Mad Men Season 5 Episode 5

Mad Men Season 5 Episode 5

“Buy a bigger house and live in the suburbs”

Whenever we hear this song by Tracy Chapman, S launches into a diatribe about how she really dislikes Tracy Chapman. No one in the family knows why. It’s one of those inexplicable things like volcanos erupting or people thinking up a game like curling. The fifth episode of Mad Men is about, Pete Campbell, who has moved out the burbs with his wife and new child to live the dream. The same dream that Don Draper was living with his wife, Betty, now divorced, in season one of Mad Men.

Pete has always been a bizarre dopppleganger of Don’s. Like Don, he is extremely driven to succeed in business, he’s ruthless and careless with women. It was clear in the first season, right from the start that a part of Don’s dislike for Pete was based on how much Pete cared about rising in the ranks of Sterling-Cooper. However, retelling the sad story of, Don, through the eyes of, Pete Campbell, does change some things.

For one, Pete is obsequious. Where Don has always been charming with women and overpoweringly opinionated and successful in business using his creative vision to bludgeon clients, Pete has always been slyly wheedling in the background, trying to convince everyone to like him. Not in a charming way, but in the sort of way that makes everyone feel uncomfortable because they know they are being had, that the person Pete really wants to please is himself, and that underneath every compliment is a man who is, in short, pretty much an a-hole, which no amount of posturing can hide. Why is it that we dislike people who are trying so desperately hard to be liked?

The episode takes its original shape around a dinner party thrown by the Campbells in which the Draper’s play a starring role. The dislike for Pete is always practically dripping off Don, he notes that he wishes Pete could close the deal as well as his wife, who quasi cons he and Megan into coming over. The dinner party goes off without a hitch. The interesting part of the evening is the transformation that takes place in Don. He winds up fixing a sink and actually conversing with the people at the table as if they were friends, rather than subordinates. This season continues to be Don’s discovery of life through the vehicle of his wife. He is finding out that he likes people, noting that Megan likes everyone.

Of course, there lies in wait the very real possibility that Don doesn’t particularly like being happy, or at least not in the conventional manner. It’s interesting to watch, to see if we’ll be convinced that the Leopard can changes his spots. Can someone live for twenty years as one person and wake up as someone else one morning? Perhaps. Perhaps not. More likely it will be something in between. It’s certainly relevant to ask whether everyone craves happiness. Perhaps Don, perhaps many people are not happiness after all, but something else, contentment, dominion. Certainly these parts of our personality are always in play, occasionally warring with one another in a fight to guide our thoughts and our dreams.

Despite the fact that this episode is basically the Pete Campbell episode, Ken Cosgrove also plays an important role. Ken has a steady and happy marriage that remains largely off screen. He is in the process of working on a collection of short stories that are going to be published by a good press in New York. Ie, outlier here, he seems to be happy.  (Before I move on to talk about the implications of Ken’s writing, it’s of note to discuss why Ken and his wife remain off screen so much. S complained that the show was basically about infidelity, unhappiness etc. I asked whether it would be an “interesting” show if the people were sitting around discussing their work day over a game of backgammon. She demurred after a while, conceding that perhaps watching scenes of blissful people pouring one another coffee and reading the morning news wouldn’t be as interesting. I don’t particularly know why that is true? I suppose we are social creatures and like to gather our social queues from other’s experiences. And yet, if you’ve lived long enough to see the various “happy” marriages and lives that people have carved out for themselves there is not a lot of universality. Sure, certain characteristics like not being an absolute ja-k-ss are probably applicable, but the way that two people find a way to make a life work together is invariably their own, and count me as a person who isn’t particularly interested in watching someone butter toast. ((This whole thing is hard to do, and maybe that’s some of the pleasure of Downton Abbey at its best. Forget all the intrigue and lying and death. The show is at its purest when they are debating the placement of a fork and making it drama)).

Ken’s writing winds up being a sore subject at work. Roger asks him to stop writing and Ken gives his assent, noting that it probably wasn’t going anywhere anyway. (Classic writer response. Also, true). Ken winds up writing under a new pen name by the end of the episode, dissecting the strange and lonely life of Pete Campbell in a short story, talking about the pernicious allure of the suburbs. I won’t comment on the proclivity of writers to write about other writers, particularly in a glorified fashion, except to say that Ken Cosgrove is much too happy to be a believable writer.

Pete spends the latter portion of the episode trying to seduce a young woman in his driver’s education class, only to be eventually outdone by a young handsome man named handsome. After failing with the young girl, Pete, Roger and Don head out with a new potential client who indicates that he’d be inclined to have more fun than he’d had on a previous outing with Lane. Naturally, they head off to a whorehouse where Roger, Pete, and the potential client sample what the house to offer. The camera only follows Pete, who demands that his accompanying woman assume the correct personality before he’s willing to partake. It is this strange need for control, something almost evil that seems to lie under Pete’s every move and motive. The same behavior, when watched through the lens of Don should be no less morally reprehensible, and yet, it certainly doesn’t feel that way.

Don and Pete ride home in the cab together, affirming the strange duality between the two. Don chastises Pete, claiming that when you have it good it’s not worth screwing up. Pete accuses Don of pulling his pants up to the world because he’s still in the honeymoon phase. Pete, as start and odd companion to Don, stands out in this episode’s final scene, saying to Don, “I have nothing.” Of course, Pete has a nice house in the suburbs, a child, a wife, and yet, something is missing. The dream that he was seeking or thought he wanted turned out to be a mirage. That’s in large part why he seems to want to continue to pursue other women, to temporarily alleviate the feeling of emptiness, of nothingness that hangs around his neck like a millstone. This is not just the internal dialogue of Pete, but of Paul, of every piece of writing that castigates the vapidity of the “American Dream.” The vapidity is not the American Dream, it is not living in the suburbs, or the city, having the right set of clothes or car, the vapidity is to think that your dreams and hopes and desires can ever be satiated. 

Of course, Pete's final moment of failure comes when the old British man in the office, Lane, challenges him to a boxing match and beats him up. It's one of those strange scenes where you're rooting at first for Lane not to just get beat up, and then when you realize he's going to win, you are both happy and simultaneously kind of sad of the further confirmation of Pete's essential weaseliness. He could be a Dickens villain. 

Meager Offerings

When I think of trains, I think of you. I think of your purple fingernails tapping the window and the tip of your tongue worrying the left side of your mouth. The countryside is slipping past—cows, heather, bails of golden bay, celadon skies, trees shaped like the backs of bent pilgrims, everything verdant—as we glide over the rails.  I locked eyes with you before I sat down and pulled a book from my bag, something by Mann that I couldn’t focus on because I had already been caught in the thick headlights of your gaze.

Game Of Thrones Season 3 Episode 2

Game of Thrones Season 3 Episode 2

Well, the second episode of Game of Thrones came and went, and it was a bit akin to opening the pages of a pop up book to say hello to everyone. Hey, remember all these other people who weren’t in the first episode, let’s check in and see what’s going on with them in the dark dank woods. I think at this point it’s fair to say that either George R.R. Martin needs to kill off half the cast for the sake of the television viewers, or the HBO writers need to have a giant tournament where half the characters are killed off. I’m kidding. Slightly. I know last week that I said I wasn’t worried, but here I am, worrying. How are they going to be able to get enough time to move this many storylines along? They don’t have 1000 pages. I’m serious though, it means that the moments that we spend with characters have to do a lot of work.  We need to see their development as human beings, how the war or the events are shaping them, and we also need to see them in a sword fight or hunting with dragons or wolves or something. It’s going to be quite a task.

The highlight of the show was the coming out party for Margerery. She’s pretty much a safe bet to one day ride Geoffrey’s corpse down the throne room on her way to snatching the crown. After duping Sansa, does anyone like Sansa? It was nice to have Tyrion talk about how attractive he thought she was, but honestly, does anyone? I guess Littlefinger does, but really he’s pining after her mother. Anyhow, I can forgive the Judasing in the first season, but I can’t forgive how stupid she is. If GOT has taught any of us anything, it’s that you have to be smart. Sansa blurts out that Geoffry is a monster to the mother of Margerery and Sir Lauris, a matriarch who rivals Tyrion in sense of humor and disgust for everyone else, one of my favorite additions to the episode, which in turn allows Margerery to exploit this information by titillating Geoffrey with tales of killing things while he watches. I mean, obviously that’s going to be a huge turn on for that guy.

A fair portion of the episode focuses on Bran, who, woops, grew up a hell of a lot in the week since we’ve left him. In fact, he appears to be about four inches taller and his voice has now dropped several octaves. I suppose this is one problem with having child actors. To no one’s surprise, because Martin stole the idea from Robert Jordan, it turns out that Bran is a warg, or someone who can inhabit the bodies of animals, which, come to think of it, everyone stole this idea from The Beastmaster. (Beastmaster is amazing, we should all get together and watch it sometime, internet).  Anyhow, Bran is captured by another Warg child, who has apparently been hunting for him for a long time. I think this part was added in because the plot wasn’t complicated enough.

Who are you rooting for in GOT? It’s nihilistic attitude towards just about everything, complicates one’s rooting alliances. Yes, ultimately we’re rooting for people who aren’t flesh eating ice zombies, but who is the best among them. I’d cast my vote with Arya and Jon Snow, mainly because they don’t have armies at their back, which always makes people easier to like. But I’m willing to buy Daenerys or Rob Stark if you’re selling.

Speaking of complicated plot twists, young Theon is being held captive, by Lord only knows who, I thought he went off with his fellow countrymen, and the men are using his feet to try and drive screws into the ground, apparently not realizing that Ikea furniture is easier to put together when you don’t try and shove the bolts through human flesh. I think they might have misunderstood the picture where it encourages you to be sure and put it together with a friend. I expected the hooded person driving nails through is foot to be his sister. I was disappointed when it wasn’t, just because it would make all the people who have actually read the books rage about how miscast that actress is. I love nothing more than the television series departing from the book in order to enrage readers. Mind you, if I’d read the books I’d be saying the same thing.

We get one more heartwarming story from Caitlyn Stark, about how she prayed for the death of Jon Snow when he was a wee babe. Has anyone taken a harder fall than Lady Stark? Of course, eventually she prayed that he not die, and when her prayers were answered, she took advantage of it by calling him a bastard a few hundred times. I think by the end of the show we’re going to discover that she was the one who convinced Geoffrey to cut off her husband’s head.

We didn’t have any dragons this episode. It’s nice to save on your CGI budget every now and again. Even The Hobbit didn’t show its dragon, and they have movie money.

We spent a brief period of time with Jon Snow, admiring the wonderfully bleak scenery of Iceland. I don’t remember that anything else happened. But hey, how about that Iceland?

We took a brief peak at Rob Stark, long enough to witness him attending his grandfather’s funeral, which earns him an upbraiding from one of his bannermen. The bannermen points out that the war was lost when Rob got married. I don’t necessarily agree, but these are the sorts of folks who consider having your hand gnawed off by a wolf to be in good fun, so perhaps he’s got a point. Marriage has made Rob soft, otherwise he’d have gone all the way to the heart of the Seven Kingdoms and killed Geoffrey, or gotten killed, or whatever.

Let us not forget the brief scene of Tyrion and his lusty house maid. In which we all see Peter Dinkelage, in retrospect, suggesting that Tyrion not be so badly wounded as it means an extra hour or two in makeup on any given day. Of course, the meetings between Shea and Tyrion are shot through with the reality that his father probably will end up killing her at some point, which generally ends a successful relationship.

We also continued the adventure of Breanne, the world’s tallest female knight, gamboling through the countryside with the wise cracking Jamie Lannister. Jamie had a couple of gems, including one about the late Lord Renley. On a serious note, Jamie points out that a tinker that they meet on the King’s road could possibly give them up, and suggests to Breanne that she should kill him. She refuses, and, of course, the beggar reports them to the authorities. If any lesson is to be learned from GOT it’s that you can’t be nice. You must be ruthless, and kill local tinkers, refuse to get married, and have one’s hand gnawed on by a wolf. The morality of the show continues to be at odds with a traditional hero’s journey, as characters who constantly make the “true” choice are often punished if it isn’t the right one. It’s a bit hopeless. However, I’m sure they can all agree that anything is better than being eaten by an ice zombie. Or at least let’s hope so. 

Mad Men Season 5 Episode 4

Mad Men Season 5 episode 4

What is Mad Men or any show about? I’m generally not one for boiling things down in such way. In general, television shows, good or bad, are primarily about the relationships between people. Procedurals are less bound by this convention, reliant as they are on action and suspense, less about the characters than about solving a mystery and bringing justice etc. However, at heart, they still need to have interesting characters and relationships in order to be worth watching. Plenty of television shows aren’t worth watching.

I don’t know what Mad Men is about. That’s a pretty crappy way to answer a question that you’ve posed. But I suppose if I’m to follow my own logic then the show is about people. And I suppose the show’s real meaning or what it’s about are then found in what the characters are dealing with. Friends is a show about finding someone to marry and having some laughs with friends. Seinfeld is a show about friendship and narcissism. Grey’s Anatomy is a show about helping people/seeing their anatomy. The fourth episode of Mad Men starts to offer some clues as to what at least this season will be about: death.

It’s familiar ground, death, certainly not the road less traveled. Though paradoxically it’s a road that nobody gets to travel down twice to tell us whether the evening wear is formal or business casual, the dinners light and airy or comprised of worms and mud. Various cultures and epochs of time have resulted in different postulations as to what exactly happens at that moment. Most have settled on the theory that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Papa New Guineau results in a funeral in western Texas, but the results haven’t been confirmed.

The episode is also about, Don, and Don’s propensity for sleeping around during his previous marriage. And therefore, it is about fear. The fear motif is introduced via the murder of eight nursing students in Chicago, and, in particular, the story of the one woman who survived when the murderer lost count. It’s strange how the mind of everyone turned to the one survivor rather than the slain, but that is what everyone pretty much does, which makes sense, the fear, and fear of death is the element that the living can grab onto. To be dead is merely to be dead. As Oscar Wilde said, “We die only once, but for such a very long time.”

The fear generated by this actual historical event in the lives of the characters on Mad Men was expertly employed during this episode. It is Don and Megan’s fear, made explicit by her verbally, that he will wind up running around on her. Don, sick as a dog, denies this but is haunted by his subconscious. He imagines that an old flame follows him home and seduces him. The confusing, and expertly played part of this scenario is that the viewer is roughly 75 percent sure that they are watching a fever dream, however, the other 25 percent is like, “wait, is that crazy lady really at his house?” The tension between the real and the imagined is heightened when Don strangles her to death after they sleep together. For me, even mostly suspecting that the scene was not real, it was one of the most stressful moments on Mad Men that I’d ever watched. The murder would have been a moral failing on the order that would have made liking Don Draper, which many of us do, damn near impossible. As he frantically tries to shove the body under the bed my heart was beating intensely fast. Did Mad Men just jump the shark? No. It didn’t. Because once you have a murder you spend the rest of the season/show talking and worrying about that murder. The characters all become caricatures revolving around a plot point rather than dynamically fleshed our realities. However, by shoving the body under the bed we get not only a reenactment of the Chicago murders, we also are introduced into Don’s raging battle with his sub-conscious mind in an incredibly visceral way. On the surface, he seems happy, but can he trust that happiness? Can he trust himself? Expertly played.

The sub plots also revolved around varying kinds of fear. Sally, unmoored from the wonderful parenting of Betty Draper is taken care of by her step-grandmother, who turns out to make Betty wind up looking like mother of the year. By the end of the evening, the grandmother has described her father kicking her across the room for no reason as good parenting, told Sally the details about the murders in Chicago, sits in a chair wielding a meat cleaver and gives Sally a sleeping pill to send her off into the night, where she too, like Don’s old girlfriend, ends up underneath the couch. The grandmother and Sally, so at odds throughout the episode are united in their fear.

The episode also deals with the various parental failings. Betty is described as letting Sally watch television all day during the summer. Don is the absentee father, who disapproves but isn’t around to change anything. The grandmother’s father booted her across the room for no reason to teach her about the world, and the grandmother is passing out meat cleavers and sleeping pills. I don’t think anyone has a subscription to Parenting Magazine on this show.

The other sub plot revolves around Peggy taking Don’s new secretary, Dawn, home to sleep on her couch. Dawn’s brother is afraid for her to ride home on the subway because of the riots and the muders. Thus, once again the murders in Chicago are the backdrop for character development. Peggy winds up spending the evening awkwardly trying to bond with Dawn, who is clearly uncomfortable, and pretty much spoils the whole gesture of saying, “we’re both different in that office,” by locking eyes with her over her purse before going to bed.

The other major plot deals with the return of Joan’s husband, Greg. The whole return is aided by Joan’s carping mother taking the baby away, so the two of them can have some quality time having sex/having Greg tell her that he’s signed up to head back to Vietnam for another year. This eventually winds up in the dissolution of their marriage, with Joan pointing out that he’s never been a good man, which is pretty much true from what the viewer has been shown. And yet, it’s hard not to feel that Greg is in a tough position. He has been cast as a bit of a wayward person who has finally found his calling in the army. And, he’s on the front lines of a war watching young men die in battle. It’s easy to see why he might feel pulled between country and home. However, as Joan pointed out, he has always kind of been a jerk.

This episode, more than any other, was about death. It was about fear. It was about the variety of ways that people try to combat fear. It’s compelling and strange to watch everyone flail around with meat cleavers or sub-conscious ex-lovers. It felt like a very good episode because it felt so familiar. I remember sitting with a baseball bat in my living room on many an afternoon convinced that someone else was in the house because of a small noise that I’d heard. We human beings are strange. This episode did a good job capturing that. 

Mad Men Season 5 Episode 3

Certain nights you drive home with the music on high, singing along to songs, poorly,  which is the only way you know how. You dance in the car within the confines of your seat. Rain is falling in the dark, but you know your skin wouldn't even feel it. This is an act of transcendence, of futility, as all are. And even though you know that this gesture will fall short of the arising you seek, a part of  you wants to take a picture of this moment, so you can put it an envelope, and mail it to soeone you used to know who lives in Kansas now, with three dogs, you'll attach a note that says, "This is the person I have always been." 

Mad Men Season 5 Episode 3

The third episode begins like a punch line to a joke, with Henry Francis calling upstairs for Betty. It was easy to forget that she was part of the show during the first two episodes. She spent no time on screen and her last parting with Don at the end of Season 4, signaled a break from the show that we’d started with. It was easy to imagine that the break would be permanent. And yet, here was the Betty episode.

In order to talk about the Betty episode we first have to talk about January Jones. Once a show becomes popular, as Mad Men has, the actors and actresses suddenly become minor celebrities. With celebrity comes the offer of movies, commercials, hot air balloon flights with ice sculptures (I may have made the last one up) etc. And, eventually the actors and actresses will take on a role, something different than what we’ve seen from them before. Christina Hendricks shows up in Drive, and you can stumble across her in old episodes of Firefly as well, where she plays an as- kicking conniving thief. You can watch Jon Hamm making a fool of himself on 30 Rock, or Bridesmaids, or SNL. While I always feel a bit silly watching Don Draper act like a cad, I’m reassured by it because I realize that Jon Hamm is an actor, playing a role. I realize that Christina Hendricks is as well. And that takes us to January Jones.

The problem with watching January Jones in any other movie is that you suddenly realize that she operates at one register. Suddenly, what seemed a well-acted first season, culminating in her walking out back to shoot some birds, now feels like exactly the sort of performance she’d give if she was imbued with mutant powers. As a viewer, you watch season 1 and can see the echoes of Betty Friedan, of a woman living at the periphery of her philandering husband’s life, and her distance, her iciness, even her poor parenting seem like a natural outgrowth of her alienation. It makes her seem kind of like a wonderful actress. I suppose I should have picked up on the warning signs when her voice didn’t moderate at all during the brief almost fling with someone else’s fiancée during her riding lessons. The problem is her voice. The instrument that makes Jennifer Lawrence able to seem 30 when she’s twenty one, makes January Jones sound like she’s perpetually arriving from a state of having just been unthawed, one can see her playing a mean Han Solo, and because of that cold voice, she needs to add extra emotion into her acting, and she’s just too damn expressionless and pretty to make you believe she’s suffering all that much. I realize that it’s unfair to blame her acting on her beauty, but it ain’t helping. It’s hard to picture anything could ever go wrong when her face and skin always look so exquisite. In this case, her beauty is doing her no favors.  I’m trying to watch the show imagining that I don’t know that JJ operates on one level. If I do that, I can almost enjoy her. (Her finest moment in this episode is reaching over and having a second bowl of ice cream and managing to seem about as satisfied with herself as any person has ever been despite her concerns about her weight).

The Betty episode primarily centers around her scare with cancer. The scare highlights, rather well, the difficulty of two people deciding to separate after many years of marriage. It’s clear that Don is shaken by the news, and that Betty feels it necessary, in some small way, to turn to him, which feels entirely believable. It also leads both of the new spouses to question the motives behind Don and Betty’s calls. And yet it is so obvious to the viewer that so much has passed between these people that it would be nearly impossible for the two of them to pretend as though it didn’t matter.

The other main plot of the episode is an attempt to get the Rolling Stones to sing a song for Heinz. The attempt is so patently wayward, that the only tension arrives when Don briefly talks with a teenager girl waiting to see the Stones. He quickly diffuses the sexual tension that she tries to bring about and begins questioning her about her like of the Stones, which is the first sign that he is remotely invested in work. I don’t think I was ready for an entire season of Don cooking pancakes and mooning after his wife, so I was glad to see a bit of that old flame, even if it does come with requisite burnings.

SCDP also retains the services of Mowhawk Air courtesy of the fine workings of Pete Campbell. He slides a subtle dagger into Roger by moderately putting him in charge of the account. And, thus we continue to see the ascendancy of Pete and the decline of Roger, which is also evidenced in his retrograde view of Don’s new black secretary. It seems clear to me that he’s turning into a bit of a dinosaur, but I hope they hold on to him since he always has the best lines. “Get me a good looking version of, Don.”

The final piece of the puzzle is the hiring of a Jewish copywriter. In case you’ve forgotten this is the season where we deal with racial and religious tension. We’re not even remotely approaching Downton Abbey territory, but it will be interesting to see how much of a role these tensions play in the upcoming season. I say this because as interesting as ethnography is, what’s really interesting are the dynamic characters that we’ve seen evolved through the first four plus seasons.

Mad Men Season 5 Episode 2

Mad Men Season 5 Episode 2

The second episode of Season 5 offers hints and outright clues as to what the season will be about. First, Sterling Cooper is forced, after an add joke gone awry, to hire an African-American to work in their office. This doesn’t go over with everyone in the office, but the audience can see the connection from the first episode, this season’s historical maker will be race and inequity. Thus far the show has dealt either sensitively or tangentially enough with world events for them to have been an interesting part of the show without ever overwhelming the main plot. Race is something of a taboo subject in America, and I’m interested to see how the show engages with it. Certainly, they are doing it through a historical lens, but it’s still interesting to watch them walk that still tenuous line.

The second piece, hinted at in the first episode, is Pete coming home a bit later to his wife, who, sweet lady that she is, affirms him in his desire to be ruler of Sterling Cooper/the world, before he gives her a big hug and slithers into bed. I don’t think he ends this season as the consummate family man. His development has been interesting though, as he’s always been that kid in school who no one liked, but who didn’t give a damn and just kept succeeding. It was clear from the first season that he could one day be a rival to Don Draper in terms of his sheer ruthlessness, and, in this season when Don says that he isn’t even that interested in work, it’s easy to see the baton starting to be passed to Pete. It’s unclear what Pete will do with the baton, perhaps use it to bash everyone else on the head.

The episode also highlights Joan’s return to the office, casting her as a woman who has a desire to work, clearly showing a shift from the beginning of the show in the late fifties when such an idea would have been anathema. Joan is being shown as the forerunner of the modern woman, one who wants to have it all, and knows, in a strange way, that she can’t. She can’t be both at home to enjoy her child’s every moment and working long hours at the office, and so she must choose. Weiner has simplified the choice a bit at this point, making Joan’s desire to work a stronger force. I’d be interested to see if the tension between the two could be explored more for her internally, as it’s pretty clear that the easy way to create that tension is externally, from her husband’s return. However, the internal struggle would be of more interest to me as the viewer.

The centerpiece of the episode is the tension created in the office by the  marriage of Don and Megan. Her French bedroom song, is mocked by Roger and lusted after by Harry, which leads Don to say, “we don’t make fun of each other’s wives here.” It’s clear after two episodes that much of the focus on this season will be on the dynamic between Don and Megan. The difference in their age and experience, and how their relationship changes the working relationships in the office and the degree to which Don is respected by his colleagues. When Megan leaves early, upset at Don’s treatment after the party, he hurries home after her, cancelling on the rest of the day. Part of Don’s charm and magnetism has always been his desire to do great work. Absent that, it will be interesting to watch how he is regarded in the office.  

The tension  created by the difference between Don’s age and Megan’s is ever present. It is clear that he desires her a great deal, as expressed in their make up sex, but it is also clear that her youth unnerves him. He is trapped between wanting her and wanting her to be safe. The transition of a spouse like Betty, a traditional, if ice queenish fifties house wife, to his young French secretary is vast, and the big question in the early part of the season is whether she has tamed him, whether his disinterest in work and women will last. 

Game Of Thrones Season 3 Episode 1

Game of Thrones Season 3 Episode 1

Note: I haven’t read the books. Nor do I ever intend to read the books. I have very little interest in how the source material compares to the television show that we are watching. I care about the quality of the television show.

I was late to the Game of Thrones party, binge watching twenty episodes in the late summer. I didn’t know whether I’d like or not, but I was willing to give it a shot. This is sort of a lie. I grew up reading fantasy books by the dozen. For years, when other pre-teens and teenagers were hanging out with friends or trying to figure out the riddle of the opposite sex, I was holed away reading fantasy novels. For a while, I’d come home and read a book a day. Eventually I gave up on fantasy novels, myth books and dragons were replaced by banana boats, bull fights, and Macondo. However, the seed that was planted in my childhood never went entirely dormant, and so, when I started watching GOT it was with a childish and nerdy joy. Look, dragons and people wearing armor! Yay!

The show has wound up being much deeper and interesting than just dragons and armor. We have a beheading within the first ten minutes of the first episode, which, though executed legitimately and with honor by Ned Stark, arises out of a misunderstanding of what the man who is being beheaded has scene. This scene casts a long shadow over the rest of the show, and it was important that they nearly lead with it. It immediately set the tone that no action or decision was absolutely white or black. This was a world of complexity, no ring of power and ring wraiths in this version. No. Everyone wasn’t going to be as good or as smart as we’d like them to be. And, if things went poorly, they’d lose their head.

I wrote a great deal about the last season of Downton Abbey, and what I was constantly harping on was the show’s pacing. Every episode seemed intent upon bringing up an issue, money, a marital quarrel, and then having it resolved by episode’s end, often to the detriment of good storytelling. Well, now we have the return of the show that is almost the antithesis of the Downton model, GOT is telling a story in ten episodes, not one, and so the individual episodes can feel flatter than they really are, mere preludes to a longer journey, and, of course, they feel that way because that’s precisely what they are. However, when done well, as I’d argue GOT is, the narrative matches that of a good conversation. You don’t keep talking with someone to hear how things are going to wind up. You keep talking to hear the next joke, next quick turn of phrase, or interesting story. We are too consumed with narrative endings, finalities etc. The late great David Foster Wallace’s master work Infinite Jest followed this model to a t, continually keeping you interested by humor, sadness, pyrotechnical linguistic wizardry, memorable characters, and occasionally, the plot. The good things are worth waiting for, sometimes even when they don’t come. GOT, at its best, works in this manner. They have lush scenery from Croatia, Iceland, coupled with sword fights, low cut dresses and fire breathing dragons. So, even if the characters aren’t doing as much as we might like, we’re entertained along the way.

The first episode of the third season follows the model of season two. Establish the wide set of characters in their new surroundings. The first is John Snow, who has moved from Winterfell (Which made me sad when I didn’t see it in the opening map scene) to the Night’s Watch, to keeping company with the wildlings in short order. He delivers a semi-convincing reason for joining with the wildlings, citing the complicity of the watch with the slaying of innocent baby boys, which becomes a theme in this episode, oh, GOT, how you warm my cold heart with all your talk of innocents being slain. I’m going upstairs to hug Julian. Anyhow, Snow delivers a brief speech, and here is the cool thing about GOT. I’m eighty percent sure that he’s just saying it to get in good with the wildlings. I’m also eighty percent sure that he’ll find out it’s more complex than he thought, and twenty percent of me thinks that maybe he has changed his mind after seeing Gwen from Downton Abbey.

The action shifts from there to the armies of Robb Stark, marching after the retreating Lannisters. At Harrenhall, they discover two hundred of their kinsmen slain and the castle empty, which pretty much just confirms what we already knew about the Mountain. Also, he finds a cell for his mother, which, it may have been a bit kinder to not put her up in a castle renowned for ghosts and death, but a son has to do what a son has to do to his traitorous mother.

Was the episode good? Sure, it was good. It was good in the sense that I’m fairly heavily vested in a number of the characters, and they’ve been put in interesting and or dangerous situations. I’ve also been shown that the characters, like Tyrion, are complex, capable of change, and I’ve also been shown that valor and honor isn’t always rewarded as we might like. In short, I rarely know what is coming next, and I find that kind of delightful. I don’t get the sense of meandering that other folks sometimes complain about with GOT. Sure it meanders, but thus far, through two very solid seasons I’ve no reason not to trust that we’re going somewhere good. This is not the smoke monster from Lost. This is the smoke monster born of the red lady, which, what the hell was that about? Are they all just in purgatory?

From there we move to the plight of Tyrion, locked away in his tiny cell despite having saved the kingdom at Blackwater. He and Bron negotiate new terms of service for his protection and then Tyrion spars with his ever acidic sister and later, his father. Tyrion has it tough. If the show has a “hero” at this point, it’s probably Tyrion, which just means that he’ll wind up with his head on a pike a year from now.

That’s the other interesting thing about the show. Once you’ve established that anyone is fair game for a beheading, it unsettles the viewer. It makes us question who we’re supposed to be rooting for. By the end of Season 2, when the white walkers (I’m just glad we have another show with some zombies on it because it’s fresh) appeared, you find yourself sort of rooting for everyone to start getting their shi- together lest they become white walker meat, which means, you have no idea who you’re pulling for. You’re pulling for peace, which doesn’t look promising.

One excellent scene in the first episode shows Marjorie leaving the caravan to speak to the children in an orphanage about their father’s, dead in the battle of Blackwater, and promise them her patronage. If we’ve learned anything about her character thus far, it’s that she’s rather calculating when it comes to power . And though it would be easy to be charmed by her, especially when compared with Geoffrey, it’s clear to me that she is doing it to help mend the rift between the royalty and the commoners. Right now I’ve got dibs on her sticking around for a while, just as I have dibs on Lord Balisch running away and marrying Sansa against her will.

The final two pieces of the puzzle are Lord Davos, surviving the wildfire and the death of his son to head back home for a good old fashioned failed murder attempt on the red lady. This one was seen from a mile away, so much so that even his friend who dropped him off warned him of it. Sir Davos was too good. He had to go.

The final piece is the mother of dragons, who spent the large portion of season 2 whining about her dragons. In this season, she seems a bit stronger, only briefly whining about her army before watching her dragons roast and gobble up fish. She then goes to a small island to try and obtain some enuchs soldiers from a salty war lord who cuts off their manhood and nipples and has them kill baby’s to prove their worth. It’s not necessarily a job I would apply for, but I’d at least inquire about the health benefits. By the end of the episode it’s unclear if the Dragon Lady is going to buy the slaves, reform them and turn them into a wandering band of troubadours, or whether she’s going to burn them all with dragons. I’m voting for dragons, but I know that’s my childhood talking.