In which I gripe about Season 7,
Episode 2, on the World Wide Web, rather than talking off my friends'
and family's ear about it. This is for the greater good.
How did Euron Get Here and Why Should I Care? – There were a number of things that
struck me as ill-conceived about last night's episode of Game of
Thrones: Most of the dramatic
tension in the North stems from Jon and Sansa's inexplicably terrible
communication skills. It was never previously established that Arya
was unaware of the Bolton's defeat, nor that her belief to the
contrary was a driving motivation for her revenge spree. Allying
Randal Tarly with the Lannisters puts all of the most dislikable
characters on one side, which further erodes the moral grayness and
nuance that the show at least pretended to in the past.
However,
it was the sea battle at the end of the episode that struck me as the
most preposterous cluster of shark-jumping. The first question, which
passed through my mind as soon as the battle began, was how
did Euron's fleet find Yara's ships on the open ocean, in the middle
of the night, without being seen themselves?
The most plausible answer I can think of is that Yara was using a
standard sea-route toward Dorne, and Euron knew where to wait for
her. But this doesn't really make sense, since Euron had no
established way of knowing Daenery's plan. It's not impossible that
he had a spy, or that he split his enormous fleet to cover the
various routes that Yara might take from Dragonstone, but no such
thing is established.
This
continues a general problem with Euron Greyjoy – The writers have
him show up to advance the plot without establishing anything about
him or his abilities, and without placing any realistic limits on
him. How did Euron build the greatest armada in Westeros in the time
it took Yara to cross the Narrow Sea? Presumably he made the sails
out of human hair, from his back. How did he find Yara's fleet? He has a
compass that doesn't point north. How did he become so good
at fighting that he handily defeated the Sand Snakes, who at least
drew even with Bronn and Jamie? He's Captain Euron Greyjoy, mate. The
difference is that the Pirates
films know Jack Sparrow is absurd.
With
Euron functioning as a MacGuffin, it's hard to build dramatic tension
around him, because it's not clear what constrains or guides his
actions; the audience cannot worry meaningfully about what he will do
next and whether he will succeed, because his actions abide by no
identified logic. This brings us to the next problem. It's not clear
what motivates Euron, if anything, except the desire for power and
revenge. Although this character choice is not an inherent travesty,
it also doesn't make for a terribly interesting villain, especially
since we don't know why
he has these malign desires. Compare Euron to Cersei, who similarly
covets power and revenge, but whose underlying motivations have been
established over several seasons. Cersei wants power and revenge,
because the power to guarantee her own safety, autonomy, and dignity
have been dangled just out of her reach since she was married to
Robert Baratheon.
Euron's motivation,
an ill-defined lust for power and vengeance, is especially a problem
in the context of the sea battle, because this motivation doesn't really
contrast with Yara or Ellaria's motivation in any interesting way.
Yara wants power, and Ellaria wants revenge. Yara probably wants
revenge too, come to think of it. These motivations aren't developed
enough to differ in their nuances, and since both sets of combatants
want the same basically amoral thing, there's no moral contest
at stake in this battle either.
It
doesn't help that all of the characters present are essentially
B-characters at this point. We haven't seen much of Yara or gotten to
know her outside of her relationship to Theon. Ellaria and the Sand
Snakes are notably unpopular and lack individual characterization. In
fact, when two of the Sand Snakes died, I couldn't remember their
names, never mind anything else about them, which somewhat blunted the emotional impact. If, just for instance, Bronn had been involved in this battle, even though he is also amoral and fairly one-dimensional,
at least the dramatic stakes would have been raised because he's a
familiar and likable character. The only reasonably well developed
character present was Theon, and he had his own problems.
Specifically,
I found it unclear whether Theon's escape was supposed to be an act
of cowardice or an act of prudence. The episode seemed to imply that
Theon's escape fit into the ongoing question “Has Theon recovered
his manhood?”1
and this question was answered in the negative, setting up a further
manhood-recovery arc for Theon. This is a problem for me for two
reasons (1) This particular narrative has already been played out
with his escape from Winterfell. If they wanted to reignite or
further develop Theon's recovery narrative, it needed more set up
than it received. (2) Running away struck me as the obviously prudent
thing to do, rather than as cowardly. He had no chance whatsoever of
rescuing Yara or reversing the battle. Attacking Euron would have
been suicide and/or Euron would have killed Yara, whom he was holding
hostage. His decision seems no more cowardly than Yara's retreat
after her abortive attempt to rescue Theon from Ramsay.
So, what we are
left with is a battle between two groups of underdeveloped
characters, set up by a MacGuffin, in which both sides just want to
acquire power for themselves, where they fight in the dark, and in
which it is often unclear which ships and figures are fighting for
which side. The show clearly intended the battle to provide a strong
emotional cadence for the episode and to establish a sense of real
peril for other beloved characters. Instead, it incapacitated a
number of characters that nobody cares about, and it signaled that
Captain MacGuffin Greyjoy can strike anyone, at any time, regardless
of whether it makes sense.
That
is not the same thing as establishing peril, because the audience has
no parameters
according to which they can worry about the characters. When Rob
Stark married inappropriately and then returned to the Twins, that
established peril for a major
character, because the viewers had a specific reason to worry that
Rob might be betrayed at that specific time, leaving them on the edge
of their seats. When Stannis attacked King's Landing, a battle which
was set up over the course of a season, there was specific peril for
well liked characters, such as Tyrion, because it was established
that Stannis was a self-righteous ideologue receiving most of his
advice from a religious zealot who burned people alive. If Stannis
won, he would surely have killed Tyrion, who at that point in the
series was colored with shades of gray that would have been
imperceptible to someone like Stannis.
If a Euron can ride the Black Pearl over the horizon at any time, seems to
possess godlike durability and combat skills, and doesn't have a
clear set of motivations, this doesn't put any particular character
in peril; it puts every protagonist in vague danger, and you can't be
on the edge of your seat all the time for a whole season.
Some
thoughts on the episode from a feminist standpoint –
I don't think it would be quite right to say that the end of the
episode was outright sexist, but it struck me as somewhat tone-deaf
on matters of gender-politics. The episode's finale featured a
notably vile male character (Euron), whom a number of viewers have
identified as an analogue for Donald Trump, killing or capturing four
of the show's combat-oriented female characters in under 10 minutes.
Euron personally overpowered two Sand Snakes and captured Yara, and
was party to the capture of a third Sand Snake. So far as I can
recall, that leaves Arya and Brienne as the only two women in
Westeros who are established as able to use a sword. I understand, of
course, that Westeros is a feudal society. The problem isn't that
there are few combat-trained women. What's uncanny is that the
writers just had Euron incapacitate two thirds of them at once.
I also understand
why the writers might have wanted to do away with some of these
characters, especially the Sand Snakes. One would wish to avoid a
television show full of Sand Snakes for the same reason one would
wish to avoid a movie populated by 13 dwarves. They are
underdeveloped, interchangeable, and (in the case of the former)
widely disliked. I am not convinced, however, it was an unavoidable
that these female, martially skilled characters were underdeveloped.
It was, at some point, a conscious choice by the show writers to give
the hound an interesting story-arc well after he dies (or retires) in
the books, but to have Obara and Nymeria pout while Tyene whispers to
Bronn about his need for “bad pussy.” So, I'm not saying that it
was sexist for the writers of Season 7, Episode 2, to kill off Obara
and Nymeria. I'm skeptical, however, that the factors which led them
to be disposable, unpopular characters were nothing but random
accident.
Finally,
the writers seemed to have obliviously repeated one of the most
uncomfortable features of the scene from Season 5 in which Sansa is
raped by Ramsay Bolton. Arguably, the most objectionable aspect of
that scene was that Sansa's brutalization turned around suddenly to
feed into Theon's character development. The scene's cadence wasn't
about Sansa's trauma, but Theon's emasculation as he stood by and
failed to intervene. By all accounts, Theon's current importance to
the “great game” is ancillary at best.
Yara describes him as an adviser and protector, though we've seen him
doing neither of these things. Nevertheless, as Daenery's fleet is
lost, and two significant political leaders (Ellaria and Yara) are
captured, the scene ends with an emphasis on Theon failing to fulfill
his potential. This
doesn't seem like the right water for the series to retread.
1I
don't think this is a bad way to describe his character arc. Theon
starts out as a deliberately macho character, then is is literally,
physically emasculated, and then he needs to find himself again.
