‘GoT’ fans know one thing: Blood will spill this season
Popular TV shows have been set in earnest police precincts, desperate emergency rooms and somber funeral homes. But none has so tightly clutched to the intertwining of death and endurance as a driving theme like the swords and dragons epic “Game of Thrones.”
Its characters repeatedly squirm away from death until the point where some succumb to it. This is usually followed by a spasm of some sort.
The squirming creates tension and intrigue crucial to the story. The succumbing adds poignancy — also crucial. The spasms are just TV titillation. But titillation has pull.
“Game of Thrones,” which returns for its sixth season tonight on HBO, boasts an international audience in the millions, each wondering how the show will advance a narrative that is venturing deep into territory not mapped out by George R.R. Martin’s thick, detailed fantasy books.
HBO has been especial-
ly cryptic and secretive regarding what’s to come in the Seven Kingdoms — refusing to even send out screeners to the media. But one thing is certain: There will be plenty of death and the determination of trying to outrun it.
Keep in mind, “death” accounts for seven of the first 96 words in the prologue to Martin’s “A Game of Thrones,” the book that started it all. And that’s before the killing starts proper.
For all the torment, Martin’s first book — which turns 20 this year — remains a hopeful template for what’s to come.
Fans have had years to move past the unsettling Book 1/Season 1 death of Eddard Stark, a character who in more sentimental hands would have lorded over the entirety of Martin’s narrative. Instead, Martin deftly spun a story around Stark, even after he and his head went their separate ways.
The actions unfolding in the upcoming season and the next book (“The Winds of Winter,” Martin insists, is coming) are like the cracks in a windshield that fan out from a central point of impact. Questionable choices by an imperfect but well-intentioned man, Stark, created that impact.
As a result “Game of Thrones” on TV has been a slaughterhouse. Yet despite the stylistic red sprays that punctuate a life snuffed out, the show continues to focus on those fissures in the glass: the repercussions of violent actions.
And while allegory doesn’t seem to have been Martin’s intention, these actions and repercussions resonate because of maddening cycles that repeat in history books: separations and collisions based around different faithbased systems, uneasy class systems and slave labor, the often corrupted interaction between government and banking — which becomes more fraught for conflict when the practices of governing and banking cross seas, both narrow and not.
Martin didn’t map out a world comparable to ours, but he gave deep thought to a few continents that he created, and they provide a microcosm for the sorts of winds that create societal storms.
His damning story doesn’t just touch on civil war, international conflict and political power grabs. Martin’s “Winter is coming” mantra isn’t anything as cheap as an ominous rephrasing of “climate change.” Instead, the phrase is a more universal condemnation of ignoring gradual changes until they reach a point of reckoning. Climate change may one day qualify, but the phrase’s power has broader applications.
Martin has talked of a Meereenese Knot, referencing Meereen, a citystate in his books where numerous characters converged in a way that complicated his narrative to the point of stalling it. That delay greatly slowed down the pace at which his books were issued.
The knot has since been loosened, and the story is racing toward its conclusion in two separate spheres. The characters return to turgid motion on TV first.
Irreconcilable faith systems, political systems and class systems are now set for further violent collision. Who or what gets left standing?
It may depend on how they feel about life and death. The story’s Greyjoys have had a rough run so far, despite their belief that “What is dead may never die.”
There are lords of light and darkness, too, but there’s still too much story remaining to know how their acolytes will fare.
But don’t forget that for all the death and winter found in earliest pages of Martin’s first book it ends with a rebirth.
“For the first time in hundreds of years,” reads the closing sentence, “the night came alive with the music of dragons.”
For the foreseeable future, though, that music is the soundtrack for more violent conflict.
The long forgotten sword instructor Syrio Forel, who was dispatched in the first season, still has a student navigating the world of “Thrones.” Arya Stark has been on a vengeance mission, but perhaps she’ll remember her teacher’s claim that “There is only one god, and his name is Death.”
His response to this god is cherry in its resignation.
“There is only one thing we say to Death: Not today.” andrew.dansby@chron.com