Farewell to The Leftovers, an underrated masterpeice

It has been a life-long curse of mine that once I fall in love with a show, it will inevitably end in a way that is in one way or another dissatisfying, if not outright infuriating, to me. The most relevant example I can put forward is that of LOST – Damon Lindelof’s first foray as a show runner, and the show that I count among the most bitter of failures. I watched LOST for six years with the fervor of a religious zealot – and the bullshit cop-out of an ending (which I am about to spoil but get the fuck over it because it ended like 7 years ago) that the “sideways flashes” were actually flashes to some purgatorial afterlife where all the characters met up again before “moving on” literally destroyed my faith in storytelling.



Certain shit endings are forgivable in spite of their unsatisfying nature – Twin Peaks’ cliffhanger ending was as such because the network basically told David Lynch to go fuck himself, so there was no third season to follow it. And it took a full 25 years for Lynch to convince a different network to give him the money and leeway he needed to revisit the show – and it’s literally a miracle audiences will now get to see what happened to Coop and the rest of the weirdos that made Twin Peaks great.



But The Leftovers has thankfully broken that cycle for me – it has achieved narrative Nirvana. I’m going to go ahead and say for me, this show is a perfect masterpiece. The ending, mercifully, sealed the deal. Bulleted below are the reasons why, in no particular order:



· Knowing when to bow out is something many a show that began a gem but became a moldy rock (lookin’ at you, Supernatural) failed to do. I literally hate-watch Supernatural now because I am a completionist, but they just won’t fucking end the show even though it’s been beating the premise like a dead horse for at least 7 seasons now! The Leftovers was neither too long nor too short at 28 episodes over 3 seasons.



· It never flatlined in plot or let characters get stale – it very justly wrote Jill and Tom Garvey almost entirely out of the third season, and their lives (as well as the lives of every other major character who wasn’t Kevin or Nora) were resolved with scant explanation by Kevin in the final episode, and it didn’t feel cheap or evasive – it simply amicably resolved a remaining loose end.



· THE MUSIC – perhaps this reason is more important than some of the others, but I’m not sure any other TV show has even come close to the triumphant music direction The Leftovers has achieved. No other show has utilized pop music, a haunting score, and instrumental renderings of Metallica to better effect than this show. Relatedly:



· The opening title-sequences were poignant and always reflective of the subject matter to follow. The heavy and aggrieved composition that was paired with the Michelangelo-esque fresco of the “leftover” people post-Sudden Departure for Season 1 was an apt introduction to the visceral and spiritually despondent first season. Season 2’s polar opposite sequence, which laid the folksy “Let The Mystery Be” over a far more cheerful collection of pictures in which one or more of the people in the photo has been painted over with a starry/cloudy sky clued us in to the fact that while the images we would be seeing were outwardly less miserable and more hopeful than the previous season’s, it was mostly an elaborate slideshow designed to mask the emptiness and suffering the world of the show was still coping with. Season 3 brilliantly retained the visuals from Season 2’s sequence, and put a new song in to set the tone for every episode. Such genius selections included the theme song from Perfect Strangers (for the episode where the only non-Departed cast member from that sitcom convinces Nora to seek the Departure Machine that supposedly will take her to where her children went), a Richard Cheese cover of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” (because Matt, John and Michael all think Kevin is a messianic savior and have written a gospel about his life), and Gravediggaz “1-800-SUICIDE” (where we learn of Laurie’s attempted suicide, the direct aftermath of which leads to her joining the Guilty Remnant). Swinging away for the fences in the final two episodes, the show runners chose the theme from Season 1 and 2’s sequences, in that order, for a poetic conclusion suggesting that although the show was often bleak and doom-driven, it ultimately ends on an uplifting note – at peace with the mysteries within.



· Speaking of mysteries – The Leftovers finally succeeded where LOST failed. As a disciple of David Lynch and a partner of JJ Abrams, Lindelof is a clear believer in narratives that are dwarfed by mystery. LOST only ever answered its questions (What is the smoke monster? Where is the island? Where is the Island? Who is Jacob?) with more questions, if it bothered to answer them at all. The backlash from the botched conclusion of that show clearly traumatized Lindelof, and to his credit he weaved a much more cohesive tapestry with this show, because he did answer questions – just not with direct/definitive answers. The Leftovers’ big Unknown – what actually happened to the 2% of the population who disappeared in the Sudden Departure – is actually answered! Albeit by an unreliable narrator, of course – because it couldn’t be definitively answered. Story creator Tom Perotta said there was no answer and Lindeloff promised he could keep it that way on the show, so we never do get a ‘why’ – why the Departure occurred, no one knows. But if you believe Nora, we get a ‘where’ – Nora tells Kevin she completed her journey through the departure machine (LADR, the writers abbreviated it, but it’s not called that in the show. It’s a play on ‘ladder’ if you’re dense; there was a visual motif of ladders this season), and she wound up in a mirror reality where the 2% remained, and 98% of the rest of us disappeared. Very Twilight Zone – but we never see any of it. We only see Nora’s face as she recounts her journey to their version of Mapleton NY, where she spies her teenage children and her ex-husband with his new wife and she decides that it would be wrong for her to interrupt their new life, so she hunted down the inventor of the LADR (who was the first person to test it) and asked him to make another so she could get back. This explanation is everything I could have hoped for, honestly. It’s a theory I had myself about what the Departure actually was: it’s just tangible enough to be believable from a scientific point of view, but it leaves just enough unanswered to still be considered mystical/supernatural. If you believe Nora – who considers herself honest, but is fairly skilled at lying to herself – then it’s resolved. If you think she’s full of shit – you can believe whatever you’d like about the Departure. It’s something for everyone!



· Nora Durst is my spirit animal. I’m not sure there is a fictional character who has resembled me more closely in an ideological way than she. And Carrie Coons, the actress who portrays her, needs 32934507678 Emmy and Golden Globes thrown at her fucking feet for the performance. The extent of Nora’s suffering on this show would have destroyed most normal people in real life - but she’s like a 1980’s slasher-movie boogie man because she just won’t fucking die. Just when you think she’s about to break – this woman used to pay prostitutes to shoot her in the chest, after all – she picks herself back up and moves onward. No one was more skeptical or held more contempt for religious/spiritual mumbo jumbo than she – her living was debunking liars to prevent people from financially abusing the systems established by the government to help those who lost loved ones in the Great Departure –yet she secretly believed, desperately, that her kids were alive, wherever it was they actually were. The function of Nora and Matt, her meaning-addicted pastor brother, seemed to be a way to convey the idea that, to borrow from Fall Out Boy: Sometimes the only payoff for having any faith is when it’s tested again and again, every day. Now, faith doesn’t necessarily refer to deistic faith – Nora is an agnostic at best, and Matt spends the majority of the show a devout-but-modern Christian – but faith in one’s convictions, faith in what you believe is the truth. Matt is the more obvious example of this – he never gives up on his wife, who miraculously recovers from a 4 year vegetative state. He then loses his wife and their son because of his zealotry, and his cancer returns after forty years of remission – only to reunite and regain a fulfilling life with them before his death. Nora railed against the zealous and remains pragmatic the entire show as she overcomes plentiful emotional setbacks – waking up to life model decoys of her family as part of a sadistic attack from the Guilty Remnant, losing her adopted daughter Lily to the custody of the child’s birth mother, the deterioration of her relationship with Kevin – but ultimately chucks all common sense and risks possible annihilation because she hopes to be reunited with her kids, who she knows are still alive – and when that simultaneously succeeds/backfires (if you believe her), she returns to our reality and becomes a recluse, rather than killing herself or making a go of it in the parallel universe. She’s a wonderful and earnest confluence of contradiction – much like…



· …Kevin Garvey, the erstwhile protagonist of the show. From the start, Kevin wasn’t the typical leading man, or even a typical “difficult man” in the vein of Don Draper and Walter White. He’s played by Justin Theroux, so he’s distractingly attractive, which the show uses to great effect in flipping HBO’s tendency to glorify tits and ass by objectifying his body far more than any woman on the show. Kevin was a guy so burdened by the responsibility of remaining sane to hold his family together after the 10/14 trauma that he became unhinged. If you’re against any and all supernatural interpretation of Kevin’s seeming status as a shaman or a messiah, you might dismiss his visions as psychotic delusions – it’s clearly a hereditary condition he picked up from his dad, who began hearing voices the moment the Departure happened. He never actually saw Patti Levin, dead leader of the Guilty Remnant cult, he isn’t actually in some kind of afterlife when he’s an international assassin or the most powerful man in the world or his identical twin brother – he suffers from a severe mental disorder, seeing connections and signs that aren’t actually there, and filling in the details with convincing clarity from his subconscious. If you think he was in some form or another a conduit to the spirit realm (different, of course, from the realm where the 2% wound up) – it definitely explains his physical inability to die, which is on par with Nora’s emotional inability to break. Kevin should have died – like, 4 or 5 times – but yet he lives to the finale! This dude has been drowned, poisoned, shot in the chest, self-suffocated, and suffered a massive off-screen heart attack (which is in keeping with the self-murder in the penultimate episode) – not even Rasputin survived so much! More relatable than his seeming immortality was his tragic flaw: Kevin is never content with what he has. Before the Sudden Departure, he lived in a swanky house paid for by his successful wife, had a good job as a police officer, had two functional kids. But that wasn’t enough, he was unhappy. He keeps screwing up and redeeming himself in a cycle that never truly addresses his discontent – something that is all too familiar for many people, myself included. He is a clearer example than Nora that faith and insanity aren’t necessarily clearly defined or separate – wouldn’t you define showing up in the same location year after year hoping for a different result in your search for a person that all evidence suggests is dead or sci-Departured as insanity? Or is that just faith?



· The sheer, balls out, no holds barred, pure nihilistic fatalism of the tone. Never has a work of film reflected my personal outlook on life so closely – and I realize how alarming that is without explanation. Being perfectly frank: I vacillate between indifferent cynicism and nihilistic skepticism (very different philosophical POVs, although they may seem similar). Some days, pretty much all days in Trump’s America, I happily welcome a cataclysmic astronomical event that will make humans go the way of the dinosaur. Other days I rage against the machine, full of impassioned righteous anger about the bullshit that is regressing the world to a pre-WW2 nightmare of nationalism, xenophobia, and fascism. Because art is funded and produced for profit, it is very rare to have access to something that is unapologetically pessimistic and critical of religious and social mores. Many films and movie flirt with this kind of abandon and chicken out at the end, worrying that by siding with atheism or postmodernist interpretations they will be sending an undesirable message to the masses (lookin’ at you, True Detective Season One). But not The Leftovers – this show got as bleak as it basically can get (regular suicidal ideation, actual suicide, cliffhangers meant to suggest Laurie killed herself as per Nora’s plan to die accidently on purpose via failed scuba dive). But for me at least, as dark and punishing as some of the content was – it still felt enigmatic. It was deceptive in its anguish because often it was the show I laughed at the hardest – I nearly cracked a rib laughing at Nora and Erika Murphy bouncing their troubles away on a trampoline while Wu Tang Clan blared through the speakers. The “unique biometrics” which unlocked the Purgatory-bunker being Kevin’s junk-print was hilarious, as was basically everything Secretary of Defense Patti Levin uttered in that episode. Ironic juxtaposition was mastered by this show in a way few other visual mediums have. This was made possible of course by the excellent cast and ace scripts – the actors and writers deserve all the accolades possible.



· The Kevin dream sequences were so perfect in their symbolic assemblage they managed to out-Twin Peaks'd Twin Peaks. Many a prestige television show has used a dream sequence to further our understanding of a character or as a fish-out-of-water method to inject something fresh into a storyline fraught with seriousness – but I honestly can’t think of any instance where it was as successful as it was on The Leftovers. The international Assassin episode was the best kind of mindfuckery – it was confusing because we couldn’t tell if it was a dream or was actually happening in another dimension, but really it didn’t matter – the symbolic journey Kevin takes is unforgettable. Using karaoke as a way to escape an Underworld that looks like a hotel? GOLD. Having Kevin’s personality essentially halve into two different people, resulting in the death of one at the hands of the other, was so steeped in literary and psychological metaphor you could teach a whole college course on that one episode.




All in all – the ending was a graceful resolution to a thematic focus on the importance of love and family. Truly, Kevin and Nora spent half their life suffering in the aftermath of a mysterious event, and it seemed that without answers, despite attempts to gain knowledge and seize control of their lives through spiritual and secular means, the only take-away is that one can survive and cope with the terror and despair of the unknown if you have the love and support of people who you love and support in return. Now that they have come clean to each other after their independent ventures to figure themselves out– Kevin and Nora can be content, and whole, together. We can also be content, and whole, as a society if only we could also accept truth at face value and not delude ourselves into thinking we (or one religion/political party) alone have all the answers.

Twin Peaks: The Return, Episodes 1 & 2

I decided a bit belatedly that I was going to attempt to recap Twin Peaks: The Return, even though the non-linear nature of the show basically defies explanation. Just a forward: I was late to the Twin Peaks bandwagon. I loved many a show that explicitly called out TP as an influence (The XFiles, the Sopranos, The Killing, LOST, etc), but had never watched it myself until I was stuck at home with the flu in early 2012. Needless to say, it blew my mind and it’s fascinated me since just how prolific and iconoclast it was. I was elated when David Lynch announced its revival (especially since Laura Palmer famously told Agent Cooper she’d see him again in 25 years waaaaay back in 1990 – way to follow through, Fate!). That all being said, consider this a warning:

As groundbreaking as Twin Peaks wound up being, David Lynch isn’t half as clever as he thinks he is. Twin Peaks is profound in spite of this because it’s the closest thing we have on television to a true exploration of the nature of dreams and the powerful force that is the subconscious, but that’s only because Lynch is a stubborn asshole who refuses to put his stream-of-consciousness ideas into the narrative box that viewers/studios expect and are trained in. His work is hardly ever coherent, and to some extent that is the point. You may not remember the literal events that take place in a dream – but you remember the terror you experienced after a nightmare, even after the details slip away. Twin Peaks’ impact is similar – it’s an emotional and psychological event; the content sticks with you long after viewing it. This doesn’t really translate well to serialized story telling format, obviously. Trying to compromise with studio execs and provide narrative answers to satisfy consumer demand obviously defies Lynch’s intent as an artist. Square people want a straightforward murder mystery: Twin Peaks is not that. It was a great amalgamation of things – a noir soap-opera, a surrealist dark comedy, an esoteric supernatural thriller. That’s a lot of threads and Lynch isn’t really great tying up the loose ends, so not everything meshed well together. It was far from perfect; don’t even get me started on the dumpster fire that was Fire Walk With Me. But if you’ve watched anything on TV by JJ Abrams or Damon Lindleoff you should be fucking used to that by now (there are literally 340927345987 mysteries LOST introduced an then never resolved, for example). In conclusion: if you didn’t like Twin Peaks before and you aren’t a lover of frustrating narratives like The Leftovers or LOST, you aren’t going to magically ‘get’ the TP Revival. Even if you did love Twin Peaks and all of the shows that have been influenced by it since – you may not ‘get’ it either. Don’t get pissy about it right away – it may take 2-3 rewatches before you can really make a fair judgment of the work. That’s the nature of David Lynch.

Now that that’s out of the way….

We begin in the Red Room (which is filmed in black and white, because reasons?) with the Giant and Dale Cooper.

 

We last saw Agent Dale Cooper 25 years ago, trapped in the Black Lodge by BOB, his body in our reality now occupied by his evil Doppelgänger. The giant has some strange commentary for Coop as forboding scratching/skipping sounds emanate from an old school gramophone. “It is in our house now. Remember 4-3-0. Richard and Linda. Two birds with one stone. It all cannot be said aloud now.” We don’t know what any of it means and no one on Reddit will know until at least the end of this season, so relax: you’re not stupid, we’re just ignorant of the symbolism as of yet.

Cut to the woods surrounding Twin Peaks, where Dr. Jacoby (Laura Palmer’s unsanctioned psychiatrist, who according to cannon published in The Secret history of Twin Peaks, actually moved to Hawaii after losing his license to practice in Washington State) is apparently living in a trailer, and is receiving a delivery of shovels. *shrug* Your guess is as good as mine.

We leave there and wind up in NYC, at the top of a building which houses a giant glass cube with a room full of cameras filming it, supervised by a dude in his 20s named Sam who changes the memory cards in the cameras and, as we later learn, is responsible for watching the box in order to observe if something should pop up in there. You know, like, just your standard night gig to pay for college.

Shrodinger's Box

Sam has a lady admirer, Tracy, who shows up to bring him a latte, but she’s prevented by the stoic night guard from tagging along upstairs to watch the box. His work is classified in some way; and we’re not entirely sure if Tracy is genuinely into Sam, or if she’s actually just trying to get a glimpse at what is in the room. Later on in the episode, she returns, only to find that the guard is missing, and Sam confirms that he really is gone and not just using the (disturbingly creepy) bathroom. So he brings Tracy upstairs, where he explains to her the parameters of the job.

She asks if it’s some kind of science experiment, and he says he thinks it’s all funded by a billionaire, and that the last guy who had his job actually saw something in the box but wouldn’t or couldn’t reveal what he saw. Naturally, they start fooling around on the couch– which is when darkness itself seems to manifest inside the box. “A watched pot never boils” goes the old proverb – which is an idea confirmed by particle physics; actions are effected simply by being observed. The pair eventually notices the box has filled up with a terrifying blackness, where a pale, naked, faceless creature can be seen, and eventually forces its way out the confines of the cube, filling the room with blackness, where it seemingly tears apart (eats?) the lovers on the couch (It reminded me of the Smoke Monster from LOST, only more obtuse with better effects). Horror 101, guys: sex = death. C’est la mort.

The new murder mystery plot picks up after our first look in on Sam, in a place called Buckhorn, South Dakota, where a woman is disturbed by a smell emanating from her neighbor’s apartment as she heads back to her own, and in an exceedingly long and drawn out sequence, it is discovered by the police that the neighbor, Ruth Davenport, is dead. Not just dead, though. Beheaded, missing her body, but placed very carefully atop a decapitated male corpse under the covers in her bed. So a death as shocking for this small town as Laura Palmer’s was in Twin Peaks.

Then we’re following Doppelganger Cooper, whose long hair and sleazy wardrobe is visual cue enough to convey that he is a Bad Guy. He picks up some colleagues from a house that is, by his standards, very poorly guarded – their names are Ray and Darya. It’s unclear what exactly their roles are; the plan is unspoken if there is one at all. We head back to Buckhorn, where the police there discover that the fingerprints that are all over Ruth’s apartment belong to Bill Hastings, the local high school principle. This is a small town so everyone knows him and it’s understandably awkward when the detectives have to go and arrest him. His wife is more pissed that he’s going to miss dinner with friends than she is that her husband is being arrested for they-don’t-know-what, so right away we’re led to believe something is off with her. Bill is questioned about Ruth, who he claims to have only a passing acquaintance with, but it’s pretty obvious he knows her in the Biblical sense and they were having an affair at some point. Bill is locked up and doesn’t look good – he seems authentically horrified, but also like he knows more than he disclosed. The cops search the house under the glowering supervision of Phyllis Hastings, and they seem to find a chunk of flesh under the fishing equipment in Bill’s trunk. I guess an ear would have been too Lynchian even for Lynch. This concludes Part One of the season opener.

Part Two opens back with presumed murderer Bill Hastings, whose wife has come to visit him in jail. He admits that he had a bad dream where he was in Ruth’s apartment – but insists he wasn’t there in real life. They fight viciously over their separate affairs – his with Ruth, hers with their lawyer George, and the interaction ends with her basically gleefully telling him he’s fucked because his very real prints are all over her room and he’s going to rot in prison. Not exactly the reaction you’d expect from even a moderately unsatisfied wife. Bill has all the tell-tale signs of a BOB possession, which we were privy to with Leland Palmer in the first series. As we pan along the jail cells were Bill is understandably losing his shit, we see a weird, gray, statue-like man sitting on the bed two cells down, and he simply fades away. This all begs the question: was Bill possessed and driven to kill his lover in the same nightmarish way that Leland was compelled to molest and murder his daughter Laura Palmer?

Meanwhile, it seems Bad Dale is somehow tied up in Ruth Davenport’s murder case. We see for sure that Mrs. Hastings is no innocent when she arrives home, where Doppelganger Dale is waiting for her in the shadows. They seem acquainted – he even tells her that she “did good, imitating human nature perfectly.” Wait, does thing imply Phyllis is the meat suit of a different BOB-like entity, or else another manifestation of BOB (this brings up an interesting related question: Is Bad Dale BOB, or is Doppelganger Dale a totally separate entity? A manifestation of BOB? Was that thing in the jail cell another being from the Black Lodge, or again some sort of version of BOB? It’s too early to make assumptions; any of those theories or none may be true)!? He then pulls a gun on her, informs her it’s George’s, and shoots her dead in the hallway. The discovery of her body is going to seriously fuck with the investigation of Ruth Davenport’s murder, it’s safe to assume.

We cut away to a swanky hotel in Las Vegas, where a Mr. Todd implores his assistant Roger to “tell her she has the job.” Roger asks why Mr. Todd allows an unnamed man to coerce him into doing unnamed things, and the response is “You better hope you never get involved with someone like him.” Introducing brand new characters this way is maddeningly pretentious (like being asked to solve a math equation when there are 3 unknown variables), but I suspect the point is to build suspense and suggest that the unknown “him” is either the same billionaire funding Sam’s glass cube project, or perhaps Bad Dale.

Speaking of Bad Dale, he and his cronies are at a diner, and we find out he hooked up with these two because he needs information from Bill Hasting’s secretary.  Unfortunately for Ray and Darya, Bad Dale lands proof they were contracted to kill him by tapping a conversation they had on the motel phone. Why and who wants him dead is a mystery (as is everything else in these two episodes), so Bad Dale kills Darya after a long period of menacing her for information about who hired her. We see that Bad Dale has access to FBI databases through a briefcase laptop – who did he steal this from, I wonder?

Back to Good Dale Cooper, who is in the Red Room now with Laura Palmer, speaking backwards like the other beings native to this un-reality (It’s always been my own personal theory that the reverse speak/backward-movement-in-forward- motion gimmick is meant to imply that the Red Room /Black Lodge are a place outside of time, where the future and the past coincide simultaneously –akin to True Detective’s “time is a flat circle” idea.  Earlier, one-armed MIKE even asks Cooper if it’s the future or the past, which makes it seem more likely that when in the Black Lodge it’s unclear to the inhabitants at what point in history it is in our linear reality. The effect is less annoying when I consider it in this way, at any rate). Coop seems unsure whether this is actually Laura or not, because she’s been dead since before he got to this realm. She cryptically responds “I am dead, yet I live.” She whispers a secret in his ear, and then is ripped away from the room in a violent and confusing manner that evokes the carnage that befell Sam and Tracey in NYC.

We spend a lot of time with Good Dale in the Red Room, where he next encounters a thin tree with a pulsating talking brain, who self-identifies as an evolution of “The Arm” (previous manifestations possibly include the dancing dwarf from the original series). This is some straight up Doctor Who type shit, and I fully sympathize with people who “just can’t” when this sort of gimmick crops up because it’s bizarre even for an already bizarre dream-like sequence.

You can't even make this shit up...

The Arm tells Good Dale that it’s been 25 years and it’s time for him to return to his body – but unfortunately before he can return to our world, Doppelganger Dale has to come back to the Black Lodge – which we hear him say explicitly before he kills Darya he refuses to do. Dale meanders around the corridors outside of the Red Room, and at one point The Arm pops up, screams “NON EXISTENT” at him with full Dalek inflection, and the iconic zig-zag floor swallows Dale, dropping him through a jumbled black and white haze, after which he materializes in the very same box that Sam is supposed to be watching, only we don’t see him or Tracy. The cube explodes – was Good Dale the creepy thing that attacks Sam and Tracy on the couch!? Did this take place before or after that event? Was he the thing the guy before Sam saw? We don’t know and if we find out at all it won’t be for a while so I wouldn’t stress it too much.

If you’re upset that we spent so much time with new people and not much with the old cast, I was too, but with so many more episodes ahead, I wasn’t too bothered. The most important of these check-ins are the phone conversations between a frail Log Lady and an aged Deputy Hawk. The Log Lady says that Hawk will find something that is missing that is tied in with his Native American heritage, and it involves Special Agent Dale Cooper. The actress who portrays the Log Lady shot these scenes while battling cancer and later died after her scenes wrapped, so they feel especially raw and poignant.  There’s an irritatingly literal vignette with Sheriff’s Department Secretary Lucy, a cute moment where Lucy and Deputy Andy recall that their son Wally is 24 so Agent Cooper went missing even before his birth. We see Ben Horne and his hippified brother Jerry at the Great Northern (Ben’s new secretary is Ashley Judd!), where they have a humorous exchange about whether Ben is sleeping with the “new girl…woman” after Ben expositorily mentions that a skunk incident at the hotel upset a valued customer from New York, and Jerry expounds his lucrative pot-growing side business. We end Part Two of the opener at the Bang Bang Bar, which is still a happening place with a chanteuse-fronted synth pop band playing to a crowd of people including Shelly and James, who were teens when last we saw them. James spots Shelly from across the bar while Shelly is complaining to her girlfriends that her daughter is dating a jerk named Steve (and she would know a thing or two about shitty boyfriends). Her friends are a little skeeved by the attention but Shelly brushes it off, saying “James is still cool. He’s always been cool.”

Here’s to hoping there’s more clarity about Good Dale/Bad Dale and that we get to see more of the characters we know and love in the episodes to come.

Game of Thrones, Season 6, Episode 10: Finale

 

 

This episode of Game of Thrones was unquestionably the best thing that has happened to me in weeks. Now, you can take that as an indictment about how lame my life is, or you can accept that this 70 minute masterpiece is possibly the greatest 70 minutes ever to air on HBO, and without a doubt – the best episode of the entire show by a wide margin. I finally understand why sports fanatics yell and scream and cry at victories/tragedies that belong to other people and have no effect on their daily lives whatsoever: Game of Thrones is my spectator sport, and I will continue to invest an obscene amount of my personal happiness in it because that. was. fucking. AMAZEBALLS.

Let us begin. I’m just going to throw Emmy’s at the opening 20 minutes because this sequence was exquisitely executed. We follow all the players as they get dressed on the morning of Loras and Cersei’s trials. Getting dressed is a universal experience in this world, but your clothing says a lot about you, and as we watch Margaery being laced into her conservative gown, the High Sparrow throwing a white sack over his head, and Cersei being upholstered in a black leather number that looks like it was stolen out of the costume trailer from the set of Hellraiser: IV, we are meant to witness the roles everybody is going to be playing today.

 

The Sparrows waste no time starting Loras’ trial: the Sept of Baelor is stacked with nobles and Faith Militant alike. Mace Tyrell has a meltdown as he helplessly observes his heir and beloved son forsake his name and title as penance for his crimes (all of which he admits to, most vocally the ones involving his homosexuality) and become a Sparrow; Margaery gets pissed because Lancel carves the 7-pointed star in Loras’ forehead which she feels disregards the “promise” the High Sparrow made not to harm him.

All while this is happening, we see that Tommen is being held captive in his bedroom by Franken-Mountain, and that Grand Maester Pycelle has been lured under the Red Keep by one of the “whisper” children; tricked into thinking he had been asked there by Tommen, but what he finds is Qyburn and a room full of whisper children. CUE HORROR MOVIE MUSIC. For some reason, the writers decided that Pycelle would be murdered by the orphan children of Kings Landing; I can’t even guess as to why except for the notion that it would be terrifying to watch an old man be brutally stabbed to death by kids. Cold blooded murder by children is the only twisted fucked up thing Game of Thrones hasn’t tried (Olly and Arya don’t count; they had personal motivations for their murders), therefore: it had to be done. So long Maester Pycelle: you won’t be missed.

Loras is dripping blood on the floor, his trial concluded, but there’s still no sign of Cersei at the Sept. Margaery, clever little Margaery, has an epiphany: Cersei is MIA. Tommen is MIA. There is a reason for this, and it can’t be good. We briefly get a glimpse of the old, pre-cult ideology Margaery as she confronts the High Sparrow with these facts: She blasphemes about the stupid gods and tries to clear the sept to get everyone to safety, but the High Sparrow isn’t having it: the Faith Militant bars anyone from trying to leave. The insipid, arrogant moron ignores Margaery’s warning and sends Lancel off to find Cersei, or else he’ll just try her in absentia with half of the nobles in Kings Landing to bear witness to his power.

Lancel leaves the sept, but is immediately (conveniently) sidetracked by a whisper child, who runs into the crypts under the Sept. Lancel follows the boy far into the tunnels, and winds up in the room we saw in Bran’s vision: a room full of barrels full of Wildfire. Lancel gets shived by the boy and is left to witness little candles melt away at the other end of the hallway, moments from setting alight the pool of Wildfire they sit on. Can we just commend this kid on his cray assassin skills? What 7-year old do you know could carefully light some candles, place them safely on the deadliest liquid fuel known to man, and then stab a guy in such a way that the dude gets all the way across the room before realizing he’s too late? Sign him up for the Faceless Men!

But yes: Lancel is obliterated, along with every single person within a half-mile radius of the sept. Let’s be real here: Cersei Lannister is now Westeros’ premier terrorist. She just cratered a giant hole in Kings Landing, effectively murdering all of her immediate rivals in the Tyrells and the Faith Militant. And I could. Not. Stop. CHEERING!!! Honestly – I had no investment in Margaery or Mace or any of the countless nobles and dignitaries that were blown up in the Sept, and I couldn’t be happier about the extermination of the Sparrows. I’m not even a Cersei fan – I hate her fucking guts – but this was the most epic act of revenge this show has even seen. It is hugely important because this was Cersei’s official, undeniable, irreversible step into The Dark Side – her declaration of who she really is and what she wants. She took what Olenna Tyrell said to her not that long ago and ran with it: “I wonder if you’re the worst person I’ve ever met.... But the truly vile do stand out through the years.”

Now, some will argue that Cersei held back Tommen to spare him from the fate of his wife and a hundred others, but I think that she deliberately wanted him to see the devastation of his future. She knew he would see the explosion and realize that his wife and the High Sparrow and so many others were dead and that it was his fault: this was the price of his selling out his own mother to a zealot and his devious wife and the other disloyal Lannisters. Did she know he would leap out of his window because of it? I think she did – the prophecy stated that all of her children would die, so either she expected Tommen would commit suicide, or she figured he would snap and become a vegetable and waste away, either way she didn't care because she carried out her plan anyway: leaving a power vacuum for her to seize power. Through nihilism and cruelty, Cersei Lannister just effectively murdered her last remaining child.

As if this wasn’t enough of a bloodbath, we are treated to Septa Unella shackled to a slab in the dungeons, where Cersei freely admits to all of her crimes – and informs the Septa that Franken-Mountain is her new God because the Seven have surely forsaken her, considered the months’ worth of torture this woman has in store for her. Shame, shame – karma is a bitch, isn’t it Unella?

We’re left to wonder what Jaime would make of all of this – he’s far far away in the Riverlands, where Walder Frey and the Lannisters are celebrating their bloodless victory at Riverrun. While Frey wonders out loud where his two sons are, Bronn is jealous that all the serving girls are thirsty for Jaime at the feast (one servant will become important later), so he sets Bronn up with a few girls – only to be cornered by Walder Frey, who immediately puts his foot in his mouth, referring to the two of them as “Kingslayers.” Jaime squashes any kind of camaraderie, fast – reminding Frey that the Lannisters are the true victors here, and that they don’t need Walder Frey to hold the Riverlands if he’s going to keep asking for backup to fight his battles. That knocks the fucker down a few notches; Jaime storms off to brood.

We visit briefly with Sam and Gilly, who have made it to the Citadel. What a change in atmosphere: none of the people in this glimmering city are aware of the carnage in the capital. Sam is positively cheerful, happy to announce that he will now be attending Maester school to the bureaucrat at the main office of the library. For learned dudes they’re a bit behind the times; in fact the Citadel is still under the impression that Joer Mormont is the High Commander of the Night’s Watch (truly, even Sam is incorrect in revealing that John Snow is the current commander – raven mail is painfully slow) and that Maester Aemon still lives. These “irregularities” will be discussed later; in the meantime, Sam gets to use the library, and Gilly gets to fuck off, because NO WOMEN OR CHILDREN ALLOWED. Oh well – at least this small family is safe within the bookish city of Maesters.

A white raven flies for Winterfell, where we finally get to see Davos confront Melisandre about the murder of Princess Shireen. Davos forces the Red Woman to admit to Jon Snow that she burned the girl at the stake, and for what? Because an evil God commanded her to? She admits to being wrong about her visions (but not to having lied: she had full permission from Stannis, dontcha know?), and that’s it for Jon, who’s had enough of child murder– he banishes Melisandre to the South, and tells her if she returns she will be convicted of murder and executed. Davos swears he’ll kill her himself. She rides south with her tail between her legs, but I doubt this is the last we’ve seen of her.

Jon and Sansa bond; she apologizes for not telling him about the Knights of the Vale or Littlefinger. Like a good older brother he isn’t actually upset about her lying to him (or the deaths of countless men because of the misinformation) – but he is worried about her dalliance with Baelish. John senses that certain influences (aka Littlefinger) will work to pit Jon and Sansa against each other – she agrees that only a fool would trust Littlefinger. As an aside Jon tells Sansa she is the Lady of Winterfell and as such he had the Lord’s bedchamber prepared for her; she demurs and says John is a Stark in her eyes – which is exactly the topic Baelish brings up when he visits her at the Weirwood tree later on. This is the most upfront Littlefinger has ever been on camera: he admits to Sansa that all of his schemes are motivated by one dream: him sitting on the Iron Throne, with her by his side as his Queen. He tells her her claim to the Throne of the North is truer than Jon’s and that she should step up as the de facto ruler here (the irony here is, he isn’t wrong! More on that later…). Sansa dismisses Littlefinger’s plan as being “a nice dream” and walks off, effectively making him the new Lord Friendzone. Niiiiiiiiice! Sansa is no longer that bratty teen who left Winterfell in a hurry all those years ago with delusions of romance– she’s a grown ass woman who isn’t about to jeopardize what she’s regained for herself back in the North – a home and a brother – for the whims of her mother’s lovesick former stalker.

Next, we return to a very unexpected place – Dorn! Ellaria Sand and the Sand Snakes are meeting with Olenna Tyrell – the only Tyrell to have escaped the bombing of Baelor, because Margaery had warned her off to High Garden. This was pure pandering to the audience, because Olenna is in full insult mode, shutting down the doofy Sand Snakes (as if directly on behalf of us at home for the bungled handling of this side plot last year and in episode one of this season) so that she and Ellaria can discuss a way to make Cersei pay for her crimes against the Seven Kingdoms/their own families. Ellaria is interrupted by an old comrade - Varys - who has found the friends he was seeking in Westeros for Dany’s cause. The plan to topple Cersei and the Lannisters is really just a plan to help install Danaerys Targaryen on the Iron Throne, then – and all those present are on board.

As such, Dany is sitting pretty in Meereen, preparing for her conquest of Westeros. Task one: dump Daario Naharis. I almost felt bad for the poor bastard, who couldn’t believe what was happening to him; Dany sidelines him and the Second Sons to keep order in the Bay of Dragons (“we can’t keep calling it Slaver’s Bay, can we?”) and she later admits to Tyrion (whose idea it was to cut Daario loose) that she isn’t at all upset about it. Dany and Tryion have a touching heart to heart in the pyramid, where Tyrion confesses that as a lifelong cynic he has finally found something he can truly get behind – Danaerys Targaryen on the Iron Throne. Dany is warmed by this, and gifts Tyrion with something he’s all too familiar with: the pin of the Hand of the King. Or Queen, in this case. I can’t tell if this is a sort of sibling love the two share (considering both Dany and Tyrion have siblings of the opposite sex who hated and abused them), or if Tyrion is pulling a Jorah Mormont and falling in love with the Queen of Dragons. Either is entirely plausible.

Back in the North, Bran and Meera are saying farewell to Uncle Benjen, who has brought them to the Southern-most weirwood tree north of The Wall. Uncle Benjen says he can’t come with them back to the Seven Kingdoms because the spells that are woven into the brickwork of The Wall won’t allow it – an interesting tidbit that makes me think that in order for the Night’s King to advance, that architectural juggernaut is going topple at some point next season. Bran promptly resumes his greenseeing as the new Three-Eyed Raven, and sweet sweet SWEET VINDICATION!!!! We are back at the Tower of Joy, where two decades worth of speculation is confirmed: Jon Snow is not Ned Stark’s bastard: he is Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen’s bastard!!! Lyanna correctly assumes that Robert Baratheon would murder any bastard children sired by Rhaegar Targaryen, so she makes him promise to keep baby Jon’s true identity safe…

 

Cut to adult Jon Snow, who is presiding over a room full of arguing lords in the grand hall at Winterfell next to his cousin, Sansa. The Northern lords have ousted their Bolton overlords but are still bickering over the presence of the damn Wildings, whom Tormund vehemently reminds were invited south of The Wall in exchange for their allegiance – their presence at Winterfell is sanctioned by the powers that be. Young Lyanna Mormont has had enough of the bullshit – her ten year old ass stands up and shames the older lords for their cowardice and infighting – proclaiming Jon Snow to be the true King of the North, despite his bastard heritage (propped up by a woman who was named after his mother – how poetic!).

Looks like Jon has found his equivalent of Brienne of Tarth!

 

Other lords take a knee in solidarity – naming Jon the “White Wolf,” chanting “the king of the north!” Jon seems reluctant of his new found legitimacy as the ruler of the North, but doesn’t do anything to refuse the title either – the same can be said of Sansa, who allows Jon to become the Big Stark on campus. As Bran showed us, and Littlefinger pointed out: Sansa is the only (present) true heir to the Stark name- Jon is factually a Targaryen bastard, despite is dual noble heritage – which makes his ascent to power that much more ironic. Sansa and Littlefinger exchange a look – Sansa’s passive acceptance of Jon’s “crowning” is also a firm refusal of Littlefinger’s offer to make her Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, and while he seems calm, you can see the gears turning in his mind. I suspect next season Sansa will spend a lot of her time blocking the target that Baelish has just pasted on Jon Snow’s back – but I bet she does it like a boss.

Speaking of bosses – we cut back to the great hall of Walder Frey, who is alone, waiting to be served mincemeat pie from a new attractive serving girl. He lecherously harasses the girl, and asks her where his sons are – because servants apparently know everything. She replies: they are here. The old man is confused – the two of them are alone. The audience catches on before Wader does; the servant lifts up the crust of the pie to reveal a severed finger – she means they are here in the meat pie, because she grounded them up to be served to their father! Walder Frey recoils, and Arya Stark emerges from under the pretty stolen Face from the House of Black and White and reveals herself as such before slitting Frey’s throat. ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST!!! I was dancing in my chair at this point, because Arya is most likely going to be taking over the mantle held by Lady Stoneheart in the books as the avenger of the Red Wedding. Zombie Catelyn Stark may never have been utilized on the show, but her role as Stark/Tully avenger will be carried out by our favorite rogue assassin – Arya Stark. People will inevitably be horrified that Arya has been “reduced” to a bogeyman killer: but I think Arya has suffered enough, and it’s time for the people on her kill list to get what they deserve.

Considering Cersei Lannister is the only original member left on Arya’s kill list aside from the Hound – I’m not so sure Arya will have the honor of completing that checklist. I’m thinking Jaime (or at the very least, Tyrion) will have the honor of killing Cersei, because he is positively horrified by what he sees upon his return to Kings Landing: the Sept of Baelor is a smoking pile of dirt, and Cersei has just seized the crown from the not-even-cold-yet-grasp of their dead son, and is now Queen Cersei, the first of her name, Queen of the Andals and the First Men; her royal ass firmly planted on the Iron Throne with no one present to challenge her.

No one yet, that is – Danaerys and company are at sea, with a full navy and three dragons soaring overhead to wipe the Lannister usurpers from the face of the planet in what promises to be the most epic showdown in television history – the final conquest for the Iron Throne.  Until the showdown against the Night’s King and the White Walkers, that is – I have a feeling that will happen after Cersei’s inevitable defeat, whether it is carried out by her own lover/brother Jaime, or by her arch nemesis Tyrion via Danaerys – the witch’s prophecy says as much. My bet is on Jaime, because he killed The Mad King to prevent the very thing that the Cersei just did, albeit on a smaller scale. Take bets with me now: ten bucks says before he kills her, his last words to her are “the things I do for love…”

Lastly: I love that Game of Thrones performed a coup on itself, usurping its own place as a misogynist haven and reinventing itself as a world in which all of the main aggressors (except the Night’s King) are now women.  Cersei, Dany, Yara, Olenna, and Ellaria (and to some extent, Sansa) are directing all of the forces that will soon clash in southern Westeros, and Arya is now the continent’s most driven assassin. I can’t wait to see what changes are in store for the Seven Kingdoms now that women literally run the world.

I still have tons of feels and a heart full of excitement that will hopefully hold me over until next season – the end is nigh, and I couldn’t be more pleased with the way this season ended. Winter is officially coming!!! Valar Morghulis!

 

 

Game of Thrones, Season 6, Episode 9

 

I think I can speak for everyone when I say last night’s episode was exactly what we’ve been waiting all season for – it finally lived up to its hype, and didn’t disappoint. The penultimate episode of Season 6 takes its place as the best episode of its respective season, like Season 4’s The Watchers on the Wall or Season3’s The Rains of Castamere. So because of this, and because narrative-wise we didn’t progress very far, this will be the shortest post of this run.

We pick up on Dany and Tyrion in the pyramid; Tyrion is desperately trying to defend himself as the city burns from the siege, which is still going on. That sort of surprised me in the best way possible, because instead of just having to assume Drogon went off and burned the armada in the bay – we actually get to see it! In broad day light!!!! More on that (obviously) in a second. Tyrion gets out that the city made a comeback (leaving out the part that he used a religious cult movement to accomplish this) in her absence, and the Masters of Slaver’s Bay didn’t take kindly to their good fortune so they’ve come to restore Meereen to its former (slave-holding) glory. Dany rattles off a few trademark comments about burning the Masters to ash and punishing them utterly for their transgressions; Tyrion pushes for an iota of mercy. He tells her that her father, the Mad King, had stored Wildfire under all of the important buildings in Kings Landing (which is our HINT HINT as an audience that next week, Cersei will likely be taking advantage of this) and he was likely planning to burn his own people with it (we know this is true because Jaime killed Mad King Aerys to prevent this very thing from happening, and he confessed as much to Brienne, but never told anyone else the real reason he killed the king). He pleads with her to take a course of action that would not punish innocent civilians for the crimes of their rulers – really he’s asking her not to live up to the Targaryen legacy of indiscriminate violence.

We cut to a scene with the Masters (those sleazy jerks with whom Tyrion made his “7-year slavery” deal) and Dany and Co. – it seems Dany is there to discuss terms of surrender (psh! As if!). The Masters gloat; demanding she leave and that she return the Unsullied and Missandei to Astapor. Mwahahaha. Dany follows up with “Oh, you misunderstood – we’re here to talk about your surrender. Don’t want to surrender? Cool -Ima get on my dragon and burn you mother fuckers and everything you stand for to the ground now.”

 

The sequence that follows is by far the most epic fantasy battle since the Rohan/Ghost armies swept in and saved the day in Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Dany calls in Drogon (they must be psychically linked, or else they have really good time-management/planning skills), gets on his back, and takes to the sky. Way up high we can see Drogon’s brothers, Rhaegal and Viserion, break out of their cell under the city (why the heck didn’t they do that right after Tyrion unchained them?) because their leader has returned - and if you’ve been pent up in a dank basement for like a year, you would be itching to get out and burn some ships too. Dany commands Drogon to strategically burn down the ships with heavy artillery, and the Masters and their guards watch in horror. We also see that the Sons of the Harpy were picking off innocent Meereenese people as they tried to flee from the city: enter the wild hoard of Dothraaki led by Daario Naharis. Buh-Bye, SoH! Grey worm steps up and tells the guards they can leave in peace if they abandon the Masters, so they take off immediately. Then Tyrion informs the Masters that Dany wants one among the three of them dead as payment for their transgression; naturally the two guys turn on their “lowborn” compatriot, and Greyworm takes both of them out. The last is left to return home and inform the rest of Slaver’s Bay not to fuck with Daenerys Targaryen and that the practice of slavery is about to end abruptly, forever.

Later in the episode, we are treated with Tyrion belittling none other than Theon Greyjoy in the pyramid throne room! Looks like Theon and Yara arrived just behind the carnage in Slaver’s Bay. I admire their determination to make a deal: if I showed up somewhere to form an alliance and walked in on a giant murder scene, I would have circled the block a few times, you know?

Theon admits to his assholery and informs Dany and Tyrion that their father was murdered by their Uncle Euron and Yara’s justifiable claim to the throne was usurped etc etc. They tell her he will be coming to make a similar deal, except he wants to give Dany his “fat cock”  (erm, hand in marriage) but has no intention of being a true partner to Dany; Yara’s offer is simply her loyalty in backing Dany’s claim to the Iron Throne and her ships for the trip back to Westeros. Turns out they only have 100 ships; but combined with the ships salvaged from the siege they would have a small armada.

This was actually a really great scene. I think the Greyjoys are about as interesting as dirt, but to have two women making a deal to support each other in their respective quests to become Queen of their people was a first on the show, and probably in the history of this world. Dany agrees to Yara’s offer on the condition that the Iron Islanders put an end to their Viking way of life: no more pillaging, reaving, or raping. Yara’s like “….but that’s what we do?” and Dany is like “not anymore, did you see what I did to my enemies in Slaver’s Bay?” Smartly, Yara agrees: no more perpetual assholery in exchange for independence. They shake on it, and the most interesting alliance in GoT canon has been launched!

Now for the rest of this episode: the long awaited Battle of the Bastards. Where our time with Dany and Co. in Meereen was entirely uplifting and bright, our time in the North was anything but. Team Snow and Team Bolton meet to formally discuss the possibility of avoiding bloodshed. Sansa insisted on attending; feeling that by remaining in a tent she would be expressing cowardice. She wants Ramsey to see she’s not quivering by a fire in fear somewhere. Ramsey is of course his typical smarmy, psychotic self. John tells him he’ll fight him one on one, right there. Naturally Ramsey declines because he has far greater numbers. Sansa promises Ramsey that he will die tomorrow and rides off, in a commendable mic-drop.

Back at camp, the guys talk strategy, and Sansa blows up on Jon for not including her in the conversation. Normally I’d disagree with Sansa; what does she know about battle? But she insists that unlike Jon or Davos: she knows Ramsey. She saw what he did to Theon, what he did to countless people, what he did to her. She tells Jon that Rickon is as good as dead. John, the commensurate good guy, says they can’t just abandon him. Sansa warns Jon that Ramsey will find a way to fuck with them and PLEASE: don’t take the bait.

Of course, Sansa is right. Before I move on, I’ll mention that Jon paid a visit to Melisandre and told her that if he dies, he doesn’t want her to bring him back. She says she has to do what R’hllor wants; they have an interesting exchange about the nature of gods:

Melisandre: Maybe [R’hllor] brought you back here; only to die again.

Jon: What kind of god would do something like that?

Melisandre: The one we've got.

Davos and Tormund bro out together about how they both came to be in the service of Jon Snow; their male bonding was a good example of how people with vast differences can work together for the common good. Also: Davos finds the wooden stag he carved for Shireen in the remains of her sacrificial pyre, which means he’s on to Melisandre. I won’t be upset if he kills her next episode for her gross human transgression.

Speaking of child murders, it wouldn’t be Game of Thrones if an innocent child didn’t die, so of course, Rickon Stark is murdered. This is the situation Sansa (sort of) predicted: Ramsey sets Rickon free and commands him to run to Jon across the field between them, and then starts firing arrows at him. Predictably Jon takes off to try and save his baby brother, only to watch him get shot through the back, and die (mercifully it seems he died rather quickly instead of suffocating on his own blood).

 

That does it –Jon blows the plan and charges Team Bolton – one man against 6000, 2000 of which seem to be archers because within seconds Jon’s horse is shot through and he’s running on foot.

What follows is a feast of cinematic war-porn. The contrast from the Tolkienesque Battle of Meereen is shocking: instead of dragon fire and shrieking horsemen, we are forced to watch the disorienting mess that is actually war. For millennia: this is what war looked like in human history. Blunt force trauma and chaotic blood and guts; the sensation of not being able to process what’s going on before having to act or else die. The cinematography here is Emmy worthy, for sure.

To sum up – Team Snow is surrounded, trapped between the Bolton infantry (with a shield formation reminiscent of the Spartans in 300) and a literal wall of dead bodies, over which the Umbers stand to pick off anyone trying to flee. Things felt and looked grim – but due to the formulaic nature of GoT’s battle sequences (plus the knowledge that Sansa called in an assist from Littlefinger) it wasn’t truly a surprise when the Army of the Vale came riding in Rohan-style to save the day. But talk about relief! With Ramsey’s army under siege, the cowardly SOB flees the battlefield and retreats to Winterfell. Jon, WunWun the Giant, and Tormund follow in pursuit on foot. The front door in busted down by WunWun, the last of his kind. Rest peacefully, large sir, for giving your life in an effort to save what was left of your Wildling brethren. Ramsey is as good as dead, because there’s no stopping Jon now: he catches three arrows with a shield at close range and beats Ramsey half to death with his bare hands. He only stops because Sansa has arrived and is staring at what’s left of Ramsey Snow.

 

LONG LIVE HOUSE STARK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Finally, a fucking win for the Stark family (even though the only true living heir -that they know of- has just died). Ramsey wakes up in the kennel where he keeps his starving hounds, with Sansa on the other side of the gate. This miserable SOB can’t accept defeat so he taunts her: "You can't kill me," he says. "I'm a part of you now." I worried briefly that this would be factually true, that Sansa was pregnant (if Melisandre can make a shadow baby assassin, I bet she can perform a mystical abortion), but really it’s a bleak statement about the nature of abuse. Even though, as Sansa points out, Ramsey will effectively be erased from history along with his father’s house, what he’s done to her psyche has permanently changed her as a person. Sansa was already tainted by Littlefinger’s devious influence: now she’s got a cruel streak in her that wasn’t necessarily there even after Joffrey beheaded her father in front of her. Let’s hope Jon’s positive influence can keep her from making any more epically bad decisions in the future.  I was happy with Sansa having the last laugh, smirking as Ramsey’s starving dogs ate him face first. The lesson learned here is that dogs are like humans: they may be “loyal beasts” but if you mistreat them long enough, they will turn on you.

Aside from being a great episode cinematically, it was a success thematically as well. Dany says in the throne room, to Tyrion, Theon, and Yara that all of them had evil fathers; that those men left the world a worse place than they found it, and that their generation would leave it better than they were given. Everyone fighting in this episode was fighting more than just a physical war – they were fighting against a corrupt system, fighting to remake the shitty world they were given into a place worth living in. Dany and Jon triumphed and for a change, the good guys came out on top. I’m not going to be too quick to call Dany a good guy though – her conqueror’s mentality was tabled in favor of Tyrion’s pragmatism today, but now that she’s won in Essos: will she be able to take Westeros in a way that doesn’t detract from her accomplishments? Next season I wonder if she and Jon might join their forces to defeat the Night’s King/White Walker army in a deal to guarantee her place on the Iron Throne, even though we all know Jon is a secret Targaryen and he would be a kinder, fairer ruler. Maybe it’s a Batman situation: Jon is the hero Westeros should want, but Dany is the hero Westeros deserves. Only time will tell.

Next Week: Cersei’s barbeque –erm, Trial.

Game of Thrones, Season 6, Episode 8

By and large, this episode is a giant exercise in anti-climax. The only storyline followed in this hour and six minutes that was even remotely satisfying in a cathartic sense was Arya’s, and maybe slightly the Hound’s. Like clockwork, the most action-packed/gripping GoT episodes are the penultimate ones, so next week’s Battle of the Bastards will surely be more text book edge-of-your-seat entertainment. I guess that’s why the writers chose to have pretty much everything that could have lived up to its hype end on a ‘meh’ note, watered down with comedic moments.

We begin with Lady Crane, who is breaking hearts again on stage as Cersei Lannister during Joffrey’s death scene. The fictionalized Cersei is far more sympathetic and compassionate than real-life Cersei, and thank the Old Gods and the New because when Crane finds a dying Arya in the back of the theater, she takes her home to care for her. Arya’s wounds seem to be superficial enough for Lady Crane (with only years’ worth of abusive relationships as medical training) to patch her up; the surrogate mother pampers her once-would-be-assassin and makes sure Arya gets some soup and sleep.

While Arya rests, we are caught up on what the Hound is up to – which is straight up murdering sleazy dudes in the forest. Despite the carnage, the whole thing plays out as situational comedy: the Hound mocks his victims for their choice in last words as he dispatches with four guys who weren’t even his intended victims and who didn’t offer any useful information about where those particular three murderers were. He does eventually stumble across those guys further down the path – but they’ve already been captured for their heinous crime by the Brotherhood Without Banners, with nooses already around their necks. Wouldn’t you know it – BERIC “RESURRECTION” DONDARRION is there himself meeting out justice! The ensuing reunion between the Hound and Beric (whom we last saw post-resurrection after being cut down by none other than the Hound himself) was excellent writing – enough cynical, biting dialogue to satisfy the most ardent Tarantino fans. The Hound wants to kill the villains himself to avenge his friends – Beric says he can have one. TWO, the Hound counters. They settle on two – Sandor Clegane kicks the stools out from under the two fuckers on the left and Beric takes care of the other guy. That being settled – the Hound asks for a bite to eat, because he’s had a full day of murdering and could use a refresher. Beric and company oblige him, and another discussion about violence’s place in the world happens. It seems the Brotherhood are in the know about what’s about to happen up North with the advance of the White Walkers, so they’re headed up that way because as followers of the Lord of Light – they are compelled to serve a purpose greater than themselves. "Lots of horrible shit gets done in this world for something larger than ourselves," the Hound replies. This part of the episode was uncomfortable to watch in light of the fact that not even 24 hours earlier, the deadliest mass shooting on American soil took place in Orlando, FL. There are a lot of critics who decry GoT for its gratuitous depictions of senseless violence – myself included from time to time. However: I feel that as a society we should be less offended by fictional occurrences on television – however gratuitous or exploitative – and more affronted by how pathetically close our actual society mirrors a fake medieval one in the amount of hatred and violence we inflict upon each other. We should treat GoT as an example of what happens when the mentality of “you’ll never get rid of violence” is the de facto motto of the masses: we shouldn’t be resigning ourselves to this fact. The Hound might have decided that his foray into pacifism was a failed venture – but we shouldn’t give up so easily.

Let’s now talk about an example of avoided bloodshed, a rarity on this show. Brienne and Pod have reached Riverrun, and much to her surprise, she finds the surrounding area occupied by Jaime Lannister’s (they aren’t even pretending to be in service of the Crown, really, although they are technically) army. She easily gets access to Ser Jaime, her former BFF, but their reunion is fraught; soiled by the fact that they are currently fighting for opposing sides, which Jaime points out (Sansa is still wanted for her assumed role in Joffrey’s murder, and to have the Starks retake Winterfell is basically the opposite of what the Crown would want to happen). But Jaime lets her have a go at convincing the Blackfish to vacate the castle in order to travel (under a temporary truce) North so that he can aid Sansa at reclaiming Winterfell. Simultaneously, we witness another reunion of sorts: Podrick and Bronn. Bronn sneaks up on Pod and then proceeds to fuck with him for a small chunk of screen time to lighten the mood. It seems that the writers felt for every conflict there must also be a comedic relief this episode, and this part was unnecessary but welcome, much like the Hound’s banter with the Brotherhood earlier. Bronn asks Pod if he thinks Brienne and Jaime are fucking in the tent, which segues into Bronn casually stating he would def get it on with Brienne – wouldn’t Pod? Which segues into a training session where Bronn schools Pod on hand to hand combat ("Lesson number 1: assume everyone wants to hit you, because they do" -SMACK).

Brienne tries her best at reasoning with Blackfish, but he shoots her down, refusing to give up his advantage because: 1) He distrusts Jaime Lannister’s word about the truce, 2) Is unwilling to help Sansa, despite his sympathy for the situation, because he barely has enough men to hold down this fort, let alone take on the Boltons, and 3) He’s a miserable old bastard who would rather die in his former home than let the stinking Frey’s have it. Brienne is crushed: she sends Pod off to inform Sansa of her failure.

 

Jaime, in the mean time, is carrying out his plan B. He has a sit down with POW Edmure Tully, who understandably has NO patience for whatever shit Jaime’s trying to pull with this nice-cop act. We know that Jaime isn’t being insincere when he tells Edmure he would arrange for a meeting with his wife and son, or that he respected his sister, Catelyn, because of her fierce love for her children – but to Edmure this is just baseless soothsaying from a repeat oath-breaker. He says to Jaime that on some level, Jaime must understand that he is an evil man. Jaime counters that all the things he does, he does for love (remember when he said that before he pushed Bran out of the tower in Winterfell?), especially for Cersei. He makes it abundantly clear that to get home to Cersei, he would behave much in the way that Catelyn Stark did for those she loved, whether that involved releasing a prized hostage or slaughtering a whole army of Tully men - not to mention Edmure's toddler son, whom he threatened to catapult over the wall of Riverrun. Edmure is technically the heir to the Tully name and is responsible for the lives of his bannermen, and is thusly convinced by Jaime’s threat to approach the drawbridge and demand entry as the rightful Lord of Riverrun. The Blackfish knows that Edmure is tainted goods: he commands the men to ignore Edmure’s request because it’s a coerced request. But the men are honor bound to obey their Lord, so they let Edmure in, and as such they forfeit the castle because once inside, Edmure orders the men to lay down their arms. This is a good example of a phenomenon I like to call “Ned Starking:” when people act in order to uphold an ethical ideal despite the fact that this very action is in direct conflict with their best interests. The Lannisters storm the castle and Blackfish, in one last decent act, helps Brienne and Pod escape in a row boat. Blackfish goes down swinging off camera and dies during his last stand. Jaime seems indifferent about that news as he watches Brienne get away down the river. He may not be in love with Brienne, as she may still be with him, but he does respect her enough to let her escape to return to the service of Sansa Stark, one of his family’s sworn enemies. They wave goodbye to each other in a rather poignant moment: Jaime Lannister (on the show, at least) is a complicated guy who isn’t lying when he says whatever violence or misdeeds he perpetrates, he does as an act of love. He retook Riverrun for love of Cersei, but he did it bloodlessly out of respect for Brienne.

Cersei isn’t doing quite as well as Jaime in terms of wins. There is tease of a confrontation in the Red Keep – the Faith Militant shows up to force Cersei to report to the High Sparrow at the Sept of Baelor.  She finally gets to utter the “I choose violence” line we’ve been looking forward to all season: and instead of a bloodbath, we get Franken-Mountain ripping the jaw off of one Sparrow and the rest running away in retreat. NOOOOOOO! I wanted a proper wipe-out of the Faith Militant, and was denied. Cersei got to be smug for ten minutes before the rug was pulled out from under her by her own son, the King, who has decreed from the Iron Throne that Trial By Combat would be outlawed in all the Seven Kingdoms as an act of barbarity and a way for corrupt nobles to evade prosecution. SUCKERPUNCH – this was Cersei’s ace in the hole since last season’s Walk of Shame, and now that’s been taken away from her too. Tommen is also lost to her now – plus she’s toast because all of the Septons hate her and will surely vote to have her executed for her crimes. But wait! Maester Qyburn has intel from his child-sources about something promising (yet unnamed) in Cersei’s interest. Although it isn’t confirmed, based on Bran’s vision depicting the Mad King’s Wildfire caches, I’m going to go with they’ve found some of the stuff that wasn’t used up in the Battle of Blackwater and Cersei’s going to try and pull a Daenerys and burn Kings Landing (or at least the Sept) to the ground.

Speaking of Dany, in Meereen Tyrion is patting himself on the back for his “successful” enlistment of the Cult of R’hllor, because the city is thriving again. Varys is less quick to consider it a job well done, and we find out he’s off for Westeros to put out feelers about getting ships for Dany’s conquest (assuming she ever comes back). Tyrion peer pressures Greyworm and Missandei into enjoying some wine with him in the pyramid and an adorable exchange of jokes takes place. I especially enjoyed Missandei’s first foray into humor with a joke about what would happen to two translators on a sinking ship (“I can call for help in 19 different languages!”). The merriment and Tyrion’s joke beginning "I once walked into a brothel with a honeycomb and a jackass-" are cut short, however, by an attack on the city: the Masters have come to take Meereen back in spite of Tyrion’s negotiation.

 

 At first when I saw the ships in the harbor I thought Yara and Theon had traveled at warp speed to get to the Dragon Queen, but nope – it was a fleet of war ships from the other cities along Slaver’s Bay, and boy do their trebuchets pack a punch. Greyworm puts down Tyrion for his naivety and rightly blames this debacle on his poor judgement. He insists that the denizens of Meereen remain in the pyramid because it’s the only defensible location in the city. Greyworm’s plan is tested by a loud kerfuffle on the roof, and our beloved characters brace for the worst – only to be surprised by the Dues ex Machina return of Daenerys Targaryen, who had been dropped off seconds ago on the terrace by Drogon. We can see a shadow of Drogon flying over the sea in the background behind Dany, so again we are denied actual footage of cool shit happening and are just meant to assume that we’ve won that battle.

We return to Arya, who seems to be doing pretty well under Lacy Crane’s care (despite the fact that she almost certainly would be half dead from sepsis in real life). Crane says Arya should join the traveling show, Arya says she wouldn’t be a good actress because she would forget her lines (isn’t she humble?). She says that she’d like to travel to whatever is west of Westeros (um, an ocean and then Essos, because the world is spherical, but I’ll let that slide). Lady Crane leaves the room to get more medicine, and is met by a weird looking boy – and we all know it isn’t actually a boy, but the Waif, who has come for Arya again. RIP Lady Crane – you were too kind for this world, so you had to go.

Choose your preferred Terminator Reference

 

The last ten minutes of this episode played out like a horror movie, because the Waif came off awfully Bogeyman-ish as she chased Arya through the streets of Braavos. She was like the Terminator – doing the determined slow walk and yet still catching up to our heroine, refusing to die like Michael Myers or Jason Vorhees.  Arya is bleeding from her wounds again and takes a couple of really bad stumbles – but it becomes clear that she’s leading the Waif someplace specific with her trail of blood. Finally, the showdown we’ve been waiting for: the Waif has Arya cornered in a windowless  room, only now Arya has Needle (because this is the room she hid out in after she abandoned the House of Black and White). Arya uses the last card up her sleeve and extinguishes the only light in the room – cutting to black. AGAIN WE ARE DENIED A PROPER FIGHT BETWEEN OUR PROTAGONIST AND HER AGRESSOR! God dammit! We do get to see that Jaqen discovers the Waif’s severed face in the Hall of Faces, and rather than kill Arya when she holds him at the point of her sword, he is impressed with her moxy. “A girl has truly become No One,” he says with pride, and we are rewarded with Arya’s uberpredictable but oh-so-desired response: "A girl is Arya Stark of Winterfell, and I'm going home." It’s hugely satisfying: Arya has had so many aliases and different identities in order to survive over the course of the show; she’s now fully capable of embracing her name and her destiny back home in Westeros. I could make a comparison to another orphan who went off on a long quest to become skilled enough to metaphorically avenge their parents’ deaths (*cough cough BATMAN cough cough*), but Arya and Bruce Wayne lack other thematic similarities for that to really be a true analogy. But wouldn’t BatGirl be an awesome mashup!?!?

 

Maybe Arya’s not a master assassin/detective, but I have high hopes for her survival if she does make it back to the Seven Kingdoms. Who’s next on her hit list? Cersei Lannister? Walder Frey? Let’s hope she gets to cross another name off of it in a way that is most helpful to Sansa and Jon’s story arcs next season!

Next Episode: The Battle of the Bastards – Jon verbally requests a Do Not Resuscitate from Davos. DOWN WITH RAMSEY BOLTON!