Tee hee! Come thee hither weary traveller. Welcome to a world of fantasee and magick! Fol-de-dee, etc . . . Face it, Game of Thrones fans, you're watching sexy Dungeon and Dragons. You were lured in by the relative absence of fantasy tropes initially, but now it's filled with giants and dragons and zombies and shapeshifters and witches.
It’s okay. Best concentrate on the entertainingly grim “real world themes”. These are: “chaos” and “power.” At this stage of the game (of thrones), most of the major characters are deeply depressed because of all the “chaos” or else they’re drunk on the “power”. And some of them are drunk on booze. And some of them are having well-lit gratuitous sex, which is also “a real world theme” if you’re lucky.
The new series starts with a teenage Cersei goes to see what, in other fantasy dramas, would be an old crone in a hut (this is a real job in fantasy stories. Core skills: "Being vague") but as this is Game of Thrones, teen Cersei meets a young crone who sucks her fingers and predicts her future in a sexy way.
"Three questions you get!" says the young crone channelling erotic Yoda and also, many characters in Monty Python's Holy Grail.
Then it cuts to present day King’s Landing where Cersei and Jaime, her brother/lover (very confusing when filling out forms), are staring at their father Twyin’s corpse.
Twyin has open eyes painted on his eyelids so for a moment I anticipate a hilarious Weekend at Bernie's-style ruse. Instead they glumly contemplate their debts, their enemies and the whereabouts of their brother Tyrion.
In the last series Tyrion killed Twyin and escaped on a boat hidden in a box. At the time I thought this reflected contractual discussions with the actor Peter Dinklage (“Look Peter, we could just hire a voiceover artist and have Tyrion stay in a box”).
Now, with contracts renewed, Varys Master of Whispers (of the Antrim Master of Whisperses) lets Tyrion out of the box and reveals himself to be a Whiggish historical optimist and reformer who wants Tyrion’s help saving Westeros.
Tyrion puts him straight. "The future is shit, just like the past," he says before vomiting on the carpet, thus summing up the wider message of Game of Thrones and, incidentally, Late Capitalism.
They’re a good vaudeville double act. Varys says Tyrion has “compassion.”
“I killed my lover with my bare hands. I shot my father with a crossbow!” says Tyrion. “I never said you were perfect,” says Varys, chomping on an invisible Groucho Marx cigar.
Tyrion’s depressed world view is echoed later by lady warrior Brienne who is looking for the Stark daughters.
"The good lords are dead," she sulks, before we cut to newly nefarious Sansa Stark who is now Bad Sansa (Billy Bob Thornton). In timeworn tradition, she marks this transformation by donning black and going goth like Willow in Buffy or Steven Jobs in reality. Bad Sansa now hangs with upwardly mobile dark lord Charles Haughey (Aiden Gillen) in his home in Kinsealy.
“Mara!” yells Haughey angrily as he contemplates the chaos and the PDs.
Regime change
In faraway Meereen, Daenerys is discovering that regime change isn’t easy. There’s an insurgency killing her soldiers and her WMDs (acronym for: Whoa! Major Dragons!) are hidden underground.
Their dark power scares her, she tells her nude assassin lover, who is busy hiding his penis behind things. In contrast to the liberal female nudity policies in Game of Thrones (we've seen three pairs of breasts so far this episode), a lot of effort is expended avoiding penis shots. ("This is a story about breasts, not penises!" I imagine author George RR Martin shouting angrily.)
Later, for example, the props and lighting department conspire to keep Loras's penis hidden for a whole nude scene. This actually imbues Loras's penis with a certain mysterious charisma. In time, Loras's penis could become one of the great unseen characters in television, like Wilson in Home Improvement.
Up north, Channel 4’s Jon Snow and the Night’s Watch are recovering from the exciting, bloody battle in the last series.
The Night’s Watch guard The Wall from monstrous outlanders. Wannabe King Stannis and his witchy priestess girlfriend Melisandre have arrived. Melisandre leers at Jon Snow in a lift (they have a lift).
“The lord’s fire burns inside me, Jon Snow,” she says.
“I’d really get that seen to,” says Jon Snow (he doesn’t really).
“Bows the knee”
Stannis offers the barbarian Free Folk (a 1970s prog-group from over the Wall) the chance to become his subjects if their leader Mance Rayder “bows the knee”.
Rayder declines, so Melisandre speechifies about how great her fanatical monotheistic religion is (the pitch: “sexy Catholicism”). Then Mance is slowly burned on a pyre. I’ll say this for Stannis: he’s tough on crime.
Watching Mance burn to death is horrible, so Jon Snow shoots him with an arrow. In Westeros, shooting an arrow at someone who’s on fire makes you a stand-up guy. The bar is set quite low.
And that’s more or less where we leave it, with Daenerys experiencing dragon-related performance anxiety, Stannis planning to conquer the north, Brienne, Bad Sansa and Haughey searching for a plot and Varys and Tyrion on their way to Meereen, where Varys will no doubt institute child labour laws and build a light rail system.
Predictions for the future: there will be more shocking deaths, more shifting allegiances, more crushed hopes, more gratuitous female nudity and ultraviolence.
Then eventually Daenerys’s dragons will fight the White Walkers’ zombies, which will be awesome and is, “real world themes” notwithstanding, what this is really all about.
Fol-de-lol!
