Game of Thrones | review by Rafe McGregor

Game of Thrones, HBO, 8 seasons, April 2011-May 2019, £9.99 (monthly subscription rate)

Fantasy at its finest.

I’ve been wanting to write about HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019) for a while now, but kept putting off what seemed like a mammoth task. I came to the series late, somehow insulating myself from all the hype for nearly a decade. Then COVID-19 arrived and (like many people, I later learned) it seemed the perfect time to tackle all 73 episodes (which run to just over 70 hours in total). I watched it on my own during the first lockdown, then with my wife, and then we watched it together again during the second lockdown. I had heard, as one does, that GOT was yet another case of diminishing returns and that fans were particularly outraged at the final season. The former accusation is complete nonsense and the final season was just as good as the rest and even better than some. One of the reasons for its poor reception may have been the slightly longer wait (two years instead of one) creating unreasonable expectations. Another is probably the fact that the television series had overtaken the novels on which it was based, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (five of seven novels published from 1996 to 2011, the rest as yet unpublished), and readers were dissatisfied with the direction it had taken. Which is fine…but no one is forcing you to watch the series and personally I sometimes avoid cinematic or televisual adaptations if I really love a novel or series of novels. The only justified accusation of anticlimax is that there is a Lord of the Rings-like sense in which the biggest and most desperate battle takes place before the final battle, but the final battle is between the protagonists and the antagonist so the narrative is perfectly in keeping with what we expect (and, indeed, desire) as audiences. To stay with LOTR for a moment, I loved both the films and the books, but read and watched them as two separate works rather than expecting the latter to slavishly imitate the former and I recommend the same approach to GOT. (I read Martin’s novels after watching the series and enjoyed them too, but they are very different.) On the point of giving audiences what we desire, two of the great triumphs of GOT are the way in which it both deploys and undermines the mythic mode of storytelling (which has been the Hollywood norm for the last fifty years) and combines that mode with a rich architecture of allegorical meaning.

GOT is an incredibly complex narrative with a multiplicity of interwoven plotlines, all of which revolve around the struggle among the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen for the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. The plotlines involve hundreds of characters, dozens of main characters, eight great noble houses in addition to the pivotal three (Arryn, Baratheon, Bolton, Frey, Greyjoy, Martell, Tyrell, and Tully), and at least eight leading characters. The leading characters are an older generation of three Lannisters (Cersei, Tyrion, and Jamie), a younger generation of four Starks (Jon, Sansa, Arya, and Bran), and Daenerys Targaryen (played by Emilia Clarke). These leads can be distilled to two protagonists and an antagonist, one from each house, as follows: Jon Snow (played by Kit Harrington) from House Stark, Daenerys, and Cersei Lannister (the antagonist, played by Lena Headey). Each of the 73 episodes runs from 50 to 82 minutes and they are distributed across the seasons as follows: 1-10 (Season 1, 2011), 11-20 (Season 2, 2012), 21-30 (Season 3, 2013), 31-40 (Season 4, 2014), 41-50 (Season 5, 2015), 51-60 (Season 6, 2016), 61-67 (Season 7, 2017), and 68-73 (Season 8, 2019). The series also employs the five-act structure popularised by Shakespeare, although the acts do not follow the series exactly. Having watch it four times now, I’d say the overarching narrative goes something like this: exposition (episodes 1-9), complication (episodes 10-29), climax (episodes 30-50), crisis (episodes 51-67), and resolution (episodes 68-73).

In addition to following this structure, the overarching narrative is structured as what the late Fredric Jameson calls a ‘genuine allegory’, which I first mentioned in TQF when reviewing another television series, Amazon Studios’ Carnival Row (2018; there’s a review of the second and final season here). Genuine allegories have four distinct levels of meaning that combine in interesting and sometimes unique ways to provide audiences with especially memorable and meaningful experiences (and are well-suited to the television series because of the length of the form). The literal level of meaning of GOT is revealed in the title, the deadly game played by the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen – as well as the other eight – for the Iron Throne, which bears the weight of many a different noble bottom as the seasons progress. The symbolic level is the Night King (played by first Richard Brake and then Vladimír Furdík), his army, and his winter as transparently representative of climate change. Significantly, the first episode of the series is titled ‘Winter is Coming’ and it is an oft-repeated phrase used by the inhabitants of Westeros to refer to a particularly lengthy cold season that occurs across the continent on an intermittent basis. At the existential level of meaning, GOT appears to establish a fairly simple moral axis, with Cersei almost completely selfish and vicious, Jon almost completely selfless and virtuous, and Daenerys somewhere in between, for the most part well-intentioned but prone to egotism and hubris. Given that Jon has no desire to rule the Seven Kingdoms, the Kingdom of the North, or even the Night’s Watch, it is Daenerys and Cersei’s constructions of subjectivity that drive the overarching plot, in a particular and peculiar play of difference and identity that draws attention to sexual violence, femicide, and systemic sexism. The anthropic level is primarily concerned with the relationships among the three levels of war that threaten to destroy the Seven Kingdoms. The micro level is the internecine conflicts within individual kingdoms or noble houses, such as Stannis Baratheon’s (played by Stephen Dillane) wars against first his brother and then his nephew. The meso level is the conflict among the Lannisters, Starks, and Targaryens and the macro level the war between the living and the dead, between the armies of Westeros and Essos (the continent to the east of Westeros) and the Army of the Dead. This is the only war worth fighting and quite obviously the most momentous, but it is the war that the noble houses are the most reluctant to fight, content to dismiss the Night King as a legend and to believe that the imminent winter is natural rather than supernatural.

GOT is, as my brief summary suggests, an incredibly complex narrative consisting of layer upon layer of plots, meanings, protagonists, characters, and conflicts, all of which are eventually – and masterfully – tied together in a resolution as rewarding as it seems retrospectively inevitable. While the combination of myth and allegory is, as already mentioned, exemplary, my particular fascination with the series is the way in which it succeeds in replicating rather than representing the experience of living through an – or perhaps the – apocalypse. In his long essay, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2022), Mark Fisher discusses one of the few other narrative fictions to achieve the same end: ‘The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.’ As T.S. Eliot wrote before him (influenced by if not explicitly reflecting on the mass destruction of World War I) in ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), ‘This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.’ For all the fire and ice in GOT, deadly dragons and unstoppable undead, humanity is petering out slowly, person by person, most by starvation and disease rather than blade or bow. It is, another words, a world very much like our own, where humanity faces existential threats from multi-polar conflicts, artificial intelligence, and climate change that most of us are able to ignore most of the time. I have only had such an experience twice before, with Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, which consists of the novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) (about which I wrote here) and with Alfonso Cuarón’s feature film, Children of Men (2006). Read and watch them all: I guarantee you won’t be disappointed and you might just find them resonating with you in the same way I did. ****

Westworld, Season 2, by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy & J.J. Abrams | review by Rafe McGregor

Narrative diffusion taken too far in underwhelming second season.

Stephen Theaker was not impressed by Westworld, the 2016 HBO series based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 film of the same name. In his review in TQF59, Stephen introduces the premise of the series as a live action role play version of the videogame Red Dead Redemption, where the player characters are actual human beings (guests) and the non-player characters androids (hosts). He astutely identifies a paradox in the USP of the holiday park: the guests are either motivated by wanting to experience life in the Old West (or at least the Old West as represented in the Western movie genre) or by wanting to act out their fantasies free of consequence. The former would likely be horrified by the behaviour of the latter (which involves a great deal of physical and/or sexual abuse of the hosts) and the latter would be afraid of their behaviour being recorded (during the course of monitoring the hosts). And indeed one of the disclosures in season 2 is that Delos (the company that owns Westworld) have built a database of every single action of every single guest that has ever visited (albeit not for the purpose of extortion). Setting the paradox aside, however, I thought that the sophisticated exploration of evaluative and descriptive conceptions of humanity (and the relationship between them) made for compelling viewing and I would have pushed Stephen’s three stars to all the way up to five.

Westworld, Season 1, by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy and chums (HBO/Sky Atlantic) | review by Stephen Theaker

In the future life is too easy (good to know they fixed that whole global warming thing!) and so people jazz up their lives by coming to Westworld, a live action roleplay version of Red Dead Redemption, with robots playing the parts of all the non-player characters. The original film didn’t spend a great deal of time thinking about how any of this would work, simply showing people having a gunfight and bedding girls in brothels before setting Yul Brynner off on his famously terrifying rampage, but this new series is all about life in Westworld, and specifically what life is like for the robots who live there. For reasons best known to the park’s founders (one of whom is here played by Antony Hopkins, bringing his usual gravitas to a show that really appreciates it, since it is trying its hardest to be taken seriously), these robots, rather than being all run by some central computer system, have individual minds of their own, some of which have been operational for over thirty years, and they are beginning to have strange thoughts. They start to notice the glitches in their matrix, they start to remember their mistreatment at the hands of the park’s patrons, and they start to get angry about it. Thandie Newton, Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden portray brilliantly some of the androids as they react to their dawning knowledge of their unconscionable situation, and here the show is at its best: how should we treat non-human people, and how will they react to that treatment, it asks. The programme’s problems come when you think too much about the park itself, and how it is supposed to work, and why people would want to go on holiday in such an unpleasant and horrible place. Yes, we’re happy to play Red Dead Redemption, but when you fall off your horse in that game you won’t break your actual neck. Westworld guns may not work when pointed at a human, but a knife will kill you just as quickly if a visitor decides to kill you and there aren’t any androids around to stop them. Would anyone want to go to dinner in a place where your fellow holidaymakers could start sexually assaulting someone right in front of you? And would the people who liked the idea of doing that kind of thing be happy to be filmed doing it? The programme does show one chap being blackmailed, so it’s unclear why this doesn’t bother everyone else. Equally odd is the way the quest lines work. They seem to proceed whether any players turn up or not, which leads to a great deal of damage being done to the scenery and the androids, all of which (it’s a major plot point) needs to be repaired, apparently pointlessly. Hard to understand why they don’t just use squibs for the explosions of blood, rather than wrecking the androids every day. And why use expensive androids rather than cheap human actors, as, for example, in Austenland? Plus, if you’re a guest who rolls out of bed a few hours late, how happy would you be to find that all the storylines have gone on without you? Would you be happy paying $40,000 a day to twiddle your thumbs? The important new storyline being created by Hopkins doesn’t seem to have any role for a human at all – though that might foretell a twist to come in season two, showing that the new storyline is not actually the one we’re shown; there do seem to be some metagames going on. (Though there’s nothing to suggest this in the first series, I wondered if it will eventually be revealed that the Earth faces disaster and so the park is an attempt to accelerate the evolution of post-humans who might survive it.) It’s an HBO programme, so there’s a requisite amount of nudity. Most of it is degrading and unsexy, in the course of the androids being repaired, reprogrammed and analysed; you’re supposed to feel bad for the androids, as demonstrated very clearly by a scene where Antony Hopkins’ character rips away the clothing a lab technician has allowed one robot, but you feel bad for the actors too. That doesn’t stop it being an interesting programme, though, and it rewarded the time it took to watch it with some later developments making clever sense of what had previously appeared to be storytelling non sequiturs. I would never go there on holiday – at least in Austenland the food looks nice! – but I’ll be happy to watch more idiots risk it. Here’s hoping for Roman World in season two. ***

Game of Thrones, Season 5, by David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and chums (Sky Atlantic) | review

Tyrion crosses the sea in a crate, reluctantly, to start a new life working for Daenyrs, the mother of dragons. She’s having trouble keeping control of her city, the previous ruling class refusing to accept the changes she has made. Jon Snow and the men of the Night’s Watch must consider what to do with the defeated Wildlings. Winter is coming, and if humanity doesn’t stand together, even the scruffy ones with bad hair, they’ll all be killed by the zombie army of the White Walkers. And then be revived to join that army! Winterfell suffers under the heel of a mad tyrant, while further south King’s Landing falls prey to religious mania. Elsewhere, Arya learns what it takes to become an assassin like the Faceless Man. This is probably the weakest season of the programme so far, and the level of violence towards women and children is extremely uncomfortable at times. But it’s still very good. By now we care about these characters; we’ve watched some of them grow up, we’ve seen what they’ve been through, and their lives matter to us. The effects are of a very high quality. The Wildling giant, in particular, is magnificent. Stephen Theaker ***

Game of Thrones, Season 4 / review by Stephen Theaker

Game of Thrones, Season 4 (Sky Atlantic/HBO) feels for a while as if it has hardly moved on from the beginning of the previous season. Jon Snow is still bumbling around beyond the wall, Sansa still wandering with the Hound, Daenarys is marching around Slavers’ Bay with her army, and Joffrey is still doing bad things like the bad little king he is. The weird army we saw marching at the end of season two has yet to arrive anywhere. In television we’re used to things moving rather more quickly, arcs concluding at the end of a season and new arcs beginning the season after. That doesn’t really happen with Game of Thrones, but season three came to a famously cataclysmic conclusion, and the ripples of that final episode become tidal waves in season four. It’s the aftermath of some things, the beginning of others, and there’s a great big battle by the end featuring the programme’s best special effects yet.

True Detective, Season 1, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Is True Detective, Season 1 (Sky Atlantic, TV, 8 episodes) a crime programme or a supernatural programme? Even by the end I wasn’t entirely sure, though I suppose the title is a clue. I’ll hedge my bets and call it horror.

The series tells the story of two police officers in Louisiana working together for the first time. Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) is a family man cheating on his wife (Michelle Monaghan). Rust Cohle, played by an incandescent Matthew McConaughey, is a loner with a bare apartment who cribs his bleak philosophy of life from the likes of Thomas Ligotti. They don’t get on – a shame given how much time they’ll spend stuck in a car together.