Game of Thrones Season 4, Sansa Snark Blog- Episode 10

Previously on recapping Game of Thrones: #Blackcastle (I WILL MAKE THIS HAPPEN OR REMAIN IN OBSCURITY TRYING!)

Season 4, Episode 10: The Children

“Arya, with your pretty white horse
Oh Bran, you’ll never be a man
And you’ll never see your home again
Oh Westeros, so much to answer for.”
-George R.R. Morrissey

Whose Children? Which children? What will happen to the children? Won’t somebody please think of the children? These are just some of the questions I had leading up to the season finale when I saw its title (along with, “Why is Winterfell still in the intro? We ain’t been there in ages!) Much like its viewers, this show makes its children suffer. Sansa was psychologically tortured for the better part of three seasons. Tyrion is sentenced by his own father to have his head chopped off until dead. Hell, Bran got pushed out of a window in the first god damn episode! What indignities will the children of Game of Thrones be forced to suffer now? (If you’re Sansa, the answer is no indignities, because you do not appear in this episode. See you next year, Sansa!)

Hey, remember that Bran Stark story line you got so wrapped up in episode five? Well five episodes later, they finally got back to it! Bran is at long last completing his journey to touch a weird tree and meet the three-eyed raven of, literally, his dreams. And of course by completing his journey, I mean that he has at last been dragged to his destination by the ever-durable Hodor. Unfortunately for Bran, Hodor, the kid from Love Actually and his sister (colloquially known as Jojen and Meera,) they stumble right into a rejected script of The Walking Dead. Don’t you just hate when that happens? You’re just walking along on the snow, about to touch a weird tree face, when skeleton hands pop out and start grabbing at your ankles trying to trip you up! Rude. Even more rude, they kill Jojen in what I think may have been the least graphic on-screen act of violence of the entire series. If not for the deus ex hard fantasy machina of a fireball-shooting tree-child, none of our heroes may not have made it out alive. “WHAT IS GOING ON!?” I screamed, utterly confused as a fireball exploded the fallen Jojen. “I know you have to burn the dead in a world where winter is slowly slowly slowly coming, but this is ridiculous!” I thought, as Bran, Hodor, Meera and tree-baby scrambled to safety. Once inside Bran crawls on his hands and knees to meet the three-eyed raven, who is really just some really old warg dude that lives inside a tree. Not a bad life when you think about it; just lounge about, checking in on what everybody in the world is doing. Anyway, even though Bran is totally late for his appointment, Mr. Tree promises him that while he cannot grant him the ability to walk again (I mean, let’s be realistic here; it’s a fantasy show, not a miracles of medical technology show,) he will be able to fly. HAHA, whatever that means! Maybe he’ll become a dragon or something. Who even knows what is and isn’t possible anymore?

Slightly south of there, it turns out we’re not quite done with sad Jon Snow yet, because Mance Rayder’s encampment is apparently less than an episode’s walk away from Castle Black. The two sit down to negotiate terms, but first thing’s first: A toast! “TO YGRITTE!” I guess she was everyone’s dream weaver; what a gal. Of course, Jon is there to kill Mance and well, things just get crazier from there. Mance insists that his people just want to get south of The Wall, because if you haven’t heard yet, winter is coming and you don’t want be there when it comes (around Season 6 I’m guessing.) Winter turns out to be the least his worries however, as something even more improbable than all the events of the previous paragraph happens. Who shows up on horseback with an entire army, but Stannis Baratheon himself! You probably thought I was being a sarcastic little prick, but I told you! We waited and he finally did something! All hail the “One True King” whose character arc I never doubted for a second! They end up taking Mance Rayder prisoner, because Jon Snow is an honorable little scamp (or maybe it’s just that he knows nothing, apparently that’s a thing too,) and head back to Castle Black. Jon pays a visit to his fake old buddy, the captured Tormund, to see if he wants to say any words before the dead Wildlings are burned. And at first he’s all stand-offish like, “Hey bro, the dead can’t hear us,” but when he realizes that he’s actually getting treated pretty well by the Night’s Watch despite being their prisoner, he opens up the soft heart beneath his hard exterior, beneath his soft beard, to Jon. Ygritte loved Jon, she tells him. Sure all she ever talked about was killing him, but she was still always talking about him. If that ain’t love, then Tormund doesn’t know what love is. At Tormund’s insistance, Jon takes Ygritte’s body out beyond The Wall, to be at rest in “the real North.” You can just see the heartbreak in Jon’s already sad face as he walks away from her burning body.  I loved her too buddy. I loved her too.

DON’T YOU…FORGET ABOUT ME….

Across the Narrow Sea, Daenerys can’t govern worth a damn and she can’t control her dragons because they’re dragons. What else is new? Next!

“And then the internet never complained about anything ever again.” That’s what they’ll say twenty years from now when they talk about Tyrion Lannister’s actions in this episode. I know I announced the death of potential spin-off “The Kingslayer Bros.” a few weeks ago, but I think this was the true series finale. Like it was off the air, but then they brought it back to air the last episodes all at once and give the ravenous fanbase closure? It turns out Tyrion does in fact have some friends in King’s Landing, one of them being his big bro Jaime. Jaime, perhaps motivated by sibling love, perhaps invigorated by the other kind of sibling love, helps Tyrion to escape his prison. In his heart, he loves his brother and knows that he is innocent. All Tyrion has to do is go up the staircase and meet Varys, but Tyrion’s got something else on his mind. From everything we have ever heard on the show, Tyrion has been put down and marginalized his entire life. Seeing him go on a compact (there’s really no word to use here that doesn’t seem like a contrived pun on Tyrion’s/Peter Dinklage’s height,) murder-revenge rampage then, does bring about a strange sense of satisfaction, even if Tyrion himself does look particularly anguished about the whole thing as he strangles Shae to death in his father’s bed. At least he said he was sorry! But wait, there’s more! He locates his nephew’s crossbow and marches all the way down to… the bathroom to confront his father. Believe me, if you’re sitting on the toilet, the last thing you want is for someone to bust in pointing a crossbow at you. No one understood this more than Tywin Lannister, that’s why he spent all that time trying to talk his way out of that entire situation! He doesn’t care what happens to Tyrion one way or the other, so long as the legacy of the Lannister name is preserved. Bad news for Tywin Lannister then. His legacy will forever be, “Tywin Lannister, the first of his name, killed while sitting on the toilet.” (Like the piece of shit he was, get it? GET IT? Master-level subtext here on Game of Thrones.) Happy Father’s Day, Tywin. Finally finished, Tyrion meets up with Varys, who has secured for Tyrion a real nice looking box to hang out in as he sails off to anywhere but here. Just as he’s walking away to head back to King’s Landing though, Varys hears the bells. We’re not entirely privy to what they might mean, but Varys knows. Varys always knows. Tyrion, you’ve made quite a mess of things in King’s Landing.

Finally, we have the hypothetical spin-off cross-over episode of the century. Yes, Brienne and Podrick of M’lady-Ser cross paths with Arya and The Hound of the poorly named spin-off of the same name. And the results are…well, they’re catastrophic. These spin-offs were like, I don’t know, half of my great jokes. Now I’m down to just one hypothetical spin-off. What the hell am I going to do? Brienne and Podrick only show up like once every three episodes. I can’t just make up new spin-offs for other characters on a whim, IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT! Just when you think you’re getting into a nice groove creatively, Brienne kicks the crap out of The Hound, and then literally kicks him down a small mountain to his certain death. At least what turned out to be the series finale of Arya and The Hound had a satisfying ending. Sandor “The Hound” Clegane has become quite the interesting character during his adventures with Arya. We discover that he has lived the epitome of a sad life. But deep down, The Hound was really a monster of  a human. He ran down and killed Micah, the butcher’s boy. He wishes he would have raped Sansa so he would have a “happy” memory. That’s why Arya doesn’t kill him, despite his inclusion on her intergalactic hit list. For all he’s done, The Hound, even when he’s begging like a dog, doesn’t deserve the easy way out. Or maybe Arya has just become a hardened sociopath, that works too. Free of all obligations and adult supervision (and helping herself to The Hound’s silver) Arya does the only rational thing. Get the hell out of wherever she is. She finds a ship, gives its captain a coin we haven’t seen since Jaqen H’ghar gave it to her and utters the magic words, “Valar Morghulis,” which of course roughly translates to, “I have a paper here that entitles me to fast track status.” With that, Arya has a ship, with her own cabin, sailing into the wide-open sea, into endless possibility. Strangeways, here we come.

Spare thoughts to distract you from the fact that this is the end:

-So, do you think The Leftovers will be any good?

-In our one neglected plot of the “recap”, Cersei says “fuck it” and “reunites herself,” (if you know what I’m sayin’) with Jaime, who still remains her brother. Eww.

-Farewell to Jojen, The Hound, Shae and Tywin. You were all good to great characters.

-The “Is Alliser Dead?” watch continues. Seriously, is he dead?

-In the end, Tyrion gets away. Again, what was the point of introducing Oberyn? Sure now it looks like The Mountain is going to undergo some blood transfusion related transformation (perhaps akin to Khal Drogo?) as a result of their fight, but who gives a shit what becomes of The Mountain? Unless he becomes like some bizarre comic relief guy, who really cares? What was the point of Oberyn?

So, how’d I do? I think I achieved my goal of tastefully mocking a show because it deserves to be while still maintaining a coherent narrative of recapping the action of individual episodes. Don’t you? Throughout the writing of these I have often struggled with the question of, “do I sacrifice deep analytical comments for the sake of making a joke?” to which the answer has mostly always been “yes.” Overall I wish I would liked to have done more photoshops, but I just did not have enough time to come up with ideas and make them, while staying on a normal Sunday night sleeping schedule. It’s all of our loss, really. I also wanted to do a post where everything rhymed, but that would take more time and patience than I can afford to spend. But yeah, now that Game of Thrones has ended for the year (along with the NBA season on the same damn night!) what am I going to do with my precious little life? Here’s hoping I can figure something interesting out before my actual job consumes my soul. We’ve been through a lot this season, my little lords (I hope you’re cool with me calling you that, because it’s going to stick like Reek on Theon.) Until next time, I’ll be here, still not reading the books.

Sincerely,
George R.R. Jeremy