Game of Thrones – The Children

This season began with Tywin Lannister, at the height of his powers, melting down the family sword of his enemy. It was easy to imagine, watching Charles Dance briefly threaten to smile, that this was only one step in Tywin’s planned erasure of the Starks – their line wiped out, their home destroyed, the evidence of their passing erased like the Reynes before them. As the season went on, and disaster after disaster befell the various would-be power players of Westeros and Essos, Tywin loomed behind them as the only man capable of mastering the chaos this season was swept up in. “You win or you die,” Game of Thrones told us so many years ago, and then it showed us that if you wanted to win this was the kind of person you had to be.

Only that wasn’t the case, was it? The chaos finally caught up with Tywin, too proud to bow before it and too inflexible to ride it, and it caught him in a particularly painful way. Even before he died, we saw him challenged, unmoored, and defeated in a way that Robb Stark’s army had never managed; his own daughter ripping out one of the great pillars of his life. In the books, Tyrion shoots him in the gut; here, a couple less precise shots sufficed, because Cersei had already taken care of that. Of all the ways to die, it’s hard to think of one worse – well, many worse (and in this episode!) but none worse for Tywin. Here was a man so obsessed with dignity and status that he built not only his own life but the lives of those around him on those principles, shot to death on the shitter with the dissolution of his dream still echoing in his ears.

“The Children,” as is usual with GoT, refers to all sorts of things, including fireball-hucking sprites and Stark escapees. But the Lannister children are the episode’s object lesson, an illustration of one of the most significant themes of the series on page and screen – the utter failure of the family dynamic in a feudal society. The lords of Westeros value their children as trade chips and game pieces, defend their blood not out of affection but because the dynasty demands it. Tywin is by far the worst of the lot, but he’s not alone; look at where Stannis’s desperation to father an heir has led him, or how Sam Tarly’s father dealt with an unworthy son, or how quickly Theon was rendered worthless to Balon Greyjoy. Even Ned Stark, loving father that he was, tried to shelter his children against the realities of the world.

“Okay Charles, we need you to look like your entire world is collaps – yeah, wow, EXACTLY like that.”

And the result, of course, is the same across the world. Children aren’t game pieces, a truth Westeros is still struggling to realize; they’re players in their own right, and they will never do what they’re expected or desired to do. Stannis couldn’t make anything but a shadowy monster, Randyll Tarly sired a hero worthy of a better family, and Balon’s daughter abandoned him to rescue his son; Ned’s most sheltered daughter helped betray him to his doom because she couldn’t conceive of the consequences outside of fairy tales and history. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the family by far best-placed to take advantage of the current chaos is House Tyrell, where Mace Tyrell, buffoon that he is, indulged his children enough to teach them affection while his razor-sharp mother prepared them for the world they were being pushed into.

Even metaphorical parents aren’t safe. Maybe Daenerys had been taking her ferocious children for granted while she focused on her conquest, or maybe she gave the scaly brood all the affection a good dragon-mother should. But they’re still dragons, and while Drogon’s crime was heavily foreshadowed to the audience, it caught her off guard just as much as a crossbow bolt to the chest. Maybe she should have seen it coming, or maybe these are just the limits of the last Targaryen, without family or maesters to help her command her family’s legacy. The scene of the self-proclaimed Breaker of Chains putting collars on her children was about as on-the-nose as it gets, but it was no less powerful for that, due to some wonderfully emotive CGI conveying Rhaegal and Viserion’s distress. I didn’t know dragons could make me think of mournful cats, and yet, there you go.

Being a harsher, crueler parent wouldn’t necessarily have helped, either. Witness Sandor Clegane, sadly the closest thing to a father figure Arya has had since Eddard’s head rolled, willing to fight to keep her safe when her financial value to him had long since vanished. And in keeping with the tragic arc of Sandor’s life, he was fighting one of the very few people in the world who honestly wanted nothing more than to keep Arya safe. The ensuing fight, essentially an invented scene (though not without a wink-nudge, more on that later), was possibly the most wholeheartedly brutal combat GoT has yet seen, and yes, I’m counting “The Mountain and the Viper.” That may have ended with an unforgiving crunch, but this fight was brutal impacts from beginning to end, two of the strongest members of the cast just absolutely wailing on each other with sword, fist, and boot. You had to feel for Brienne of Tarth and the Hound, who have a lot in common – neither knights, both better people and warriors than the vast majority of knights, one on the downswing of a life ruined by the toxic institution of chivalry and the other just starting to smell the same poisoned roses – just absolutely beating the shit out of each other in a fight that hardly needed to happen.

But at least it finally set Arya free, in a sense. As Sandor so brutally elucidated, everyone who might possibly give a shit about her life is dead, but he missed one. Arya is the ultimate product of Westeros’s broken families; old before her time, her expressions of childlike wonder mostly produced by a particularly well-executed murder, greeting the death of her last relative with hysterical laughter because, well, when you’re Arya Stark that’s about as funny as it gets. She might as well see what Braavos and its faceless assassins can make of her, because the Seven Kingdoms haven’t made much but death. Her plotline has diverged from the books by leaps and bounds, and the fact that it’s stayed consistently one of the show’s strongest throughout is a testament to good adaptation choices, but also to what a phenomenal actress Maisie Williams is; I can’t wait to see what she makes of the material across the Narrow Sea.

Jon Snow, permanently at the mercy of ruthless redheads.

So much happened in this episode, in part a product of its extra-long run-time, and it’s hard to find any of it that deserves to be glossed over. We thankfully had “The Watchers On the Wall” wrapped up right off the bat, with Stannis making his long-overdue appearance to save the Wall from wildlings and Jon Snow from whatever fate awaited him. Possibly death by wildling moonshine? The show hasn’t always done Stannis justice, but in this episode, we finally saw a bit of what makes Davos (otherwise a man of apparent good judgement) follow him so faithfully – every other claimant in the War of Five Kings claimed to be Protector of the Realm. Stannis actually went out and did it. And he didn’t even sacrifice his daughter to a bloodthirsty fire god to do so! The adaptation also gave us the nice touch of Davos appearing at the Wall, whereas in the books he’s already been sent off on his next mission, so we might get some neat material between him and Jon in the next season.

But of course, all that material will likely be concerned with wildlings and Watch commanders and fealty and other such things; Melisandre might be batfuck crazy, but she probably has as good an idea as anyone not wearing black of the true threat beyond the Wall. We got an unexpectedly fantastical glimpse of that when Team Bran reached their destination, only to be ambushed by a D&D encounter. The skeletal wights struck me as a little too Harryhausen at first, but a rewatch with a little more eye to detail made me feel better about it, with their clinging rags of skin and sped-up, graceless motions adding a little horror to something that might’ve been a bridge too far with a lesser crew or a small budget. And of course, any reminder needed of what show we were watching was provided when one of the dead sent off Jojen Reed in a manner suggesting that might’ve been the corpse of a Frey.

The Children of the Forest, though, were a little…well, I could have handled the rag-wrapped forest-pixie design that GoT chose to go with, or the fact that the one we saw only prepared Scorching Ray four times that day, but both together kind of took me out of the scene. There’s plenty of hope, though; recall what the White Walkers looked like in our brief season one glimpse, compared to the current design. And the show can certainly manage a creepiness evocative of wildness and the living heart of the North; we need to only look at the Childrens’ guest of honor, Bran’s three-eyed raven in his mortal form. More later on this guy’s true nature; I was expecting a little less beard and a little more exposed bone, but the way he was woven into the roots of his tree was masterful design. Bran’s arc is quickly approaching the point where he’ll pass the written material, and while my overall feelings on that phenomenon are a post in and of themselves, at least they’ll look awesome.

Gandalf shout-out not coincidental, I’m certain

So alright for Bran, though a pity for his companions, who now live in a tree. But it could be worse than that. They could be Lannisters. The fall of Tywin’s empire will be greeted with little joy among those who destroyed it. Cersei only wanted the approval and love denied her, and got neither because one was dependent on Tywin showing affection and the other was gross as hell. Jaime was torn between the three conflicting poles of his family and the dictates of his own ragged conscience, made his choice, and will now have to live with his father’s death on his hands. And Tyrion, the best of them, now fallen as low as any Lannister could sink. I’m not in love with the adaptation choice the show made when it came to Shae’s death; in the book, Tyrion was much more premeditated there, strangling Shae to silence her and to gain his revenge, and this version lets him off the hook a little by making it almost self-defense. But on the other hand, show-Shae (a vast improvement over the book’s one-note born survivor) legitimately loved Tyrion, and he knew it up to the end, so a ruthless killing might’ve been too dark even for Tyrion’s darkest moment.

The more interesting thing adapted out, I think, was the truth about Tyrion’s first wife, the luckless prostitute Tysha, hired by Tywin to teach his son a lesson about love in the time of Lannisters. In the books, Jaime confesses that Tysha was never a prostitute, just the crofter’s daughter she seemed to be, and Tyrion’s ensuing rage at his whole monstrous family and himself is a major animator in what happens next. It’s no mystery why that was adapted into the background; without interior monologue to lean on, referring to Tysha over and over would have been tedious, and not nearly as impactful as Sibel Kekilli’s Shae falling in and out of love with Tyrion up close and personal. Still, that’s Tyrion and Jaime both off the hook, though in this case the show’s Jaime could probably stand to get off the hook once in a while.

In any event, without Tysha’s ghost hanging over the Lannisters, the show still had a great deal to build on before it all culminated in that privy. In a season bereft of Robb and Catelyn Stark and their identifiable Force For Good, viewers were left to make what they would of Westeros’s swirling chaos. As it turns out, when it came to instability and unpredictability, we ain’t seen nothing yet. “Seven kingdoms,” Tyrion said presciently a season back, “United in fear of Tywin Lannister.” And with those two crossbow bolts, they might not be united anymore. The children have grown up.

No context. This was just a beautiful shot.

Stray Thoughts:

-Regarding the Brienne adaptation choice I mentioned earlier – for non-readers, The Hound is left dying of wounds sustained in a totally different fight (with some of the Mountain’s men) and his helm is recovered by Rorge. You know, Rorge? That guy who got completely chumped by Arya a few episodes ago? He’s much scarier in the books, and wearing Sandor’s distinctive helmet he and his outlaws cut a bloody swath through the Riverlands until Brienne dispatches him. So she did fight the Hound in the books, sort of.

-Also on that note, I have a theory on the show’s pattern of killing off characters. It seems like GoT is unsparing with the lives of characters who are either status-unknown, or presently alive but no longer contributing to the plot. So the fact that the Hound’s fate mirrored the books exactly makes me think he does, as many readers have theorized, still have some part to play.

-Not so for Jojen. Good stuff by Thomas Brodie-Sangster, giving a potentially insufferable mystic-child a mixture of the creepy and genuinely likable. His page fate was never confirmed, but the prevailing theory among people who thought he didn’t survive the arrival under the tree was that he was cooked and served to Bran’s sickly party. He at least avoided that fate on the show, unless it’s BBQ night.

-Something I should have expanded on earlier but ran out of space for – regarding the theme of rebellious children, almost all of the failed parents listed were fathers. Correlation with Westeros’s patriarchal culture, or deliberate storytelling choice? Maybe that’s a whole essay too.

“You can execute me, but know that you’ll never pimp a fur coat like I do.”

-Ciarán Hinds got to show a little more range as Mance Rayder, something a little closer to the charming trickster of the books. Here’s hoping for more of the same next year, if he lives.

-Bloodraven! That’s the three-eyed raven/tree wizard, if you were wondering. I have no idea how much the show is going to delve into his complicated backstory, most of which is only available to readers via supplementary materials (the “Dunk and Egg” short stories set a century before the main books). I’d like to think “A thousand eyes and one” indicates that we’ll get some Bloodraven-related exposition (maybe via Maester Aemon?) but it could just be the show doing a fanservicey shout-out. We’ll see.

-Problematic Shit Department: it appears that things are proceeding as if The Scene between Jaime & Cersei was consensual, what with Cersei’s wholehearted embrace of her brother tonight. That’s gross from a meta-standpoint, but it’s also possibly the only way to watch the show and buy into any of Jaime’s redemptive arc without vomiting all over the place. Here’s hoping that Benioff & Weiss (and Alex Graves, director of said Scene) take some of the fan outcry into account when it comes to handling future material.

-You know, if you want to avoid it, guys, you could just stop shooting so many goddamn rape scenes.

-That bonding experience between Brienne and Arya was heart-wrenching on so many levels – you could see it in Maisie Williams’s face, Arya thinking about Ned when Brienne talked about her father. Look, if you assholes are gonna mess with canon by killing Pyp when he’s totally alive in the books, you might as well just have everyone patch up their differences and turn it into an adventure show about Brienne, Sandor, Arya, and Pod riding around righting wrongs.

-If this is the last we see of Rory McCann, season 4 was Emmy-worthy. It sort of says something that his potentially dying words weren’t the most powerful scene he got this year; Sandor was a broken man lying on that rock, reduced to begging a child for death she wouldn’t give. He captured that exhaustion as well as he managed the Hound’s banked embers of rage, sarcastic humor, and odd stumbles towards affection.

-Similarly, goodbye to Sibel Kekilli, who should get some work real soon. Her character was a tough one, both because of the major rewriting necessary and because of the possible audience reception to “mysterious sassy sex worker,” and she made Shae a dynamic and interesting character whose life surpassed her book inspiration’s and whose death meant something beyond “Wow, Tyrion, that was messed up.”

-And lastly, Charles Dance. I think Tywin Lannister is the most iconic villain of the series, the summation of all that is bad and damaging and permanently fucked-up about feudal Westeros; for every psychotic Gregor Clegane or Amory Lorch or Vargo Hoat (Locke, to show-only folks), there’s the man who knowingly employs them. There is nothing to say but that Dance was the perfect Tywin, right up to the end, when he singularly did not shit gold.

-That concludes Dorkadia’s Game of Thrones recaps for the season. I hope you all had as much fun reading them as I did writing them, and feel free to opine loudly and frequently on our page about any GoT-related nonsense you so choose. We’ll likely be back in Westeros before the next season starts to at least touch base on casting and adaptation choices.

-Happy Father’s Day!