The Return of Colbert - Same Comedian, New Platform

One of the better moments of Stephen Colbert's return to late-night television last night came right after Republican Presidential candidate Jeb Bush arrived on stage.  Bush, the first candidate to appear on this new iteration of "The Late Show," commented genially on the new stage, and remarked "you've got more pictures of yourself than I thought you'd have." Colbert then quipped "I used to play a narcissistic conservative pundit...now I'm just a narcissist."

It's a good joke that highlights the kind of comedian Stephen Colbert is - off-the-cuff, lithe and pouncing - but it also reflects the essential continuities in what may appear to be a total makeover of a beloved but enigmatic host.  For all the ballyhooed shift in persona, the sense of humor that accompanies a Colbert-hosted episode of television has not changed all that much.

Colbert's Oreo-themed skewering of Donald Trump exemplified this well.  Likening journalism's Trump obsession to the craving for Oreos, Colbert stuffed himself over and over again with equal parts cookies and Trump-lampooning sketches.  It was hilarious - one of the funniest parts of the broadcast - but what exactly was it?  On the one hand, this was Colbert engaging in a fully honest skewering of a political figure, something he didn't do quite as directly on the "Report."  On the other hand, the ludicrous caricature of journalism, the literal stuffing of his face with Oreos - this is the kind of subversive maximalism that "The Colbert Report" mastered.  It was one of many occasions that I felt exhibited more continuity than change in Colbert's persona shift.

What exactly did we expect?  This isn't, after all, the news - this is "The Late Show," where David Letterman broadened and emboldened comedy, which airs, you know, late.  Nobody would confuse CBS and Comedy Central, but this is basically the same premise and format as the "Report" - a funny, bold late-night comedy, talk and variety show.

What really excited viewers has been to see Stephen Colbert emerge reborn from the brilliantly glowing ashes of his old persona.  It's been funny, but who are you?  Colbert, as the "narcissist" joke shows, is completely aware of this, and he played it up many times during the premiere.  The first big takeaway, from his first episode at least, is this; Colbert the comedian is basically the same kind of comedian.  This being essentially, still, a comedy gig, we shouldn't expect to see naked-hearted admissions of personal truth on-air from the new "The Late Show" host anytime soon.  This is still performance art.

But there was nevertheless an exciting air that a mask has been shed, that Colbert still has a ton of tricks up his sleeve.  At the beginning of the show, Colbert skipped onto stage and danced like a kid auditioning for the school musical, before addressing the audience, beaming.  Colbert was genuinely thrilled to be there.  I think Colbert is a genius, that the Stephen Colbert pundit persona is one of the most ingenious strokes of comedic art I've ever seen.  If that man is excited about his new show, then I am too.

I suppose we can only hope that the grin isn't just about the paycheck.  There's lots of room to be encouraged based on yesterday's outing, though I think most viewers would agree that the show hasn't quite gotten out of bed yet.  The interviews were more focused on this being Colbert's first show than anything.  Jeb Bush, the blandest man alive, couldn't help but be overshadowed by Colbert, while Clooney and Colbert engaged in staged self-aggrandizement.

But talk shows are defined by their host, and while Stephen Colbert the efficient, slick host may take some getting used to, Stephen Colbert the comedian has come out swinging.

Birdman and 'Real Performance'

Washed-up actor Riggan Thompson can't tell where Riggan ends and his menacing alter-ego/former character Birdman begins.  This is just as well, because moviegoers may find themselves similarly confused in the layers of performance and fictionality at play in the latest Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu film, Birdman.  Played by Michael Keaton, Riggan once starred in a popular superhero franchise as "Birdman," who can levitate, fly and direct objects with a sweep of his hand.  Though Riggan still gets recognized in public, his high-flying days as an actor are behind him.  Riggan is thus attempting to revitalize his career by directing, producing and starring in a stage adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story.

The adaptation looks like a disaster, dogged by personnel and production problems.  A falling ceiling winch injures Riggan's costar during rehearsal; forced to improvise, Riggan calls in Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), a manic method actor in a tempestuous relationship with fellow co-star Lesley (Naomi Watts) who threatens to unravel the whole production.  Meanwhile Riggan's sanity visibly frays.  He's haunted by the gravelly voice of Birdman, who encourages Riggan to shun his theatrical vanity project and return to his once-successful franchise.  "You tower over these theater douchebags...gravity doesn't even apply to you!" hisses his darker half.

Framing the film as a struggle between Riggan's ego (his civilized desire for actor-ly validation on Broadway) and id (the bloodthirsty Birdman) works up to a point, though Birdman's insights on the nature of authenticity, of performance and of subjectivity ultimately extend far beyond a psychoanalytic read.  But it is tempting to stick to that interpretation, largely because of the remarkable technical trick Inarritu and the wonderful cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki have pulled off.  Incredibly, the film appears to have been filmed in only one shot.

Hitchcock and others have attempted this illusion, but the deft, nimble motions of the camera in Birdman are more in the tradition of Alfonso Cuaron's astonishing single-shot wartime birth sequence in Children of Men than than the static stage scenes of Rope.  Birdman tops them as a cinematic spectacle, however, and moreover, it truly uses the single-shot illusion as a piece of the storytelling.  It is difficult to imagine Birdman without this most distinctive characteristic, and besides it has meaning for the story.  Lubezki's camera follows Riggan through labyrinthine back hallways of his theater, onto the stage, up onto the roof, through the crowded streets of Manhattan, and even into the sky, as the Birdman persona begins to take over.

This seemingly uninterrupted camera movement gives the film a truly subjective viewpoint.  By subjecting us almost exclusively to Riggan's point of view, Birdman taps into the deep psychic concept which Slavoj Zizek describes as "anxiety".  It's the underlying fear, in every person, that we are not significant, or that the position or station we perceive ourselves as holding in the world is not authentic or sincere.  Trapped, for the most part, in Riggan's consciousness, the viewer cannot help but share in his anxieties.  Is the play as bad as it seems?  Is it worse?  Is it even real?

The opening scene, where Riggan whirls from his dressing room through conversations with his lawyer (Zack Galifinakis) and his recently-rehabbed daughter Samantha (Emma Stone) and onto the stage, highlights the ambiguities of turning performance on and off, and of the bizarre layers of authenticity that envelop the film.  Is he performing in his dressing room, alone with Birdman?  Does he start performing when he emerges and has conversations with other people?  Or is it when he's on stage?

The troubled, weaselly Shiner is obsessed with performance but does not have a very nuanced view of it.  Fixated on authenticity, Shiner feels like he can only come alive when he's performing his life in front of an audience.  When Riggan replaces his gin with water at a preview screening, Shiner breaks character and berates Riggan in the middle of the show.  "Does anybody give a shit about truth other than me?" he screams.  In an on-stage sex scene with Lesley, he tries to rape her; apparently they haven't had sex in months but he sprouts a raging erection on stage.

For Shiner, the theatrical stage is the only stage, but by ruthlessly trying to inject authenticity into the proceeding, he's completely missed the point.  What he doesn't realize, and what this film does, is that truth and performance are basically the same thing - we are always performing, whether for ourselves or for others, whether on stage or in the dressing room, alone with our thoughts.  

Headhunters

The lead in the Norwegian export Headhunters has a serious Napoleon complex.  Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) may be one of Norway's most successful "headhunters", or high-end corporate recruiters, but the first thing he tells us about himself is that he's 5,6' - not tall enough, he thinks.  Roger suffers from a general sense of inferiority.  He worries that he doesn't make enough money to support a luxuriant lifestyle for his statuesque wife, so he steals expensive art from his clients to make ends meet.  Even still, he's gone into debt to keep their sleek, elegant house, but Roger sees this pampering as a requisite for his marriage.  After all, there are always plenty of men taller than 5,6'.

Headhunters is much more secure in its modest stature than Roger, and better for it.  A twisty and slickly executed thriller featuring a compromised, flawed man on the run, this Morten Tyldum film benefits from a desire not to reinvent the wheel, but to have some bloody-minded fun nevertheless.  The film benefits in particular from a black sense of humor, the occasional stroke of mad genius and a surprisingly comforting quality.

Roger interviews candidates in his capacity as a corporate recruiter; while doing so, he verbally scouts their art collections.  He asks them if they own any expensive art by way of an anecdote, and also asks if they have a family at home (in case anybody might disrupt the theft).  Roger has a partner, Ove (Elvind Sander) who dismantles the alarms before Roger goes in and steals the artwork personally.  One wonders whether these methods would work on repeat; I can picture corporate victims of art theft recounting the story of the headhunter who always uses the same weirdly specific artwork anecdote.

Indeed, Roger's transparency gets him into trouble.  At the opening of her art gallery, Roger's wife Diana (Synnove Macody Lund) introduces him to the dashing Clas Greve (Jaime Lannister), whom Roger immediately recognizes as an excellent candidate for one of his biggest clients, a GPS company called Pathfinder.  At their next meeting, he also realizes that Clas is in possession of a valuable piece of art, making him a prime candidate for Roger's night job.  Roger steals the art, but Clas smells a rat immediately.  Inconveniently, it turns out that Clas, besides being devastatingly handsome and charming, is also ex-special ops; for the diminutive Roger, cat and mouse becomes a fitting term.  When he realizes he's been outed, Roger hits the road, but not before discovering Diana's phone in Clas's bed.  Under the impression that he's been betrayed by everybody he knows (and frazzled by Clas's mysterious ability to track him down wherever he goes), Roger goes completely underground.

The film plays to these dramas with varying degrees of sincerity.  Confident and rugged, Nikolai Coster-Waldau is perfectly cast as a deviant threat to Roger's insecurities, but descends into something of a stock bogeyman after the first act of the film.  As a sly mystery thriller, however, Headhunters does well for itself, buoyed by a few genuinely inventive action pieces and kept limber by Tyldum's taste for blackly comic violence.  During one scene in particular, at a remote wooded farmhouse where Clas has cornered Roger, Headhunters hurtles into slasher tropes with a self-aware flair that '90s-era Wes Craven would admire.  Especially gruesome use is made of a tractor, and not in the way you expect.  It is sequences like these, of grisly violence with a streak of winking black humor, that get you to realize that this is a warmer film and in better fun than the austere, menacing set decoration and high-stakes set-up suggest.

This warmth comes through the most in Roger and Diana's relationship.  It appears as though the film is setting up Roger's liberation from his icy, conniving wife, but this plot thread takes an unexpectedly tender twist, one that teaches Roger the simple but important lesson of being comfortable with who you are.  A story about a marriage as much as anything else, Headhunters turns into a fast-paced exercise in violently ridding oneself of personal demons rather than succumbing to them.  It's a welcome alternative to interesting but increasingly predictable Breaking Bad-inspired sagas of mild-mannered men turning to the dark side.  That Headhunters nevertheless has some twisted fun on the way to real reconciliation makes it an odd mix of the kind-hearted and the breakneck.  You'll enjoy yourself and you might even get a feel out of it.  

Mamma Mia!

Mamma Mia! is like a musical class clown, trying over and over and over again to impress.  Last song didn't quite stick it with you?  Don't worry, there's another in two minutes!  The film is best characterized by its boundless desire to please, its relentless efforts to get the viewer to have as much fun as the cast is having - a nigh-impossible achievement, by the looks of it.  The star-studded cast - which includes, just for the headliners, Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Amanda Seyfried, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard - all got together to shoot on location on a Greek island, and they look like they had a whale of a time doing it.  Good for them.  I mean that, I really do.

This is a film adaptation of a Broadway musical that itself is based on the music of the Swedish pop band ABBA.  Sophie (Seyfried) is the sunflowery daughter of Donna (Streep), the ex-hippie who runs a shambling hotel on a Greek island.  Donna is all work and no play these days, but she used to be quite the opposite.  The summer that Sophie came along, Donna had three successive trysts and has no idea which of the three men is Sophie's father.  But on the eve of Sophie's wedding, she decides that she needs someone to walk her down the aisle, and invites the three unknowing candidates (played by Brosnan, Firth and Skarsgard) for the bash.  The mystery of Sophie's father is the basic agent for the "plot".

Let's just step back and think about what is going on here.  This musical is based on the songs of ABBA, which means that the original playwright Catherine Johnson put a wobbly narrative together that intends to make a story out of independently written songs.  I love ABBA.  This is preposterous.  This is awesome.

Mamma Mia! is a bit too stupid and shallow a movie to capture the true depth of ABBA's music, which doesn't mean that it isn't a blast.  Even its critics must admit this; it has no pretensions of being anything other than it is.  It is a shameless vehicle for the brilliance that is ABBA, with a deeply silly story that nevertheless manages to honor the basic emotions of the songs.  This is one of the few things that is genuinely clever about this movie, and one of the things that carried it for me; as botched as so many of the executional elements of this film unquestionably are, it never betrays the tone of ABBA either.  I wanted little more.

This is pure, exorbitant candy-fluff, and so purely candy-fluff that it is an extremity, an outlier.  It's like the camp movie of romantic musicals.  The actors seem to have been hired more for being game than anything else.  Pierce Brosnan, for example, plays a character who gets some big-ish singing bits, and it's not pretty.  But look at that smile!  It's Pierce Brosnan!  He's having fun, and if he sounds like a airplane engine, at least he's being likable doing it.

I don't what the draw was for these actors, but Phyllida Lloyd (who has very clearly never directed a film before) managed to draw some very appealing presences to fulfill these stupid, stupid roles.  The unstoppable Streep is the key to it all.  This amazing actress, in the face of pure bubblegum material, manages to wring every bit of pathos and subtext out of the role.  Despite everybody having a great time, personnel questions remain.  Why is Stellan Skarsgard passing off as a former hippie?  Why are Julie Walters and Christine Baranski degrading themselves as the two most insipid wannabe cougars on the face of the earth?  The film's idiocy is bursting at the seams.

Enough of it, though, is very good fun.  A lot of the songs stick really well; "Dancing Queen" features weathered Greek ladies abandoning their daily work and joining Meryl Streep in an exuberant number, and "The Winner Takes It All" is rendered in all its resigned anguish by Streep in a situation that merits the powerful song.  The most disco numbers like "Lay All Your Love on Me" and "Voulez-Vouz" benefit from the music-video/party quality of the film.  A few, like "Chiquitita" and the fascinating, ambivalent "Take a Chance on Me," flop completely.  But at the end of the day, it's basically watching a filmed version of ABBA's greatest hits, performed by charming movie stars at the height of their silliness.  For the most part, you ought to know whether or not this film is for you.

Dead Man - Dismantling the Western

Dead Man is a funny, nihilistic deconstruction of both the West and the Western.  This is the story of a man, William Blake (Johnny Depp) on a journey in several senses of the word.  The film opens with a innocuous but telling montage of Blake's train journey from Cleveland to the apocryphally-named town of Machine.  He's also on a journey to his emotional interior, reacting to a world seemingly without rules and simultaneously adapting himself to it.  He's also traveling inexorably to his own death.

Director Jim Jarmusch doesn't pull any punches on this point.  Early in the film Blake has a tryst with a girl who makes paper flowers and they are caught by her jealous lover.  The offended shoots the girl and Blake shoots him but catches the first bullet after it exits the girl.  Escaping deliriously into the wilderness, Blake wakes and is told by a Native American who calls himself Nobody that he will soon die.  The bullet is too close to his heart to remove.  Nobody takes it upon himself to bring Blake with him to "the place where sky meets sea," and where presumably, Blake will die.  Blake, therefore, is displaced and dying in the west.

So what this mean, to have this experience in Jarmusch's self-described "acid western"?  The name "Machine" is the first sign that this film means to represent a deliberately mythicized version of the West.  Blake is identified as from Cleveland, but Machine is not located in any particular place ("that's the end of the line!" is all we hear about the place).  It's not supposed to exist other than as a generalized representation of the deep, old West.

Dead Man is as much about journeys as it is about borders and transitions - between life and death, decency and indecency - so here it may not be a bad idea to bring in Frederick Jackson Turner's famous essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."  The Turner Thesis, as it has come to be known, is largely accountable for a number of basic understandings about the American West.  Taught in schools throughout the early twentieth century, it is largely the Turner worldview that characterizes the West and classic cinematic depictions of it.

Turner argues that for all of American history, the continually expanding frontier - "the meeting point between savagery and civilization" - has been the most significant constituent aspect of the development of the American character.  He says that the frontier fostered a distinctly American individualism, which in turn has promoted democracy.  This proudly individualistic character of the frontier, and particularly the American West came to be a significant influence on cultural representations of frontier society, which were beginning to become popular at the time that Turner's lectures became mainstream.*

Dead Man subverts that quasi-mythical account of the American frontier with its own generalized Western hell.  There is Machine itself, or the civilizing frontier, in Turner's conception of things.  It's a grim place, reeking of death and desolation.  Machine is dominated by Dickinson's metalworks, and Mr. Dickinson (Robert Mitchum, in his last film performance) holds a lot of local sway.  Blake's encounter at the factory is a critique both of the faceless, playing-against-the-house insurmountability of fighting for your place in industrial capitalism, and of frontier individualism.  Blake has a letter that says he has a job.  He gets there, he has no job, and he's spent all his money to get there.  Dickinson, meanwhile, points a shotgun at unsuspecting visitors and runs his metalworks with militant senility.  This vision of industrialization run amok in the unrestricted frontier neatly characterizes Dead Man's twisted sensibilities about life in the West.

Blake's wilderness retreat with Nobody, escaping the assassins of Dickinson, comprises the bulk of the film, but here we find no charming rugged individualism facing the encroaching advance of institution, except perhaps in the figure of Nobody.  But the frontier, whenever it permeates, is savage.  Take Iggy Pop's cross-dressing rapist, chatting lazily by the fireside, or the cannibalistic bounty hunter.  These are figures borne of the West, but while they are certainly individual, one wonders whether this is really what Turner meant when he stated that frontier independence fostered democracy.  Jarmusch consistently presents the civilizing side of the frontier as savage, even inhuman.  Rather than fostering the individual as democracy-boosting, Dead Man's frontier provides a world without rules, open season for people to become whatever they prefer, with no repercussions.

This is a surprisingly funny movie.  Even in the names like William Blake and Nobody, the film has all sorts of winking silliness about it.  But with their names as with most other points in the film, the absurdism of Dead Man generally has underlying significance.  Both names, in a sense, serve the film's critique of traditional representations of Native Americans (which I think is an important element of its deconstruction of the Western genre).  Blake has no idea that he shares his name with a major poet, but Nobody has heard all about him and believes Blake to be a reincarnation of the poet.  Not only does this fit into some plausible Native American beliefs (the film is considered one of the most well-researched with respect to its depictions of Native Americans), but Nobody is far better-read than his white counterpart.  Furthermore, the name "Nobody" is a dumbed-down translation of "he who speaks much, saying nothing," a much more complex idea, but Nobody both dumbs it down for ignorant white travelers and gives literal spoken word to the thought at the back of the minds of American frontiersman.  The way that Nobody represents himself to this white person he finds is a mirror of how he believes they view him.**

Those elements of the traditional western vernacular are consistently turned on their head, in particular the spirit quest sequence.  This is not a journey of enlightening introspection but rather a man's dark commune with himself under frontier and existential extremes.  What makes the film so dark is that this isn't some liberating catharsis of late-life violence or hedonism.  We could write that off more easily.  But Blake, even though he has no experience with violence or frontier brutality (see the opening train ride), casually slips it on like a second skin.  Jarmusch suggests, thus, that our savage frontier selves are at least a part of our true selves.  All we need is for the shackles to come off.

* See this for the original "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" for the Turner thesis, and this for a discussion of the historical response to the Turner Thesis.

**The film is regarded as being one of the most carefully-researched with regards to Native American depictions, but debates therein rage on.  See this for a critique of Dead Man's depiction of Native Americans (which could do with some fleshing out) and this for a Sartre-influenced discussion of the names in the film.

Mother's Mercy

This review is way too long.  It's taken a month to write because it's been hard for me to write.  So many events, so many feels.  I feel as though I can't short-change any of the major events because they were so momentous and so...complicated, in a lot of ways.

A madcap, eventful finale to what has been an interesting season of Game of Thrones, "Mother's Mercy" was...a decidedly mixed bag.  The failings of the episode are in part due to the jam-packed nature of the show.  I think that this season and the last season have been markedly more stuffed with content than the first three.  It was last year that the show came to take on its more globe-trotting character, where we drop in on each character for 5-10 minutes each week.  This year, they did a much better job by simply focusing on three or four major stories every week, fleshing those ones out and ignoring a couple threads that wouldn't have gotten meaningful attention anyways.  On the whole, the season has been expertly put-together, and giving characters 3-5 scenes in a week rather than just a few minutes before jumping somewhere else has made the content and the characters seem particularly rich.

The greatest challenge for the show in this respect has always been pacing.  How will D+D put their rogues' gallery together into something cohesive and meaningful?  The earlier sequences of the episode didn't really put together something all that meaningful, although with the complicated climax at Winterfell, you have to admire the guys for keeping all these plates spinning.

Stannis has had his meatiest season, sittin' pretty after his victory at the Wall and riding into battle against the Boltons.  We almost liked him.  And then he did...that thing, and reminded most viewers why they didn't really like him in the first place.  Stannis woke up the next morning to find the snows melting, but his men have deserted - most of his sellswords, and all of the cavalry.  Selyse has hanged herself after burning their daughter.  Even Melisandre abandons him.  At this point we'd all be hightailing it back to Castle Black, but what does Stannis do?  He leads his seriously outnumbered infantry into battle, and they get absolutely crushed.  And proving the point about Chekhov's monologues in Thrones, Brienne of Tarth is there to execute Stannis.

I'll cry about Stannis, still fighting in the books, later.  But this was all just very badly paced.  They skipped the battle - and I get it, money better spent at Hardhome and Daznak's Pit, but come one! - and managed to make the conclusion to Stannis's epic career seem even slight, the very last word with which we would describe Thrones.

There's not too much to shit on but the editor here, but it just goes to show - bad editing fucks everything up.  Lots of this was great.  Stephen Dillane killed it.  The early moments, when everything went from bad to worse and he stared disintegration in the face - those were brilliant.  But by simply not cutting - to anything, literally anything - Thrones blasted through his whole conclusion and made it seem as though the showrunners were simply trying to get it out of the way.  This is just bad construction for the whole season.  You don't build up this huge battle at Winterfell, involve many more major characters than ought to be there, and then make it slight.  GRRM is waiting a whole book to get to that point.  If only the show-runners could show similar restraint.

What kills me about this is that the content was fine.  Dillane was incredible.  Leading a band of ragged infantry into the galloping horsemen of the Boltons was one of the most Stannis-y things we've ever seen him do.  Also in resolute character was his resignation to death at Brienne's hands.  Just put something else in between all of these scenes and you have something pretty effective, with weight and gravitas.  Rush through it, and you have the ignominious conclusion to the seasonal arcs of tons of major characters, and worst of all, to the epic struggle one of the most resilient and unusual players in the game of thrones.  Brienne is one of the most appealing characters on the show and her cause, in this case, is supremely righteous, but that doesn't make up for the poor pacing.

Rest in peace Stannis.  You deserved death, but not like this.  Ya done fucked up, D+D.

Simultaneously, the writers took a bunch of strong, season-long work from Alfie Allen and Sophie Turner and again, rushed things.  Sansa escaped her room while the Boltons rode off to battle, but what was the impetus?  When things just happen like this, you can't help but feel that events are being generated for plot convenience rather than from organic, character-driven decisions.  So too was Ramsay's turn back to the light (paying homage to tossing the Emperor in the Death Star?)

Yet in the end - as in with most of the post-Stannis episode - their paths went the way of the conclusion of "A Dance with Dragons."  Theon and Sansa jumped off the high walls of Winterfell into the snows below.  It's a cliffhanger that hasn't been justified contextually, and since neither character felt terribly motivated by anything other than the long-established fear, it was also anti-climactic.

The ending of the Dorne subplot made me wonder why the fuck we'd been there in the first place.  Jamie, Bronn, Myrcella and Trystane leave with genial blessings from Doran.  Tyene says something so degrading that I don't even care to repeat it here, but it reduces the entire show by a considerable margin.

The point, perhaps, could have been that Jamie came into his own as a father, only to have it snatched away at the last moment in a classic Thronesian twist.  The father bit was actually pretty sweet, if a bit slight with respect to its actual story relevance.  But because nobody cares about Myrcella and because the Sand Snakes and this bloodthirsty twisting of Ellaria were both annoying and underdeveloped, the whole thing rang terribly false.  Dorne never got better and ranks as the Thrones team's all-time weakest thread.

This was an especially reckless off-book thread, but the rest of the episode swiveled back to book territory; for Cersei, Jon and Daenerys, things ended very explicitly as they did in "A Dance with Dragons."  And in this sense, the show was merciful.  Apart from the hard death of Stannis, they left us pretty much where we were at the end of "Dragons," though signs of reshuffling showed at the seams.  I'm trying to move from weak to strong so let's go "average" with Dany, wandering in the wilderness only to be found and surrounded (captured?) by a khalasar.

Thrones has been in pretty good touch with Dany's dragon queen side this year but the scene at Daznak's Pit and her brief scene this week display the limitations of the show.  It can't display internal dialogue as powerfully as GRRM can with his POV format.  I don't want to be a book complainer but in Daenerys's case the show has been aping the books pretty hard and failing to get the content across all that powerfully; I think her last two chapters of DWD tell us more about her than anything that had come before.  Without the internal monologue or the content flowing through Dany's delirious mind, they have no access to the depth of the books.  Through no fault of their own, I think, but the point stands.  Decidedly average Dany cliffhanger scene this week that leaves us right in DWD territory.

Except back in Meereen.  Hoooollly shit.  The brooding, post-Dany advisors try this one for size; while Jorah and Daario go off hunting for Dany, Meereen - on the brink of civil war, mind you - will be ruled by 1) a eunuch general whose soldiers have been getting massacred by the insurgents 2) a foreign scion who knows nothing of the local politics and 3) a hairdresser.  Ok, so there's more to Missandei, but you just have to shake your head at this.  The Thrones universe should eat these guys up given how badly this has been thought out, but I doubt it.  I guess we get another season of Meereen.  But the magically appearing Varys does give them some serious help, I'll admit.

I've got to be honest, pretty deep into the episode I was snickering at how silly all of it seemed, how rushed, how badly thought out.  But there were a few terrific, twisted sequences towards the end that really drove the knife in, so to speak.  As we suspected, Arya took the bait that is Meryn Trant and made an unsanctioned killing.  In the moment, the whole thing is very satisfying, the most brutal, justified revenge porn perhaps ever sanctioned by D+D.  Disguising herself as one of Trant's little girls (which is still just disgusting), Arya whips off her Faceless Mask and gouges Trant's eyes out, then talks to him while he lies bleeding from the face.  It's all incredibly graphic - director David Nutter leaves the camera lingering for what seemed like at least a minute and a half on an eyeless, bleeding Meryn Trant.  It's pretty horrible, but fuck Meryn Trant.  Arya reaffirms her identity by way of talking Trant to his death.

Her triumph is short-lived.  Personal killings are not the way of the Many-Faced God.  Arya is so not "no one" yet, and Jaqen seems to know this immediately.  He takes her through existential emotional punishment and then blinds her, in a move that, uniquely in this episode, retreats backwards into the books to make yet another cliffhanger climax.  It's a nasty scene and Maisie Williams killed it.  Arya's plot has been broadly inconsequential this year, but it's also a necessary trial-by-fire for the character, who has been turning into a killer but is learning what kind of killer she will become.  The whole thing has a complicated moral bent, in that the teacher-thing that Jaqen is doing makes a lot of sense and Arya seems selfish, but then, fuuuuck Meryn Trant.  This is some of the distraught moral ambiguity that Thrones does best.

Thrones really nailed that kind of ambiguity during Cersei's walk of shame this week.  Compelled, by desperation, by the need to see her son, Cersei makes a strategic confession to the High Sparrow.  She hits only the points that she knows the Sparrow can confirm, namely the Lancel affair, but she categorically denies the accusations of incest leveled by Stannis and others.  This could destroy the crown as it stands, and we will have to wait for Cersei's trial by the Faith next year to see how this plays out, but for know, the Sparrow is as sphinx-like as ever.

Cersei is allowed to proceed back to the Red Keep, having confessed, but there's a nasty twist - she will walk naked through King's Landing, with the evil septa shouting "shame" behind her.  Cersei is utterly stripped of her dignity, as the Sparrow foreshadowed in his arrest monologue, shorn like a beast before being unclothed.  During the walk she is pelted with insults, accusations, fruit and rocks from a hateful public.

This astonishing scene, one of the very best and most gut-wrenching in the show's history, is a confrontation, even though it looks like just a punishment.  Cersei's walk of shame is a battle between Cersei's ferocious desire for independence and respect being pit against the horrific sexual politics of the day in a pitched, seemingly one-sided showdown.  Lena Headey, giving a terrific (better be Emmy-garnering, honestly) performance alongside an equally brave body double, attempts to hover above the jeering crowd and her own physical shame.  The odds seem overwhelming.  The scene is paced brilliantly - at first the crowd is silent, and the only sound is the arhythmic clanging bell.  But the crowd eventually gets into it, mocking Cersei's body, her sexual sins - they attempt to destroy her humanity and identity.

Cersei is despicable, one of the most straightforwardly evil characters on the show, but this season has shown a tendency to want to get inside her head (observed most obviously during the quasi-mythical flashback scene).  Left to her own devices for once, Cersei absolutely fucked herself over and is now enduring punishment.  As with her awful son, we demanded comeuppance for years.  When we get it, we're not sure if we like it - moreover, we're not sure if this is what justice will look like in the broader political future of Westeros.  In a lot of ways, the scene completely strips Cersei down, in all senses of the word.  When you see her facing such awful punishment, perhaps the gravest, most horrible manifestation yet of the sexual politics of the Thrones world, you don't see the  horrible woman who betrayed Ned Stark, who fought for Tyrion's death.  You just see a woman struggling to retain her basic human dignity.  It's riveting.

Cersei eventually makes it up the hill and into the Red Keep and she sees...Pycelle, Kevan Lannister, too shocked, perhaps cruelly offended by her state to even engage with her.  But Qyburn, her personally-fostered "Grand Maester," shields her immediately and introduces her to Ser Robert Strong, the product of all that "work" he's been doing.  Confirming a popular book theory, it looks like Cersei is down but not out.

To me this season has largely been about leadership failure, and the final, gut-wrenching twist at the end of this season exemplified that more wrenchingly and hopelessly then even the great defeats of Daenerys and Cersei - Dany is down but has dragons, Cersei is down but has Robert Strong, and Jon is dead.  Inevitably assassinated in the Castle Black courtyard by a gang of Night's Watch, led by Ser Alliser, Jon completed his emergence this year as the great tragic hero of the show.  Questions will continue to circulate about whether Jon Snow is dead or not, but as an arc, this was certainly effective in driving the nail in.  This has been a particularly dark season of Thrones, and this felt an appropriate note to end it on.  It's worth noting that this greatest of the ongoing mysteries in the active book series has thus far been preserved.  In this and with a number of other threads in this finale, the show circled back to A Dance with Dragons cliffhangers, and thus gave GRRM some more time to get "The Winds of Winter" out there.  Good.

I have very mixed feelings about the execution of this finale, but the Arya, Cersei and Jon stuff was very good.  The season as a whole was also mixed but had some of the series' finest hours.  I'll write a crisper review of the whole season later.  This is so late because I've been busy and honestly, I've been not feeling like thinking about Thrones and doing other things so I've just been not wanting to write this.

Bits

- Given Thrones' proclivity for gruesome violence, one has to question the strategic cut from the death of Stannis.  It would be nice if he made it but I kind of doubt it.  They really went out of their way to emphasize his downfall during his sequence this episode.

- Not like anyone will miss Meryn Trant, but Ian Beattie sure was a fun performer to watch in a sleazy, misanthropic kind of way, and apparently he just fucking loves being on the show.  But you could hardly have asked for a more memorable death.  Perhaps they can bring back Ser Ilyn Payne now that Wilko Johnson is miraculously cancer-free?

Book Bits

- An impossibly cruel Benjen Stark troll, but also brilliant.

Tragedy in Bengal - The Blood Telegram

Much of the developing world continues to face obstacles related to one of the most common consequences inflicted by the age of imperialism - post-colonial borders.  In the post-World War II era, exiting colonial powers (particularly in Africa and most of South and Southeast Asia) left behind a slew of borders, most of which are unchanged, that often came to exist without consideration to the demographic or human components of the areas that would be affected.  The geopolitical sphere of South Asia continues to be dominated by the political arrangements drawn up as the British departed.  India and Pakistan were created as modern political entities in 1947.  The modern Indian nation is only the latest state to claim dominance over the subcontinent, but the trappings of being a modern political entity - a nation-state, a sovereign power, a series of designations arranged by West definitions of nationhood - required increased specificity.

So, on August 15, the predesignated date of independence, suddenly you have India, and you have Pakistan.  One is secular, the other is Muslim.  They are now entirely distinct, and the border will put them right next to each other.  The sectarian violence accompanied by the 1947 Partition of India, especially in the Punjab region, has become the notorious stuff of legend, though sadly not as much in the West as it ought to be.  But the source of this violence, while complex, is worryingly callous in one respect.  The border, a rush job done by inexperienced hacks who hadn't taken the time to survey the land, was haphazardly drawn by a British commission on a deadline.  It resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the largest mass migration in history.

The borders on the other side of Pakistan makes even less sense.  The different regions of the British Protectorate of India had the opportunity to vote as to which independent new nation they wanted to join.  The Muslim-majority country now known as Bangladesh, on the border of the Indian states of Bihar and West Bengal, voted to join Pakistan.  Thousands of miles away from the governing center of Islamabad, East Pakistan was more populous than West Pakistan and had an entirely different people and culture, despite the common Islamic heritage.  So what you had, from 1947 to 1971, is an unwieldy, incongruent Pakistan divided by thousands of miles of India.

This geographic situation in the Bengal region was very messy under these circumstances and continues to be.  The Indian state of West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh have much in common culturally but their national governments debate over water and refugee issues.  Springing from the Mughals, the British initially governed the whole region as one body, up until a violently-received attempt to partition them in 1905.  But in modern history, the region has been continually bisected until the "Bangla Desh" once envisioned by Rabindranath Tagore is hardly recognizable.

In 1971, the struggles with this ridiculous Pakistan-bisected-by-India came to a head in the complicated crisis detailed by Gary J. Bass in The Blood Telegram, which provides a strong overview of the events from a geopolitical perspective and accomplishes a fine piece of Nixon-bashing in the process.  Despite the advent of such institutions as the United Nations and a ruling generation scarred by the unspeakable genocide of the European Jews, the United States found itself not only standing by while an allied regime committed a genocide, but almost deliberately abetting it.  In power at the time was Richard Nixon.  His primary foreign policy advisor was Henry Kissinger.

The United States backed the standing president of Pakistan, Yahya Khan, whose power and support were concentrated in West Pakistan.  But East Pakistan, the region now known as Bangladesh, was more populous than the West, and united behind a single political party - which happened in the elections of 1970 - they could overwhelm the West's entrenched political stranglehold.  In the December 1970 elections, the Bengalis of East Pakistan united behind the Awami League candidate, Mujib-ur-Rahman, who called for greater autonomy from Pakistan for the Bengalis.  Yahya Khan banned the Awami and declared martial law, and began sending the Pakistani military - armed with American weapons - into Bangladesh.  In the ensuing crackdown the military wiped out hundreds of thousands of Bengalis and displaced millions, most of whom fled to India's western states.  Meanwhile, the American government willfully did nothing, deeming the matter an internal Pakistani affair.

It's remarkable how bad Nixon can still look after all these years.  After extensive archival research from recently-released White House documents (which seem to be a very authoritative source; rarely does Bass complain about a dearth of American information), Bass paints a scathing picture of the sitting president and his advisor.  Nixon seems like an embittered, racist bull in a china shop, but also like a defensive, sad little man (there's a very funny story about Nixon's chief of staff worrying about the boss's isolation and attempting to find him a friend).  The man disliked almost everybody he knew, but inexplicably held Yahya Khan in high esteem.  Nixon, not a subtle man, appreciated Khan's militant bluntness, a bluntness reflected also in the vicious crackdowns of 1971.

On the other hand, Nixon despised the Indians, and in particular the sitting prime minister Indira Gandhi (not a lovable woman herself).  He hated the poverty and squalor of India and found its leader pretentious and pandering.  To Nixon, this whole corner of the world was destitute and largely faceless, and he simply did not care much about them.  There is no other conclusion to reach from Bass's book - Nixon just didn't give a shit.

The whole of South Asia was to Nixon a pawn in what was, admittedly, he and Kissinger's diplomatic coup in opening relations with China.  In this respect his alliance with Yahya Khan was instrumental.  Pakistan and China had cordial relations and both opposed India, which in turn was friendly with the Soviet Union.  Nixon and Kissinger used Khan to ferry messages between themselves and Zhou Enlai (Khan, who for all his brutality was little more than a blustering drunk, apparently loved the cloak-and-dagger aspect).  It was largely for this reason, which Nixon could not reveal to the Indians, that they continued their alliance with the military dictator.  In the face of the genocide in Bengal, the whole thing is, of course, deplorable.

Bass doesn't claim to give a comprehensive account of the genocide, focusing instead on the role that world leaders played in allowing or downplaying it.  But we do get a window into the terror through the eponymous eyes of Archer Blood, the foreign consul in Dhaka.  His telegram, sent and signed by most members of his staff, excoriated American policy in Bangladesh and the Nixon administration in particular for doing nothing about what he saw clearly as a "genocide," - a difficult word that unfortunately is the only correct term for what in Bangladesh was little more than a concerted effort to wipe out an ethnic group.

This bit has to give you some faith in humanity, in that most people on the ground saw clearly what was happening and felt obligated to risk their careers (in Blood's case) to stand up for what was just.  The ambassador to India, Kenneth Keating, also saw the horror of the refugee crisis on India's eastern borders and unsuccessfully implored Nixon and Kissinger to do something; Senator Ted Kennedy, while he certainly had a political agenda, became an outspoken advocate of intervention after he visited the refugee camps in West Bengal and Bihar.

But it also raises troubling questions for everybody who doesn't see these things in person.  Hopefully Nixon is an appalling outlier, but one wonders about an age in which the influence of great powers has become so far-reaching that their leaders have literally no ability to conceive of the suffering they may be engendering.  Caught up in his Cold War diplomatic games, Nixon didn't notice or didn't care about what happened on the ground.  One hopes that it was the latter and that this principle extends just to grumbling crooks like him.

Bass deserves enormous credit for bringing to harsh light one of the most brutal human consequences of the Cold War and the complicity of the United States - and frankly, most of the world - in this tragedy.  It also is an interesting tale of pre-Emergency Gandhian politicking.  The Indian government has been even more guarded than the U.S. with its state secrets, and Indira Gandhi's personal papers and correspondences have not been released.  But through the papers of her chief foreign policy advisor, P.N. Haksar, a clear Indian perspective emerges.  Though India ultimately liberated Bangladesh and before that armed and trained its guerrilla force, they also aggressively provoked war with Pakistan for their own belligerent reasons rather than out of sympathy for the human crisis at their doorstep.  They make out better than the Americans in "The Blood Telegram," however.

This is not a definitive story of the "Cruel Birth" of Bangladesh, as Archer Blood later put it in his memoirs, but it is an incredibly important story of the consequences of geopolitical maneuvers and schemes in this still-recently globalized world, and a harsh reminder of the racist, ignorant lows to which this country only recently could still sink.  Bass infuses the whole work with a clear moral directive.  While there is no doubt that the nations of the world found themselves laying with bizarre bedfellows and mired in shades of grey in the early years of the Cold War, "The Blood Telegram" shows that even in these situations, right and wrong can and ought to be distinguished.

- For more information on the Partition of India and Pakistan, which is much more complex than what I've given here, I'd like to recommend Freedom at Midnight by Dominique LaPierre and Larry Collins and this more recent article from the Journal of Genocide Research on the specifics of the genocide.  There is also a new book called Midnight's Furies by Nisid Hajari, which I've just ordered. 

The Debt

Is the truth too much to handle sometimes?  Are there circumstances in which it is better to tell a "noble lie" than to tell a hard truth?  "The Debt" engages with that eternally diabolical question on a morally heavy tableau, a sort of alternate-history, post-Holocaust spy thriller set from the perspective of three Mossad agents.  The story is told in two intercut timelines, featuring younger and older versions of the three agents.  The emotional stakes, then, are pretty high.

In 1965 young Mossad agent Rachel Singer (Jessica Chastain) arrives in East Berlin to meet with two other operatives.  She and the brooding David (Sam Worthington) will pose as a married couple; the other agent is a more swaggering guy named Stefan (Martin Csokas).  All of them take their directive, to capture the infamous Nazi doctor Dieter Vogel, known as the "Surgeon of Birkenau," very seriously.  As covert agents of the Jewish state, the issue is of considerable national and personal importance.  Rachel's mother died in the Holocaust, and can only assume that David and Stefan didn't go unscathed.

Posing as native Germans recently immigrated from Argentina, Rachel pretends to be pregnant to get into Vogel's postwar East Berlin gynecology clinic, where she is exposed to long, ominous examinations and faux-interrogations with the professional but reptilian former Nazi.  "The Surgeon" is played by Jesper Christensen.

The primary plot drama of this narrative is less in the capture of Vogel (although that is pretty cool) but in the process of smuggling him back to Israel.  The nasty Cold War setting is put to very suspenseful effect; perhaps the most thrilling scene involves a madcap attempt to cross the Berlin Wall.  Between escape plots the three main characters hole up in a dreary East Berlin apartment, and these scenes, where the captors become mired in mutual suspicion and their Nazi captive taunts them by diagnosing the weaknesses of the Jewish race, are the most unnerving and fascinating of the movie.  Rachel, David and Stefan take shifts watching and feeding the unruly Vogel; they all want to get out of East Berlin as soon as possible.

In this respect, the personal tension for the characters is largely rooted in their Jewish heritage, and the test that they ultimately face - which comes to a choice between honesty and national pride - is given significantly more weight with the Holocaust context.  The Mossad captors only break down when Vogel says something like, "the Jewish deserved to be destroyed because they were too weak to kill" or some such nonsense.  They are all children of the Holocaust - to be a citizen of Israel is much the same thing, at least within a generation of the post-World War II founding.  And the scene-stealing Christensen, lecherous and cunning, is a wonderful representation of the potent evil and twisted logic of the Third Reich.  This historical context gives the psychology of the decision at play gives this movie considerable moral weight.  The real story here - about the conflict between honesty and decency - probably could have been told without this context, but it certainly makes the difficulty of the choice the three characters face much richer.

This Cold War spy thriller timeline, very interesting, is unfortunately intercut with another in which the surviving agents are played by Helen Mirren (Rachel), Tom Wilkinson (Stefan) and Ciaran Hinds (David).  While it's a pleasure to see these three working together, this narrative doesn't work quite as well.  This, in fact, supposed to be the really important part of the film - it opens in the modern-day timeline, and the larger throughline of the film is about the events of 1965 coming back to haunt the three living agents.

But things just aren't as tight or ambiguous in the modern-day thread.  All three actors are phenomenal but the story becomes blunter and is structured more like a traditional thriller.  The central argument, about truth, is resolved in such a way that sort of allows the characters to have their cake and eat it too.  When it's the long-suffering Jewish people that receive this satisfaction, it's hard to complain, but it also undermines the significance of the choice itself.  The climactic element was also very silly in the face of all the previous portent.  The first thing I thought of was "Nazi zombies," and that didn't help things.

That "The Debt" doesn't stick the landing is a shame, because elements of the film are rock-solid.  The performances are excellent, Chastain in particular; she's as compelling here as a novice spy than she was as the cold terrorist-hunter in "Zero Dark Thirty."  The film is well-helmed, and it is asking provocative questions.  But in this case, things don't add up to anything particularly insightful, and the film sadly retreats to something a little more conventional that it had aspired to be.  

The Dance of Dragons

Let it be said that even in this blackest of seasons, which reaches all-time new lows in "The Dance of Dragons," Game of Thrones never lost its sense of humor.  Early in the episode, Jamie and the Dornish - Prince Doran, Ellaria Sand and Prince Trystane - are negotiating themselves through the little diplomatic spat the Martells and the Lannisters find themselves in, and clan Lannistell realizes that they've probably all been duped by Ellaria's vengeful connivings.  All will be forgiven, but Bronn must be punished according to his crime of striking a prince.  Those of us looking for episode 9 deaths get nice and worried when he's dragged out of his cell, but alas! Just a commensurate slap in the face from Areo Hotah!

As pointless and plot-sucking as the Dorne storyline has proven this year (unless they have something really big planned for next episode), when you reach the end of an episode like "The Dance of Dragons," you can't help but feel grateful for a little mindless levity like that.  This truly brutal hour of Thrones featured probably the most unforgivable act in series history, one that came as a shock to both book and show readers but which apparently will soon be book canon (see D+D rushing to slip in that GRRM told them about this twist in the "Inside the Episode").  This is, course, the burning of Shireen of the House Baratheon, and it is so nasty that it overshadows even the concluding triumph.

Nothing exemplifies the general bleakness of this season as much as the turn of Stannis.  Long a derided character, always holed up on Dragonstone, either doing nothing or burning men alive, Stannis did not seem to make much of an impression on show watchers until last year, when he unexpectedly showed up at the Wall to save Jon Snow and the Night's Watch.  This remains one of my all-time favorite moments in the series - for shock context, my Unsullied friend literally stood up and screamed when Stannis and Davos rode through the mist.  

Stannis's climb to the top seemed unstoppable this season.  From "fewer" to his tender scene with Shireen earlier this year, to the fact that he was riding against the Boltons, probably Westeros's nastiest remaining villains, Stannis seemed poised for greatness and even widespread popularity.  Trust Thrones to fuck us over like this.  Stannis has been in trouble - his camp is snowed in, his men are starving, and there's that nasty Melisandre proposal hanging over his head.  Ramsay raids the camp at the beginning of the episode, destroying food, supplies and horses.  This, I suppose, is the final straw.  He elects to have Shireen burned to turn the tide of war in his favor.  

The sequence itself, directed by David Nutter, was in part an exercise in restraint, given the content, but it still could hardly have been more horrible.  Much of it is shot from Shireen's point of view - the reveal of Melisandre standing by the pyre strikes a chilling note in this respect.  Even worse, however, are the shots of her parents, standing idly by.  One would expect the fervent Selyse to be all for this, but it is she who breaks and weeps by her burning child, not Stannis.  This goes to show how committed Stannis is to his own cause, and to the Lord of Light.  Selyse may be the more outwardly devoted but Stannis is just as much so if not more, he's just less obvious about it.  Worst of all are Shireen's drawn-out, agonized screams.

With respect to that scene with Shireen at Castle Black, it could be argued that this is out of character for Stannis, but I would disagree.  The show likes to fool us into forgetting what people really are, and they have really pulled a hood over our heads with Stannis this year.  Yes, he gets the Walker threat.  Yes, he saved the Night's Watch.  Yes, he has good grammar.  But Stannis has been burning people alive since we first saw him.  He underhandedly murdered his own brother for personal gain.  None of that bothered us too much - it was all in war, and Renly's death certainly isn't the most horrific war crime we've seen portrayed on Thrones.  But this...this is on another level.  Even the Red Wedding can be justified as people acting, however appallingly, against their enemies.  But Shireen is his fucking daughter.  They've set this up, with Stannis's inflexible ambition and will, with the leeches and the king's blood concept, and the burning of Stannis's kinsmen (his brother-in-law suffered this fate back in the third season) but to burn one's own daughter is a betrayal of trust so deep and disturbing that even I, the most ardent Stannis proponent I know, cannot condone it by even the most heartless, realpolitik logic that this show operates within.  Gods help you, Stannis Baratheon.  Now you are truly lost.  

"The Dance of Dragons" is largely about aspirations and self-imposed identities being put to the test against perhaps more primal identities.  Stannis faces a terrible test of his will and chooses the path of the Lord of Light, the result being an unforgivable act.  Arya's chosen path of becoming a Faceless Man is also tested this week by a brush with her perosnal past.  I skimmed over her thread last week because HARDHOME but in "Hardhome," she was given the assignment of learning about and killing a thin man who runs a cruel life-insurance scheme for merchant captains.  This week she walks right by the thin man because someone from her past appears - Meryn Trant, the murderer of Syrio Forel, escorting Mace Tyrell on his mission to renegotiate the crown's terms with the Iron Bank.

Meryn Trant sure is a shit, and the thinly-veiled brothel suggestion that he sexually abuses little girls in his spare time doesn't do him any favors.  Besides, he killed Syrio, which lands him firmly on Arya's list.  "No one," of course, should not have a list.  We knew when Arya couldn't throw away Needle that she wasn't 100 per cent ready to be a Faceless Man, and the appearance of Trant appears to put her engagement with her own identity to the test once again.  Since she spies on him in the brothel, though, it seems as though she's already made a decision.  The significant glance from Jaqen suggests that she's not the only one who knows it.  

Wisely not ending the ninth episode with a sequence of child molestation or immolation, the producers instead concluded the appropriately named "The Dance of Dragons" with another scene that ranks up there with Thrones' better spectacles spectacles (though it doesn't come close to topping Hardhome in that respect).  As with "Hardhome," they took the structural step this week of concentrating a large set-piece in a lengthy, uninterrupted passage at the end of the episode.  

It's the much-ballyhooed big fighting pits day in Meereen, and Daenerys, Hizdahr, Daario and Tyrion have turned up to watch the great games at Daznak's Pit.  Like all the best Thrones sequences, it's a bit hard to describe because it's twisty and it keeps escalating.  They give us pathos by putting a greyscaled, exiled Ser Jorah in the fight.  This is good, because for the sequence to have any contextual efficacy we need to watch a little bit of the fights, and its better to have someone we care about in the mix.  It's good killing - Jorah always gets some of the best fight choreography.

Jorah hurls a spear at Dany's tent - not at Dany, but at the would-be Son of the Harpy assassin.  And then things turn up.  The Sons of the Harpy are everywhere in the crowd, and Nutter has some great shots of the Sons emerging from the crowd, visually articulating the sense that the Sons and what they stand for are deeply woven into the fabric of Meereen, and that Dany's attempts to exorcise these demons from the city have been halting and useless.

What this sequence achieves best is the sense, for the first time in years, that Daenerys is really in danger.  The Sons kill willy-nilly throughout the crowd, going especially after Dany's protectors.  Hizdahr is killed and nobody cares, least of all the viewers.  Daario, various Unsullied and Jorah, newly allowed to protect Daenerys again, kill a lot of Sons but the tide turns against them.  Dany and her entire squad find themselves trapped in the middle of Daznak's Pit, protected by an Unsullied phalanx (which is no protection at all) but surrounded by hordes of the Sons of the Harpy.

And then Drogon shows up.  With a burst of flame, Dany's biggest, baddest dragon rolls into Daznak's Pit and starts crisping Sons like they're going stale.  And then, in probably Dany's best dragon queen moment since "dracarys" she mounts Drogon and rides off on him, out of the Pit, seemingly even out of Meereen.  The final shot of the episode is of Tyrion, absolutely floored, absolutely sold, I think.

Self-evidently, this is one of Thrones biggest sequences, and the scale and everything is quite well-achieved.  And Dany riding off on a dragon is one of the most unambiguously triumphant events of the series.  While the sequence couldn't possibly match the existential bite of "Hardhome," nor could it entirely shake a sense that somehow Daenerys was going to come out ok from this one, there was much to admire from Daznak's Pit - the special effects were terrific, especially of Drogon, and they've done as good of a economical job with the Sons of the Harpy this year.

But this is an example of a time where the lack of Martin's POV's changes the significance of the scene.  In A Dance with Dragons, the appearance of Drogon - which may seem to some like a convenient bit of deux ex machina but to me is Drogon knowing that his mother is in danger - is largely about the connection between Dany and Drogon, and about Dany beginning to embrace a different, less diplomatic and much more Targaryen approach to ruling.  This can't be achieved in the show.

Still, you can't help but be impressed with the production, and I think most viewers will find themselves as slack-jawed as Tyrion.  It may have been a bit shamelessly triumphant for Thrones but the more you think about it, the more this seems like a less-than-stellar development.  Tyrion, Jorah, Daario and Missandei are left in the Pit, with not much direction, I would think, and goodness knows where Dany's going.  They could have highlighted those ambiguities, but in an episode as heavy as this one, perhaps it was best to just wrap things off with some unabashed dragon-riding.

Bits

- The emasculation of Mace Tyrell continues.  Mace loses, but the viewer wins in situations that find him regaling Mark Gatiss's Iron Bank representative with a long song.

- I was very glad to see that Ramsay didn't kill Stannis in his sleep, less glad to see what came of his raid.

- Great shot of Ser Alliser atop the Wall.  What I like about Ser Alliser is his sense of duty - he didn't have to let Jon Snow and all of them through.

- I am still a pretty big fan of Alexander Siddig as Doran Martell and I wish that everything about Dorne didn't completely suck.  I am not that excited to see Prince Trystane on the Small Council, apparently next year.  

Book Bits

- I like the way they're using the Mercy section of the forthcoming Winds of Winter here.  If Meryn Trant is a stand-in for that character, than the pedophilia is canon.

- They seem to have made Elia the main villain of the Dornish situation - we all suspect that she sent that threat to King's Landing, her amends with Jaime Lannister notwithstanding.  It would be a somewhat controversial move if I gave even one fuck about the situation. 

- The apparent death of Hizdahr is a bit of a wrinkle for those of us adhering to the Harzoo conspiracy theory.  Which is not to say that I'm fussed because whatever, it's just Hizdahr.

- D+D sure went out of their ways to emphasize that GRRM told them about Shireen.  Large implications for Stannis but since Shireen is still at the Wall and Stannis is campaigning, I don't have much of an idea where all of that will fit in.  The Stannis stuff is so recklessly off-book that it's hard to even compare the two anymore.   

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is primarily about drugs.  There's some other stuff going on, yes - Dick Nixon's face looms large in Raoul Duke's (Johnny Depp) hallucinations, and Vietnam is omnipresent.  There are some musings on the rise and fall of the counter-culture movement.  But this film is really about drugs.  Director Terry Gilliam apparently intended for the film to feel like a drug trip from beginning to end.  I was more than ready for it to wrap up, which I suppose is not exactly unlike a trip.  The film is quite hallucinogenic and almost anti-plotted; it deliberately derails any attempts of the viewer to piece a story together.  So to Gilliam's credit, he succeeded - Fear and Loathing is a trip.

Duke (a stand-in for source-material author Hunter S. Thompson) and his associate Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) are on a road trip to Las Vegas when the drugs hit.  They're smoking and swerving in a top-down convertible, loaded to the breaking point with sheets of acid, quarts of liquor, sacks of grass and the feared ether, the only drug that worries Duke.  In some films the audience might take that as a cue to worry about an ether-binge final act, but that would not be in keeping with the total lack of order in this film.  They take the ether within a half-hour, and of course, it goes badly.  Not to worry; in this universe, there's always a step up.

So what do drugs look like through Fear and Loathing's eyes?  Sheer insanity on many levels.  In the first cross-country road trip scene, Duke has relentless visions of bats, creatively evoked through swooping shadows on the hood of a car ("don't stop here!  this is bat country!").  When they arrive at the hotel the receptionist turns into an eel and Duke can barely stammer out the reservation information (this is one of the funniest scenes in the film).  A jam-packed bar turns into a reptile orgy.  And when Duke and Gonzo arrive at the Bazooka Circus (probably a bad place to go on any drug), "the fear" hits, and things begin to spin horribly out of control.

I don't have an experience to compare Fear and Loathing to - I haven't read the book, or any Hunter S. Thompson for that matter, nor can I think of a film that so wholly attempts to embody the drug experience.  I may be at a serious critical disadvantage having not experienced Thompson before.  But this is not a part of the Thompson canon, this is Terry Gilliam's film.  The film medium fully embodying drug-think is going to be a different thing than the written word doing so.  And I don't think this is a trip much worth taking.

I'm pretty opposed to the mission of post-modernism, which this movie neatly falls into with its rejection of linearity and causality.  I think that in general, doing this - rejecting things like story and meaning - makes a fucking mockery of art.  Nothing is ever made in a vacuum, but post-modernism would hold that we live in a vacuum by going out of its way to reject all the trappings and constructs around us blah blah blah.  Now, I don't wholesale reject post-modernist works (I like me some Borges, for example, though he's at a bit of a precipice rather than fully initiated).  Anything structural/stylistic bit of creativity or wildness is fine as long as its in the service of a story, or in making some kind of point, and it is possible for post-modernist works to make powerful points.

Fear of Loathing has no point to make.  It's a series of drug experiences.  It has no story.  Un-contextualized Vietnam flashbacks and a floating Richard Nixon head does not constitute a point - not that Fear and Loathing meant to make one by showing those things.  Gonzo flits in and out of the plot with no sensible pattern.  And I get it, that's the point.  You're supposed to feel like you're on drugs.  What I'm saying is not that the film has achieved its intents badly, but rather that its plan in the first place was a bad idea for a meaningful film.

All of which would be well and good if Fear and Loathing were actually fun but my god, its just exhausting.  It's like being slapped in the face with a wet tie-die t-shirt for two hours, over and over and over again.  Sure, there are some funny moments; I could watch a slobbering Benicio del Toro for a while.  But not two hours.  And there's nothing more to this film than fairly predictable tripping ideas, which are hard to sell in the first place because there's always a serious inauthenticity, for every viewer, to such a personalized experience as psychedelic use being portrayed on cinema.  It rings false, and it numbs you into boredom.

And I think that's the most damnable offense for this film, which thinks of itself as anything but boring.  There are inspired moments, but I looked them up, and most of them come start from Thompson - who, I remind you, I haven't read.  So it seems to me that everything really interesting about this film is a second-hand interpretation of what I can only imagine is a superior work.  And that's really all there is to this film.  It's empty-headed and waffling, and not nearly as much fun as it thinks it is.

Hardhome

In the Jon Snow-heavy first episode of this fifth season of Game of Thrones, "The Wars to Come," I wrote that disaster loomed, though you couldn't always tell where it was coming from.  I've given up trying to predict what's going to happen this season - from the Sansa/Ramsay marriage to the death of Ser Barristan to the convergence of Tyrion and Daenerys, it's become impossible even for an astute reader to truly follow what has been going on.  And heading into the final stretch on Game of Thrones, disaster had come to loom on many, many fronts, but it wasn't clear where, as Gandalf once said, "the hammer stroke will fall hardest."

I cannot even comprehend how, in the remaining two episodes, the hammer stroke could possibly fall harder than it did at Hardhome.

I'm floored.  I have taken several passes at writing this review and keep giving up after it descends into increasingly unintelligible superlatives.  This was a truly seminal episode of Game of Thrones, and more game-changing for the story and for the show than any episode I can think of excepting perhaps "Baelor", which simultaneously set the War of the Five Kings in motion and showed viewers how this show was really going to work.  But structurally, emotionally and with respect to the future of the show - well, I've not seen a Thrones quite like this before.

Let's pull back a little bit before I lose myself in Hardhome superlatives again, because this was the best episode of the fifth season long before I lost my face in the last twenty minutes.  The non-Hardhome headliner of the week was obviously the long-anticipated interactions between Tyrion and Daenerys, which were phenomenal.  They're unsure of each other.  Dany plays hardball and holds the threat of execution over his head - Tyrion bluntly tells Dany that he's deciding whether or not he is interested in working with her.

I realized that this was one of the only times, except perhaps when Jorah was exiled last year, that we've seen supplicants of Dany that we really care about.  Being in Meereen's throne room and seeing it through Tyrion's eyes gave a real sense of Dany's trappings and appearance of power.  The set is absolutely incredible, first of all, but Emilia Clarke - who has the affect of a seemingly once-in-a-generation ruler down to a tee at this point - simply exuded strength and influence.

This power dynamic is extremely important for this pairing, which represents the strongest narrative device connecting Dany to the Westeros canvas to date.  Ser Barristan arrived, yes, but he was always a fairly minor player, a member of the old guard.  Tyrion - yes, one of "The Children" - is a son of those Robert's Rebellion combatants, an informed, cynical master of Westerosi political machinations and a devastating judge of character.  It's not in his character to believe in someone like Daenerys, but we can see that he's become more convinced by the end of their interactions.  Dany is powerful and intelligent and good-hearted, and Tyrion sees this (as much as sees her weaknesses and recognizes her need to have someone like him at her side).  By pairing Tyrion and Daenerys, the show has taken the greatest step to date of bringing Daenerys into the fold.  Appropriately, it portends great things.

 This was a dense episode, stuffed with a new assassination assignment (and costume!) for Arya, and the major revelation for Sansa that Theon killed two farm boys, not Bran and Rickon.  Like last week, this constitutes another incomplete step towards returning Sansa to agency.  Between the scalpel and this knowledge, she now has two weapons to possibly use against Ramsay.  She may reveal Reek's treachery, but as she also made clear in their tense, well-acted scene together, it doesn't much matter to her what happens to Theon.

Now all of this was well and good - and Lena Headey was also fantastic this week - but HARDHOME literally blows every other conflict or interaction on the show out of the water.

Quite frankly, this was the most impressive single sequence Game of Thrones has ever put together.  "Hardhome" was a full hour of television, and you really feel the weight of those against the comparatively flighty 50-minute episodes that D+D occasionally fling our way.  Structurally, "Hardhome" was brilliant.  When the show has a standout or climactic sequence to get to, they approach them in one of three ways, depending on the character of the sequence.  With battles (Blackwater and Castle Black) they devote the entire episode.  Sometimes (see the third and fourth episodes of Season 4 for Daenerys) they stuff an important climax into the beginnings or ends of episodes and ignore them thereafter.  The best approach, in my opinion, is to spend a major chunk of the episode in a major set or location and flesh things out before we get to the the good stuff.  This served "The Rains of Castamere" and "The Lion and the Rose," two of the series' very best episodes, very well.  But what is done here is somewhat unique even within that last category - the creators devote an uninterrupted half hour to Jon and Tormund's mission to rally the Wildlings huddled at Hardhome to the cause of the living.

The sheer number of amazing things that happened in this powerful mini-narrative is astonishing.  Jon and Tormund arrive at the coastal fishing village of Hardhome, which is a beautifully photographed, seamlessly enhanced Northern Ireland coast.  Even before Jon and Tormund reach land, we feel the significance of this moment.  Ramin Djawadi's score pulses menacingly and hostility looms from every corner.  But Jon and Tormund are convinced of the necessity of their mission, and when the charming Lord of Bones shows up and starts talking shit, Tormund beats him to death.  It's ostensibly because Rattleshirt insulted his masculinity but also because there just isn't time for such squabbles when winter is coming.

It's not easy to get the Wildlings to accept the help of the Watch, and they don't completely succeed in that endeavor - only about 5,000 of the remnants of Mance's army voluntarily join the alliance, and the Thenns are especially opposed.  The foul-mouthed giant huddled in the corner doesn't seem too happy about it either.  But chieftainess Karsi (Birgitte Sorenson, and I'm butchering that) speaks up for Jon and Tormund's cause, and it's because the cause is truly desperate, not because of any lost love.  "We're not friends," Jon Snow says of himself and Tormund.  "I'll never trust a crow," says Karsi.  But ultimately, some of these Wildlings recognize the reality of the situation; that they are a broken, battered people holed up on a frozen shore at the end of the world with unstoppable enemies descending, and they need all the help they can get.

Jon, Tormund, Dolorous Edd and Karsi are helping Wildlings into boats when the cold winds rise.  An unearthly storm descends from the cliffs pressing Hardhome to the sea, moving much faster than any meteorological event I've ever seen.  The winds of winter sweep through most of the Wildling camp until the Thenn leader, knowing what's up, orders the gates separating most of the camp from the dock area to be shut, locking most of the wildlings from escape.  Thousands of them, doomed to their frozen fate, die and are resurrected as wights.

The White Walkers attack in force at Hardhome, sending in their unstoppable horde of wights, and the final fifteen minutes of this episode details this horrifying battle and the escape of those few living lucky enough to get out.  The logistical and emotional interior narrative of this pivotal sequence was just astonishing.  Everything made such good sense.  The Thenn, who strongly opposed the alliance with the Night's Watch, stands fast with Jon against an actual White Walker, to his doom.  And wouldn't he?  These are the White Walkers - they are death incarnate.  Feuds between humans, no matter how ancient, falter completely in the face of such ruination.

The insanity continues.  Hordes of Wildlings flee in utter disarray to the sea as the wights struggle to break through the gate, drowning each other and overturning boats.  Karsi, having just sent her daughter away, stands and fights to protect them.  At a desperate moment, Jon Snow rallies the Night's Watch to make a stand.

The visceral horror that has been achieved by the production team of Game of Thrones cannot be overstated.  The wights are terrifying, detailed in varying states of decay, ranging from the totally-decomposed skeletons like those that took out Jojen Reed last year to the very newly-dead Wildlings from the other side of the gate.  The Walkers first appear in apocalyptic fashion, four dread horseman directing battle from high above the snowy cliffs.   The wights are fast and hard to kill - they keep clawing back at you, no matter how dismembered.  This is part shocking Thrones medieval action, part brutal, undead horror, achieved at a visual level that takes the already impressive production quality to soaring new heights.

What separates this battle from the maw of zombie thrillers is the intensely realized sense of fear at the prospect of the undead, and the fascinatingly story that is behind the sequence.  Great action tells a human story amidst the maw, and this story is already deeply powerful.  This tense, barely-forged alliance between two ancient enemies is the backdrop to an assault by the White Walkers on the living, Night's Watch or Wildling, which makes every other conflict in the show seem utterly superfluous.

I'll leave it to you to watch for the rest of the highlights - giant smashing wights with a tree trunk is my personal favorite - but I really need to emphasize the importance of this sequence.  When the sinister leader of the Walkers strolls out onto the docks to stare down Jon and Tormund, who barely escaped with their lives, what he's doing is issuing a threat to the living, to the world of Westeros, more brutally and powerfully than either Game of Thrones or, to be honest, George R.R. Martin himself, have ever achieved.  This is where the real battle lies.

That the show constructed a deeply powerful, entirely original climax and situate it structurally within the season so that people wouldn't actually know what was coming - this was episode 9 level stuff - represents a huge payoff in the liberties that D+D have taken with the books this year.  This was simply one of the very finest episodes in series history and though it diverged from the books, I really did feel that it was telling the same, important story.  Their handling of Jon Snow and the Wall this year has just been stellar, and this gives me extreme confidence going into the final two episodes.
Bits
- So that's at least a massive chunk of Mance's 100,000-strong army, which makes all the emphasis of that number last year continually harrowing.

- Lena Heady was absolutely terrific in her cell.  The creepy-faced septa, who I was hoping wouldn't return, totally returned.  She's a great tormentor for Cersei, who is reduced this week to lapping up water from the ground.

- One of the show's most ominous "somebody talks about a character then we cut to that character" transitions with Olly and Sam, on so many levels - "he always comes back".

- Really, really great sparring by Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen.  The script emphasizes their many personal connections, which you don't realize until the two of them are paired like this.  It makes you hope they can stick together.  Daenerys seems a good bet to fight the Walkers with her "break the wheel" approach to things. And dragons.

- I've become a huge fan of Kristofer Hivju as Tormund.  He's sheer force and just a ton of fun.

Book Bits
- Wun Wun!  Will "For the Watch" be playing out in the same way?  I mean Wun Wun could cause a lot of trouble in Castle Black.

- Valyrian Steel kills White Walkers - confirmed.  Most people know in the books but it was not confirmed.

- Is there a Night's King in the books?  Idk but this guy is super scary.

- Ramsay plots a raid against Stannis.  I am very scared for Stannis's life this year, and I really think he's going to die at the end, but if Ramsay kills him with twenty of his Bastard's Boys in a little wintry raid I will be livid.

- Of course, this Tyrion/Daenerys pairing is necessarily shortlived, as next weeks episode is called "The Dance of Dragons".  Nice to get a taste.  I do feel that their paths will cross eventually, despite the near-miss at Daznak's Pit.

- Hardhome is heard of in the books as this really horrible place where there are "dead things in the water" and the Wildlings are slowly being picked off.  This was pretty nasty too.  

The Gift

A big part of a successful, resonant episode of Game of Thrones is where it chooses hedge its climactic bets.  Last week’s episode would not have been quite so wretched had it not chosen to climax with 1) a pretty appalling instance of sexual assault and 2) a poorly-choreographed battle featuring the much-maligned Sand Snakes.  One of the things I complained about last week was that the episode chose to conclude with the rape of Sansa – something like that was probably inevitable, but the show didn’t to draw so much gratuitous attention to it.  “The Gift”, which is a successful, resonant episode of Thrones, is so by playing to the show’s strengths, old and new.  This fifth season has in part been so exciting because characters who have never met before have been interacting, and we got the best instance of that with the hotly-anticipated encounter between Tyrion and Daenerys.  Thrones throughout its run has done some of its best work staging intense, intimate two-handed scenes between terrific actors, and in the plethora of King’s Landing scenes building up to Cersei’s arrest, we got that as well.

Another thing Thrones does well is foreboding atmosphere, and this week we got plenty of that as well, particularly in the northern reaches of Westeros.  Jon departs Castle Black with a newly-freed Tormund, showered with scowls from Olly and withering advice from Ser Alliser.  This episode made very clear that nobody at Castle Black likes this plan, excepting Sam and, perhaps, Maester Aemon.        

After this episode, though, such support amounts to very little.  We experience perhaps the most unusual death on Game of Thrones, in that Maester Aemon dies of natural causes.  Even Ser Alliser and Janos Slynt were wroth to question the Maester’s wisdom.  Now that he is gone, Ser Alliser seems appropriately aggrieved, but whispers to Sam “you’re losing all your friends, Tarly.”  He’s right.  And Sam’s support has little effective value either.  With Jon and Aemon gone, two nasty Night’s Watchmen take it upon themselves to get closer to Gilly.  Sam tries to fight them off and gets brutalized as a result – without Ghost, they almost certainly would have killed him.  Sam has a good heart and a sharp mind, but his support really doesn’t count for much since he can barely swing a sword.  Sam does at least lose his virginity thereafter, which is quite funny if you can get past the bleak context.

It’s also snowing in the north – all over Castle Black, in Winterfell (which really highlights how fantastic that set is) and in Stannis’s camp.  The Baratheon army is starving and snowed in.  This plays to the advantage of the Boltons in the upcoming fight – as Ramsay says, the northerners know how to fight in the cold, and these southerners and sellswords are completely unaccustomed.  Stannis nevertheless insists on plunging into the breach.  It is, as all his advisors point out, terribly risky, but the Mannis is right to note that winter could last for years and that he just can’t risk taking himself out of the game for that long.  Winter, as always, is coming, but now it's actually coming.
In both Winterfell and Dorne, the show took steps towards correcting some of the fuck-ups from last week.  Sansa still has not been given the agency she deserves, but she does try some moves.  She tries to use Reek to light the candle in the high tower, as she is locked in her chambers all day, but Reek, who insists to her that “it can always get worse,” instead tattles to Ramsay, who flays the old northern woman alive.  It’s too bad, but during the showmanship scene where Ramsay reveals this gruesome fact to Sansa, Sansa starts to show some pluck.  She snatches some kind of shiv (which will hopefully find its way to Ramsay’s throat) and hits Ramsay where it hurts, at his bastard-born status.  Ramsay gets the final word in this exchange by revealing the flayed woman, but on the whole, this episode was still a significant step in the right direction as far as finally giving Sansa some damn agency.

Little of consequence happened in Dorne (well...more on that in the book-y speculation) but this week we were given two scenes that were actually tolerable.  Jamie and Myrcella technically doesn't involve any Dornish characters, but the Sand Snakes and Bronn was not even that bad.  True, Thrones resorted to its tried-and-true sexposition tactics, but at least Tyene's striptease served the actual purpose of moving the poison through Bronn's blood more quickly.  But it was the little, lived-in details that made the Sand Snakes finally seem like something close to actual people.  Nym and Obara roll their eyes at Tyene like "here she goes again," and this does so much more to make it seem like these women have an actual relationship than their introduction or ill-fated kidnap attempt ever did.  A partial but incomplete step in the right direction.  

"The Gift" did a very nice job ratcheting up the tension to nearly unbearable levels at Castle Black and Winterfell while getting a couple very neat climaxes in.  One of them was quite expected - the inevitable collapse of Cersei's schemes at her heels, all at the hands of the season-long ticking time bomb, Brother Lancel.  But this scene was expertly set up by a series of the actor-y standoffs - these two-handed scenes at which Thrones absolutely excels.  I don't have the time to spew adulations on Olenna/Baelish and Cersei/Tommen, which were both wonderful, but the two High Sparrow scenes stand out.  Olenna spars with the High Sparrow over the arrests of Margaery and Loras, and the fantastic Jonathan Pryce hinted at how scary true devotion can be.  Try as she might (and there are few people in Westeros better at this than Olenna), the Queen of Thorns cannot get under the High Sparrow's skin.  He really seems to want nothing other than justice, as dictated by the Seven-Pointed Star (a Westerosi Bible equivalent).  There's nothing more dangerous or immovable than a fanatic, especially one given a royal mandate to do whatever they think is necessary.

And finally, the High Sparrow springs his trap.  It's Cersei's own fault, for he has been very clear about his intentions to bring justice to everybody.  Only a fool would not think to include themselves in such calculations, but Cersei has always been blinded by fear and hatred.  She has allowed fear and hatred to drive her actions this year - fear of losing her remaining children, utter hatred for the beautiful, young, usurping queen - and failed to realize that she created the biggest potential threat to her own existence.  The High Sparrow obviously relishes his reveal, deep under the Sept of Baelor, but how stupid did we think he was?  He's known right from the start that Cersei was the worst of them all.  That didn't stop him from arresting Loras and Margaery, who did sin in his eyes, but Cersei was probably the big prize all along.  

This is a serious comeuppance for one of the show's most despicable characters, but by opening with the childhood prophecy of Cersei's, this season has attempted to at least explain her motivations - as I said earlier, fear and hate.  Fear and hate stem from deeply-rooted insecurities.  Cersei is basically a very sad woman, and it's hard not to feel the overwhelming despair of having all her power and authority stripped away in an instant (shoulda brought a Kingsguard down there, but that's book-consistent).  It reminds me of Joffrey's death in a way.  He looked like a sad, scared little child, the nastiest villain (at that time) reduced to pitiable reaching for his mother.  He deserved it - oh god, he deserved it - and Cersei does too, but once again the show has found ways to find sympathy for its devils at the hours of their comeuppance.  It's this kind of moral ambiguity that makes the show so great, at its best.

The big takeaway from the episode is, of course, the interaction of Tyrion and Daenerys (at this point its not even worth going over all the book-to-show changes, but this really hasn't happened in the books yet).  I figured that it was coming this season - unlike GRRM, D+D tend to satisfy rather than prolong ad infinitum - and what I liked about this scene was how unexpected it was.  For the third straight episode, Tyrion had his season's best episode, talking/fighting his way into being purchased by Yezzan along with Ser Jorah.  It's been really pleasant to watch the character worm his way back into relevance, and he seems to have done so here.  The whole thing was quite unexpected, in that it teased a near-miss.  Jorah and Tyrion really weren't supposed to be out there, and frankly I didn't expect them to get to Meereen quite so quickly.  But it's good when Thrones has the capacity to surprise.  While Tyrion and Daenerys haven't met in the books, I don't care.  GRRM delays and ponders and meanders and pontificates and it's wonderful, but this is television.  We can't be dicked around interminably.  Bring it on.  A (One of the very finest episodes of the series)

Bits

- Tormund isn't helping anybody (least of all the Wildlings) by prancing around like that once he's been freed.

- Daario's scene this week emphasized how much Daenerys needs somebody less brutal to also advise her - not to say that there isn't some wisdom to his savagery.

- Melisandre says "I saw myself walking the walls of Winterfell"...but not Stannis.  I'm turning the death-watch on.  Gods please don't let it be true.

- Rosabell Laurenti Sellers.  Not to sound like a sexist pig but damn gurl.

- Here's Chekhov's Dragonglass (I stole that, can't remember from who)!  Sometimes the show is too obvs.

Book Bits
- I don't give a shit that Tyrion and Daenerys haven't met in the books or that this probably confirms they eventually will.  It's just going to be too much fun for me to care.

- So I am now seriously concerned that Bronn will be Arys Oakheart and die, given the seductive overtures of Tyene this week.  Bronn is smart, but he probably can't restrain himself in this case.

- If Bronn and Stannis both die...I actually will barely be able to make it.  I actually cannot bear the thought of Stannis dying.

- One of the best, saddest lines from the book made it - "Egg...I dreamed I was old..."  RIP Maester Aemon.

- So...will Sam go to Oldtown?  The death of Aemon and the Gillysex kind of wrecks that storyline.