SPOILER ALERT: if you haven't yet watched Game of Thrones Season 6, Episode 5, titled "The Door," and you don't want to know any plot spoilers (yet), don't read any further. In the opinion of a majority of the show's audience, Happy Days became unwatchable when Fonzie jumped over a shark on water skis, taking the tough-guy persona from being somewhat difficult-to-believe well into the theater of the absurd. The idiom "jumping the shark" became famous soon thereafter, and was used to describe the point in any television series when far-fetched plot twists began being included merely for the sake of novelty, which tended to mark the beginning of a sharp decline in the show's quality of writing. To be brutally honest, I'm afraid that Game of Thrones jumped the shark in last night's episode. For whatever reason, I was reminded of that approximate point when Twin Peaks stopped being interesting, and started getting stupid. Now I suppose I'll eventually watch "Blood of my Blood" (the next installment in Game of Thrones) out of morbid curiosity, and the hope Ramsey Bolton might be killed off, but the plot twists in last night's episode pretty much ruined the plot line for the entire series, in my opinion. I don't know how the writers can fix it. In essence, Bran Stark learned that the Children had created the either the first White Walker or the Night's King by shoving what looked like a wooden blade deep into a captive human's chest. But then asked to explain why they had created the first White Walker, the spokesperson for the Children claimed that their reason … [Read more...]
Jon Snow and Game of Thrones
The HBO series Game of Thrones is famous for brutal, gory sword fights mixed in with dire wolves, dragons, and quite a bit of kinky sex. Based on the A Song of Ice and Fire series of novels written by George R. R. Martin, the television adaptation has largely remained faithful to the books thus far. And for the most part, the television shows have been dazzling. Martin has published five novels. The television series has now run for five complete seasons. However, the novels and "seasons" of the show haven't matched up perfectly -- events occurred in the most recent novel that have not happened onscreen, and not everything in the books made it onscreen. In the final episode of season 5,, one of the few remaining heroes in the broad saga, Jon Snow, was murdered, which (according to my wife and son, who read them) also happened in the most recent novel. Readers of the books will remember that Jon was brought back from the dead in that same novel in which he was killed, because he's become an essential character in the overall story. Clearly, the word "ice" in the title for the series refers to Jon Snow, just as "fire" refers to the dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen. Yet in response to speculation coming from fans of the books, HBO president of programming Michael Lombardo has been quoted by Deadline Hollywood as saying, "Dead is dead as dead as dead. He be (SIC) dead. Yes. From everything I’ve seen, heard, read, Jon Snow is indeed dead." The problem is that the show really won't make any sense or have much of a future without Jon Snow. Therefore, I … [Read more...]
