‘GoT’ season 6 finale sets the stage for war

‘Silicon Valley’ 3 finale happy ending

LOS ANGELES, June 27, (RTRS): Since “Game of Thrones” began — first in the guise of George R. R. Martin’s novel of the same name, published 20 years ago — the question of Jon Snow’s parentage has been a lingering mystery, and the Season 6 finale finally gave us the answer. As fans have long speculated, it appears that R+L really does =J— Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark are the true parents of Jon Snow, and Ned kept his sister’s secret to protect Jon from the wrath of Lyanna’s betrothed, Robert Baratheon, claiming his nephew as his own son. Bran discovered this powerful revelation by revisiting his vision of his father and aunt at the Tower of Joy, just as the leaders of the North were declaring their allegiance to Jon at Winterfell, proclaiming him the King in the North.

Unfortunately for Jon, not everyone in the room was entirely enthusiastic about following him to glory — Littlefinger outright admitted his desire to claim the crown for himself, and Sansa right along with it. Since Sansa’s already had more than her share of creepy suitors over the past six seasons, that offer didn’t go down so well, but it’s inarguable that without spouses or heirs, Sansa and Jon are both in a fairly tenuous position politically. (That has already led some to speculate that the Starks may follow the example of the Targaryens and Lannisters and opt for an incestuous marriage of convenience, but I have a hard time imagining Jon going that route rather than finding Sansa a suitable, non-Littlefinger substitute at this stage of the game. Then again, misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows — and stranger things have happened in Martin’s world.)

All things considered, the finale’s body count was probably comparable to last week’s “Battle,” as we witnessed Arya Stark taking her long overdue revenge on Walder Frey for the murder of her mother and brother, disguising herself as a serving maid to slit his throat and letting him bleed out in her hands — and that was after serving Walder’s gormless sons to him in a pie. (Her time undercover with the theater troupe has definitely cemented her flair for the dramatic.)

Trial

Vengeance was in steady supply in the extended episode, as Cersei avoided her trial by using the Mad King’s stockpile of wildfire beneath King’s Landing to destroy the Great Sept, along with the High Sparrow and his followers, Margaery and Loras Tyrell and their father, and countless unwitting nobles. Stricken with grief after losing his wife, Tommen killed himself, leaving Cersei to assume the Iron Throne (much to Jaime’s horror). And in the episode’s final moments, Daenerys set sail for Westeros with a magnificent fleet of ships, along with her army of Dothraki, Unsullied and Greyjoy forces — not to mention those handy dragons.

The episode furthered the season’s overarching theme of dismantling the hierarchies created by overzealous men. The High Sparrow may have cloaked his arrogance in piety, but true faith should be used as a shield to defend the helpless, not a sword to oppress them. Extremism in any form is dangerous, and that’s true whether you serve the Seven or the Lord of Light, as Davos realized when he discovered what Melisandre, Stannis and Selyse had done to Shireen in the name of the Red God. If you have to torture people into confessing their sins, or burn innocent children in the hope of securing victory, you’re probably putting your trust in the wrong place — and it remains to be seen whether Tyrion has done the same in choosing to believe in Dany.

She has the noblest intentions for her people — wanting to abolish slavery, see women on equal footing with men, and allow the people of Meereen to choose their own leaders — but she’s still sailing into Westeros with the far less noble intention of slaughtering anyone who stands in her way. She may have told Yara that the Iron Born will no longer be able to raid and rape once she is queen, but as we’ve seen time and again, whether sanctioned by the Lannisters, the Freys or the many sellsword factions still running amok across Westeros, there will always be bad men to take advantage of those who are perceived as weaker. Even with Daario in charge of Meereen, who’s to say that slavery will never return to Slaver’s Bay, or that the Dothraki will be willing to ignore centuries of raping and pillaging any place they conquer just because their current khaleesi (who they were all pretty ambivalent about following in the first place, until she offered them the incentive of killing people on a different continent) tells them not to? Dany even admitted that her quest for power has already changed her, telling Tyrion that she felt nothing when she said goodbye to Daario, “just impatient to get on with it.”

A little reluctance goes a long way when it comes to leaders — Jon has never had designs on the Iron Throne; his positions of power have all been thrust on him against his will, and the fact that he’s already been sent to meet his maker and discovered that there’s no one waiting on the other side has probably left him with a healthy sense of his own insignificance. But he’s also a man who has always craved acceptance and been met with derision, so it’s possible that a small taste of that long-withheld adoration might go to his head. Martin’s novels and their TV adaptation have always made it clear that institutions are deeply flawed at best and downright dangerous at worst, and while Cersei once mockingly told the High Sparrow that “the faith and the crown are the two pillars that hold up this world,” it seems as though the people of Westeros will never be free until those pillars are knocked down for good.

Sunday night’s “Silicon Valley” season three finale found the Pied Piper guys back where they’ve been off and on since the series’ beginning — broke, living in Erlich Bachman’s house and working for a startup that may be totally worthless. It’s a happy ending.

Thanks to an eleventh hour save by Bachman and Lawrence “Big Head” Bighetti, Pied Piper avoided being sold to and scrapped by evil tech giant Hooli. It was a surprising end to a strong, satisfying season for HBO’s highest-rated comedy series.

Executive producer and showrunner Alec Berg directed the finale — which premiered three weeks after HBO gave a series order to “Barry,” a new series from Berg and comedian Bill Hader. Berg spoke with Variety about the finale, next season and the storyline that had to be killed to save season three.

Question: Did you know from the beginning that Bachman and Big Head would own the company at the end of the season?

Answer: We kind of didn’t know where we were headed at the beginning of the year. We spent all this time setting up Barker and having the guys toil under a hostile CEO. Early in the season, they conceive this skunkworks, this company inside the company, and as we started writing that, our intention was that that was going to be the bulk of the season. And it just wasn’t giving us the comedy that we wanted. It was just a lot of very farcical stuff — someone knocks on the door and everyone has to hide their plans. So we called an audible in the middle of the season. That skunkworks episode, they did all the planning and then at the end of the episode, it all blows up in their face. That honestly was just the most interesting way we thought of to get out of skunkworks.

It was a surprise when the skunkworks blew up at the end of that episode.That was very much by design. It was our hope that the audience would be surprised by it, because in all honesty we were sort of surprised. We spent a week or two in the room trying to write skunkworks episodes and being like “Why is this so hard? It should be giving us loads of material, and it’s just binding us.”

Q: When did the Bachman-Big Head solution come into focus?

A: Once we blew up skunkworks, very quickly we got to “then they fight with Jack and they beat him and now they’re back in the house on their own.” I kind of view the season in two halves, and that was half one. Then half two kind of came together in one big piece. So we wrote episode one, then two, then three, then four, then five. Then we laid out six, seven, eight, nine, 10 all at the same time.