful climactic moments. The show’s ruthlessness was shocking, but made sense as you thought it through. Those surprises reinforced an essentially tragic tone and message: the Game of Thrones had winners and die-ers, and, since valar morghulis (all must die), even winning just buys you time until you die and someone else can win. Power is treachery, and treacherous; the Game of Thrones is The Wheel, endlessly turning (or the astrolabe from the title sequence) with its heartbeat the accompanying theme music, the show’s true MVP, a song that never ends and never changes.

I hoped the show had another shock like that in its back pocket. The more fool I; Jon killing Daenerys was, to put it bluntly, not it. There was no element of surprise since other major characters were begging him to do it, and neither actor did anything interesting in the scene except look as surprised by what was happening as we were supposed to be. It also wasn’t earned, and didn’t feel like it meant anything: if Daenerys’ tragic flaw was the self-justifying cycle of “killing the bad guys,” why was killing her the solution to her turning bad? Why didn’t Jon Snow seize the throne afterwards (wasn’t everyone’s argument that he would be the best King?) How did he get imprisoned? Did he confess? Grey Worm’s actions make no sense; he had literally been executing soldier nobodies who had surrendered, just because, but the guy who killed his queen he just tosses in jail? And then accepts the jurisdiction of A Random Collection of I Guess These Are The High Lords and Ladies of Westeros Now when they free him? Offscreen? Why does Jon Snow go to the Actually There Isn’t A Night’s Watch Anymore So I Guess We’ll Just Roam North Epically? I mean, Tyrion can just walk out of prison and become the Hand of a king who he also just happened to appoint? Why did Grey Worm accept any of it? Why didn’t all the lords and ladies follow Sansa’s example and declare independence? Why is Bronn in charge of four castles or whatever, just because TYRION promised it to him?

WHY DID ANY OF IT, in short. What are the peasants up to? Which gods ordained all of this?

(The outcome was so beyond baffling that I found myself fixating on little things. When the Iron Throne was melted by dragon-fire, it should have been grand and dramatic and terrible, and instead it was just funny; did the dragon burn the chair-made-of-swords because he saw his mother murdered by a sword and blamed the chair? Can we really blame him for jumping to that conclusion, given what nonsense the rest of the plotting was?)

For me, the best example of the sort of thing that I’d foolishly hoped the show might do, last night, was the season six revelation of Hodor’s name. Not only shocking, earned, and tragic, but narratively productive, opening up a new dimension in the show’s temporal fabric. Through the head-fuck of Bran accidentally changing the past (or, rather, what the past had already always been), the show suggested a lot of new narrative possibilities, most interestingly, that Bran was himself both the Night King and “Bran the Builder,” my personal favorite missed opportunity: while mortals fought their petty wars, the cosmic backdrop could have turned out to be one guy’s transhistorical war with himself, building walls to stop himself from killing himself, and ruining so many lives by accident along the way.

Instead, it was all downhill once the show killed off the Night King. Without him, Bran’s plot didn’t make much sense and it seemed clear that the showrunners neither knew what to do with him — since he was functionally omniscient and no one ever asked him any questions — nor would there be much for him to do. So, of course, they made him King, and made his kingship the endpoint of whatever crazy hand has been guiding the plot. Was it the Lord of Light? The old gods? The new? The many-faced God? The show’s entire religious structure seems to have had a hand in saving him to become King, but what Tyrion and the rest of them seem to value about him is that he’s an ego-less cipher. Going a step beyond Douglas Adams, the only person who can be trusted with power is someone who not only doesn’t want it, but who isn’t even a person. And yet, who made Bran king? As ludicrous as Tyrion’s speech is — and as ridiculous as it is that Grey Worm and the lords and ladies accept it — an awful lot of deus ex machina had to happen to make this outcome possible. “Why do you think I came all this way?” is a goddamned good question, Bran, and we’d like some goddamned answers.

We got no answers. If we aren’t satisfied — and I’m not — one reason is that the show wanted to stick the landing and there just wasn’t a landing to stick. It shouldn’t have tried. They wanted to have it both ways, an ending that would be “bittersweet,” the showrunners said, probably imagining something like putting sugar in chocolate or coffee. Instead, it was like pouring lemonade into beer; yes, there was some bitterness, and yes there was some sweet, but there was also just so much that it ultimately tastes horrible.

At its best, this show could have it both ways on a lot of things because there was always more to the story. The weird mix of the Hollywood sensibilities of the showrunners — who loved them some Good Princes and Evil Zombie Hordes — and the (somewhat) more interesting genre-bending agenda of the anti-Tolkienesque author could work because the resolution of that weird emulsion was deferred, still working itself out. There was so much yet to be revealed and explained, and the game kept going on, that the presumed possibility of an ending that would work was in the back of your mind the whole time. And so the show got to live firmly within the genre’s expectations — princes, prophecies, apocalyptic doom, and heroism — while also subverting them with a grounded cynicism about politics. All the contradictions became riddles to be explained, a map filled with empty spaces; red herrings could be not-yet-revealeds and plot holes were wait-and-sees. Any character abuse could seem to be in service of some larger narrative that wasn’t yet completed, and thus, couldn’t yet be judged a failure. As long as the prince that was promised never came, we could keep waiting; the moment he did, and the show reached its conclusion, we could suddenly look at what it had done and judge it, and for the first time, the emptiness of the show was unavoidable. Like a shark, the moment it stopped moving forward, it started to die.

Obviously, the show and the showrunners don’t understand this. They went down a list, giving endings to each story which seemed to them to be plausible and appropriate, which they superficially all are. But the reason they don’t add up to anything larger is that there is nothing larger in the show: democracy is laughable because no one else exists in this show except characters with names. Most of them are now dead, but the few who remain — including long-lost second-stringers like Robin Arryn and Uncle Edmure — showed up at the end to collectively Fortinbras our way back to whatever passes for normalcy in this world. The totalitarian threat is dead — and the democratic one is inconceivable — so we’re back to the same old small council chairs.

And this, in a way, is the real problem: even after the ending, the world has to go on, and when it does, it undoes the finality of everything that happened in the finale. The story continues (even as it ends) because at some point in the future, it won’t anymore: Bran will die without children, and a new political order will be born. But this new way to defer the show’s resolution — picking a non-King for the Iron Throne that doesn’t exist anymore, the solution to hereditary kingship because he’ll be the last of his name — only works to the extent that we’re not going to see it happen. And so we don’t: the show ends, so that it can continue.

Yours, walking somewhere, forever,

Aaron

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