Elizabeth Sandifer

Let’s start with the good, a phrase that pretty decisively tips my hand as to the overall shape of this review. The direction is largely solid – Sapochnik’s sense of composition is reliably impeccable. The wide shot of Davos after he’s discovered what happened to Shireen is probably the most straightforward of them, but it’s hardly the only one. His shots emphasizing the absolute carnage are things we haven’t seen the show do with violence before. The long take of Jon in combat is exquisite, as is the scene of Jon crawling his way out of the crush. 

Many of the small moments are similarly strong. Sansa riding away from the parlay is delicious, a beautiful setup for the final scene, Sophie Turner getting to play imperious badass and absolutely nailing it. Her smile as Ramsay is ripped apart is perfectly poised, at once capping off a long-awaited bit of narrative payoff and letting it go just a little too far. Davos and Tormund’s version of “the men chatting before the battle” is delightful. And pretty much everything in Meereen is fantastic, from Peter Dinklage’s understatement to the basic satisfaction (and intelligence) of opening an episode that had been promoted as if it was another “Blackwater” or “The Watchers on the Wall”-style single location battle with a scene in Meereen, and more to the point with a spectacle-laden battle scene in Meereen. And then of course there’s “I never demand, but I’m up for anything really,” which is straightforwardly the best line of the episode, and probably of the season.

The problems, then. Sapochnik’s direction is mostly excellent, but his taste for visual perversity, so effective in “Hardhome” when he was doing zombie horror battles, is just irritating here. Things like the gratuitous shot of Rickon’s body being riddled with additional arrows, or the decision to play Wun Wun’s death as a punchline with an arrow going through his eye are just crass – the worst instincts of the Red Wedding distilled into singular shots, included for no other reason than the fact that Game of Thrones is a show that is apparently fundamentally obliged to include tawdry spectacle.

Furthermore, while sloppy plotting vulnerable to refrigerator logic is a standard feature of Game of Thrones that I’m usually not bothered by, this episode is particularly egregious. Many of these are small things that can easily be ignored – the degree to which the starving dogs comply with dramatic pacing in exactly when they devour Ramsay, the fact that Sansa wasn’t actually there when Ramsay said he hadn’t fed them, or Ramsay’s mysteriously improving aim as Rickon recedes. Their aggregate is perhaps a particularly bad run of sloppiness, but none of it is outside the realm of what the show’s basic narrative engine depends on the viewer being willing to forgive.

But the Rickon scene also starts to get at some of the larger problems. Ramsay’s supernatural archery skills are highlighted by the fact that the scene is a drawn out spectacle of unpleasant anticipation.…

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Burn Goreman finally lands a job more ridiculous than Torchwood.

Review of “Battle of the Bastards” will be along later today – I’ve got an early morning, so can’t get it up the night before I fear.

State of Play

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I’ve successfully moved, and even unpacked most of the boxes. So that’s nice. Settling and finally getting back to work, at least when I can avoid being horribly distracted by the book I’m reading. (It’s a really good book, but alas I can’t mention the title.) Finally back to work on Last War in Albion, both revisions and new material. Just had cause to crack open How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way. And the Neoreaction a Basilisk copyedits are almost done. So life is largely good. 

“Battle of the Bastards” review will probably be up Monday morning, as Jill’s first day of work is Monday and I’m somewhat disinclined to stay up til 2-3am reviewing Game of Thrones the night before that. 

In other news, friend of the blog James Wylder is running a Kickstarter for Goblinpunk, a Pathfinder and D&D compatible adventure. They’re just under $270 from goal with just over a day remaining, so if that’s a thing that interests you, well, do the obvious thing.

And that’ll do for this week, I reckon.…

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From worst to best of what I read, with books that I wasn’t willing to pay money for.

Lazarus #22

I may be putting this at the bottom for my own failings as opposed to the book’s, given that I discovered an entire plotline I’d apparently completely failed to understand in the recap pages. (I’d been parsing the scenes of the second Forever as flashbacks for some reason.) Anyway, this is a fine issue of Lazarus, but I have to admit, there’s not a lot that’s fresh in this book at this point, and not only on the level of “what happens all feels pretty standard and expected,” but on the level of “it is difficult to even imagine how the book could surprise me.” Which I suppose is an odd question to ask, as it wouldn’t be a surprise, but all the same, this just isn’t a book I’ve got much excitement for right now and is becoming a bit of a loyalty read.

Spider-Gwen #9

I have a much easier time with Spider-Gwen when she’s in conversation with the rest of the Marvel Universe, as opposed to when she’s doing stories in her own bubble, and started this book mildly annoyed and a bit underwhelmed by it and wondering if I was going to keep going. I ended the book much more enthused and interested, after some good character notes. There’s a mild impatience for the silly and obviously temporary “Gwen only has a finite number of doses of power left” status quo to go away so that the book can get back to its actual premise – it’s exactly the sort of plot superhero comics are slightly crap at. But for the most part, fun superheroics.

Mercury Heat #10

Missed that this came out and just snagged it. A very “gets the job done” sort of issue, the job being a pseudo-conclusion that gives way to a nice big cliffhanger that will presumably close out this arc. There’s not a lot new to introduce, though, and most of the intriguing questions left by previous issues have resolved into answers that, while perfectly fine and good storytelling, are, as is often the case, somewhat less interesting than the open-ended questions. So nothing wrong with it, but not an exceptionally gripping issue either.

Klaus #6

The Morrisonia really hits in full, with the sort of symbolism-infused vision quest you expect from Morrison. On the one hand this is a bit sad, the book seeming to give up most of what made it feel fresh and innovative in favor of predictability. On the other hand, this book has been wheel-spinning, and even if Morrison is leaning hard on old favorites here, it’s still providing the book with a new momentum that it hasn’t really had since issue #2 or so, making me at least a bit interested in the conclusion, even as it’s pretty clear how everything is going to shake out. This remains Morrison’s best work in a couple years, for better and for worse.…

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I really find myself wondering what Jack Gleeson thought of that scene.

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laud out thusly:

Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister

Dragons of Meereen: Daenerys Targaryen

Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow

Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish

Roses of King’s Landing: Margaery Tyrell

Ships of Dragonstone: Davos Seaworth

Burning Heats of Dragonstone: Stannis Baratheon

Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

The Dogs, Sandor Clegane

Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly

Bows of the Wall: Ygritte

Paws of the Wall: Tormund Giantsbane

Flowers of the Wall: Gilly

Shields of King’s Landing: Brienne of Tarth

Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys

With the Bear of Meereen, Iain Glenn

The Dreadfort is abandoned.

The episode is in eight parts. The first part runs fourteen minutes and is in three sections. The first sections is four minutes long; the opening image is identical to the closing image of the previous episode. The second section is two minutes long. The transition is by implication, from one of Joffrey’s murderers to the other. The third section is six minutes  long. The transition is by dialogue, from Olenna talking about Joffrey to his corpse.

The second part runs six minutes and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by hard cut, from Jaime raping Cersei to some hills.

The third runs three minutes and is set at the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Arya to the yard at Castle Black.

The fourth runs four minutes and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, from Sam to the table in Dragonstone.

The fifth runs two and is set in Molestown, just south of the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Princess Shireen writing to Sam and Gilly riding through a street.

The sixth runs eleven minutes and is in two sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is six minutes long; the transition is by image, from one brothel to another. The second section is five minutes long; the transition is by family, from Tywin to Tyrion Lannister, and by dialogue, with Tywin and Oberyn talking about Tyrion’s trial.

The seventh part runs five minutes and is set at and around the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Podrick departing to an babbling river.

The last runs eight minutes and is set in Meereen. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Daenerys Targaryen. The final image is of a slave landing on a ladder as he looks at a broken collar.

Analysis

For the most part, “Breaker of Chains” is a standard-issue bit of transitional play, primarily concerned with placing the season on its forward course following the ridiculous fireworks of “The Lion and the Rose.” And yet look at that State of Play: eight parts. That’s insane. The only Season Three episode to have that few parts was “Valar Dohaeris.” All told, the only other episodes in the first three seasons to come in under ten are “Winter is Coming,” “The Wolf and the Lion,” and “Blackwater.”…

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Hm. I freely admit, this is a slightly tough and weird one for me to review. Not for anything having to do with the episode – just that I watched it twenty-four hours after moving house and socially instead of my previously standard Game of Thrones ritual of pizza and relative solitude. So I don’t know if my sense that it was an oddly disjointed and directionless thing was simply because I was disjointed, or because this was actually an odd and slightly off-kilter thing for an eighth episode. I suspect at least partially the latter – the odd structure of a Lannister-focused episode with a pair of Hound/Arya scenes bolted onto each end (via hard cut in each direction) harkens back to some of the weird and half-baked approaches of Season Three. And there’s a relative absence of driving and climactic momentum that jars for an eighth episode.

The most obvious thing to point to in that regard – and it’s a genuinely peculiar move – is that Jon and Sansa aren’t in it. The preview makes it pretty clear that we’re doing a single location battle episode for our penultimate one, which is good and exciting, but it’s positively bizarre not to include a scene along those lines that might gesture towards the sense of impending climax. Instead the plot leaves that out, which gives the episode an oddly hollow feel, especially since its only vague contribution to that plot is the thoroughly anticlimactic killing of the Blackfish, a move that both departs somewhat abruptly from the books and that raises the question of why the hell we set out on this particular plot line in the first place. He just turns a corner after a dumb line about how Brienne will serve Sansa better than him (as though it’s an either-or choice), and that’s apparently that for a character we went to great length to bring back after three years.

It’s not a total loss – the Jaime and Brienne scene is delightful, and the Jaime/Edmure scene is quite good as well (especially the use of the “things we do for love” line) – but the Riverrun material this week is at once lengthy and mostly tedious. Even Bronn and Podrick don’t really work. And yet a huge chunk of the episode is spent there. Not only that, a huge chunk of work across the season has been spent making it so that we actually remember who the hell Edmure and Brynden Tully are. And yet it seems for the most part to amount to nothing. It’s possible that the tenth episode will manage to find something to do with this plot that redeems it, but right now it seems utterly pointless.

And this isn’t the only moment that plays out weirdly. Daenerys’s return to Meereen is inexplicably limp, coming as it does after a two minute “and now the Masters welch on the deal from four episodes ago” siege that, while a fair amount of money was spent making it look nice, still feels ridiculously perfunctory.…

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From worst to best of what I bought. At the end is a list of my planned purchases for next week. Anything you’re gutted to see absent from that list, take it up in comments.

Wonder Woman: Rebirth #1

A hot mess, but potentially a forgiveable one – certainly I’ll continue with the first issue or two of the actual Rucka run, as I have historically liked his Wonder Woman. But this barely deserves to be called a comic – the overwhelming majority of it is simply an internal monologue on Wonder Woman’s part. And not an internal monologue with tension and drive, nor, for that matter, with much artistry. It’s mostly just a restatement of the fact that Wonder Woman’s origin story is thoroughly and completely fucked. Then Wonder Woman punches a mirror and goes to Olympus for answers, only it’s apparently not really Olympus and there aren’t any answers given. Or, actually, questions asked. Seriously, I don’t think Marvel and DC have managed a feat of synchronized suckage as bad as Rebirth and Civil War II since Zero Hour and the Clone Saga were bowing at the same time twenty-two years ago.

New Avengers #12

There’s nothing particularly wrong with this issue, but there’s not much that’s massively compelling about it either. The character bits are fun – Ewing does some excellent Squirrel Girl bits, a great Hawkeye beat, and some nice setup (it’s good to see the Maker back, for instance). But on the whole, it’s kind of dismaying for this to already be caught up in another crossover I’m disinclined to read, and I suspect this’ll be my last issue barring reader intervention.

Darth Vader #21

Solid rising action, with the requisite things you expect from Darth Vader. Vader intimidates and kills people, Aphra and Triple-Zero are funny, everything moves inexorably towards a conclusion. but Gillen’s Darth Vader arcs have all been end-loaded, and his last one looks like no exception. 

The Wicked + The Divine #20

Hm. I can’t say I’m overly thrilled with this issue, mostly because it handles the “how Laura survived” issue in a way I generally dislike, which is to reveal that what we saw was presented in an actively misleading manner. It’s not a bad issue – the entire “Nergal” section is absolutely hilarious, Cassandra is consistently delightful, and Matthew Wilson is doing some really cool, weird stuff with the colors. But as big reveals go, this one is at the moment leaving me a bit cold. Although I’ve high hopes that it’ll work out, because it’s Gillen and WicDiv.

Injection #10

The second arc ends with lots of chilling, meaty stuff, beginning with Ellis doing the classic detective “bring everyone together to explain the plot” resolution, and ending with a nice, disturbing sequence of strange horrors inflicted upon the world by the Injection. In the middle is some fun discussion of money, magic, and religion, and also discussion of sex with ghosts. I hope the break before this comes back isn’t too brutally long, as it’s an utter delight.…

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Kevin and James are joined by “their friend Thomas,” according to the episode description, which doesn’t sound suspicious and like it’s just going to be James putting on a funny voice at all. In any case, they talk about more classic westerns (Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) before moving on to evolutionary horror with a discussion of one of the flat-out greatest Doctor Who serials of all time, Ghost Light.

You can listen to that right here.…

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Take your pick on who’s body posture is better here, Jack Gleeson or Natalie Dormer.

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister,

Roses of King’s Landing: Margaery Tyrell

Ships of Dragonstone: Davos Seaworth

Burning Hearts of Dragonstone: Stannis Baratheon, Melisandre

Kraken of the Dreadfort: Theon Greyjoy

Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon

Direwolves of the Wall: Bran Stark

Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark

Shields of King’s Landing: Brienne of Tarth

Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae

Flayed Men of the Dreadfort: Ramsay Snow

Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys

Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn

Winterfell is abandoned and in ruins. Meereen is empty.

The episode is in seven parts. The first is three minutes long and is set in the forests around the Dreadfort. The opening image is of Ramsay and Miranda running happily through the woods

The second is three minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by image, from Theon watching the dogs devour Ramsay and Miranda’s prey to a plate of sausages.

The third is six minutes long and is set at the Dreadfort. The transition is by hard cut, from Jaime and Bronn sparring to Roose Bolton and his men arriving at the Dreadfort.

The fourth is six minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Ramsay smiling to an establishing shot of the gardens.

The fifth is five minutes long and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion smashing a cup to the fire.

The sixth runs four minutes long and is set north of the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Melisandre to a POV shot from Summer.

The seventh runs twenty-three minutes minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by image, from Bran’s vision of a dragon flying over King’s Landing to, shortly after, an establishing shot of the city. It features the death of Joffrey Baratheon by poisoning. The final image is of Joffrey having landed on a snake and died.

Analysis

“The Lion and the Rose” demands to be read in comparison with “The Rains of Castamere,” a structural conceit straightforwardly inherited from A Storm of Swords and worn on the episode’s sleeve as Olenna laments the horror of killing a man at a wedding while palming the poison Littlefinger has smuggled her. In the book this marks the completion of Melisandre’s blood magic, the death of the last warring king save for Stannis. Here it is simply a bit of symmetry performed over the season break – the ostentatious death set piece previously associated with ninth episodes unexpectedly slotted into the traditionally sleepy second episode. This is tremendously clever – indeed, it’s by far the best trick the show has pulled since “Baelor” itself, very nearly justifying the tawdry spectacle of the Red Wedding.

The most basic comparison to make, then, is the fact that all told twenty-three minutes of “The Rains of Castamere” take place at the Twins, whereas that’s the length of the final part of “The Lion and the Rose” alone, with another nine minutes worth of King’s Landing earlier in the episode.…

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A tremendously effective tone piece of rising action. The decision to do a cold open to dispatch the episode’s headline event sets the tone well, and seems where you have to start in looking at the episode. First, the obvious criticisms, which are numerous: they literally bring him back after sixteen episodes with nothing more than a Missy-esque “well I escaped”; there’s nothing like room to actually build his arc this episode; it amounts to a Martin-esque “I BROUGHT YOU ANOTHER VIEWPOINT CHARACTER I HOPE YOU LIKE IT” of exactly the sort that the show historically does poorly (and for that matter so does Martin). Fine. But of at least equal weight is the sort of bloody-minded televisual efficiency with which it’s done. The Hound does Unforgiven and we got Ian McShane to be the walking cliche needed to do it. Fair enough. It’s hard to complain about an eleven minute western shot in Northern Ireland with Rory McCann and Ian McShane.

Aside from giving the episode a sense of oddness from the get-go, it sets an almost necessary theme; one that’s fairly quickly emphasized as we deal both with fellow religious fanatics (and Maribald is definitely a religious fanatic, even as he’s a somewhat more straightforwardly sympathetic one than the High Sparrow) and old wars. The relatively large number of parts and of hard cuts belies the tightness of the episode, with scene after scene of people preparing for battles and getting dragged into old conflicts. Things like the cut from Lyanna Mormont to the Kingslayer and Blackfish’s parlay and back to Jon Snow are elegant things. And it’s difficult to seriously call the Hound-Arya-Hound sequence at the end a set of arbitrary “hard cuts” even as they don’t quite fit into any of the standard categories of transition. 

There’s also a stripped simplicity to the majority of scenes. All of them have straightforward stakes and a clear structure of someone trying to get what they want. For once the profusion of short scenes is simply an episode moving quickly and with pace. Even the quiet scenes have great moments – Olenna’s “I wonder if you’re the worst person I’ve ever met” is fantastic, as (once again) is Natalie Dormer’s performance of “I am very clever and two steps ahead of everyone else in the room.” And the Yara/Theon scene is a small delight, with some of the best chosen nudity in the series’ history, a bunch of great lines (Gemma Whelan’s delivery of “fuck justice then, we’ll get revenge” is perfect) and a throwaway line about Daenerys that does a lot of larger structural work for the season. And the short Arya scene is quite effective, abruptly putting Arya in a very new sort of danger – she’s literally never had any sort of serious injury before, and seeing Maisie Williams get to do a very standard bit of Game of Thrones acting for the first time in season six is a delight. 

Seeing Jaime in a decidedly different place, at once taken down a few notches and put in a new position of power, is similarly rewarding, and having both Clive Russell and Jerome Flynn back after absences of varying lengths is satisfying.…

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