Game Of Thrones - Season 6

At Least They Moved Things Forward

If you had to put it in a nutshell, season 5 felt like they were spinning their wheels. Nothing really advanced a whole lot and some pieces moved around the board to reposition things, but in most part season 5 was mostly a regrouping kind of season for many of the major characters, and then Jon Snow got killed by his own guys.

So... (world's worst kept ) Spoiler alert!



I'm guessing we'll remember this decade for the great TV series we're seeing, just as much as we remember the 60s for music and the 70s for bad taste in fashion! ... we'll remember the 2010s as the decade of amazing TV series that commanded loyalty and close watching. With things like 'Breaking Bad', 'Mad Men' 'House of Cards' and 'Game of Thrones' together with any number more of amazing serials; it really is a golden age right now.

Season 6 of GOT is a departure from the earlier seasons in the sense that it is starting to pay off some of the tory promises they made along the way. We're get an elaborate introduction as to who the three eyed crow really was and why it was important for Bran Stark to travel deep into the north, and what the whole business warg-ing really means. Arya starts plying her skills as an assassin, and the Lannisters do more Lannister things. Even Danaerys looks to be gathering all her assets, getting them ready to cross these to invade Westeros; and even Theon Greyjoy makes it home. For those whom destiny has called, they are beginning to answer those calls in Season 6.

In a sense, if the entire 'Game of Thrones' series can be seen as one long epic story (which it obviously is) we've moved deeper into Act 2 and maybe to the turning point that get us to Act 3. The sort of story churn that was endemic in Season 5 was perhaps a symptom of the story being in Act 2, right across the board. it felt like nobody was really getting anywhere.

Just How Much Stuff Is There?

It's worth doing some back of the envelope calculations, as you know I like doing.
A series of 'Game Thrones' goes for 10 episodes at roughly 45mins content subtracting out opening title and end credits of each episode. That makes it roughly 450minutes of story per season, across the 8 projected seasons we're talking about 3600minutes, a 60hour story. That's pretty extraordinary for a screen story that is serialised. This in't like 'Seinfeld' with 60hours of 22minute episodes each standing freely.

Just for comparison, if you count all the behemoth 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Hobbit' movies together, you get about 1100minutes excluding opener and end credits. So when all's said and done, 'Game of Thrones' is going to be 3 times as long as the epic-beyond-epic Tolkien screen adaptations.  It's going to be twice as long as all the Star Wars movies put together even after 'Rogue One' makes its entry late this year; twice as long as all the Harry Potter movies strung together; three and a half times longer than all the Rocky movies put together and about the same for all the 'Die Hard' movies strung together.

You - literally - get the picture.

How can something like this not be the 'War and Peace' /monumental-creative-output™️ of this decade if not this century? Clive James was lamenting that he would not get to see Season 5 because he was expecting to die. I really hope he enjoyed Season 6.

It's gobs and gobs of narrative about people and places you'll never really need to know about except to participate in conversations about TV around the water fountain at work. It might just be overkill. A fine example where overwhelming quantity is of itself a kind of quality.

"But Is It Any Good?"

Amazingly there are some holdouts out there who won't watch it until G.R.R. Martin has finished the books and they've read it all. The report I got from Skarp about these bookish that after the first one, the actual quality of the writing goes down sharply, and os one would not be missing much in skipping the books altogether and consuming the fiction as one epic TV story.
I'm agnostic about these things because life is actually short enough not to want to engage in reading yet another FAT Book when you could read 3-4 cool books in their stead.

I mean, we're already inundated with content. Take it from somebody who watched a lot of television this year - if I had to read all the comics and books before I watched all that stuff it was based on, I'd have no time to do my thing... Like this blog.

Of course I'd be amiss if I didn't link to this, so here it is...


Some people are really intense about all this.

The Ironic Politics Of 'Winter'

The catchphrase "Winter is Coming" finally got its moment in Season 6 where it was declared Winter has arrived. That's another sign the entire series has transitioned into the final act.

The Winter is very much the metaphor for Global Warming, except it's a kind of global cooling in the world of Westerns and Essos. As you'd expect the big picture problem of the army of the (un)dead doesn't seem register much with anybody in Westeros. If you consider Jon Snow strategically brought the Wildlings to the south of the Ice Wall in order to deprive the army of the (un)dead, then not even his compatriot Crows could understand the simple maths of addition by subtraction and promptly killed him as traitor at the end of Season 5. So do people wise up even a little bit about the impending problem? No, Season 6 is spent in equal parts settling old scores and squabbling for the penny-ante.

I can't but help think about our own recent elections where the big vote-swayer was the Medicare but nobody - not event eh Greens - went on the front foot about Global Warming or Renewable Energy. The most I could gather from Grayndler was that the Greens candidate trying to knock off Albo was a real dickhead in private, and many a lefty-greeny was glad he didn't get up. Meanwhile the planet...
I only bring that up to highlight the point that the Greens are equally unperturbed by Global Warming as characters in Game of Thrones are unperturbed by the army of the dead.

Why Is Westeros Like That?

It's a weird milieu, the world of 'Game of Thrones'. It's a little like it should maybe be an alternative England. The events are reminiscent of (because they're based on) events of the Hundred Years War as well as the War of the Roses. Yet, there is a strangely modern sensibility to the English vernacular spoken. I struggle with this because it's the biggest impediment to me suspending the disbelief as required. I can' help but wonder "when and where the hell is this going on?"

My current pet theory is that Westeros and Essos is a future lost colony deep in space where English has survived. That would account for the accumulated knowledge of English-speaking in our world as it applies to their medieval-looking world. It would make much more sense if they were in the far future, rather than in a parallel world given the way they speak.

Also, I struggle with the notion that their civilisation is thousands of years old, but static in this high-medieval mode. When you consider even one thousand years gets us to the Viking invasion of England and another gets you to Julius Caesar invading Britain, a static culture and technology for "thousands" of years gets me thinking of that as a feasibility.

In my version - which is totally made up so I can combat my own straining cognitive dissonance at watching the series - is that it's taking place in the distant future on another planet that strongly resembles Planet Earth, but isn't. It got colonised by people who were nostalgic for England of Old Earth in parts where they could re-build it. The dragons the Targaeryans had in the past were genetically engineered amusements and/or bio-weapons, but now that technology is lost, but basically these people are living on a lost colony.

Yeah, it's really elaborate but it's the only way my brain can make sense of the way these characters speak and behave.