Game of Thrones has produced
many WTF moments during its four season run but in this season’s finale “The
Children” the WTF moments kept coming from the brutal showdown between Brienne
and The Hound to Tywin Lannister having a Father’s Day from the pits of hell.
The Show’s creators David
Benioff and DB Weiss have been crowing about the season finale being one of
their best yet and it’s safe to say that their confidence was justified.
John,
Mance, Stannis and The Wall
The show kicks off with John
beyond the gate on his suicide mission to kill Mance, “The King beyond the Wall”.
Having watched copious amounts of television and a plethora of main characters putting
themselves in perilous positions, I was pretty sure nothing would really happen
to John as he surrendered himself in order to talk to Mance but to say that
things were tense would be an understatement.
However, for two men at war
with each other and not a lot of love between them, John and Mance were pretty
amicable as they both shared a cup of wildling moonshine and a chat about their
lost comrades and Ygritte. Despite the abnormal civility between the two
enemies, we know that John, with his mission in mind, is still angling for a chance
to end the war by killing Mance eyeing all the sharp objects lying around.
However, Mance, not too keen on trusting the bastard son of Ned Stark again,
spots John eyeing a knife plunged into a table nearby then sternly questions
whether he has stones to do it before a loud horn rings out interrupting Mance
before he could slit John’s throat.
Strange riders cut through the
unprepared wildlings subduing any opportunities for retaliation. We find out
that riders are riders for House Baratheon as Stannis and Davos ride up to
Mance’s quarters and arrest him. We’ve been waiting for years for the story to
hot up on the wall with introduction Stannis, the red lady and Davos to the
wall, things just might get interesting.
Dany
and Meeren
Game of Thrones rarely gives
its’ characters what they want and if they do they are confronted with cold and
hard realities that pale in comparison to the grand visions they had in their
heads of glory, conquest or absolute rule and nobody is experiencing this
dichotomy as profoundly as the Mother of Dragons. The show is making the point
constantly about difference between conquering and ruling as this week she
learned that slavery may be an evil system but it provided an identity her “new
world” can’t as a slave begs the Breaker of Chains to return to his old ones.
Taken
aback by the old man plea and his revelation that he’s not the only one who wishes
to return to bondage, the Mother of Dragons allows the old man to sign a
contract with his former owners which may provide a major loophole that might see
the breaker of chains over a more agreeable (if that’s even possible) form of
an injustice she made her name on. However the tough decision just kept on
coming as a goat herder cradling what appears to be a child burnt to a crisp by
one of Dany’s dragons.
In this season more than most
the show has gone out of its way to show that while her dragons may be her ace
in the hole they may also be her number weakness as their wild and terrifying
nature can end up costing her dear. She has the equivalent of nuclear weapons
in the GOT universe and when the goat herder reveals the bones of his dead
daughter, it was like she found out that they were radioactive.
Fresh from the court meeting
from hell, Dany leads the two dragons she can fins into the catacombs and
chains the wild young dragons as Dany cries at the thought of the so called
Mother of Dragons and Breaker of Chains forced into chaining her own children
who are way too wild and dangerous to be free. It been a tough season for Dany
and if she plans to experiment with the prospect of ruling, season 5 look like
it turn out to be a nightmare for the last dragon.
Brienne,
The Hound and Arya
GOT does violent duels like
Michael Jordan did slam dunks but the battle between The Hound and Brienne was
brilliant as it was brutal. After Brienne finds Arya practicing her water
dancing, they share a short but warm chat about their fathers and their warrior
ambitions before they’re rudely interrupted by The Hound, unfriendly and rude
as ever so rude he forces Brienne to draw her sword.
What happened next was one of
the best and most brutal fights in the show’s run as what starts out as a bread
and butter sword fight turns into a primal fight to the death with both parties
fighting dirty which Brienne ended with multiple blows with a rock to The Hounds’ head before throwing him over a hill.
As Brienne admonishes Pod for
losing Arya, we see Arya catch with The Hound, badly injured and looking death
in the eye. Season 4 has done a good job taking Arya down an even darker path
and “The Children” continued the trend as she watches The Hound writhe in pain
as he begs his road companion to kill him. Arya, dead eyed and emotionless, just
watches The Hound as he tries to goad
her into killing him by going into graphic details what happened when he killed
the butcher’s boy in the first season and openly rueing his opportunity to rape
Sansa.
Arya, still unmoved by his
desperate attempts to provoke her into killing him, walks over to The Hound,
takes his bag of silver and walks off leaving him to die. It was quite a bum
note to end one of the better odd couples on the show as while we thought Arya
may have some feeling of camaraderie with her captor who has racked up a large
body count protecting her from the worse Westeros has to offer but the way she
ended her time with The Hound showed that wasn’t the case.
The
Lannisters and King’s Landing
I don’t know if it’s
coincidence or great scheduling by HBO, but I suspected that with last night
being father’s day it was going to be one to forget for one of Westeros shitty
patriarchs and unfortunately for Tywin, one he wished had never happened. Let’s
face it, if a parent ever deserved to fall at the hands of his children there
is only one candidate that comes to mind, Tywin Lannister. He has made the lives
of his children hell from using them like pieces in a chess board to sentencing
one of them to death for a crime he knows full well they didn’t commit.
The Father’s day from hell got
going with Cersei refusing to marry Loras Tyrell. Tywin, in his usual uncaring
manner, dismisses his daughter’s defiance insisting on her acquiescence.
Cersei, not exactly daddy’s little girl despite sharing a number of his nastier
character traits, reveals that the worst kept secret in all of Westeros is
true, she’s been sleeping with her brother and the Lannister bloodline is a
little more purer than he’d like. Tywin, firm in the belief that the nasty
rumours about his eldest son and only daughter were falsehoods, tells her she’s
lying however we can see it on his face that he knows she’s telling the truth.
Season 4 has been one disaster
after another for the Lannisters as we predicted before GOT started as so far
they have been largely shielded from the horrors that have visited just about
everybody else the narrative. Another reason for this recent uptick in
Lannister misery is that the show did threaten to make them the central focus
of the show as the show is often at its best as the best and richly drawn
characters in the show are Lannisters.
However, if there was ever a
show where being the central focus of it was a downside, Game of Thrones fits
it to the tee and all you need to do is look at the fate of the Starks for
irrefutable proof. The show has also proved a perilous ground for fan favourites
as we found out two weeks ago with the red viper and for the whole season with
Tyrion who has spent season 4 losing loved ones, friends, and very nearly his
life.
In this week’s finale Tyrion’s
losing streak came to an end as one of his few allies and loved one left,
Jamie, came through and broke his brother out of his cell. The Tyrion and Jamie
relationship has been one of the high points in a strong season as Peter
Dinklage and Nikolaj Coster Waldau have played a blinder playing brothers who
care deeply for each other’s in a world where your brother is pretty much your
best friend or, much more likely, your worst enemy.
Jamie instructs the little
brother to knock on the escape door for Varys to open it before they embrace.
There are a number of heartbreaking scenes in the GOT cannon but Jamie’s and
Tyrion’s farewell embrace must be the first heart-warming scene in GOT for some time as the show has excelled a gut
punching its audience we gotten used to its cynical approach of trampling all
over our conditioned expectation for poetic justice in our storytelling.
The show continued its usual
trend as Tyrion ignores his brothers’ instruction to knock on the door to
freedom and instead sneaks into his father bedroom to honour a family tradition
of paying debts owed. However to his horror, he finds Shae, half naked, draped
stomach first on Tywin’s bed. Heartbroken, Tyrion jumps on top of Shae after
she reaches for a knife. Tyrion disarms Shae then strangles her to death.
Tyrion no doubt had a score to
settle with Shae but we can tell from the look on his face when he strangled
the life out the woman he had loved and loved him back that ending her life
wasn’t in his plan for payback. Tyrion had become another victim of one of a
long line of cruel ironies that litter the GOT narrative as he ends up killing
the woman he went through great pains to protect.
Broken from his murderous act,
Tyrion spots Joffrey’s crossbow hung up on the wall. In the next scene, we
follow a dishevelled Tyrion dragging the crossbow down a dark corridor which
leads to a privy where he finds his father sites engineering bowel movements.
In just about every scene we’ve seen the Lannister patriarch in he has radiated
magisterial power and dominated every room he entered but in his privy, literally
caught with his pants down by the son he hates with a crossbow and life’s worth
of intent, we see Tywin in a position we doubt he’s ever been, one of
vulnerability.
Tywin, the master politician
and manipulator that he is tries to negotiate with his last born son who’s in
no mood to hear his father who has countless times shown his contempt towards
from birth. Sure enough, none of the old lion parlour tricks are working on a
son he has done his utmost to slight and ridicule at every turn. The old lion
then makes the fatal mistake of calling Shae a whore triggering Tyrion to shoot
his father with a bow to the chest knocking him back. As Tyrion reloads the bow
and aims it at his father, Tywin knows the jig is up and then reveals what he really
thinks before Tyrion delivers a bow to the throat killing his father instantly.
All men die in Westeros but it
but no one would suspect that feared and respected Tywin Lannister would be
felled by his “demon monkey” son of “low cunning” in the shitter which is a
fitting end for a man who put his family legacy over the family itself with
dire consequences.
After killing his father,
Tyrion follows Jamie’s orders and meets Varys who smuggles him onto a ship
inside a wooden crate that resembled the crate opened last season revealed the sorcerer
who made him a eunuch. GOT has many characters scheming in the background with
their true intentions shrouded in mystery but Game of Thrones has from the
beginning seemed like a chess match
being played by Varys and Littlefinger (the best schemers on both sides of the
continent) and everybody else in the narrative is a piece to moved or removed
on the chessboard.
We suppose we’ll have to wait
until next season to see what happens to Tyrion as he sails with Varys across
the narrow sea and thanks to a strong finale this week of strong season overall,
the nine or ten month wait for more GOT will be painful.
Till next year.
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