"What was it all about?" Tyrion Lannister asks his brother at one point in season four of Game of Thrones. He's referring to a long dead cousin, Orson, who suffered from brain damage and whose favourite, indeed sole, pastime was crushing beetles with rocks. The gratuitous, methodical and utterly pointless killing apparently provoked an existential crisis in the young Lannister and he relates how he devoted all his time and energy to determining why his cousin felt compelled to smash insects into paste. He never gets an actual answer, but, it is inferred, it's the same reason that some men beat, kill, steal and rape. Because they can. Because they have a rock and you do not. Because they are large and others are small. And this, to get back to the original question, is what Game of Thrones is all about. To say that power is tempting is obvious bordering on trite. But what George RR Martin conveys is that it's the application of power (the ability to impose your will on others) that's intoxicating, rather than the trappings (wearing a shit metal hat and sitting on the worlds most uncomfortable chair) and that it follows its own pitiless, remorseless logic, spurring the user on to ever greater brutality in an effort to fill the vacuum created by their own ability to act. The violence depicted in the series is brutal, ugly and very rarely satisfying-
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| Except this. Whoever made this made the most satisfying thing ever |
-but it's a feels like a faithful representation of power politics which, when you strip out all the fancy words and dynastic posturing, ultimately boils down to one man twatting another man over the head until he does what he's told. Thankfully, for the most part, we follow the bludgeonees rather than the bludgeoners - the bastards, cripples and broken things that are as near as this setting gets to heroes - thereby preventing the show from being depressing as all hell.
Given the somewhat high mortality rate in Westeros more and more of the focus is on the younger cast members. They are, for the most part, excellent. Props to Alfie Allen, who at one point plays a dude, who thinks he's another dude, playing a dude, all the while trying not to think about how he now lacks that part of the anatomy normally associated with dudes.You do wonder if Jack Gleeson will spend the rest of his life reminding people that he is not in fact a homicidal, odious little turd who gets his jollies murdering prostitutes, or if Kit Harrington will forever be condemned to having complete strangers inform him that he 'knurrs nuffin.'
The standout performance is Peter Dinklage however. Compare with the Xmen film, where his primary character trait was having a sweet moustache here he's given much more to work with. We've spent three seasons with the character not only surviving within a system inherently prejudiced against him, but thriving. Now, when the powers that be really start sticking the boot in, we see him first reduced to the shell of a man, before lashing out with a lifetimes worth of stored venom. Over the final few episodes we pass through defiance, hope, despair and gallows humour, before staggering towards the final confrontation of the season, a man with not a single fuck left to give. All that's missing at the end of it is a mic drop. Good stuff.
It's not all good. There's a lot of plates to keep spinning and it's unsurprising that some wobble. Both individual episodes and the series in general are heavily weighted in terms of action towards the last third.This results in a lot of what can only be described, for want of a better term, as pootling about in the early and middle stages. Season 3 ended with Stannis (the Mannis) Baratheon realising that shit is about to get super real beyond the wall in the far north and he needs to get up there and start knocking heads together, like, yesterday. Cut to this season where he spends nine tenths of the time sitting with his lip out and giving Ser Davos (The inexplicably loyal Gromit to his dour, gloomy Wallace) the stink eye for failing to magically produce an army out of his bum, before finally remembering he's got some ass to kick in the final episode. The numerous plot cul de sacs and shaggy dog tales rob certain plot strands of any tension, such as the Jon Snow/Ygritte romance, while turning others, like Bran and chums quest for the magic pigeon, into a bit of a trudge. At one point Arya Stark (Little Miss Mentalist) breaks down into manic laughter after being told that (metaphorically) your princess is in another castle. As an audience member, it's easy to sympathise.
Not that this is anything but the mildest of criticisms. Travelling round with Arya and the Hound, kicking ass and eating chicken is a fun way to kill time. But there's the nagging feeling that despite some fairly momentous goings on in this season we're broadly at the same place we were at the end of season two, with Daenerys Targaryen to the east being all Mother of Dragons and that, the white walkers to the north, wondering whether to finally get off the pot or shit and a major part of the kingdom presumably about to go apeshit due to the deadification of a prominent noble. The difference this time around is that, following the events of this season, many of the people remotely qualified to deal with things should the hammer drop are either dead or on the run. Roll on 2015.
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Back in the real world me, my lady love and my sister will be participating in the Sunderland Color Run come 20th July. Me and our kid are running simply for the honour and glory of our family name (Our house sigil: The startled badger. Our house motto: 'I'd give it five minutes if I was you'). Wor lass, however, is raising funds for South Tyneside Women's Aid, a charity that, among other things, provides refuge for women fleeing domestic violence. Assuming you're not reading this from the future, please feel free to make the world an ever so slightly less shitty place and donate here.
Love and Fishes
Dave Denton
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