Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones is back and it's....as oriented towards really being one ten hour movie as opposed to a show that can be broken down into individual episodes. That said, let's break down this individual episode.

The show begins with one more Ned Stark indignity, the melting down of his sword with Tywin saying that the owner had no more use of it. And yet we have immediate metaphoric value, and I love a good metaphor, as the strong sword is split in two this is the first episode in which cracks begin to show in the Lannister party. First, Jamie, freshly returned from losing his hand refuses his father's offer to go back home and says he'll stay in the King's Guard. Now I'll grant you that Tywin will probably spend the rest of the season setting up Jamie's death at his wedding to Cersei in, Red Wedding Part 2, but it's the first time that someone has said no to him since we first met him slowly skinning that deer and talking of family honor.

The indignities for Jamie continue as his sister is no longer into incest just because he left for a bit and got his hand chopped off. And his son, King Geoffrey is hell bent on reminding him what little impact he's made in the world. The transformation of Jamie from complete villain into lovable handless rascal was one of the most satisfying of last season, and it will be interesting to see what portions of his new honorable self are retained in the veritable viper's den of King's Landing. We can already see the tension in his conversation with Breanne about his duty to the Stark children.

And in continuing the theme of celibacy,(outside of the whorehouse) Tyrion denies Shea his glorious body, in part to keep her from being killed, which is obviously going to happen at some point, but also because he's become a more honorable fellow who has a wife now. A sad and not very bright wife, but a wife none the less.

We are also introduced to Daenrys knew grown up dragons (CGI budget warning. Can we just borrow some money from Peter Jackson's 19 part The Hobbit to make these dragons a mainstay?) who are having a nice time relaxing on the beach taking selfies, purring, killing goats, and threatening her. From this we move on to see Dario Naharis engaged in a game with Worm over who loves her more. And we're to our first big surprise of the season, Dario is also one of those shape shifting assassins, and he's changed from a ruggedly handsome and dangerous guy who's raw sexual energy and masculinity were off the charts into a bearded guy with a nice smile. Now, I'm glad that old Dario was around to sack the city and stare brazenly at nude Danerys, but now I'm happy about the new Dario as well. I can't wait until this guy reads Voltaire for the first time and finds out about skinny jeans. Dany is in for a world of discovery when he sits her down for the first time and introduces her to Arcade Fire before they sold out.

 Of course, Dany's path is never easy. She always has some slaves to free and some bodies of dead female slaves to cut down on her way to free them. I've heard from numerous people that her story bogs down for quite a while here, and it will be interesting to see how the show handles it as she's beloved by fans. Her quest to free slaves, though admirable has already been tread, and we'll see if this journey brings anything new. I'm hoping that at least one of the dragons gets killed in the fight, so we can get it down to one, borrow from Jackson's budget and have the final season filled with Sleeth single handedly destroying troops of White Walkers. In the meantime, my prediction for the season is that she frees more slaves, fights a big battle, loses or has a dragon harmed, teaches all the slaves to be back up dancers in her remixing of Man in the Mirror, cleverly changing the lyrics to Woman in the Mirror before heading over to save Westeros. Totally plausible.



If the first three seasons have been about the triumph of the Lannisers, it's clear that the fourth season is about chickens coming home to roost. I'm going to have to eat all the effing chickens. First, we're introduced to Oberon, a whore loving bisexual with a grudge against the Lannisters, who says that they aren't the only one's who repay their debts. It doesn't look good for him, strutting around in a city full of Lannisters, but he seems dead set on getting revenge, and the actor does a wonderful job of shifting from relatively sane to completely maniacal.

And on the other end of the Westeros spectrum is Arya, wandering through the woods with The Hound trying to kill her way through all of the Lannister and Bolton men that she runs across. You named your sword. Lots of people name their swords. Lots of (idiots). Arya winds up reciting the very words to Pavill or Pevin or something that he did to her friend before murdering him as she takes her murdering revenge on him by plunging needle through his throat. And GOT continues its tradition of having one lovable couple traveling the roads of Westeros, Bran and Tyrion in season 1, Jamie and Breanne in Season 3 and now the Hound and Arya in Season 4. I realize that I've left out Season 2, but I'm sure there is an example. And, much like the redemption of Jaime in Season 3, it appears that The Hound will be redeemed in his travels as well. If Arya winds up trying to kill him just because he road down her friend I'll probably be rooting for him to win the sword fight.

The last new character, Styr, is introduced near the end. He's the leader of a clan of men who have elaborate face markings and who walk very slowly. You get the feeling that Legolas would kill 1,000 of these guys, but I think that's a different fantasy world. Anyhow, Styir meets up with Ygritte to help with the assault on Castle Black, where Jon Snow returns to help warn the men and brag of having slept with a woman. Styr and his men then go on a long diatribe about the meatiness of flesh south of the wall before revealing that they are cannibals. And though you want Ygritte to point out that there is a Burger King just up the road, you can see how it adds to the fierceness of these guys to eschew a double cheeseburger in favor of a hand.

All in all the episode serves as a warning shot to the careful plans of the Lannisters. You can see the cracks in the foundation and the characters hell bent on revenge. Here's to hoping to a full season of banter between Arya and the Hound and to an episode wholly devoted to the new Dario's discovery of Sartre.

Her

The first few days at his house passed in just such a way. Early morning breakfast with the family, in the afternoon, someone would suggest an outing and they'd make their way to a lake, or a shop, or a market, or for a short hike to find some flowers or a few boulders with some water running over it that his littlest sister was convinced was a waterfall. She felt the most natural with the girl, Elsa, seven years old. Children were disarming like that, capable of only being themselves, which was enchanting. Maybe the enchantment that adults feel with children is only the loss of this ability. Though she was nineteen and possessed of good looks and some intelligence she already missed being a child.

On the morning of the third day, after an expansive breakfast of eggs and toast covered in hollandaise sauce along with roasted potatoes, she set out with Elsa to hunt for flowers. It was difficult to be parted from David for even a short period of time. She felt that what was happening between them was magical. It was as if a part of herself was connected to him, like a spool and thread, and as she wandered away from him into the thick grass, she felt herself unwinding.

And yet at the same time it was a relief to be parted from him. She had lived for eighteen and a half years without feeling connected to anyone in quite such an oppressive way. How nice it was to walk among the grass with this little girl. They were hunting for butterflies.

"You have to be very, very quiet," Elsa reminded her. Elsa had pig tails held in place by two large white ribbons, but her expression was of a general giving commands at war.

"I understand," Lauren said, smiling once Elsa had turned her back.

They walked through long grass, left a bit wild, running up to her knees and Elsa's waist. The ground was a bit wet, and she knew they'd have to take off their shoes before returning to the house. Her feet made a slight sucking sound as they gathered and released the mud. Elsa didn't necessarily remind Lauren of herself at that age. Lauren had no been so confident. She'd been bookish and mostly avoided visitors by reading whenever they were around. She had been shy by nature. However, Elsa reminded her of childhood none the less.

"Shhh..." Elsa said, holding up her hand. "I found one." The butterfly was perched on a bit of saw grass, bright orange wings expanding and contracting. It was really just a very well-dressed insect. But beautiful. Elsa crept up as quietly as possible behind the butterfly and threw her net out over it. "I've got it," she cried, holding her net aloft, and for a moment she did, but the butterfly, sensing its danger, fluttered wildly about and wound up making its way out of the top of the net and hovering in the distance for a moment before disappearing into the grasses and small trees.

"Why did it go?" Elsa asked, fighting back tears from her fierce little face.

"I guess it prefers flying to being in a net," Lauren said, bending to cup Elsa's chin in her hands. The little girl pulled away quickly and scampered ahead. In truth, Lauren was happy to see the butterfly escape. Who wouldn't be? 

Him

                Neither one of them knew how to respond. It was too crude a description of life, to describe its ending as something that needed to be fixed.

                “I’ve got a gun in the trunk of my car,” the man said.

             Before the crack of the rifle, and the emptying of light from the eyes, H asked for a moment with the deer. His natural aversion to death was sending off alarm bells in his head but he knelt just the same. The deer reeked of blood and fear, its breath was rapid and shallow. He put his hands on its ribs and said, “Shhh, Shhhhh,” as much for the deer as for himself. The fur was matted and tough, like bristles on a brush.

            He felt himself wanting to withdraw from the moment, but something made him stay. As the two men watched on H said a small prayer for the deer. He asked that the deer be given peace in its final moment, and he felt the deer relaxing with the tone of his voice. He did not remember from his doctrine class if animals went to heaven. He suspected as he was learning in most religious debates, you could find someone who would say that they went to heaven.

           He wasn’t really praying for heaven though. He was praying for peace, a stillness in the soul. His favorite song then started, “As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after thee,” taken from one of the Psalms. He would spend the next few years of his life often leaving these sorts of moments, rife with emotional tension and danger. And yet, that particular day he remained with his hands on the flanks of the deer until the man shot and the body spasmed. When he stood up he was crying. He did not think to compare himself to Christ, but it was a moment of intense and overwhelming pain, waves of sadness about not just the deer but everything in life that falls short of glory. He avoided it as often as possible thereafter.

           The headlights of the car were ribbons strung through the dark. The birds retired for the evening, and he rolled his window down and snuck his arm out of the window, making snake like movements with his arm, enjoying the wind and the cold. In the morning he thought that he’d write her another letter. It was one of those silly and strange things in life, waiting to receive a letter that could possibly be at his house already. Perhaps he should call his mother and ask. 

Her

If she lay in bed for a few moments longer perhaps she’d be ready for that sharp hello. Or better yet, better yet, maybe she could sneak outside before anyone else was up, walk down the driveway past the magnolias and find a quiet place to sit. Life is an interpretative act, a jigsaw puzzle spread out on the floor of the mind. What did his father mean when he said that he liked her choice of major? Why didn’t his mother offer her a glass of wine?

                She slipped out of bed, into her clothes and contacts and walked downstairs. Something was going to have to happen with her breath before she spoke to someone from within five feet. The house was old and the stairs creaked, reverberating in her mind as if they were fireworks booming. She wanted to be a ghost. She wanted to slip through walls and observe a conversation about herself without her being present. She had to walk through the kitchen to get to the front door and to her shoes. It felt like a really slow adventure novel.

                His mother was washing dishes at the sink. The kitchen was south facing, and a large bay window brought in the first bits of morning light. In the yard, evergreens shifted in the breeze. A row of yellow daffodils ran in a row along the house, interspersed with Hollie and azaleas.

                “Oh darling,” Janet said, turning from the kitchen sink, arms half-covered in flour, “how are you this morning?”

                She didn’t remember the crash or the rescue in detail. Bits and pieces of it came back to her in flashes. She couldn’t remember if she knew that guy sitting next to her was attractive before or after the crash. He said he remembered seeing people, strands of hair floating aimlessly before they were carried to safety. Now sometimes when she remembered the crash she was those same people, but she knew that they weren’t a part of her memories, but of his.

                “I’m lovely,” she said, “just lovely.”

                “I’m sorry if I woke you up,” Janet said, turning back towards the sink and spreading dough across a baking sheet, covered in flour. “I wanted to make something nice for everyone. Not that they’ll appreciate it,” she said, smiling.

                She didn’t know how to escape, or whether she even needed to escape. How could it be so terrible to have a conversation with someone’s pleasant mother? Her hands white knuckled the chair as away from Janet’s gaze, she had to either make a move towards the door or sit and be a part of the morning, sacrificing that bit of solitude that she knew she wanted.

                “Can I get you anything?” Janet asked, and Lauren sat, pulling her chair around to face the kitchen, so they could talk together with ease. 

Her

After she awoke she sat for a while in bed. The sun made bits of shadow dance on the wall. She was sleeping in a yellow room, with two small square windows. It had been her boyfriend’s sister’s room until she left for college, and now she was inhabiting it, a stranger’s bed, a stranger’s room. Her toes were cold. The sheets were almost impossibly stiff and tucked tightly beneath the mattress, so that she could not wrap the covers around her as she liked. Little drafts of cold occasionally slipped beneath the sheets with her and she shivered.

                The visit was going well. Her glasses were on the bureau next to her bed. She only put them on when she was by herself because she was certain they made her look librarian like and unpretty. The family breakfasts in this house were large and well attended events. In some ways, they unnerved her. Breakfasts at her family home were rare and haphazard. Often, she and her sister would eat in the living room, reading a book, or watching a show, while their parents finished up. The meal was never particularly formal.

                She found that she liked to ease into her mornings, slowly and surely. She enjoyed an hour or two of quiet in the morning. Something about the first voice of another person, if it came to early in the morning, was like a piece of glass being shattered on the floor. She knew it was silly and that everyone in the family meant well when they said, “Good morning, and how are you?” which she cheerfully answered, the color coming into her cheeks as she smiled brightly back at them, all the while wishing that she was back in bed or wandering some old country road, listening to the birds or the sound of a distant mower. 

That time that Michigan lost and I embraced my sorrow by deciding to write my zombie apocalypse novel because of that episode of New Girl

By and large everyone else has become a zombie. It's passe, I know, and I kept telling them that as they were knocking at my door and asking to eat my brain. "Just one little piece. I won't eat it all," says my neighbor, who hasn't even bothered to give back the lawn mower that he borrowed two months ago before getting turned into a zombie. This is precisely the sort of thing that gets you a shovel in the head, so I waited until he stuck his head through the window and then I bashed my shovel into the side of his head, which pretty much left the majority of his brain all over the kitchen floor, which, to my credit, I didn't even think about eating. 

I'd like to begin at the beginning, way back when everything was fine, and Ron, that's my neighbor, was just a slightly overweight guy who would invite you over to his house to jump in the pool or play a game of ping pong while being jumped on by his oversized golden retriever with him saying, "oh, we've been teaching him not to do that," which, no you haven't Ron or your dog wouldn't be jumping all over me right now that big, affectionate piece of shit when all I'm trying to do is enjoy a delicious and cheap hot dog at the pool. This is precisely the sort of behavior that is probably going to earn Ron's dog a shovel to the head if I ever see him sniffing around doing zombie type things. 

I'm going to get back to that story in a bit, but can I just say that one of the most annoying and underrated things about the zombieapocalypse taking place is that it's damn near impossible to have an intelligent converstaion. Like, I'd have liked to have invited Ron in and maybe shot the breeze with him for a bit over a cold one about the state of the Lakers, or the decline of Western Literature or something, but all everyone is interested in is taking a slight portion of your brain, which is how we wound up in this situation in the first place. The one thing you can't do with a zombie is say something like,

"hey, let's reason about this for a while, what if I just start you off with a small portion of my leg, and we talk about some issues of food supply over the long term. Have you read the Bible? You know, the part about Joseph storing up all the food for the lean years? How would you say this compares to Cormac McCarthy's The Road in terms of your expectatioins?"

This is precisely the sort of tack you can't take with a zombie because they'll just try and eat your brain, and you'll wind up spending the afternoon cleaning them up off the kitchen floor witth a sponge and a heavy heart because you didn't really mind Ron all that much, on his best days he was a pretty decent guy who knew how to throw a party. 

I was also just starting to get involved in online dating and had made some inroads, had a couple of good nights out with some women who seemed like they were just about crazy enough to go out with me again. And then you start logging in to profiles and sending messages, and you're just waiting around to see if they are going to respond and as if relationships aren't hard enough, there's a possibilty that they've been turned into mindless zombies or are just cowering in fear and not checking their internet dating profile but instead focusing on news outlets and random blog posts, fearing for their life or maybe they just didn't have a good time. How the hell is a guy supposed to know? 

Outside, Ron's dog is nosing around in my flowers, which I'm just going to let go because they're pansies, and I didn't like their shade of purple anyway as it wound up clashing with the brick. I also can't tell if his dog, Rudy, is a zombie apocalypse dog ravenous for brains or whether he's just a normal and annoying dog who will jump up on you even if you ask him to stop. These are the sort of connundrums that you'll probably already aware of if you're at all a fan of the genre. I wasn't a connoisseur, but I sort of knew what to expect in terms of little zombie children coming at your or your wife or something, which I didn't have, so I guess I'm missing a critical part of the zombie apocalypse experience, which is the mental anguish you experience over closed loved ones turning into zombies or living in fear of zombies. 

The main thing, if I hadn't made it totally clear is that the zombieapocalypse is a mix of fear and horror and boredom. There is really nothing good on television. The only channels still running things are just showing repeats of movies that I've already seen, and I don't suppose we'll be seeing new episodes of our favorite shows anymore, and I suppose one of the strange things that you wouldn't think you'd find yourself worrying about is what happens to that awful boy king on Game of Thrones? Does anyone kill him, does everyone? That's the sort of thing that I'm thinking about right now as I'm watching Rudy kind of scoot around the back yard doing dog like things. Maybe I'll go throw him a stick. 

 I knew as soon as I stepped into the yard that I'd made an error in judgement. Rudy had always been kind of terrible at fetch. He was one of those sorts of dogs who gets the ball in his mouth and then won't give it back, and even though he deeply wants to continue playing catch, he's entirley unwilling to give back the ball, which will help faciliate his joy. I'm just saying that it probably wasn't going to work anyway. It also wasn't going to work because once I got outside and saw a bit of Rudy's hind leg protruding at a forty five degree angle I knew that he'd become a zombie apocalypse version of Rudy who would probably even be worst at catch. 

I gave him a chance though, because I'm a decent type of person. Who knows? Maybe zombie apocalypse dogs are different than humans and really keep their good senses about them, so I tossed a stick towards him and said, "Go fetch the stick Rudy." And I should confess that Rudy, ever dutiful, started to lurch across the yard to get at the stick while I snuck up behind him and clipped him over the back of the head with my shovel a time or twenty. 

The sun overhead was bright and surreal. Nature didn't seem to care one wit that everyone had all turned into zombies. It was the sort of thing that you'd take time to reflect on, maybe help put things in perspective, "the earth keeps on spinning, eh bud," I said to Rudy, who wasn't really Rudy anymore, but a rude sort of collection of parts that had once been Rudy. I kind of missed him jumping all over me already. 

I'd been asking myself for the past two decades almost on a daily basis, "What does it mean? What does it mean? Why are we here? What am I supposed to be doing?" And I saw now, in the strangeness of this new world that I'd found my calling. I was supposed to go around shoveling things that looked or acted like zombies in the head. Who'd have thought this is where I'd end up? 

Her

She was quiet by nature and fell easily in love. Since the plane crash and rescue she had dreams that she had died. The dreams were strange, her fourth grade teacher was delivering her eulogy, using an overhead projector to talk about her struggles with the capital Q in cursive.

In another dream she awoke to find herself in a coffin. It was eerily silent, and she beat on the top of the wood until her hands started to bleed. Just when she felt that she couldn't bear the feeling any longer that her body and mind would be ripped into a thousand distinct pieces, she remembered that she had died, and drifted back into a peaceful sleep.