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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.01: The North Remembers

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State of Play
The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister
The Lion, Jaime Lannister 
The Direwolves, Catelyn Stark, Robb Stark
Dragons of the Dothraki Sea: Daenerys Targaryen,
Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish
Bears of the Dothraki Sea: Jorah Mormont
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Ships of Dragonstone: Davos Seaworth
Direwolves of Winterfell: Brandon Stark
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark
The Direwolf, Arya Stark
The Kraken, Theon Greyjoy
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon
Dogs of King’s Landing: Sandor Clegane
Burning Hearts of Dragonstone: Stannis Baratheon, Mellisandre
Bears of the Wall: Jeor Mormont
Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn
Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys
Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae
The episode is in ten parts. The first runs eight minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The opening image is of the Hound fighting another armored man. 
The second runs four minutes and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion and Cersei talking about the Starks to Bran. 
The third runs four minutes and is set in the Red Waste, east of the Dothraki Sea. The transition is by dialogue, from Bran and Osha talking about dragons to Daenerys and her dragons, and by red comet. 
The fourth runs six minutes and is set at Craster’s Keep, north of the Wall. The transition is by family, from Daenerys Targaryen to Jon Snow, and by red comet.
The fifth runs seven minutes and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by red comet. At the episode’s halfway point, Stannis is being crowned the Prince that Was Promised as he is reborn amidst salt and smoke in the creation of Lightbringer.
The sixth runs three minutes and is set in the Stark camp in the Riverlands. The transition is by image, from the flickering fire behind Melisandre to the fires in the Stark camp, and by dialogue, with both Robb Stark and Jaime Lannister being discussed at Stannis Baratheon’s small council meeting.
The seventh runs five minutes and is in sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is two minutes long; the transition is by family, from Jaime Lannister to Tyrion. The second section is three minutes long; the transition is by family, from Tyrion Lannister to Cersei. 
The eighth part runs five minutes and is set in the Stark camp in the Riverlands; the transition is by family, from Cersei to Alton Lannister.
The ninth runs five minutes and is in sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is two minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Catelyn Stark to Cersei walking into the throne room. The second section is two minutes long. The transition is by hard cut, from Cersei to prostitutes having sex, and by consequence, from Joffrey ordering the death of Robert Baratheon’s bastards to one being killed in the brothel.
…

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“I’ve never seen a rainbow”: Galaxy’s Child, Identity Crisis, The Mind’s Eye

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Poor Geordi La Forge.

I have no idea what it is about the Starship Enterprise‘s chief engineer, but absolutely nobody seems comfortable with writing for him or even has any real idea who he is. Michael Piller’s big contribution to fleshing out Geordi’s character was turning him into an insecure mechanophile who didn’t know how to act around women, Ira Steven Behr thinks he should be eaten by Klingons and even René Echevarria mentioned he had no idea what Geordi and Beverly Crusher would have to talk about to each other as an example of how hard he found it to write for the Star Trek: The Next Generation characters. Only Deanna Troi elicits a comparable level of writer’s block and despair amongst Star Trek creator types, and even she’s had “Night Terrors” and bits of “Half a Life” by this point.

So it really is fitting one member of this trio is entitled “Identity Crisis”, because that’s what it feels like Geordi is going through. And not just him, but Star Trek: The Next Generation too-Recall that while we’ve seen some strong stuff in the past few weeks, we’re still very early on in the show’s Mark II phase and it’s still finding its footing to some extent. That process won’t be complete until we enter the summer hiatus. But as for poor Geordi, it really does feel like the creative team has absolutely no idea what to do with him here: Instead of looking at the role he plays on the Enterprise and his relationships with the other members of the crew, the episode invents backstory for him, is primarily interested in creating the person he used to be instead of who he is now and tries to tell a story in the past tense (unlike what the show did with Captain Picard in “The Battle” where the Stargazer backstory was firmly in the past, here the Victory stuff has real material bearing on the plot). Also, it turns Geordi into a 1980s version of the aliens from Raumpatrouille Orion.

The other episodes in this set aren’t especially better. “The Mind’s Eye” is the most obviously offensive, being a rote, boring “Shocking Betrayal!” Manchurian Candidate ripoff. It’s an unimaginative and stock “Let’s Do” plot well beyond the point at which we should have learned that these don’t work, and the treatment of Geordi is absolutely horrific: Let’s take his visor, which was designed to facilitate an empowering portrayal of blind people, and turn it into a security risk by treating it like a computer in a thriller movie you can hack and make it do whatever you want. On top of that, it renders Geordi subservient to the by this point entirely and unnecessarily overblown Worf/Mogh/Duras discommendation story arc. The one bit of partial credit I suppose I could give this episode is that Commander Sela is in it, but she really doesn’t need to be in this episode.…

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The Gift

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State of Play

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

Lions of Meereen: Tyrion Lannister
Lions of Dorne: Jaime Lannister
Lions of King’s Landing: Cersei 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
The Burning Hearts, Stannis Baratheon and Mellisandre
The Ship, Davos Seaworth
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Paws of the Wall: Tormund Giantsbane
Flowers of the Wall: Gilly
Stags of King’s Landing: Tommen Baratheon
Kraken of Winterfell: Reek
Direwolves of Winterfell: Sansa Stark
Flayed Men of Winterfell: Ramsey Bolton
Shields of Winterfell: Brienne of Tarth
Chains of Dorne: Bronn
Swords of Meereen: Dario Noharis
With the Bear of Meereen, Jorah Mormont.

Braavos is abandoned.

The episode is in twelve parts. The first is three minutes long and is set at the Wall. The opening image is of a horse.

The second is three minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by hard cut, from a reaction shot of Gilly to an establishing shot of the hall outside Sansa’s room.

The third is three minutes long and is set at the Wall. The transition is by image, from Brienne watching for a candle in the window to candles lit around Maester Aemon’s deathbed. It features the death of Aemon Targaryen, who dies of old age.

The fourth is four minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by image, from snow falling over Maester Aemon’s funeral pyre to snow falling on the battlements at Winterfell.

The fifth is four minutes long and is set on the road between Winterfell and the Wall. The transition is by image, of snow falling, and by dialogue, from Ramsey talking about Stannis in the winter to Stannis’s camp in the winter.

The sixth is six minutes long and is set at the Wall. The transition is by hard cut, from Stannis to Gilly tending a fire.

The seventh is five minutes long and is in two sections; it is set in Meereen. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Sam and Gilly having sex to slaves being marched. The other is two minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Tyrion to Daenerys and Dario in bed.

The eighth part is seven minutes long and is in two sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is four minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys to an establishing shot of the Great Sept of Baelor. The second is three minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Oleanna talking about Margaery to Tommen and Cersei doing the same.

The ninth part is five minutes long and is in two sectionsl it is set in Dorne. The first section is one minute long; the transition is by family, from Cersei and Tommen to Jaime and Myrcella. The second section is four minutes long; the transition is by image, from Jaime standing in front of a window to a window in the prison.…

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Saturday Waffling (May 23rd, 2015)

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Let’s see. Got the edits back on the first two seasons of Eruditorum 6. About 3-4000 words from the end of Book One of Last War in Albion. Logopolis books will finally go out Wednesday.

Several unrelated things kicking around that I’d love to find time for, but I’m not quite sure where that time would go right now.

“Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” is still very much on my mind right now, and rather making moving on to A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.x a bit of a sour experience. I’d been going to roll out a new feature on the GoT reviews for the back half of the season in which I made next episode predictions, and was left in far too foul a mood after that episode to do it. But anyway, here’s predictions for “The Gift,” based on officially released HBO material and the books.

It looks like we have the Wall, Winterfell, Dorne, King’s Landing, and Meereen up this episode, but no Braavos.

The Wall: Probably where the episode’s title comes from. Jon Snow will commence the rescue mission of the Wildlings at Hardhome. Dissent in the ranks will continue. This looks straightforward.

King’s Landing: The arc here is clearly that Oleanna is going to throw Cersei in the path of the High Sparrow as well, with Lancel providing evidence of her crimes. Whether Oleanna will enact that plan this episode, or merely fail at talking Margery out out of jail is unclear. I’ll bet on her enacting it, though.

Winterfell The presence of snow and the repeated talk of “the snows starting” suggest we are going to do a variation of the plot in which Stannis gets bogged down in a snowstorm. But I think we’ll be in the early stages of that here. As for Sansa, my guess is that she’s going to be a functional prisoner, but that she’s going to get Theon to signal for Brienne. I hope this plot advances pretty far, obviously. It’s perfectly plausible that Ramsey is going to die this episode.

Dorne: Tricky, as Jaime’s presence now prevents most of the obvious plot arcs. I’ve seen speculation of Bronn being poisoned. Could happen. All we know for certain is that Jaime and Myrcella are going to have a chat. It’s entirely possible that’s all there will be; they’ve hardly been putting Dorne at the forefront of the plot, and there’s not necessarily a lot more to do with it either. Really all that’s guaranteed is a big Doran scene in the next four episodes.

Meereen: By far the hardest to predict. It wasn’t clear Daenerys was in it until some publicity photos emerged. All we have to go on is that Daenerys is in it, and a trailer shot of Tyrion (looks like indoors, but in theory could be on a ship). This could be a straight plate-spin. Obviously we’re building to a Tyrion/Jorah/Daenerys/Drogo collision, but as with Winterfell and Dorne, it’s very hard to tell how far we’ll go in this episode.…

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It’s All True (The Last War in Albion Part 97: Nightjar, Sinister Ducks)

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This is the ninth of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore was particularly passionate about his handful of collaborations with Bryan Talbot. But his major effort at collaborating with Talbot, a strip to be called Nightjar and be published in Warrior, was never completed.

“The world must be warned about those ducks. It’s all true.” -Translucia Baboon, quoted by Neil Gaiman
Figure 776: The opening to Nightjar, unpublished for
twenty years. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Bryan
Talbot c. 1983, published in Yuggoth Cultures #1, 2003)
Nightjar ultimately became a casualty of Moore’s falling out with Dez Skinn, who, for his part, insists that he “was never very keen on Nightjar (hated the name) and Bryan was another slow – or busy – artist, so it would never have happened in Warrior.” Talbot ultimately only completed two and a half pages of the strip, with another page partially completed, but roughly twenty years after Talbot had started the page,  William Christensen at Avatar got in touch and asked if he still had the unfinished pages. Talbot did, and Christensen proceeded to commission Talbot to finish the strip, reprinting it along with the script and Moore’s letter to Talbot about the development of it in the first issue of the anthology Yuggoth Cultures, collecting various Moore obscurities with newly commissioned adaptations of some of his poems and song lyrics.
Figure 777: The seven villainous sorcerers
who killed Mirrigan’s father. (Written by
Alan Moore c. 1983, art by Bryan Talbot,
from “Nightjar” in Yuggoth Cultures #1, 2003)
The resulting strip is a straightforward thing – mainly a slab of exposition that starts with ten-year-old girl watching her father die, a death that Moore, in typically florid captions, describes as “a dirty death, stumbling and falling amidst the yellow grass and rusted pram wheels, eyes rolling, white foam flecked on blackening lips” as a man the audience is told is the Emperor of all the Birds is “murdered by sorcerers.” The strip then cuts eighteen years later as the girl, Mirrigan Demdyke, receives a lecture from her dying grandmother (memorably depicted by Talbot as an old woman with her eyes sewn shut), who explains that her father was not killed fairly under the rules of magic, as he was not killed by a single opponent, but by a cabal of seven sorcerers conspiring against him. Outraged by this travesty, Mirrigan swears that she will kill the seven, who are introduced at patient length by her grandfather, starting with “Hart Wentworth, whose soul is like a monstrous slug, crusted with sapphires, thrashing contentedly in the tarpit of his own vileness” and ending with Sir Eric Blason, the new Emperor of all the Birds, who Moore leaves relatively undescribed in the comic, but notes in the script is “a member of parliament” with “power on a level that drug-addled ninnies like you and I can scarcely conceive.” 
…

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“When you think you love someone, you love them”: The Host

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For some reason I’ve always taken “Half a Life” and “The Host” together: The two well-remembered big dramatic doomed love stories from the back of the fourth season brought to you by the letter H. They’re also the two episodes I was the most apathetic about revisiting from this filming block, as I didn’t have especially fond memories of the pair. I was completely mistaken in the case of “Half a Life”, which I now consider to be a definite highlight of the fourth season.

It turns out that if I had any reservations about this diptych at all, it was entirely thanks to “The Host”. This is another one that I’m afraid I can’t redeem in the slightest.

In the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation, there are three infamous scripts whose clumsy handling of gender and sexuality, along with their general ineptitude, are directly responsible for saddling the series with a reputation of heteronormativity and homophobia. The first was the titanic piece of shit that was “Blood and Fire”: Although the show was able to dodge that particular bullet, so cavernous was the yawning expanse of its suckitude that it somehow managed to bend reality such that it makes Star Trek: The Next Generation look homophobic in every potential universe regardless of whether or not it physically exists in them. The third is a deeply unfortunate car crash of an episode we’ll look at next season that at least has a strangled redemptive reading you can tease out of it. The second is “The Host”, and this time the show has no goddamn excuse.

This isn’t to say the initial concept isn’t worthwhile or influential. The Trill of course go on to be a major, major species in the Star Trek universe (though for a number of reasons they eventually end up having nothing to do with the way Ambassador Odan is depicted here) and they open up a genuinely compelling set of storytelling possibilities. However, that’s all due to what Terry Farrell and Jadzia Dax establish on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine-The rhetorical logic behind Ambassador Odan’s role in this episode is surprisingly prosaic and unambitious. The point of the Trill in “The Host” is to set up a very stock and boring moral about how “it’s what’s on the inside that counts”. The person Doctor Crusher is in love with is the symbiote, not the hunky guy it lives in. The idea being, as director Marvin Rush explained it, “if your beloved turned into a cockroach, could you love a cockroach?”

Which makes it all the more inexplicable that, in what is quite possibly the single most ethically bankrupt and ill-fitting conclusion in all of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Host” ends by having Beverly break off the relationship with Odan’s next host, a woman, because it’s “too complicated”. There is, of course, the obvious homophobia. Rush and the writing staff vehemently deny that they were intending to pass judgment on homosexuality and that this wasn’t even a place they were meaning to go and that the episode isn’t about that.…

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Sans Everything

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Spoilers & Triggers

So, Sansa and Ramsey.

Well, it was totally necessary because it shows rape is bad, which we didn’t already know…

Oh, hang on, we did.

Well, some people don’t understand how bad rape is, and this’ll make them see that they were wrong…

Oh no, hang on, it proably won’t.

Well, it was necessary for the plot.

Er… no.  And even if it had been, plots are things people make, not things that grow by themselves.

But it was in the book, wasn’t it?

Um… no, it wasn’t.  In fact they had to rewrite the storyline from the books quite extensively to make it possible.  And even if it had been in the book, that wouldn’t bind them to include it.

But at least it was germaine to the text, like the rape scene in, say, The Accused…

Umm… except that this is a show about dragons and magic in a fairytale kingdom.

But at least it shows the horrors of the treatment of women in the middle ages…

Except that this show isn’t set in the middle ages in the real world…

But, being set in a fictionalised version of the middle ages, the show has a mandate to cover medieval misogyny…

Um, no.  Not necessarily.

Well, at least it’s broaching a topic it’s been silent about up until now?

Except that it hasn’t been.  In fact, it’s looked at violence against women, sexual or otherwise, in what some might say is pitilessly and cynically unnecessary depth and detail.

But it handled it tastefully and unsensationally and in a way that nobody could possibly get off on watching in any kind of creepy, woman-hating way…

Um…

But it at least advanced the characters’ progress towards… er…

Well, at least it told us stuff we didn’t know about the characters, like Ramsey’s a sadist and a misogynist, and Sansa can put up with cruel treatment.

Um…

Well, it’s good for headlines and ratings, so that justifies it.  I guess.

Er…

Well, it was edgy.  ZOMG, they are so hardcore and dark, man.  Yay for them.…

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Which?

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In response to watching the silly TV show Salem, I’ve been cursorily boning-up on the actual history of the Salem witch trials. 

The first three accused people were:

1. a black slave,

2. a beggar woman, and

3. a woman who married her former indentured servant, possibly for financial reasons.

It’s almost too perfect. 

A proto-capitalist, patriarchal, colonial society.  What do they fear?  Women who make independent sexual choices, or why try to control money.  The breaching of class boundaries.  The poor and dispossessed.  Black slaves.

The initial accusations were made by young women or girls who were thoroughly indoctrinated and submerged within the ideological thoughtworld of their high-status parents, and their society. 

They went for suspects they knew would be believable to others.  They went for the stigmatised and mistrusted.

What you have there is the refracted terror of the ruling class towards their own oppressed groups.…

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Comics Reviews (May 20, 2015)

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Guardians of the Galaxy #27

I take it that this is the last issue before it goes on vacation for Secret Wars. In which case it’s a rushed, sloppy, and pointless issue that provides nothing like a satisfying stopping point and demonstrates the abject stupidity of wasting this book in a bad crossover during the lead-in.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #12

Love the opening section, which is another fantastic set of Bowie riffs. The subsequent sections kind of stall for time before eventually resolving into a neat cliffhanger. But very much a filler issue, I fear.

Loki: Agent of Asgard #14

I find that Ewing’s Loki stories tend to start slow for me and then work themselves out later in the plot, so I’m sure this will pick up for me, but I found almost every section dealing with Odin a bit of a drag. Part of this is just that I don’t much like Marvel’s Odin, but it’s also a place where the Secret Warsness of it doesn’t really hold together, as this book seems to be pursuing a different apocalypse than the rest of the Marvel Universe. Loki and Verity are always great though.

Daredevil #15.1

Not sure why an ending book needs a .1 issue, but as filler fluff goes, not bad. Unconvinced of the merit or necessity of the second story, but the first one is a solid Daredevil story. Oh, wait. We just had the TV series. That’s why there’s a .1 issue. In any case, fun.

Ultimate End #1

Interesting. This serves as the first bit of Secret Wars to show us Manhattan, and turns out to be a fairly integral chunk of the plot, at least on first inspection. Certainly there’s more 616 than I expected. And really, it’s nice to have a tie-in mini that would have been perfectly justifiable as an event in its own right.

Uncanny X-Men #34

Oh boy. I can’t wait for the next issue. When’s it coming out? Oh. October.

More seriously, good issue. Basically a Dazzler one-shot. There are not enough comics featuring Dazzler. Really impressed with Anka’s art too. Nice, clean storytelling. The denouement of Bendis’s X-Men run has been completely fucked by the release schedule, but it’s also been good stuff.

Trees #9

No concessions to accessibility. None. But it’s hard not to love its sheer lack of compromise. I’m not even sure I have a detailed opinion; lord knows I neither followed nor remember the first arc of Trees well enough to even quite pin down who the characters here are. And yet I enjoyed it, simply because looking at something this smart and well-done is pleasurable. Just as sitting down with it all when it’s done will be.

A-Force #1

Smart, accessible, and it has Miss America Chavez to boot. This is apparently not just a Secret Wars book, although its initial premise is very much grounded in that, and I have to admit, I’m excited for it. Excellent jumping on point, even if you’re not following the crossover.…

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Secret Reality

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Spoilers

The last episode of The Blacklist was hilarious.  Red describes an international cabal – comprised of people in government and the private sector – who run the world behind the scenes, start wars, control the media, kill to protect their power, etc.  It’s supposed to be so edgy.  Dark, terrifying conspiracy.  He has to get loads of investigate journos to attend his briefing in secret.  They’re all stunned by what he says.  But… he’s just describing the ruling class!  Seriously, the ‘Cabal’ is just the capitalist military-industrial-media-government complex.  But we’re supposed to be shocked by the existence of this group.  Once informed about it, the Washington Post runs a front page story telling everyone of the breaking news.  SHOCK NEW REVELATION: SMALL NUMBER OF POWERFUL PEOPLE ARE POWERFUL AND GET UP TO STUFF FURTHERING THEIR OWN POWER WITHOUT TELLING US!  The evil director of the CIA looks at the paper in horror, like he’s thinking “oh no, now everyone knows!”  It’s like structuring the big, dramatic denouement of a drama series around the astonishing revelation that water is wet, and having all your characters suddenly back away in terror from any rivers or taps they happen to be standing next to.

On the other hand, I can’t help thinking this is still more charged than a story in which such facts of life are ignored.  Even presented as an outlandish, shocking revelation, it’s still presented.  Even framed as a surprise, it’s still there.  

Reminds me of the best Bond film ever, Quantum of Solace, in which a bunch of corporations, eco-businesses, military hardmen and Western politicians are presented as members of a secret criminal cartel who are trying to take over Bolivia’s water reserves.  Now this basically happened in the real world.  The film depicts it as an evil secret conspiracy that MI6 wants to stop.  It also depicts Quantum as sneakily damming up loads of water to create an artificial shortage.  But it basically connects with the real world, albeit distantly.  It’s far more connected to the real world than anything in the follow-up movie Skyfall (which is total shit, by the way, both politically and as entertainment).  Quantum of Solace also connects with the idea that powerful Western interests are behind politically-motivated Right-wing coups in South America… which is just one of those things that any sensible person takes for granted as an established historical truth, but which the mainstream media treats as a bizarre revelation.  But Quantum of Solace at least acknowledges it.  The movie puts the evil secret conspiratorial organisation behind such things rather than, y’know, the CIA and the US government… though it does have the CIA complicit in Quantum’s machinations, even if it is because one CIA guy is a rotten apple.

Is this subversive?  Of course not.  It’s gatekeeping.  It acknowledges things about the real world that people either know about or strongly suspect.  It then packages them in the classic methods of containment of such incendiary truths.  Bad Apple Theory. …

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