Into the Woods – Page 66 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Restoring a vintage cast iron skillet

The 1940s skillet after stripping, scouring, and one seasoning treatment. It looks brand new!

I bought this vintage cast iron skillet at an antique shop in Stuart, Virginia, for $17. It’s a great skillet, and it was a good bargain, though it’s not as collectible as some vintage cast iron, which is very much a thing now. But, since I bought it to use, it would be hard to do better.

Back in March, I wrote here about my interest in returning to the iron age of cookware — chiefly cast iron for skillets and heavy copper for saucepans. But I also like Corning Visions glass pots for cooking with liquids, because glass is so inert.

Why do you want to cook with cast iron? Many people are returning to cast iron, after realizing that, properly seasoned, it’s the original non-stick cookware. The cast iron surface does not degrade if properly maintained, and so cast iron cookware is durable enough to become heirlooms (try that with Teflon).

If you look at vintage cast iron cookware on eBay, you’ll find that pieces made by the most respected manufacturers — Griswold and Wagner, for example — have become very valuable and very collectible. Why would anyone prefer the vintage cast iron cookware to the very good cast iron cookware manufactured today in the U.S. by Lodge?

The reason is a good one, actually. If you look at the surface of a new piece of Lodge ironware, you’ll see that it has a kind of sandy finish from the casting process. I believe it actually is cast in sand. Today’s Lodge ironware has not been polished, because polishing probably would double the cost. Most vintage ironware, however, has been polished. You can see the difference if you look closely.

If you look at the photo above, you’ll see that the cooking surface has a circular pattern. That pattern was made by a rotating polishing stone. That’s what you’re looking for in vintage ironware. The polished surface is smoother and makes the surface more non-stick than an unpolished sandy surface.

Because vintage ironware is a thing, if you Google you’ll find many good sources on how to restore and re-season old pieces and how to identify what you’ve found. After watching eBay for a while, I’d say that bargains are difficult to find there. Sellers know what they’ve got. You’re probably more likely to find vintage ironware at a good price in your local antique stores.

Notice that my new skillet is not stamped with the name of its manufacturer. However, there are some features that pretty conclusively identify the manufacturer and the date. There is no “Made in USA” stamp, which means that the skillet dates from the 1950s or earlier. The “7” is the size of the skillet. A No. 7 skillet is just over 10 inches wide at the top and is pretty much the right size to fit exactly on a large burner on a modern range. The “D” identifies the product type (though I don’t know what it stands for). But the identifying factors are the notches in the heat ring at 3, 9, and 12 o’clock. That makes it close to a certainty that this is a vintage Lodge skillet. It probably was made during the 1940s.

Lye, by the way, is very effective at stripping the old seasoning from a vintage skillet. Check the label, but most oven cleaners are made of lye. After stripping, the bare iron will be a kind of battleship gray. After seasoning, it will turn black. Though my new skillet had very minor amounts of rust, it wasn’t enough to cause a problem during restoration. Stripping and scouring (with steel wool) removed the rust. If you’re shopping for vintage ironware, watch out for pitting on the cooking surface or heavy rust — anything that makes the cooking surface less smooth. What you see in my top photo is pretty much ideal, if you’re buying the ironware to use for cooking. You’ll probably find that most old ironware has pitting or other damage. But with luck you may find an old jewel at a decent price.

How it looked when I brought it home — not bad!

The back of the skillet. Note the light rust after 4 o’clock and 9 o’clock, and the notches in the heat ring at 3, 9, and 12.

Light rust on the top edge of the skillet

Stripping the skillet with oven cleaner

Season 8, episode 4 (4 updates)

Ken Ilgunas and David Dalton are reviewing each episode of the final season of Game of Thrones. Check the “Game of Thrones” category to list all of these posts.

David:

Mornin’, Ken…

This beautiful episode reminds us that in spite of Game of Thrones’ achievements in world-building, plot-spinning, and politicking, it’s the characters that really matter. We got quality time with all of our favorite characters — those who remain alive, anyway — as they tried to wring some moments of fire-lit happiness out of the temporary peace. Even so, most of their hearts were broken by the end of the episode, which is of course what must happen in a story, if any are to end up permanently happy when the final curtain comes down.

With the death of Missandei, I don’t expect many more deaths (other than villains) in the last two episodes. Two or three more deaths of characters we love will be required to clear a path to the throne, in acts of violent payback and acts of self-sacrifice. But I think (or hope, anyway) that having brought the remaining characters this far, there will be no more deaths hereafter other than deaths that are strictly necessary to the plot.

At last we are focusing on the endgame of who will get the throne. The candidates are (or seem to be) Jon, Daenerys, and Cersei. Still, even with all the war and politics involved, the question of the throne comes down to relationships and character. Martin’s long investment in rich characters is paying a wealth of dividends as we approach the end. Viewers are being invited to take sides: Whom do we want to end up on the throne? After a long dry spell of Tyrion-Varys scheming, much of the analysis is done for us, and I can’t say that I disagree with it. Is Varys contemplating assassination?

As the end-plot unfolds, I think it’s useful to look at the motivations of the key characters to make predictions about who will do what. Grey Worm now requires atonement for the murder of Missandei. Arya and the Hound are probably on the way to to King’s Landing. Cersei, of course, is still on Arya’s list. The Hound is just the right person to kill Gregor Clegane, his monster brother (probably with some fire involved). Though Jaime gave us to believe that he was returning to King’s Landing to protect Cersei, he could just as easily kill her. Though Brienne (poor Brienne!) has a duty to protect Sansa, love will surely bring her back into the action (and, I hope, for a reunion with Jaime). Podrick will go with her. I’m guessing that Sam is out of the action now, and the wildlings, too. Gendry is now indebted to Daenerys and must join the action. Yara has dibs on killing Euron (slowly, one hopes). The awful Qyburn must die. As for who kills Qyburn, I can’t think of a better death for him than some contraption or creation of his own backfiring on him. Bronn will kill somebody; I just hope that it’s a villain. I’m afraid that we may lose Varys, not only because he is contemplating treason but also because his loyalty to the little people will demand a sacrifice. If Varys does die, we can expect him to make his death count. Bran seems superfluous at this point, yet surely he has a remaining part to play. With Sansa and Bran at Winterfell, the story must return there before the end. Daenerys is in a rage. That bodes ill for her future, because Daenerys is not a nice person when she’s in a rage.

The plot is now congealing. Like buttermilk being churned, with the small lumps of butter coming together into larger and larger lumps, the possible number of outcomes are now rapidly being reduced. And yet there is plenty of room to shock us and surprise us in the final episode.

Two mysteries: Is Cersei really pregnant by Euron, or is she only lying to him to motivate him? That will matter to Jaime. Tyrion asked Jaime about Brienne’s genitals. When Brienne unbuttoned her shirt, the camera turned away. There are three options, I suppose: that she is fully a woman; that her gender is ambiguous and intersex; or that she is physically male. I have no idea which. But we’re assured that it will be revealed. Brienne is the purest soul in the entire cast of characters. She is a Joan of Arc, living according to her inner lights and suffering because of her differences. That it should be so is a mark of George R.R. Martin’s genius. In all of literature, only the Arthur story can compete with Martin’s cast of characters.

Ken:

Morning David.

Last season ended with snowflakes falling over King’s Landing. Yet, in this episode, it looked like a warm day outside the walls of the capital, didn’t it? Winterfell didn’t look too winterly itself. Apparently, whether it’s White Walkers or winter, it doesn’t matter too much if they’re coming.

The show has invested for years in its characters, as you say, and it almost doesn’t matter if there a few glaring plot holes, so long as we get to follow them to their destinations for a few more hours.

I do think the series has mostly lost me, but this wasn’t a bad episode. It was fun to see some clever banter between Tyrion and Varys, and the political situation (for Dany especially) does indeed seem complicated and hard to predict. Stray thoughts…

– For having just faced about a million zombies, there was, in Winterfell, 1) remarkably little reflection on what the hell just happened, and 2) a remarkable number of survivors. I’m craving some Night King closure. And half the Unsullied survived?! At the end of the last battle, the zombies had overrun everything and the only survivors left were our favorite heroes with their backs against the wall. Also, where are all these hot northern women coming from? The north, by now, should be covered in a glacier embedded with a million rotting bodies, and the people should be suffering from famine, fatigue, and disease. Instead, Dany still has half of her resources and everyone’s shacking up in Winterfell.

– What is the point of Bran? For all his powers of warging and time-travel, he’s become a rather impotent character. What has he accomplished apart from a few reconnaissance missions and figuring out Jon’s parentage?

– Are the knights of the Vale still sitting out all the important battles?

– I would have preferred that Jaime and Brienne never have consummated their love with a sexual act. Theirs seemed to be a rare and special bond, one forged by admiration and a deeper, more complicated variety of love. Jaime was reborn in a way because of Brienne, whose purity of soul made him realize that some inner part of him still clung to the ideal of living a life of honor. And now they have some unprotected sex and Jaime leaves halfway through the night? Brienne deserves erotic love, too, but I would have liked the show to have celebrated a rare form of love (just as there have been rare sorts of characters to be loved), rather than just throwing two more characters in the sack together. It sort of cheapens something distinct.

– I take it that Jaime is still conflicted about what to do with his sister. The only sensible thing his character can do, now that he’s ever more soaking up the purity of Brienne, is to kill his sister.

– Varys does seem to be contemplating assassination! This is an interesting development, and it works because everyone is being true to their character and their character’s motivations.

– Our favorite commenter, Josh, once predicted that Dany’s purpose is to “break the wheel” of the constantly warring kingdoms in order to end the very idea of kingdoms. In this theory, perhaps Dany could do for Westeros what Charlemagne did with the many little kingdoms of Germany and France, which is to weaken all these little kingdoms to the point of obsolescence and unify them to form the one great Dark Age empire, the Carolingian Empire. However, Dany’s award of Storm’s End to Gendry seems to be a continuation of this old style of government, perhaps ruining this “wheel-breaking” theory. Maybe so, but I’d still love to see her final dragon melt the Iron Throne.

– How does this end? Dany has fewer and fewer allies. Will Westeros be the Carolingian empire or Brexit?

– Jon is acting as admirably as he can, though I’m not sure why he felt so compelled to tell his sisters the truth about himself. Ned Stark kept Jon’s genetics a secret for decades. Why can’t Jon?

– There’s no way Cersei has been impregnated by Euron. You’ll remember that she claimed she was pregnant well before she met Euron. (There’s the chance she’s been faking it all along, of course.) In any case, Euron should be wondering how Tyrion knew of Cersei’s pregnancy. This display of accidental knowledge could perhaps create some tension in the King’s Landing royal bedroom.

– Interesting theory about Brienne as a possible intersex character. If you watch the one scene where she gets naked in the hottub with Jaime (in season three, I believe), the camera cleverly left her body parts concealed, and I do recall a surprised look on Jaime’s face. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBb3Q8VdYas

– You’re a big Brienne fan. What would you have done with the Jaime/Brienne bond? Also, remind me to go on my rant about “Chekov’s gun.”

Update 1:

David:

I can agree with you that the transition from battle to drinking and shacking up was a bit abrupt. But we did have the pyre scenes for grieving and for properly paying respect to the dead. Life goes on — and in filmmaking I suppose it must go on a little more quickly than in books. But, as we’ve discussed before, I am all too eager to suspend disbelief and to accept what I’m shown without too much question (especially if I love the characters as much as I love the Game of Thrones characters).

The question you raise about Brienne’s purity and the consummation (I really dislike that loaded word) of the Jaime-Brienne relationship is worth some disputation. I must ask if you might be seeing their love through an Augustinian lens, a lens that very much informed the ethic of what I call the romantic myth, and the Arthur story. It’s an extremely weird lens, though our culture has internalized it and normalized it. In the Augustinian ethic, purity is a very high (and a very conservative) value. In that ethic, sex is a great defiler of purity. The right people get to do it, and their doing it is glorified and romanticized and celebrated. But others are forbidden to do it, and their doing it is condemned as wrong and shameful, and even unnatural. But the Augustinian lens is not the only lens, though it took over the world after Rome. There still exists a pagan lens, a kind of classical lens, the shreds of which survived the destruction of the classical world.

What kind of world is the Game of Thrones world, where sexual ethics are concerned? I was amused by what one of your readers on Facebook said about Game of Thrones: “Watching society approved PORNOGRAPHY and graphic violence? No Thanks. I think it also says alot about society where incest and other taboos are portrayed and enjoyed on a high ranking show. SMH.” Many people have been offended by sexual behaviors on Game of Thrones. Do you really want to join them? (I recognize that you’re not offended, that what you’re expressing is disappointment in an element of the story.)

You acknowledge that Brienne deserves erotic love, too. I would even say that she deserves it more than any other character. If she is so deserving, then would it be fair for us to want to withhold it from her or to expect her to sublimate it for some value that we regard as higher? Far from cheapening the relationship, I think that Jaime’s seduction of Brienne ennobled the relationship — and ennobled Jaime along with it. Jaime loves Brienne, though, having eyes only for Cersei, he does not seem to be in love with Brienne. Maybe Jaime saw that, regardless of where his destiny might take him next, knowing that Brienne was a virgin and that she loves him, and given that lots of people around them were getting laid, this night was Brienne’s night. Fundamental fairness demanded it. It was a wrongness to be righted. Jaime understood that fate had assigned him to give this gift to Brienne and to right the wrong. There exists an ethic in which honor requires it, rather than advises against it. Not that it was a chore, I’m guessing. One of my hopes, when the ending comes, is that Jaime and Brienne end up together, as unlikely as that seems.

Since I just ranted, please rant about Chekov’s gun!

Update 2:

Ken:

In regard to the Brienne and Jaime night together, you make good points! If there is indeed admiration, desire, and attraction, then sure, go for it… I suppose I’d thought their love for one another was of a completely different sort that didn’t involve the erotic. And we, as the audience of a mainstream show, so seldom get to see unconventional sorts of love (between same-age male and female characters) in our shows, films, and books. There’s part of me that didn’t want this rare relationship to stray into conventional romantic territory (and the woman crying after the man departs the bedroom early is indeed a romantic trope).

I don’t think my criticism comes from a place of prudishness or from an Augustinian perspective. (I’m not one to cover my eyes when there’s nudity.) I merely hoped that the show, which pairs naked people together willy nilly, would celebrate and preserve a different kind of love without putting the two of them in bed together. Surely non-sexual and platonic relationships must have existed in pre-Roman times. If it was in Brienne’s character all along to want this, then my interpretation was simply wrong.

On a high-altitude note, I’d argue that we don’t always need to give our characters what they need. When we send them off on their own in two weeks, when the show ends, we need to give our characters new quests and unsatisfied desires that they’ll seek in the afterlife of the show. We can’t just have them all settle into a warm bath, which would have been the case if Arya partnered up with Gendry.

Okay, my Chekov’s gun rant, which I generously borrow from Jeva Lange’s recent piece for The Week.

Lange introduces a nice principle: the “Chekov’s gun” principle. Chekov reportedly said, If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.

There are too many Chekov guns in GoT. The Valyrian steel barely played a role. Same with the dragon glass. Or what about the Night King’s swirly symbol, which the whole series began with? Lange points out how the Wall (which had magical spells in it, according to a previous episode) is another. Bran’s whole character may be a Chekov’s gun. (It’s not at all clear to me why Bran is so important, especially after he relayed Jon Snow’s secret.) Isn’t “Winter is coming” a Chekov’s gun, too?

I almost feel like Chekov’s gun is a good metaphor for the whole show. You have characters like Beric and Theon and Jorah go on these long complex story arcs that could end in the most poignant ways that somehow “complete” their stories, but these arcs all end in symbolically-impoverished ways, and the only reason we feel something (and we definitely feel something) is that we love and have been with these characters for ten years.

Beric is brought back from the dead twenty times. Jorah is a slave-trader, then a slave, then an infected greyscale patient. Theon goes from hothead, to Iron Islander, to killer, to… You get the rest. These are amazing character arcs and their deaths should somehow complete their stories. Rather, the writers just randomly threw out some sorta-tragic sacrificial endings for these characters hoping they’d accidentally nail it.

Bran saying “You’re a good man” before Theon’s last run with a spear isn’t good enough to tie up Theon’s whole story. I’d almost rather he die in futility, maybe in the middle of battle, by friendly fire, or something random. Because then the story at least has something to say about futility and randomness and it would throw the whole end of the show into question again: Is Martin a nihilist and is this going to end the worst possible way? That’s horrible for Theon’s arc, but it would have done amazing things for the show, the same way Ned Stark’s death did. Same with the Red Wedding.

Instead, we get our heroes dying the way heroes have died in a thousand stories, like Jorah dying beside his beloved queen. It’s not a terrible ending, but it’s not the right ending. It’s just like the writers looked back and asked, “Well what death makes most sense for Jorah given where he’s come from?” rather than having it all preplanned.

The moment when Hodor dies holding the door was one of the most amazing moments in the series. The meaning behind the character’s name was decided practically before the first books were written. That moment is so special, not just because we lose a character; it’s special because we’re witnessing an amazing, beautiful, one of a kind storyteller create something so complex and beautiful and perfect. We got none of that in the battle episode, and I’m not sure we’re going to see it again for the rest of the series.

Update 3:

David:

I think you are quite right about Chekov’s gun. It seems I’m always making excuses for HBO, but…

Maybe the presence of too many Chekov’s guns is a consequence of making the series one season at a time, with future seasons unwritten and incompletely planned before production began. In book writing, it’s easy enough to make a single volume consistent with itself, just by going back and editing in fixes after you reach the end. But it’s a much bigger problem to preserve continuity with as-yet unwritten future volumes, unless everything is planned out in advance to the last detail. Martin’s troubles, and delays, with the last two volumes suggest that he did not have everything planned out. If that’s the case, then he had to put in foreshadowings that he thought he might need, even if ultimately he didn’t use them and they ended up as Chekov’s guns. Probably both Martin and HBO are guilty of this.

The way to do it right is the way Tolkien did it — write all of it before the first word is published. Even so, after the first edition, Tolkien made changes and corrections as the letters came in from readers pointing out inconsistencies and continuity problems.

I can forgive an awful lot of imperfection. Games of Thrones was a huge, huge project.

Update 4:

Ken:

I agree that Tolkien’s process is the way to do it. But I’m guessing GoT will in the end be something like eight times the length of Lord of the Rings. Is a story as big as GoT (told properly) even possible to accomplish by one person? And do we have examples of other people competently taking over for the original writer when he or she passes? If Martin wrote all seven books at once, then that sounds like an almost thirty year project. No publisher will ever give an advance to an author that would cover thirty years of living, so writers simply are unable, economically, to pull something like this off. You have to publish them piecemeal to make money and survive.

I think the GoT TV series had a tight, interwoven story line for the first six seasons, when they were relying mostly on Martin’s old material. Things began to fall apart in Season Seven, when the dialogue sparkled less, when the political decisions got dumber, when key characters were being conveniently resurrected from the dead… We keep watching these last two seasons simply because we love the characters and because we’re hoping it’ll all fit together in the end, and I’m arguing that it already isn’t fitting together.

Questions… You have written two, going on three, sci-fi books that are part of a trilogy, but you are publishing them piecemeal. Do you wish you waited to finish the trilogy first, so that you could have developed long, rich, and wickedly complex narrative arcs? (Not to say that yours aren’t, but you know what I’m saying…) Is creating a super long and elaborate series like GoT (or at least the GoT we really want) humanly possible? Do you think we’ll see another story that’s as long as (and perhaps more complete) GoT in our lifetimes? How do you think GoT will be remembered in thirty years? Is there any possibility they’ll do a remake in thirty years when they have more material from Martin? Or is the problem with Martin, who may have bitten off more than he can chew?

David:

I am still unwilling to use language as strong as “fall apart.” I actually thought that the dialogue in Season 7 was quite good, partly because of the superb and sparing use of English. But I agree that, once HBO outran Martin’s books, trouble was bound to happen. That outrunning never should have occurred. The reason, I assume, is that Martin missed his deadlines. Still, what Martin is doing is not something that can be rushed.

My own novels: Absolutely. I would love to be able to revise Fugue in Ursa Major (book 1 of the series) to align everything better — including the quality of the writing — with Oratorio in Ursa Major (book 2). But once a book is out the door, you can’t take it back. Still, I had done enough planning to know where things were going, and I think that I got the foreshadowing at least approximately right. As you no doubt are pointing out, to write and release the books of a series piecemeal is a dangerous process, and some things — small things, one hopes — are bound to go wrong, or at least could have been done better.

Maybe this is one reason why I am so forgiving of HBO and Martin. Perfection in a work of fiction is simply too much to ask for. If you asked me to name a perfect work of science fiction — my preferred genre — I believe that the only book that I would be able to name would be Frank Herbert’s Dune, and maybe Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. And yet book two of the Dune series was so full of flaws that I lost interest and stopped reading it. The followup books of the Ender series also were weak. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is extremely good and is of consistent quality through the series. But it is hardly without flaws. At the moment I am trying to read Brian Aldiss’ White Mars, which Aldiss co-wrote with Roger Penrose, whom I regard as the greatest living physicist. But White Mars is an embarrassingly terrible novel, Aldiss’ reputation notwithstanding. Still, I will soldier on because I want to know how Penrose’s ideas shaped the novel, because I believe that Penrose is willing to say in fiction what he dare not say (but suspects) as a physicist.

One of the sad things about getting older and having spent one’s life reading fiction is that it gets more and more difficult to find novels that are fully mesmerizing and that sweep you away the same way you were swept away as a young person. The first three books of Martin’s Game of Thrones series did that for me. But book 4 (I know that you don’t agree with me on this) began to meander, in my opinion, and started to preen on the sound of its own words. Even if you like book 4 of the Game of Thrones series, I’d still argue that such a change of style and narrative mid-series is wrong. My suspicion (and, again, I know that you don’t agree with me on this, and I respect that) was that Martin started padding his writing in book 4 to make two books (and more money) out of what should have been one book.

But my bottom line here is that, if I didn’t forgive fiction writers for their sins and shortcomings, then I’d have next to nothing to read and would therefore live in a state of existential poverty.

All the questions you raise about Martin and Game of Thrones in your last paragraph above are extremely good questions. I think that the only response I’ll venture for now is that the Game of Thrones series already is a classic in the same category as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. If Martin’s final two books diverge significantly from HBO’s version, then I will long for a remake sometime in my lifetime. Though Peter Dinklage is an American (and has the flawed princely accent to prove it), the GoT series deserves a future remake just to give a fresh set of those incredible British and Irish actors a chance to shine. Like you, I identify with writers (who are under-appreciated) more than actors (who get all the glamour and glory). But the ability of those islands to produce such brilliant actors and actresses and to astonish us with what the English language can do — that’s some kind of miracle, above and beyond the miracle of writing the story in the first place.

Vegan burger report (updated)

Click here for high resolution version.

Not only did this vegetarian burger greatly exceed my expectations, it was so convincing that I felt disgusted with myself after eating it, as though I really had snarfed down a big belly load of pink-in-the-middle beef. This is the “Beyond Burger” from Beyond Meat.

As a near-vegetarian, I can face beef only when it is well done. When I took the first bite of this burger and saw that the burger was pink inside, I felt a wave of nausea. I had to fish the package out of the recycling bin to reassure myself that I was eating pea protein and beet juice. Though the burger seemed undercooked to me, I realized that it was not undercooked and that putting it back on the grill would not make the pink go away. Not only had I given the burger three minutes on each side according to the instructions, the burger had caught fire on the grill from the olive oil with which I basted it.

The olive oil was not necessary, though. There is coconut oil in the burger — and probably other ingredients — that ensure that it doesn’t go dry during cooking.

I’m guessing that Burger King’s version, which is made by a different company — Impossible Foods — is even more convincing than the “Beyond Burger” by Beyond Meat. That’s because the Burger King version, rather than beet juice, uses a cultured “heme” made from soybean roots that is chemically similar to blood. Like the Impossible Burger, Burger King’s burger also has little particles of coconut oil in it to take the place of fat.

Burger King’s market-testing of the Impossible Burger in the St. Louis area has gone so well that all Burger King’s will carry it by the end of the year.

Vegetarian patties aimed at vegetarians have been around for ages, of course. They were not intended to be convincing meat analogs. Some of them are pretty good. But what’s new here is that the market is now going after committed meat-eaters, with burgers so convincing that they won’t know the difference.

I got these burgers at Whole Foods. The patties are little too thick for me. I prefer thinner diner-style burgers. Next time I’ll slice the patty in half.

Update: Beyond Meat, a plant-based food company, surges 163 percent after IPO

Season 8, episode 3 (two updates)

Ken Ilgunas and David Dalton are reviewing each episode of the final season of Game of Thrones. Check the “Game of Thrones” category to list all of these posts.

Ken:

Morning David.

I might like to re-watch it, but here are some quick first impressions, which are mixed…

— It was a visual feast. It mostly held my attention from start to finish. There are many superhero movies with visual feasts, and they are indeed marvels of technology, but they are often too long and too unbelievable, and sometimes they even induce sleep because you know if you nod off and wake up ten minutes later, the hero will still be alive. (I remember falling asleep for five minutes during a CGI battle in Hobbit II, and I didn’t miss anything.) A seventy-five minute battle scene works in GoT because we know, and even expect, main characters to perish. The show can amaze us with the CGI and keep our attention and emotions involved. That’s a rare feat these days. It would have been conceivable to lose one of the show’s main three (Jon, Dany, or Tyrion), and while that didn’t come to pass, we did lose a few second and third-tier characters. (If I have any criticism of the CGI battle, it was a bit difficult to understand the aerial dragon warfare, and I thought, up there, there was a bit too much movement and chaos, and I didn’t necessarily fear for either Jon or Dany’s life. This is a good point for future CGI directors: sometimes less epic is more epic! The more swoops and swirls and cartoonish feats of kill, the more quickly you lose the audience. One of the best movie sword fights was done in Rob Roy. There wasn’t any CGI, no flashy martial arts. It was just a gritty, sweaty, bloody fight, where you can watch the protagonist’s facial expression shift from confidence to fear to resignation.)

— This was a nuts and bolts battle for survival, from start to finish. There were opportunities for revealing deeper secrets of the GoT universe’s underlying cosmology. What exactly does the Night King want? Who is he? How do you ensure the dead no longer exist? What was with his fascination with Jon and Bran and Winterfell–or were they merely road bumps on his path of destruction? I feel there could have been grand moments for revelations, for secrets to be revealed, for answers, for promise of something more than a simple zombie plot… I imagined the defeat of the Night King would require some sort of mystical solution rather than a mere knife point. With a world so full of magic, of religion, of superpowers, of prophecies, of long deep complex histories, and of even time travel, I was hoping for something a bit more complex and unexpected and mind-blowing—something, ideally, that could have involved Bran’s all-seeing, time-traveling superpowers. Instead, Bran merely zoned out for a joy-ride inside a crow, and Arya solved the universe’s biggest existential threat by finding a good hiding place.

— The first scene in the first episode of the first season was centered on the White Walkers. The show has had many stories, but the White Walker storyline is arguably the main one. And while the show did a wonderful job choreographing a huge battle, and while they poured millions of well-spent dollars into this episode, it still sort of feels like the show has swept a big plot problem under the rug. With one episode, with one dagger thrust, the White Walker plot problem has vanished for good. It would have been hard literary labor for the writers to really understand the White Walkers and tie up all its associated storylines, and to have properly foreshadowed everything, and I don’t think we got that. Why do Beric and Jon have powers of resurrection? What was the deal with Jon’s half-dead uncle? What is the source and meaning of the whole fire religion? The show is no doubt capable of establishing elaborate and moving storylines, like Jon’s real parentage, or Hodor’s (“hold the door!”), or everything leading up to Red Wedding. These happen because Martin knows ahead of time how it’s all going to end, and he lays clues throughout the story which we can only fully see when looking back. It’s the best sort of foreshadowing, because these clues are both completely out in the open and completely concealed. When the writer figures it all out ahead of time, and when the story’s conclusion is perfectly foreshadowed, the beginnings, middles, and ends of the story are united into one complex interwoven whole, producing a feeling of narrative wholeness—and, when done right, it generates, for the audience, one of the best, most satisfying emotional responses we can ask for from a story. Technically, this was a good episode. But it wasn’t a transcendental one that resonates in our souls. And that can only mean, Martin and the writers, when they began, didn’t exactly know how they were going to end. The foundation of the whole story wobbles. The next three episode will determine if it can straighten itself out.

David:

All week I’ve been dreading this episode. When 9 o’clock came around Sunday night, I told myself that I was too tired to watch. I got up at 5 a.m., greatly upsetting the cat’s peaceful morning routine with the battle noise. But the sun was rising when the episode was over, and I had the day, rather than the night, ahead of me.

As you know, I don’t like battle scenes. I know they’re necessary. You can’t have a fictional world whose very existence is threatened without some epic battles. It’s life or death for an entire world, and so all the power that can be mustered in that world has to be thrown at the threat. Now that I’ve got the battle episode behind me, I would have to say that it was superb and that it set a new standard for world-saving battles. The suspense before the battle started was very well done, with those of us at home, like those on the screen, peering into the dark, not knowing what was coming. This also gave us time for some last-minute drama and some very good setup on where all the characters were located and what they were doing. The battle itself was truly scary. I agree with you that the aerial parts of the battle were a bit confusing (though I loved those straight-down dragon dives into the clouds), but, down on the ground, in spite of the frenzy, we were always able to track the action.

Then we reached the point at which only magic could save the day. I thought that Bran had something up his sleeve, but he didn’t. Still, Bran’s benediction before the death of Theon gave him something important to do. And so, in the end, it was Arya who saved the day. I have always resented the zombie element of Game of Thrones. I’ve always seen the zombies as an embarrassing breach in George R.R. Martin’s originality. The zombie fad (which did at least put a stake through the heart of the equally worn-out vampire fad) has gone on entirely too long. Now that the zombies are down, I hope to hell that they stay down and that we are done with zombies for good, not only in Game of Thrones but in all of cinema and television. Kudos to Josh and others who correctly called the dead rising in the crypts.

So, with the battle scene out of the way and the zombies down, I am looking forward to three more episodes that I hope will be driven by character, drama, and dialogue. We still have the Cersei problem to resolve. But, with luck, that will be resolved by some means other than yet another battle (though that’s probably wishful thinking on my part).

We also have a lot of denouement waiting to be dénoue-ed. The list is long: Who is (or was) the Night King? Is he down for good? What was his motive? Does the Night King have a particular connection to the Starks? As you mention, we need to know about the fire religion, and we need to know Melisandre’s backstory. What’s up with Bran? Was his joy ride inside a crow really all he was doing? With the shattering of the Night King, is the world saved for good? Or only for one winter? Do the Starks all have hidden powers? There has to be some way in which the ice magic and the fire magic are connected, like the Force and its dark side. What might the connection be?

The remaining denouement, to me, is as interesting as the remaining plot, and there’s plenty of plot left, too. Thank the goddess that most of our most beloved characters survive. Who’ll end up with the throne? How will Jon and Daenerys come to terms? How will the Lanister siblings settle their differences? Cersei still has an army. Will she use it? There seems to be an outstanding plot element with the Iron Islands. How does that fit in?

With the battle out of the way and three episodes to go, I would say that the writers and producers of Game of Thrones have aced three out of six so far in this final season. They could ace the remaining three episodes, too, in which case I believe we will have witnessed the best storytelling and best filmmaking ever done.

Ken:

I predict we’ll get a political and interpersonal denouement. I suppose I’m worried that we won’t get a mystical/spiritual/religious/and cosmological denouement. Or at least that’s what this episode suggested.

There are so many ways to critique the show, and we’ve already examined it from one of many different angles. I suppose I’m most interested in whether all the strands get tied together in the end. Call this a “series” angle. But we can also examine this from a “history of television” angle, and I don’t think there’s even been a TV series that’s in the same league as GoT (but, as you can tell, I’m worried that an off-note ending might put the value of the whole series at risk). We can also review the episode simply on the technical details of each episode, or we can look at the wider plot of the season.

As for the wider plot, we have Yara taking over the Iron Islands. Since there are now like three dozen living people in the North (and two very injured, exhausted, and malnourished dragons–though they have plenty of fresh bodies to feast on), it seems sensible for the Winterfell survivors to retreat to a small, defensible island. Cersei has a bunch of ships, so it seems we’ll probably have one last naval battle and one last land battle? I’m thinking episode four is for wound-licking, episode five for the final battle, and episode six for the epilogue, when we figure out whose ass sits on what throne, as well as a bunch of heartfelt goodbyes.

David:

It’s definitely a landmark in the history of television. The only thing that compares, at least to my taste, is Battlestar Gallactica. As you’ve mentioned before, the old standard of two-hour movies seems very limited now, like a short story. Whereas multi-season series can do so much more.

The thing that, to me, is unexpected, not to mention intriguing, is that the writer’s work can take longer than an epic production. Martin is still laboring away on the final novel, while HBO had to get out ahead of him, even with a delay in the final season. Let’s just hope that Martin finishes before he kicks the bucket, because he doesn’t look very healthy.

Ken:

I believe Martin has two more novels to go.

And, yes, it is interesting to note how the writing of a book can take five times longer than the making of a TV series, which is of course a much more complicated task. I don’t have high hopes for all the GoT spin-off series we’re reportedly going to get. I don’t think those shows will be drawing strongly from Martin’s work. Rather, it’ll require a bunch of new writers and I doubt that Benioff and Weiss will be as involved, if they’re involved at all. A spin-off will really only give us the chance to dwell in Westeros a bit longer. I think there was a big appetite to revisit Middle Earth after the Lord of the Rings series, hence the three-part Hobbit series, which was ultimately forgettable and a failure.

But I started writing this to say something else I noticed in the show… Did you feel any sadness at all when the Dothraki horde got wiped out? Or the Unsullied? I don’t want to sound PC-obsessed, but we should note how two ethnic groups, protecting white lords and ladies, were either being used as human shields or as mounted zombie fodder. Just like that, virtually a whole race of people is wiped out and no one cares. I didn’t set out to make a point about racism here. Rather, I want to point out how the show did not do a great job making us feel for a people. In the battle for Winterfell, we don’t care about just how many wildlings, Unsullied, Dothraki, or even Winterfellians die. All we care about are about a dozen and a half individuals. I feel like the show ought to have tried to make these cultures and groups stand out a bit more, and to get us to care for them, perhaps the way Dances with Wolves got us to love a Native American tribe, or Avatar got us to care for an alien race. While GoT did a great job characterizing the Dothraki in Season One, we haven’t had a real Dothraki character for ages. (Would the Dothraki really be as submissive as they have been, following a white lady on her wooden horses across an ocean and then on a death march up to the North Pole?) Grey Worm is the only individualized Unsullied character. I don’t even think we care about Winterfellians. Season after season, new Winterfell residents, despite seven years of attritional warfare, reappear and the ranks get replenished just fine.

I don’t think the show has done a great job showcasing the peoples and the culture of these groups, and therefore we don’t really care if Winterfell, its crops, or its serfs get burnt to a crisp. We only care if a handful of elites, and Jon Snow, make it through to the next episode. Again, I’m not trying to make a political point here. This is a literary point: The show would have been more emotionally effective if the audience cared more about the preservation of a race, tribe, or culture; not just a few individuals.

PS1: The crypts were not spooky and atmospheric enough. In previous episodes, the crypts always seemed long and cavernous and mysterious. In this episode, it felt like one dimly lit room.

PS2: Wouldn’t the ending of the last episode have been so much the stronger and beautiful if Arya died upon poking the Night King?

David:

Very good points about peoples vs. individuals. To tell the truth, things were moving so fast that much of it went past me, except that I did notice that the Dothraki apparently were chosen, or volunteered, for the front lines. This connects with points you made last week about the series’ failure to concern itself with the lives of ordinary people. I think that’s a very serious criticism. I think it’s something that the BBC learned a long time ago.

That said, I found Daenerys’ weeping over Jorah very moving, as was the dragon descending and folding its wing over them. There was little time for grief in this episode. Maybe the next episode will make up for it?

The death of Arya would be so hard to take. Ask a science fiction writer how hard it is to kill off a beloved character. You’ll probably get similar answers. Orson Scott Card used to say that it was literarily acceptable to kill a character only when it was necessary for the other characters, or for the reader, to take on the attributes of that character and thus keep the character and the love for that character alive. That idea probably applies to a great many of the deaths in Game of Thrones. For example, Ned Stark’s death inspired his children to take on his attributes and to live for him in many ways.

Books that get better with age

The 1960 French edition of the Larousse Gastronomique. Click here for high resolution version.

When you are browsing in an old bookstore, what catches your eye? For everyone it’s different, I’m sure. But one factor, probably, is the same: Whatever our tastes, we’re all looking for books that get better with age.

You’ll be dealing with thousands of books, so you have to move fast. When something catches your eye, you take it off the shelf for a closer look.

The books that I stop and examine are well-bound hardbacks that appear to be 60 to 75 years old, though anything published after 1920 is a candidate. Books that are older than that tend to be a little too antique and archaic. If I’m lucky, I find a book that is timeless, and I buy it.

Last week I came across a copy of the 1960 French edition of the Larousse Gastronomique. The price was $10. It turns out that I already had — but had forgotten — a copy of the 1961 English edition. Though the English edition is just as thick — over 1,000 pages — the English edition is not complete. The English edition uses larger type and has been dumbed down a bit for Americans. The first edition of the Larousse Gastronomique was published in 1938. If you can find a copy of the first edition, you’ll pay hundreds of dollars for it. The newest edition, I believe, was published in 2001. I have no idea how the 2001 edition is different from the 1960 edition. But I prefer the timelessness of the 1960 edition.

One of my favorite books cost me $1. It was in a box on the bookstore floor, deemed too low-value to even shelve. But what a find that was. It’s the eighth edition of Astronomy, published in 1964. This book had been a standard college textbook since 1930. Obviously there has been much progress in astronomy since 1964. Still, most of what was known in 1964 was accurate and still holds. This book is always on my nightstand for reading in bits and pieces.

The Technique and Art of Organ Playing was published in 1922. I acquired my copy on Aug. 10, 1965. My copy of the book was lost for years, but in a miracle too complicated to describe, and through the help of a friend, the book found its way back to me. There are many pencil marks in the book, most of them from my first organ teacher, Lillian Conrad. The meticulousness of the fingering and phrasing, and the left-right heel-toe handling of the pedal work, impress the daylights out of me today. My organ technique is limited (especially now that I no longer practice regularly), but the quality of my early training was superb. As for organ-playing technique, I’m quite sure that it has not changed since 1922 — or since the time of J.S. Bach, for that matter.

⬆︎ The 1961 English edition of the Larousse Gastronomique. Click here for high resolution version.

⬆︎ Click here for high resolution version.

Somewhat off the subject, but the markings on the page above bring it all to mind:

When I was still a teen-ager, my fingers absorbed the rules for playing repeated notes in four-part hymns on the organ. It’s something that I no longer have to think about; my hands just know. The technique for organ is different from that of the piano, since organ sounds are sustained and piano sounds are not. (Well, not exactly, regardless of what you do with the piano’s sustain pedal.) Here are the rules for playing hymns on the organ, keeping in mind that the soprano and bass are the outer voices and the alto and tenor are the inner voices:

• All repeated notes in the soprano are struck.

• All repeated notes in the bass are tied (except at the end of a phrase).

• When a full chord is repeated identically, strike the three upper voices, and tie the bass (except at the end of a phrase).

• When a full chord is not repeated identically but the tenor or alto or both are repeated, tie them.

Rules like the above have a great deal to do with why poorly trained organists, or good pianists with no organ training, cannot play hymns well. Other common flaws in poor hymn playing are poor phrasing and failure to keep a steady beat. I’m off the subject of books here, but some people probably will Google their way into this. So while I’m on the subject, I’ll add this: Phrasing is critical when the organ is accompanying a congregation. You must give the congregation time to breath between phrases, with a slightly longer breath between verses. Nothing is tied across phrases. All voices break. You cannot rush a congregation that is “dragging” the tempo, as congregations are said to do, by hurrying through the musical phrases. If you give the singers the tempo in the introduction and hold the tempo yourself, they’ll stay with you to the end — if you give them time to breathe.

By the way, since it was published in 1922, The Technique and Art of Organ Playing is now in the public domain.

Season 8, episode 2 (updated)

Ken Ilgunas and David Dalton are reviewing each episode of the final season of Game of Thrones. Check the “Game of Thrones” category to list all of these posts.

David:

Mornin’, Ken …

Well, was I ever wrong last week. I expected treachery at at Winterfell. But I didn’t realize that we were right on the edge of battle. So instead of treachery we got a series of very tender goodbyes, as well as the long-awaited scene between Jon and Daenerys. I’m afraid that, next week, we’re going to be writing a bunch of obituaries. It’s Brienne whom I’m most worried about.

You predicted last week that Jaime will die in the arms of Brienne. I wonder if it mightn’t be the other way around — that Brienne will die in the arms of Jaime. Foreshadowing in Game of Thrones often doesn’t mean what we think it means, but it seems to me that Brienne’s death is all too clearly foreshadowed. Jaime makes her a Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, providing her with a deep sense of gratification for all her selfless sacrifice and sublimated love. Podrick, revealing a very fine voice, sings a sad song, “And she never wanted to leave.” A different voice picks up the same song as the titles roll. The song is a dirge. It was heartbreaking.

I rarely make predictions about Game of Thrones, but if the day is saved in the coming battle, then I think that Brienne will do it.

As a matter of drama, I can imagine a better job of giving viewers a stronger sense of hopelessness and impending doom. Still, we are clearly to understand that the characters all believe that they may be living their last hours. The series’ long investment in rich, complex, lovable characters is now paying dividends in the kind of scenes we got in this episode. Some of what happened was obviously going to happen — for example, Arya and Gendry. But there also were a great many subtle touches where the love between the characters is loftier than the ripping off of costumes, such as the looks that Brienne and Podrick were giving each other just before Jaime knighted Brienne. Clearly they know each other very well, and they have told each other many things. It’s hard for me to imagine Brienne without Podrick, or Podrick without Brienne. Next week’s episode is not going to be easy to watch.

It was Bran who had the plan, with Bran himself as bait. Let’s hope that Bran’s plan will work.

Where was Varys? How could he have been overlooked? Is he away and up to something?

I had assumed that the great battle with the dead would be postponed until the last or next-to-last episode. If the great battle comes in the third episode, then that will leave three more episodes for struggles among the remaining characters, plus some denouement. A long epic deserves a long denouement. It should be the sweetest part of a good story, as long as the writers follow the rules of classic storytelling — and I greatly hope they do.

Ken:

Morning David. My god, that was a good episode. I’d go so far to say that it was among the best episodes. Almost all the actors nailed their little scenes, as short as they were. [Jamie and Brienne on the training grounds; the three Crows; Sam and Jorah; Arya and Gendry all glistening with sweat by the forge (their sex scene, not so much); Dany and Sansa; Dany and Jon; and one of the briefest was among the bestest: Sansa greeting Theon, and later them lovingly looking upon one another over a bowl of soup–that’s a perfect example of how so much can be done with so little.]

And of course the fireside scene! This sort of scene is what GoT was missing last season. Last season, the dialogue on the expedition north of the wall seemed too chummy and forced. The dialogue at the all-star conference in Kings Landing seemed so stilted and dry and humorless and full of tiresome exposition. It could have been a grand scene, but it was lifeless. Here, by the fire, we heard good stories, saw a lot of character, and felt the atmosphere with the characters: enjoying with them a bit of wine and warmth before the storm to come. And we were reminded of what they’re all trying to save: the best of their civilization, as all of these characters exemplify honor, loyalty, justice, forbearance, and compromise.

It was only natural that it ended with a moving knighting ceremony and a song. It was the little moments that won the scene, like the mischievous and warm smile Tyrion gave to Pod upon handing him an overflowing cup of wine. (Side note: There were a few other great smiles in the episode, including Gendry’s titillated grin upon watching Arya skillfully fling daggers.) (Extra side note: Verys’s presence at the fireside might have been inappropriate because, although he is a virtuous character, his career in espionage might have subtracted from the purity of the gathering.)

At this point, the show is moving confidently toward the end, with far more poise than I anticipated, and I’m glad to admit that I may have been wrong to have doubted the writers two blog entries ago…

Some stray thoughts…

– A friend once pointed out to me that GoT battle scenes are almost always creative. This is certainly true: think of the tightening circle in the Battle of the Bastards, where everyone was getting trampled to death, or the cool ways the Night’s Watch fended off the attack against the wildlings at the Wall. We’re bound to see some really interesting battle scenes. But I’m struggling to imagine how all the moving parts will interact. We have the forces at Winterfell vs. The Dead vs. Cersei’s mercenaries. What will the battle sequence be?

– I’m also interested in what they’re going to do with the remaining four episodes. (This season has six.) The first two episodes were set-up episodes. I’m guessing the next two will be epic war episodes, with whom and versus whom, I don’t know. And then maybe we get two more as an epilogue, or as denouement, as you say? Doesn’t this all seem a bit rushed to you? If this is one of the biggest battles in this world’s history, shouldn’t it take up more than 1-2 episodes? I wouldn’t mind three. I wouldn’t even mind a whole season set aside for military maneuvers, though it’s easy for me to suggest such a thing when I have no responsibility for the CGI budget. I fail to see how, in a few epilogue episodes, we figure out who’s the real ruler, how to deal with Cersei, and then send off the surviving cast members with a few goodbyes. There’s a lot to fix in Westeros other than the zombie invasion, right? I would have written for 10 episodes.

– You can’t go wrong with a summarizing lullaby scene, in which we get quick vignette scenes of characters set to the tune of pretty music. I love that shit. It works every time. Braveheart did it well. So did The Wire. They could end the series this way.

– Where is winter, exactly? They’ve been saying winter is coming for 8 seasons now, and there’s pretty much the same amount of snow on the ground.

– I feel the plan to lure the Night King toward Bran is a bit too convenient. The Night King should know that the Living People know that killing one of the White Walkers kills all their followers. I feel like the show is making it a bit too easy for itself to resolve a difficult plot conundrum (a million zombies versus a small castle).

Death prediction possibilities for the next two episodes: Theon, Jaime, Brienne, Jorah, Hound.

Another friend’s prediction/question: Could the dead in the crypt come to life?

More unaccounted for characters: Edmure Tully, Arya’s wolf Nymaria, Meera Reed, the fire witch from Mereen, Robin Arryn.

Unanswered questions: When does the Hound get to take on the Mountain? Will that scorpion dragon-killing contraption make its way north? Is Bronn being commissioned to kill the Lannister brothers the lamest and most predictable story this season? What’s with the Night King’s fascination with his spiral body flesh designs? Who is Azor Ahai?

Updates:

David:

Was it Josh who thought of the dead in the crypt being revived? It’s a brilliant insight. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think that’s what’s going to happen. The setup is just too perfect. And how like Martin to set up, at the very beginning, something that doesn’t figure back in until many books (and episodes) later.

Still, everything happens with a twist. What could the twist be? Maybe the Winterfell ancestors knew of this possibility, and maybe there is something — maybe something magic — that protects the Winterfell crypts or otherwise alters the outcome? Why does Winterfell have crypts in the first place? Isn’t it the only castle that buries its dead that way?

I am terrified of the next episode…

Ken:

I wish the insight was mine, but yes, it was Josh’s. I am positive something nasty will happen in the crypts. There were at least three occasions when someone said something like, “It’ll be safer in the crypts.” Which means it’s definitely not safe in the crypts. You’ll remember that Tyrion is one of the few high profile characters assigned to stay in the crypts, so there’ll be some heroics for him to carry out.

And I think you’re correct to think there’s something else about the crypts that we don’t know. Didn’t the youngest Stark have a strange, ghoulish draw to the crypts? Didn’t the three-eyed raven in young Bran’s dreams lead him down there? There could be some magic power or long-dead ancestor that might hold special significance. I believe it was “Bran the Builder” who built Winterfell in a different epoch.

What are some of the wildest theories we could propose? Could it somehow explain the origins of the Night King? Might the dead be seeking nothing short of a resting place (or the ability to rest)? Could the Night King be a Stark? (The Night King does have a strange relationship with Bran, and he has a tendency to stare with wonder at Jon Snow). Some people have proposed that Bran’s ability to travel back in time and change events might play into these last episodes (the way he influenced a young Hodor, who’d eventually “hold the door”). Some have even proposed that the Night King is Bran and the only way to kill the Night King will be to kill Bran. (I picked a few of these insights up from The Ringer’s GoT podcast, Binge Mode, specifically their episode titled, “Our Seven Biggest Questions Ahead of Season 8.” It was so good, and they were so geeky, I actually had to stop listening because they may have been taking away some of the fun of coming up with my own predictions, or the joy of simply being startled by missing something obvious, such as the coming crypt twist. From now on, I’ll probably stick with our own flawed analyses.

Binge Mode: Our Seven Biggest Questions Ahead of Season 8

Two kinds of light

On a rainy day this time of year, it’s hard to stay away from the windows. Above, rain is falling, and the windows are wet and a bit foggy. Below, it’s the morning after the rain, and the sun has come out. The woods are rapidly turning green, but the leaves are only about half out. Lily is in her favorite spot.

Game of Thrones: Season 8, episode 1

Ken Ilgunas and David Dalton are reviewing each episode of the final season of Game of Thrones. Check the “Game of Thrones” category to list all of these posts.

David:

Mornin’, Ken…

I greatly enjoyed this episode, and what struck me is how the moral middle ground of former seasons is gone. Now the forces of good and evil are lining up as the surviving characters choose sides — good people at Winterfell, wicked people at King’s Landing. It put me in mind of a hymn:

Once to ev’ry soul and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision,
Off’ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
‘Twixt that darkness and that light.

(The words were written in 1845, by James Russell Lowell, as a protest against both war and slavery. The hymn is sung to the hymn tune Ebenezer, which is very much in a minor key.)

Consider poor, poor Theon, who was tortured by living in a moral vacuum as much as he was tortured by Ramsay Snow. Now Theon, having rescued his sister and feeling a bit better about himself, will go to Winterfell to fight with the forces of good. Even Jaime had to choose sides and joins the good people at Winterfell — though the first person he sees is Bran. (I’m hoping than Bran will forgive Jaime for knocking Bran off the tower because Bran foresees that Jaime has a part to play. And would Bran be the Three-Eyed Raven if he had not fallen?)

There is a huge imbalance, though. In the wicked south, we have only Cersei, Euron, and a new sellsword. And how much longer can Euron survive until Cersei orders him snuffed? Unless Cersei cooks up something new, the ingredients of drama (including characters) are now scarce in King’s Landing. Will Cersei have to rotate uselessly in dramatic circles for a while, the way Daenerys once circled in the desertlands waiting for her next cue? If not, how will Cersei stay in the thick of things? Who is there to even engage her in dialogue, since we’re all as tired of Euron as Cersei is?

Whereas at Winterfell we have a great surplus of characters all cramped up in inadequate accommodations. Thus we can expect treachery at Winterfell. But who will betray whom? Daenerys is now the character in the most awkward position. Jon Snow is suddenly the biggest obstacle to what she regards as her right and her destiny — the throne. Daenerys is faced with the choice of either great sacrifice or great cruelty. It is Sansa who is most critical and who expresses the most discontent with the present situation. Arya is an enigma and a wild card.

Though many reunions were had and much exposition was exposed in this episode, we still have many things to wonder about. Any character who is still alive can be assumed to have a critical part to play before the end. Where is Melisandre? Why was Gendry brought back after a long absence? What work do two of my favorite characters — Brienne and Podrick — still have to do? How will Tyrion and Varys get back into the thick of things? Is Sam superfluous now? Is it meaningful that Yara chose to go back to the Iron Islands?

One character, though, has risen to the top of the dramatic heap — Bran. Bran now supplies much of the plot’s remaining mystery. Isaac Hempstead Wright has grown up in this role. I believe he was 12 years old when the series started. Now he is 20 and is as perfectly cast as any character in the series. All the wise old maesters are dead, but Bran is now wise. The transformation of Bran is one of the most beautiful surprises of the entire series. I would not be surprised if Bran upstages Jon Snow hereafter.

I’m not going to make any guesses about where it’s all going. I remain convinced that George RRRRRR Martin and the HBO writers still have many shocks and surprises up their sleeves and that they’ll pull this thing off in the end. I’d say they’re off to a great start with the season opener.

One piece of foreshadowing continues to needle me: When the dragon gave Jon Snow that funny look, what did it mean?

An aside: The New York Times has a piece this morning about how GoT tourists in silly costumes are flooding Northern Ireland, oblivious to the area’s real history. Jeekers, people. Get a life.

Ken:

Hi David. I thought this was a rock solid beginning to the final season. We are primed for small personal dramas. (Will Arya and the Hound fully reconcile? Will Arya and Gendry have the show’s final romance?) And we are primed for the big picture political dramas. (Who will be the ultimate king or queen of the seven kingdoms?) Some stray thoughts and questions….

• Euron Greyjoy has tested our patience long enough. I sense that Cersei will double-cross him soon and keep his ships. You’re right: Once that’s settled, there’s not much else for her to do, apart from move her military machine. Might we get a good Martin-esque twist if Cersei uses her political talents and maliciousness for good? Her collapsing under her own treachery and deceit seems too simple, but sometimes that’s how things play out, too.

• Yara Greyjoy is going to take back the Iron Islands so Team Dany will have a safe haven should things go wrong with the zombie war. Does this mean that such a course of events is inevitable?

• There are countless things foreshadowing the demise of the Dany-Jon love affair. Verys says “Nothing lasts” as he looks down on them. The dragon gives Jon an odd look when Jon and Dany are making out. (I think the dragon’s saying to Jon, “You better think about what you’re doing.”) And Dany seems like she’s properly smitten (you have some special word for this, I remember, which sounds like “luminescence,” right?) [Note from David: Limerance!] whereas Jon is more hesitant. (Romantic unreciprocation spells disaster!) As for who takes power… Jon has never cared for titles, just what’s right and just. It seems most appropriate for him to allow his allegiance to Dany to persist (even if he’s convinced of his superior claim), but the show seems to be moving in the direction of Jon taking over eventually, and it would be too weird for them to do that as one half of another incestuous couple. The most reasonable solution to this is Dany dying in a moment of sacrifice, and Jon taking power only when he’s called to. The person in the middle of all of this is Tyrion, who is firmly on Team Dany, but who has lost favor and who has a soft spot for Jon. It’ll be interesting to see how he navigates the situation.

• Acting award of the week goes to Sam Tarly. So many relatives die on this show. So many people are reunited after years apart. When the main characters learn of deaths or are reunited, their reactions are sometimes weak, and the acting job is uninspired and half-assed. (Think of those YouTube videos of military fathers returning home to their teary, jubilant children—that’s how real people react.) The actor playing Sam gave everything he had, and I think he found a nice balance between grief and indignation. On the other hand, Arya’s emotional reunion with Jon seemed forced and forgettable.

• I do think the show is still missing some of its old Martin magic, and we see this most clearly with the absence of good humor. Martin is a very funny and clever writer. Think of all the Verys/Tyrion/Little Finger dialogue from the early seasons. A lot of that snappy, funny dialogue came straight from the books. Now we have just a few poorly crafted testicle (or lack of testicle) jokes. They have squandered poetic opportunities, too. Think of when Jon asks Dany how to ride a dragon. “Nobody does,” she says, “until they ride a dragon.” She could have quoted a fabled line from a dragon-riding ancestor, or shared a metaphor about riding the wind, or something of the sort. (PS: Why don’t they make some sort of dragon seat for the riders? It looks impossible and dangerous to hold onto those wobbly dragon spinal spikes.)

• House Glover has it coming to them. Count on them getting sacrificially obliterated next episode.

• Great dragon ride! That’s an amazing use of scenery (as you pointed out last week), and it’s a great character-building scene, as Jon begins to embrace his Targaryen side.

• Random thought of the week: It’s way too late, but I wish the show had incorporated a character or two representing the lowest classes (i.e., the ordinary people). Sure, there are lots of characters who have risen to be warriors and advisors with merit, but I’d like a few characters who are firmly stuck at the bottom, and who look at the people of the great houses from afar and from their hovels, because that’s what it would have been like for 99% of the people in such a time.

Main characters that are unaccounted for: The Red Woman, Brienne and Pod, Daario Naharis (please no), Jaqen H’ghar.

Next big character to unexpectedly die: Onion Knight

Unanswered questions:

Are we going to have a sit-down convo with the Night King, or is he just an evil force of nature without soul and complicated motivations? I feel like we need a little more explaining about his motivations…

What will be the form of government in the end? Still a straight up monarchy?

Are there no caribou or moose for the dragons to hunt? Just barnyard animals?

Will there or will there not be elephants?

Predictions: Jaime will die in the arms of Brienne.

David:

Speaking of humor, some of it went right over my head. This morning’s review in the New York Times mentions these lines:

Tyrion: “The last time we spoke was at Joffrey’s wedding, a miserable affair.”

Sansa: “It had its moments.”

Game of Thrones countdown

Since its beginning in 2011, Ken Ilgunas and I have made a tradition and a sport of watching and subsequently deconstructing each new episode of Game of Thrones. If Ken was here, we watched it in the evening and started our “Thrones talk” at breakfast. If he wasn’t here, we did it in email. As literary confederates, there are many things about which we are in complete accord. But that’s not always the case.

To prepare for the final season (which starts at 9 p.m. Sunday, April 14, on HBO), we each re-watched the previous season, Season 7. Our discussion of the re-watching follows, lifted from email. Hereafter we will “co-blog” each episode of the final season, hopefully by the Monday after each episode.

Ken:

Morning David. You’ve told me you just binged Season 7. As you know, I had some issues with the last season (which I’m sure I’ll get to), but I’m curious: What were your impressions, and what do you think we can expect from Season 8, the final season?

David:

Yep. I binged, and I was transfixed. Two years was enough to make it fresh again, though of course I remembered most of what happens. Somehow the flaws that we’ve discussed mostly melted away. What stood out in re-watching were the incredible quality of the dialogue, the perfect casting and brilliant acting and directing, the settings, the photography, and the detail. Brilliant dialogue, of course, requires more than just the dialogue. It can occur only with strong characters inside a good story. The sibling spats are brilliant — Jaime and Cersei, Sansa and Arya. (There is something particularly vicious about sibling spats.) Another remarkable thing about the dialogue is that it’s just as good whether it’s dialogue about war and affairs of state, conducted by the powerful; or taunting and ribbing by the lowly, as in some of the dialogue while the zombie-retrieval crew were laboring north. I believe I have only one strong complaint. That’s the zombie thing, which I continue to see as an un-original selling-out to a fad, and the tail-end (I hope) of the fad at that. It’s a shame to mar something so original with more zombieness.

Anyway, as for the flaws, I’m a pushover when it comes to suspension of disbelief, as long as the story is not in the here and now. I rarely binge. But re-watching Season 7 put me into a trance.

The New York Times had a piece about how Northern Ireland is now overridden with GoT tourists. Having hiked the Scottish Islands with you since we first watched Season 7, it all looked familiar (and even more beautiful). I’m just glad that all that tourist traffic isn’t descending on Scotland, because those coastal vistas work best when they’re clear of everything but sheep. I paid much more attention to the settings while re-watching Season 7. The settings are incredibly powerful. You’ve heard me say many times that certain kinds of stories can be told only in certain kinds of settings. The example I always use is that the moment a writer chooses to set a story in the American South, it’s a given that somebody is going to be repressed, oppressed, and miserable, and that the story will revolve around social and family conflict and whether key characters can or cannot be true to themselves. It would be much harder to tell a story like that in San Francisco, or Paris. Part of the genius of HBO’s GoT is that the producers understood the importance of epic settings, and they had the budget for it. Now we’ve got those places on film forever, though I hope those places never change. When the producers of Star Wars took us to Skellig Michael, I suspect that it was because Star Wars had to hit the new standard for settings set by Game of Thrones. What a good way to use a big budget! My TV no longer seems big enough. To top Skellig Michael as an epic setting, you’d have to get out among the stars — another setting in which epic stories can be told. Some settings enlarge us; some settings knowingly cramp us and suffocate us. Compare “Angela’s Ashes,” a very different Ireland from Skellig Michael or the seascapes of Ulster. My larger point is that, in HBO’s GoT, story and setting are brilliantly matched. It may be easier to appreciate those settings in a second watching, when the characters and dialogue don’t demand our full attention.

Now I just hope that the final season doesn’t let us down and that we end up happy and satisfied, with another epic for a lifetime, like Star Wars. If that happens, then it will be your curse to watch John Snow (a few years younger than you) and the other characters grow old, as my generation had to watch Luke Skywalker (a few years younger than me) and Leia grow old. These are stories that provide a mythic framework for our lives.

The New York Times also had an article about how GoT is a new economic model for television, with a budget that would have been unimaginable not long ago. Let’s hope that that model continues … as long as somebody can come up with stories worth that kind of telling.

Ken:

Your cheery take is heartening to read because I hope you’re right and I’m wrong. I’ve re-watched Season 7, and my second watching confirmed my original impressions: It is by far the worst GoT season. I say this for three reasons:

1. The fast pace of the season is out of step with the slow pace of the rest of the series. One can now travel across Westeros instantaneously (whether by horse, dragon, or boat) when, in a previous season, it would have taken a whole season for a character to move from A to B. They are practically teleporting. This isn’t me just quibbling about suspension of disbelief issues. The “slow storytelling” of GoT was one of the things that set GoT apart from all other shows. These were great opportunities for character development, and they made long-awaited path-crossings cathartic or dramatic (like the Hound vs. Brienne). The Jon-Dany introduction could have been a bit more exciting if they took an extra episode or two to cover Jon’s sea voyage.

2. The plot became bonkers. I know this is fantasy, and I’m prepared to generously suspend my disbelief with dragons and fire magic, but the expedition north to capture a zombie to bring it back to King’s Landing doesn’t work on many levels.

3. The dialogue was substandard. In previous seasons, we had interesting pairings of characters. Now, they just shove a bunch in the same room, where they jest and prod and deliver quippy one-liners. The scene with Jon and Dany in the cave was appallingly neat, and corny. The dramatic Jaime “death” and rescue scene, after the battle with the Dothraki, was beneath the writers’ standards. There was little character development. About 85% of the dialogue was exposition, reminding us of everyone’s past, their relationships with one another, and their plans for the future. What happened to stories about their lives or the relaxed and clever banter, such as the Verys/Tyrion banter, which was so good? This all exposes the writers’ need for good George RRRR Martin dialogue, which they no longer have access to.

I say all of this with deep respect for the writers, producers, and actors, and of course Martin. GoT, as a TV series, belongs in a tier of its own, and GoT episodes, during quiet parts of my last eight years (as sad as this sounds), have been some of my intensest emotional events. I fear the show has lost its Martin magic, and I truly fail to see how they’re going to wrap up all storylines, win the war against the White Walkers, and provide satisfying epilogues for the surviving characters—all in a shortened final season. I worry that the season will only be the movement of chess pieces, followed by gory CGI fests. There are only a handful of relationships to be mended; there aren’t many more secrets to be learned; there aren’t many dramatic character reunions to be staged; there are no new love affairs to be consummated.

I think GoT is going to live out the fate of 2007 New England Patriots, who had a perfect 16 win, 0 loss season, but who flubbed it in the Super Bowl against the Giants. I worry a dissatisfying finale will make the preceding seven seasons irrelevant and un-rewatchable. No one wants to be more wrong than me.

Updates

David:

Here is a critic in The Atlantic who agrees with you. Whereas I am in denial:

The Old Thrills of Game of Thrones Might Be Gone for Good

Ken:

I agree with everything he says, 100%. In ways, we wrote the same column, but his was far better. Indeed, I felt the same thing about the Littlefinger plot. The Stark sisters plotting against one another was ridiculous. We saw Littlefinger’s death a mile away…. I envy your denial!

David:

Your case is strong, and I will concede and throw in the towel and wail and gnash my teeth if it comes to that. But I also have to hope that the HBO writers and producers are smart, are aware of these dangers and past mistakes, and that they also have access to George RRRRR Martin, who I think would not hesitate to tell them what he thinks, even if his contract binds him to public silence. I do think that stories are safest in the hands of a single inspired writer whose only product is words rather than zillion-dollar productions.

May the force be with us.

Would you like for me to append a link to this piece as an update to our post?

Ken:

Sure, that’s a good piece.

The Old Thrills of Game of Thrones Might Be Gone for Good

The ontological wilderness

Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory, by Tim Maudlin. Princeton University Press, 2019. 234 pages.

Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity: Metaphysical Intimations of Modern Physics (third edition), by Tim Maudlin. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 298 pages.

John Twelve Hawks was clearly troubled, and I don’t blame him. (John Twelve Hawks is one of my favorite science fiction writers. I’ve written about him here several times and reviewed his books. Just search here for “twelve.”) I follow John Twelve Hawks on Facebook. He had posted a link to an article in the MIT Technology Review. The terrifying headline on the article is: A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality. He made this comment about the article:

“Some philosophers are drawn to the the idea that humans are organic robots that make decisions determined by our own biology and environment. I think these ideas let us off the hook for the real choices we can make in our lives. A variety of experiments have shown that people who think they aren’t free feel that it’s okay to hurt another person. ‘Un-freedom’ becomes an alibi. So my day-to-day assumption is that objective reality might not exist, but assuming that it is encourages us to live responsible, compassionate lives. Please feel free to tell me that I’m wrong!”

Actually, academic philosophy has a word for humans as organic robots. That word is zombie. You can read the article on zombies here in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The zombie concept (as much as I detest zombie movies) is a useful concept in thinking about what it means to be a conscious, not to mention a decent, human being. If we are not zombies, then what is it in us that makes us something else?

It happened that I had just finished laboring my way through these two books when I came across John Twelve Hawks’ comment. I cannot follow most of the math of relativity and quantum theory. But I do think that I have a tenuous grasp of the gist of it. I have read a lot of books like this, and I imagine that John Twelve Hawks has, too (as would any science fiction writer who is worth the ink). If John Twelve Hawks was troubled by the suggestion that there is no such thing as objective reality, I was horrified. We are living in an era in which many people feel that they are entitled to their own facts and their own reality. Do we really need to embolden fools with the notion that cutting-edge physics is on their side?

Tim Maudlin probably is the leading philosopher of physics. Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity is a standard textbook in this area. I knew that Maudlin would rip to shreds the idea that objective reality might not exist. I worried that, if Maudlin even bothered to respond to the piece in MIT Technology Review that it might be a long time before he got around to it. But I was wrong, because (as I discovered from Googling) Maudlin was all over it immediately. The Daily Nous is a place where academic philosophers hang out on line. Several philosophers of physics wrote responses, including Maudlin. Here is a link to Maudlin’s response, which has the headline If There Is No Objective Physical World Then There Is No Subject Matter For Physics. Here’s the money quote: “Objective reality is safe and sound. We can all sleep well.”

On what grounds does Tim Maudlin say that objective reality is safe and sound? To answer that question, you’ve got a lot of reading ahead of you. Modern physics is so strange that many physicists actually believe that all possible futures are real, and that a whole new and slightly different universe is created every time some tiny particle undergoes “quantum decoherence.” This is called the Many Worlds Interpretation. Maudlin thinks that’s bunk. For what it’s worth, I do, too. I would say that the reason the minds of many physicists are drawn to the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) is that MWI returns physics to a kind of determinism. The alternative to determinism is spooky, and they don’t like spooks. It was Einstein, I think, who first used the phrase “spooky action at a distance.” For what it’s worth, I like the idea of a spooky universe.

I am by no means qualified to actually review these books. But I do want to argue that, when these mysteries in physics are eventually resolved, it will be the most important new knowledge in our lifetime (if we are lucky and it happens in our lifetime).

If Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity could be boiled down to one key point, I would say that it’s this: Spooky action at a distance is real. Get over it.

Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory is a survey of current candidates for a grand unification theory that can reconcile the contradictions between relativity theory and quantum theory. We seem to not be getting any closer, really. (And I’m not getting any younger.) These theories are largely incompatible. Physicists and philosophers of physics are polite to each other in their books. But online they can be a bit snarky about theories they disagree with.

But you don’t have to be a physicist or a philosopher of physics to choose sides and root for the spooks. You could even come up with your own theory, though you’d have to provide the math to support it.

I confess I have a sneaky suspicion about where it’s all going. I like to play with the idea that there is nothing here. Maudlin actually comes very close to the temptation of that idea himself, in the conclusion of Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory (page 221):

“This possibility makes it tempting to deny the existence of any fundamental particles at all. If particles exist, the thought goes, there must at any given time be a definite, exact number of them determined by the number of distinct trajectories. But in a state of ‘indefinite particle number,’ no such exact number exists, so there can’t be any particles at all. Instead there is a field that can, in particular circumstances, act in a more-or-less particle-like way.”

That there is nothing here is by no means a new idea. In Eastern philosophy, as John Twelve Hawks would know, it is called maya, a kind of light-and-magic show. But that cannot mean that anything goes. Yes, the spookiness seems to be real. But nevertheless the universe remains strictly governed by its mathematics. Much of that math physicists already know. But the biggest piece remains elusive. As for maya, I am not very interested in what ancient philosophy says on the matter. They didn’t provide any supporting math. I only want to know what physicists ultimately figure out.