How all men must die makes Game of Thrones so brilliant
When one watches Game of Thrones, one is reminded of Shakespeare's brilliant line from King Lear, "The worst is not so long as we can say, 'This is the worst'."
Of all the people we first met at Winterfell in the pilot episode, the only one who has been left whole is Rickon, and that poor kid must be in deep psychological trauma. A Game of Thrones season isn't quite complete until a Stark is killed, or maimed, or both, and the fifth edition has gone a little further than that. The three who had been saved from near-impossible situations, multiple times - Sansa, Arya, and Jon - finally became victims.
One could quite easily make a case for the viewers being the most traumatised of all the participants in this saga - if you thought the rape of Sansa Stark was bad, oh, wait for a couple of episodes, and there it is...the burning of Shireen Baratheon on a stake, filmed almost exactly like rape, with the camera trained on a helpless witness as we hear the victim's screams. Hardly had we recovered before we had to see Arya, this girl whom we feel is safe even when she's made a career of washing corpses, go blind. And that was a good half hour before Cersei's long-drawn walk of shame, and oh-my-god-none-of-that-matters-anymore because Jon Snow - Jon Snow, of all people - is lying in a pool of blood, the betrayed expression that has become characteristic of his eyes, by force of habit, now frozen for all eternity. And the Old Gods and New and the Lord of Light and the Many-Faced God put together are not going to be able to save the wildlings, caught between the Night's Watch and the White Walkers in alien territory, so, yay, we're in for a few more blood baths.
At this point, one wonders whether the last five years have been all about subversively garnering our support for the White Walkers.
And, yet, we know the viewership will break all records when the next season premieres. Because, hey, Bran is alive, and we haven't seen him all season, and he has to do something quite fantastic, right? Because, maybe, like Bran, Jon isn't dead, or maybe that Melisandre lady will resurrect him, because why else should she land up at Castle Black? Because, for all its clichés and binaries, and the fact that some of its scenes lend themselves to music from Hum Aapke Hain Koun, we are never quite sure what's going to happen to whom, and that is the secret behind the hold Game of Thrones has over its audience.
No drama series which has gone on for so long can be said to have never flagged, not even Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. In fact, the only TV series that I can recall having maintained their standard all through are perhaps Seinfeld and Blackadder, and those relied on humour.
Despite all the outrage and criticism, ranging from the depiction of violence against women to colonialist undertones in Daenerys' exploits at Slavers' Bay, Game of Thrones keeps millions of viewers engaged, and will continue to do so.
Perhaps what makes it such a fascinating watch is its willingness to shock its audience, to kill off characters who are proven to be much-loved, and make departures from the novels, with authorial consent, so that even those who have read all the books so far can be surprised. A show becomes boring when one can predict what will happen, and one can never do that with Game of Thrones.
Yet, nothing that happens in the story is an obvious red herring. Often, a little piece of information is planted amidst a more exciting storyline, and eventually becomes significant in another episode. Take, for instance, the random seduction of Bronn by Oberyn's daughter, through which we learn of a poison that is eventually used on Myrcella.
Game of Thrones made no bones about the fact that we would see extreme violence, right from the start. We saw a beheading the very first episode; in fact, we saw a ten-year-old being forced to witness a beheading by his father; soon after, we saw an animal sentenced to death for the foolishness of Sansa, and the sadism of Joffrey.
The show set a pattern - every season, there would be a gruesome death or an ugly battle towards the end, but the last episode would leave us with a sense of hope. In Season 1, Eddard Stark was executed when we thought, surely, any moment now, someone would intercede; in the final episode, Daenerys' dragons were born. In Season 2, there was the Battle of Blackwater; but the season ended with all the Stark children safe; Bran and Rickon escaped against all odds, while Arya found a friend who gave her a coin that would help her find her way to safety. In Season 3, there was the horrifying Red Wedding; but then, Daenerys had her rockstar moment, being carried by a mob of grateful liberated slaves; and Arya killed a man, showing us she meant business. Season 4 was packed with ups and downs - Joffrey, that despicable creature, died; Sansa escaped; Tyrion was sentenced to death; Oberyn seemed all set to save him, and then he had his skull crushed; Jon Snow found support with Stannis Baratheon; a cute little princess was teaching everyone to read; Arya was sailing for Braavos; Bran found the Heart Tree.
But this season has been extreme, even by the show's standards. The long-overdue re-transition of Reek to Theon was overshadowed by everything else that happened. At least six characters have died in the final episode, ironically titled Mother's Mercy.
Even so, it leaves us with hope. Maybe the Khalasar that surrounded Daenerys after her dragon behaved like an Indian auto rickshaw will make her their Khaleesi because they're Drogo fanboys; or, that ring she dropped in the vast nothingness may catch the light and allow the two men who are in love with her to find her; maybe Stannis is not actually dead, you know, not dead-dead; and Jon Snow can't be dead, because whatever actor Kit Harington says about not coming back, we're about 99 percent certain he's the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, right? Hey, Sam just went to become a maester, and maybe in the few hours he's had at the Citadel, he's discovered an antidote to stab injuries; and, worst case scenario, when the White Walkers come, we won't care because everyone we like is dead anyway.
That is one of the cleverest things about the show - every time we are sick of evil winning, it gives us hope. Who would have ever thought Cersei would land up in prison, starved and deprived of water, and released naked to walk through stony paths to the Red Keep, while the public spit and throw garbage at her? And every time we think this is a run-of-the-mill good-triumphs-over-evil story, we see otherwise - a Stark gets killed, or a Lannister gets saved, or a little girl is burned alive.
The writers also keep us guessing by paying attention to the rumours in which fans engage. This year, the big hope was that Benjen Stark would return. We got excited, only to find ourselves in a trap, along with Jon Snow. Yet, we don't feel played. When we step back, we're amused by the writers' little jibe at us.
The intelligence of the writing is also in how much we know that the characters don't. Which is why we find ourselves biting our nails so often, and yelling, "Oh, my god, don't do that!" We knew that Cersei had a hand in killing Jon Arryn before Eddard Stark knew, and we knew it was crucial for him to tell Robert about the parentage of Joffrey before he told Cersei what he had found; we groaned when he spared Robert the secret on his deathbed; we sighed when Sansa refused help from Brienne of Tart; we screamed when she trusted Reek; we ached for Bran to call out to Jon at Craster's Keep; for the longest time, we were the only ones who knew that Bran and Rickon were alive. Knowing more than the characters do makes us care for them, and care for their stories.
Game of Thrones can get away with a lot, because, right from the start, it has reinforced the idea of a world that is far removed from ours, with different rules - a world in which a woman falls in love with her rapist husband (let's not forget that Daenerys was subjected to marital rape long before Sansa), a world that is ruled by belief in black magic, where brothers and daughters and wives and sisters and sons will be sacrificed for power, where everyone appears to have sexual perversions.
Oh, wait, is that world so very different from our own, a world where a blogger is sentenced to a thousand lashes, and journalists are burned alive for flouting those in power, and marital rape is not a crime? Even while fulfilling our wishes for escapism by creating a world whose costumes, codes, and use of ravens in place of mobile phones tell us that it belongs to a different era, it remains relatable by referencing the issues we confront every day - crime, deceit, corruption, power-brokering, prejudice, oppression. It mocks the notion of honour, by throwing every honourable person into a crypt.
It features several of the worst fathers and brothers born of a writer's pen, with Stannis frontrunner for both titles - though he has some competition from Craster, with his daughter-wives, and Tywin, who, you know, sentenced his own son to death. Let's not forget Daenerys' brother Viserys, who tells her, "I would let him and his entire army of forty thousand men, and their horses too, fuck you if it meant I can go home."
And yet, no main character is one-dimensional, not even Stannis. Not even Jaime Lannister, whose loss of a hand seemed to make him almost human. Oh, hell, we saw him well up in the last episode, and share that corny father-daughter moment that seems to precede every daughter's death in the series. Jaime, unlike most of the men in this series, does a fair bit to protect his siblings and children. Of course, he fails every time. Not even Cersei, arguably the one irredeemable character in the series, is one-dimensional; her humiliating Walk of Atonement was shrewdly shot from her perspective, so that we are forced to empathise with this thoroughly detestable character.
Which brings me to another point - is the show going too far with its depiction of violence against women? Cersei's walk of shame, shot in graphic detail, often with full-frontal nudity, could be interpreted as yet another exhibition of the fetishist, sadistic sexuality with which Game of Thrones is rife. But, it is based on a real practice, and it is the brutality with which it is shown that strips the body of sexuality and makes it an object of humiliation and suffering.
I wonder whether any television show or fantasy novel has ever engendered as much discussion on as many subjects as Game of Thrones has, in the course of stirring controversy. Yes, we do wonder how some of these scenes were shot - a woman breastfeeding an eight-year-old, for instance, or the seduction of thirteen-year-old Tommen by Margaery, or the brothel scenes where Meryn Trant was seen whipping pre-teen girls. But there are enraged columns, and discussions on internet forums, debating topics that have rarely been broached on mainstream television - across the world, we are discussing marital rape, and BDSM, and blood-curdling punishments ranging from naked parades to penectomies, and superstition, and paedophilia, and incest, in the context of this show. Surely, it is doing something right.
That is why, irrespective of Twitterati declaring that they will never watch the show again, Game of Thrones will continue to be successful. I may joke that I'm with the White Walkers now, but I honestly cannot wait for the next season. A show that can constantly surprise, constantly intrigue, constantly distract, and constantly provoke its viewers will never run out of an audience.