Game of Drones

***SPOILER WARNING***

READ AT YOUR OWN RISK

I can't help but feel, at this juncture, like we're heading toward a lackluster finish with Game of Thrones. Episode 3 was pretty awesome in a lot of ways, but also pretty disappointing, so it ended with me feeling rather ambivalent. Narratively it felt like an unfulfilling, if not incoherent, mess. Aesthetically it was superb, perhaps, depending on how you look at it. If you conclude the extreme darkness and blurriness was an artistic or atmospheric decision, to convey the sense of foreboding and terribly disadvantageous conditions in which the living were fighting, then I suppose they really nailed it. Because for much of the episode I found it rather difficult to see what was going on exactly. If you think that it was just the result of poor technical work, i.e., bad film and editing practices, then I suppose even that aspect of it was lackluster. (I really want to believe it's the former.)

As for its story and conclusion it kind of feels like Benioff and Weiss pulled a Rian Johnson with the Night King (NK), as he was by far the most intriguing character in the series and the one I wanted to know the most about, only to be dispatched with profoundly little development over the span of 8 years. Hence the Snoke reference. Perhaps the only villain in a major production I've ever seen discarded with less character development.

I've always been in awe of the irony of that image. No, Rian, your Snoke theory sucked. That's why your Star Wars film is arguably the most hated, by a wide margin, in the franchise's history. Literally all of the fan theories about Snoke I'd been hearing for years prior to the film's release were better than that of the film's maker. The NK went out with a comparable unsatisfactory fizzle for me. He's been built up as a millennia old threat to all life on the planet. For years we've been told humanity is doomed if the NK and his over 100,000 strong undead army makes it past the wall. Only for him to die, in literally his first battle south of the wall, to a little girl with a steak knife. I can't help but feel like one of the coolest, most menacing villains ever, was squandered to a significant degree. And just like Rian Johnson, those responsible for that decision seem completely oblivious to their error, and the problem with "subverting" expectations as an end in and of itself. But more on that later. My only hope now is that one of the alleged spinoff series they're developing is about the NK. But I'll believe that when I see it. 

This disappointment is compounded by the fact there's simply no way Cersei can match, much less surpass, the existential threat that was the Night King. The disparity between these two foes, in regard to their respective power and the awe they inspire, is akin to the difference between Satan himself and Hillary Clinton. I mean, they're just in completely different leagues, and I don't see how Benioff and Weiss can compensate for that. Thus the kill order feels inverted like a boxing match in which the main event is a bout significantly lower on the echelon than the preceding fight. And so from a climactic perspective it kind of feels like it's possibly all downhill from here, as the next and last opponent is the far less frightening, powerful, and deadly of the remaining villains. As much as I hate Cersei she's no Night King, and no matter how the show might try to portray it her army is a joke by comparison. So it personally somehow feels wrong inside that the battle against her would be the "grand finale."

I understand why they saved her for last (all the Lannister Drama). I get it. But I don't think I will enjoy that as much, and frankly, I feel like the NK's death was perhaps made deliberately underwhelming because of it. In other words, his role and fate were deliberately diminished, in order to prevent it (as much as possible) from eclipsing the subsequent yet inherently less remarkable Lannister showdown.

As far as battles go, the one against the NK was pretty remarkable in some ways, from a visual and magnitude perspective. The writing, however, has clearly suffered since parting ways with the books. The show frankly, in comparison to where it started, feels very fast and loose (i.e., mediocre) now from a narrative perspective. There's a lot of narratively questionable stuff happening in GoT these days. Flagrant individual and collective strategic blunders, to give but one example, abounded in Episode 3. Staying in the north knowing the NK and his army are heading straight for you seems like a really bad decision from my point of view. Helping Yara retake the Iron Islands, and waiting there until the NK reaches King's Landing, forcing Cersei to fight with you if only for self-preservation would have been preferable. At the very least, the women and children should have been evacuated elsewhere, and not placed in a mass tomb in a battle against someone that reanimates the dead as a hobby. I mean, come on. How the hell does no one see that coming? It the narrative equivalent of telling people to seek shelter from a wildfire in a fuel shed, the sagacious leadership of Winterfell decides that the women and children will be "safe" from an enemy that raises the dead, in the crypt. 

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The Dothraki, with their suicide charge, were wasted in my opinion. Might as well have slit their throats yourself. At least then you could have burned them preventing their reanimation. Also, despite having lost one dragon to the White Walkers both Dany and Jon have an inexplicable disregard for the lives of their remaining dragons, and repeatedly put them in danger for little if any benefit. Your enemy is the undisputed world champion in the javelin throw, and yet you insist on doing things like flying straight at him, hovering stationary in the air above him, and worst of all landing and sitting stationary on the ground. We know from the Season 7 finale that not even rapid strafing fire attacks are "safe." So naturally they did a bunch more of that, and even less prudent things, in this episode. I feel like they really wrote themselves into a corner in the Season 7 finale, and as a result their only remedy was for the NK to have a terrible aim now, which he does. He nailed a Hail Mary least season, nothing but net, yet now can't seem to manage a layup. Because if he could the series would have effectively been over at the end of Season 7. Thus ever since when he shoots, he misses, because he must; because the script demands it.

When Dany lands her dragon in the middle of the zombie horde, and just sits on the ground allowing her dragon to be mobbed and nearly stabbed to death, I almost lost my mind. Both because it was profoundly nonsensical, and was an ostentatiously lazy plot device to allow her to be dismounted, in order to give Jorah his heroic finale. It was very reminiscent of The Walking Dead (TWD) as such. (What I consider one of the laziest and poorly written shows in all of television.) You could consistently tell when someone was going to die on TWD, because the characters would suddenly become full blown retards, and start doing things that make absolutely no sense. Like landing your dragon and sitting on the ground in the middle of a zombie army, for example, and allowing your dragon to be mobbed and repeatedly stabbed forcing it to choose self-preservation over you.

I guess it goes without saying no one could remain mounted on a dragon at all, much less during a dragon versus dragon aerial melee fight, without a saddle and being secured to the animal by... something? Frostbite and hypothermia apparently don't exist for Targaryens either, who seem as immune to cold as they are fire, because they routinely fly around on the backs of dragons in arctic caliber weather with little more than a modest pair of gloves and a windbreaker. It's 10° on the ground and these two are flying around at breakneck speeds, attached by sheer forearm strength, and without so much as a beanie. But I can forgive all that I suppose. It would arguably be less dramatic without seeing the actors' faces. The strategic errors are much harder to forgive however. Why would Arya, an ostensibly professional assassin who managed to sneak past a large portion of the undead army and the White Walkers themselves, scream (alerting the NK to her presence) as she attacked for example? How does it behoove you to yell at someone you're sneaking up behind before striking? She may as well have shouted "boo" as she pounced. (Are you trying to scare the NK or kill him?) But it all works out, you know, cause reasons.  

Things are also looking bad for Jon. All the other characters maintained/resurrected by the "Lord of Light" are expiring as soon as their usefulness terminates. Frankly, if anyone else but him ends up on the throne, this show will kind of feel like the most epic troll in television history. Because I never cared for Dany. She's a closeted tyrant, and too capricious and egocentric, to be a good ruler. This is of course assuming the show's creators won't simply dispense with the trammels of extant book lore again entirely to pursue whatever arbitrarily revised outcome they may have concocted. Like killing Jon, again, which would render his dramatic resurrection, being that it now obviously wasn't to play any pivotal role in stopping the NK (as he was grounded and easily and immediately neutralized as a threat), so much narrative dross. Which it already rather is I'm forced to surmise at this juncture. So I guess at this point I'm just crossing my fingers for Jon in the hopes he serves any extraordinary purpose at all.

In retrospection the mission to capture a wight is when the show really seemed to go off the rails hard for me personally. That was when nonsensical conduct really seemed to come to the surface as a conspicuous staple of the show's DNA (if you will). The NK's choice to shoot down the dragon flying a quarter mile away for example and basically getting a bullseye, as opposed to the one sitting right in front of him (which is carrying all the people who could potentially thwart his plan), which he somehow misses from a much closer range always stood out as really nonsensical. As was Jon's refusing to get on the dragon, and then being mobbed by zombies which causes him to fall into freezing water, only to conveniently be saved by his uncle Ben. Going on to survive hypothermia (yet again), after riding on horseback all the way to the coast, while soaking wet in the arctic. I mean, how did Ben even know about this excursion, much less where to find him in the vast expanse of the frozen north? It was simply poor/uninspired writing that blatantly served its purpose; giving the NK a dragon without any real regard for preserving narrative integrity to that end. 

This last episode (8:3) was filled with similar logic defying content. How many times was a main character left surrounded, and facing ostensibly impossible odds when the camera cut to something else, only for it to come back to them later inexplicably not dead and saved at the last second by some miraculously timed intervention? I'm sorry, but such excessive reliance on Deus ex machina is not "good" story telling. That's the kind of story telling you do, when you just don't give a damn, or have written yourself into a corner you don't know how to escape. Dany's landing was, following the same vein, a blatantly lazy narrative device to dismount her so they could kill off Jorah. Like I said, it was TWD caliber writing. Sam is yet another example of this. 

Fat clumsy Sam getting Edd killed.

Who doesn't know Sam is a clumsy fat ass? How many allies does fat ass clumsy Sam have to get killed before he's forbidden from being anywhere near a battle? Why wasn't he in the crypt? Because if he were in the crypt they'd have had to come up with something more thoughtful than saving fat ass clumsy Sam to kill off Edd. Everyone knew he shouldn't be there, but he was. Why? One reason. To provide a lazy excuse for killing Edd. And after doing so, fat ass clumsy Sam scurries off, never to be seen again (to my recollection) doing anything of substance. TWD often used this exact same, lazy, and consequently utterly trite technique for advancing the show's plot. Characters were routinely killed off in that show trying to save some other stupid/clumsy character.

The embodiment of the white patriarchy being defeated by feminism.

And then there's the issue of Arya Sue (or Mary Sue Stark). How did she get there? How did she get past all the zombies and White Walkers (which had the tree surrounded), to sneak up behind the NK (who was standing directly in front of his minions), and then why scream as you attack which negates the whole purpose of sneaking in the first place? All this "prince that was promised" stuff, and it's Ayra that kills the NK. Not Song of Ice and Fire, bridge between the north and the south, Christ-like figure, Jon Snow. Not mother of Dragons and Breaker of Chains, Daenerys Targaryen. Arya Stark kills him. Arya. The same Arya who, after all that pestering Gendry to make her a specialized weapon, just drops the thing during what is a relatively ordinary (inconsequential) fight early on. It is she who manages to get the drop on the NK, despite his reflexes being shown throughout the episode to be second to none. And then he basically just allows himself to be stabbed in the thorax by a little girl and turns into a slushee. He was fast enough to do a full 180° turn and catch her midair, throat and weapon wielding arm in hand, but not to snap her neck or toss her away before she stabbed him. You know, cause reasons.

Look, I have no problem with Arya being an "assassin." Women can absolutely be assassins, particularly one of Arya's diminished stature, but not in the way it's depicted by GoT. Women, simply by being women, have the potential to infiltrate and subvert in a manner men typically cannot. History is replete with examples, such as the story of Samson in the Bible, of women using their feminine wiles to ruin or destroy men. So I've no problem with a female assassin exploiting a man's natural inclination to be a defender of women, or lasciviousness, etc., to be his undoing. That's completely plausible even without the ability to change your appearance. In fact, the show itself depicts Arya killing Meryn Trant in precisely this manner; i.e., not with super human powers, which she is never depicted to have, but by exploiting his deviant sexual proclivities. (Back when the show made some modicum of sense.) She uses a disguise to circumvent Trant's defenses and catch him by surprise. But the NK is no mere man. He is without human affection and cares not for the pleasures of the flesh. He's an indiscriminate killer whose known rule of warfare is the destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions without distinction. He takes no prisoners. He cannot be inveigled or seduced. You cannot gain his trust and become close to him. He is shown to possess extra sensory perception and cannot be fooled by disguises. To kill even a mortal man with such attributes would be profoundly difficult. To kill an immortal being, with superhuman strength, reflexes, and perception in such a manner is essentially impossible (even with her acquired skill set).

There's a profound disparity between how Arya kills Meryn Trant in Season 5, which is grounded in reality and has an explanation, and how Arya kills the NK in Season 8 which is/has neither. We're shown how she gets the drop on Trant and it's basically believable. We're not shown how she gets the drop on the NK and it's absolutely not believable. Which really illustrates the extent to which the writing, and regard for detail in general, has degraded over time. Arya's actions evolved from doing things that were credible and in conformity with her character's history and motivations, to doing something that was neither and a flagrant deus ex machina. She even upstages the main character, ostensibly born and resurrected from the dead, to kill a villain she dispatches instead; thereby making her a Mary Sue also. Unlike Trant the NK was never on Arya's "list." She killed him, not because her character had any legitimate reason (or desire) to do so, but purely because the writers thought the viewer wouldn't expect it.

Arya killing the NK definitely wasn't what I was expecting, but being unexpected and being good are two different things. And Benioff and Weiss, just like Johnson, don't seem to understand that. They decided to have Arya kill him because no one will expect that, with no regard for the fact it would be underwhelming in addition to unexpected. "Subverting" expectations is easy. You could have had Sam jump out from nowhere and kill the NK. You could have had The Mountain jump out of nowhere and crush the NK's skull. You could have had Thor come down from nowhere and cleave him in twain with his axe or incinerate him with a lightning bolt. You could have had the NK realize the error of his ways, have a change of heart, and offer his aid in the war against Cersei (ultimately becoming one of Jon and Dany's best friends). All of these things would have been unexpected, and therefore would have subverted my expectations, and they all would have sucked. And they would have sucked for the same reason Arya killing him sucks; they all not only subvert my expectations but also subvert the narrative the show's been building for years. They would subvert Jon's entire character arc (with whom we've been commiserating since we first met him).

The video above really serves to illustrate how connected to and invested in this character people (of all backgrounds) have become. Benioff and Weiss didn't just subvert our expectations. They defecated all over them.

Because we all know how personal stopping the NK was to Arya. All of the tension was built with, and therefore released by, Jon facing the NK. Thus watching Arya kill the NK was kind of like having sex without climaxing, rendering the arc of both characters the narrative equivalent of epididymal hypertension. 

The NK's death would have been infinitely more satisfying if Jon played a role in it, and maybe distracted the NK so Arya could kill him, or vice versa. Jon makes it to the tree, and end's up dueling with the NK, and loses. He gets stabbed and falls. And then as the NK is about to strike Jon down, Bran inexplicably stands and lunges at the NK causing the NK to turn to catch him. Jon then stabs the NK through the thorax with his Valyrian steel sword. All the NK's forces fall. Bran removes his face to reveal Arya. It was her sitting in the chair the whole time. I realize this deviates from established show lore, but so does pretty much everything that happened in this episode, and thus the writers themselves clearly don't care about it. So, whatever. 

But I surmise that just like Johnson with Snoke, in the eyes of vacuous fanboys we will be to blame for not liking something objectively awful, as opposed to the dumb asses truly responsible for it. Subverting expectations can be good, if done intelligently and in moderation. But when you subvert them too much, too often, all you end up with is disappointment. Which was exactly what I felt, to a significant degree, after watching this episode. 

Those extras in the back are wights (zombies). I posted this image to illustrate I wasn't exaggerating when I said the NK and Bran were literally surrounded by his undead army, and because you can actually see that clearly in this image. Unlike screenshots from the show, seen above, which are so dark it's often hard to make out much of anything. (Seriously, click on those images. Those are actually some of the brighter shots.) 

In order to subvert my expectations, Jon Snow, erstwhile implied to likely be a messianic figure who would play some integral role in all of this, proved virtually nugatory by comparison. He should have been named John Doe as a foreshadowing of the sub-bastard narrative triviality he would ultimately be in this conflict. It seems neither he nor Dany were the prince/princess that was promised. Or are we now expected to believe "Azor Ahai" shall come to save the world from the vindictive, and nigh menopausal, Cersei Lannister?

Arya killing the NK is just one example of a much broader issue I've been noticing in the show however. Before I conclude, I can't help but observe how prominent male characters (e.g., Jon and Tyrion) have become increasingly incompetent, if not bumbling buffoons (e.g., Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, etc.) who consistently need to be saved by stronger, more sagacious women, who now control pretty much everything that matters. Once again, it rather reminds me of another work of fiction I shan't name. (But it rhymes with The Last Jedi.) The entire world was saved by Arya. Jon was saved by Sansa who, after Jon's betrayal by bending the knee to Dany, seems the de facto ruler of the north in the hearts and minds of the people. Jaime spent most of his life a thrall to Cersei before traveling north, and then upon arriving ends up serving under Brienne. Tyrion, and now Jon too, are thralls to Daenerys. All the real power is held by women, deciding the fate of the world, and surrounded by servile male sycophants. Both Dany and Cersei are, as is so often the case now, female characters written like male characters. They have little in the way of discernible female personality traits. Rather, they're highly ambitious and preoccupied with accruing status, power, and conquest (typically male attributes). It seems as though since parting ways with the books, the political views of Benioff and Weiss have increasingly crept into the show, manifest in the number of strong female characters increasing while conversely the number of strong male characters has decreased. As much as I liked Jorah what was he if not a friend zoned sycophant?

What the hell happened to this show? It went from something really well thought out, to let's have a fat guy fall over to kill this guy, and let's have Dany land her dragon for no reason here to kill this guy, and then let's have Arya effectively teleport here to kill the main villain, etc., etc., etc. My hopes and expectations for the rest of the season, and the finale, have been significantly lowered and deflated by this episode. The NK frankly died a ridiculous, one dimensional, vacuous comic book or cartoon character caliber villain, apparently purely so the show's makers could prop up Cersei (the clearly lesser threat) as the main event in subsequent episodes. He was more a caricature than a character in comparison to any other antagonist in the show aside from Euron. And far too few "fans" seem bothered by that.

Anyway, in closing, I hope I'm wrong about everything. I hope Benioff and Weiss have some genius masterstroke that completely defies and exceeds my expectations. I'll be the first to admit it. Or, maybe they deliberately lowered the bar with Episode 3, so that even mediocrity serves that purpose in the end. I guess we'll all find out.