Similarly, Viserion dying and being resurrected as a terrifying ice dragon has been a popular prediction among attentive superfans for quite some time The Ringer’s own Mother of Dragons, Mallory Rubin, made this exact forecast on last week’s episode of Talk the Thrones. The fight against objective evil may bear a much stronger resemblance to a classic fantasy epic than we’re used to seeing on Thrones, but we can’t say the show didn’t warn us. But Thrones has been signaling that they’re the ultimate Big Bad since its first scene, so it’s hard to begrudge the show for finally reaching that climax. The White Walkers are, by their nature, significantly less compelling than other series antagonists like Cersei or Littlefinger they’re mute, simplistically motivated, and, most importantly, unambiguous. Pitting two supernatural forces against one another has always been the destiny of this story-hence the “ice” and “fire” in A Song of Ice and Fire-even if that collision has less dramatic weight to it than other Thrones dichotomies. The outcome of “Beyond the Wall” falls into the “necessary compromise” camp. The Night King Finally Looks Like a Final Boss Watch ‘Talk the Thrones’ for Instant, In-Depth Analysis of Episode 6 (Sorry, Thoros, but you don’t exactly count.) Though it’s not exactly clear how much time Jon’s raiding party spends trapped on the rock surrounded by the wight army (several hours? several days?), it doesn’t feel like nearly enough for Gendry to run all the way back to the Wall, the maester in residence to send a raven, Daenerys to receive said raven, and the dragons to fly all the way from Dragonstone to Jon and friends’ precise location-just in time to rescue every character of importance with zero major human fatalities. This episode, however, exaggerates that hand-waving to an almost preposterous degree. Benioff and Weiss have played notoriously fast and loose with information flow and travel times all season long. Before the credits even began, then, I was immediately less engaged with the events of “Beyond the Wall” than I have been with other Thrones face-offs, largely because the story was conspicuously short on the internal logic Thrones prides itself on.īut “Beyond the Wall” is short on a much more basic form of internal cohesion as well: the logistical kind. “Beyond the Wall” goes the opposite direction: I don’t believe that bringing a wight to Cersei would persuade her to lend Jon her support I don’t believe Dany would be so casual about her prospective ally and love interest turning to her direct competition for help and, most importantly, I don’t believe so many people would uncritically accept this convoluted scheme as a good idea. That’s what made “The Spoils of War” such remarkable television: not the spectacle of the fighting itself, per se, but our sympathy for the combatants and comprehension of the circumstances that put them at odds. In order to fully invest in a conflict, it’s necessary to understand and believe in what’s at stake for both sides. Let’s start with the setup for that battle, which strained credulity even before its plot-serving purpose became nakedly obvious. It’s just straight-up fantasy, and not only because this week’s big battle pits dragons against ice zombies. Game of Thrones is no longer a uniquely subversive commentary on fantasy as a genre. And while watching the episode, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the show has reached a fundamental turning point. “Beyond the Wall” contains the most extreme examples to date of both. Many of those compromises, like reclustering the show’s long-dispersed characters or confirming certain long-foreshadowed plot twists, have been inevitable. Weiss are conducting on their own, without any blueprint to guide them-has meant compromising some of that exceptionalism. But as I’ve written before, bringing that fantasy to its conclusion-an undertaking showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, was a fantasy unlike any other fantasy. Long before it was a TV show unlike any other TV show, Game of Thrones, in the form of George R.R.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |