Revolving door to the afterlife is now a tiresome plot device
Perhaps Game of Thrones had more teeth when it was a world where there was “nothing as certain as death and taxes”. Because now death in Westeros is a spurious notion and a revolving door has been fitted to the afterlife, it’s certainly harder to get het up over, say, cantankerous squatter The Blackfish “dying fighting”. Or even Hodor “holding the door” until a marauding bunch of nihilist skeletons appear on the brink of gobbling him alive. Or did they? Probably not. Maybe they only gave him a gentle nuzzle.
At one point in the previous episode, Beric Dondarrion, who was most definitely brown-bread at one point, before full resurrection, was sharing a casual bonfire supper with Sandor Clegane, who in season five was left for dead after being beaten half to death and being chucked off a cliff. We last saw The Hound dying arduously from severe neck wound-related septicaemia, but no, because now he’s back due to the healing hands of Ian McShane.
Still, the return of The Hound has been a joyous and muchrelished addition to season seven. The image of Sandor, in last week’s closing scenes, picking up a giant axe and plodding off purposefully to chop a lot of bad men into small bite-sized medallions was marvellously spiriting. The Hound had tried so hard to get on board with the vegan Kumbaya-singing community group (led by Lovejoy) who’d saved his life. He really had. He chopped them loads of wood. He’d kept the fires burning. He didn’t even tut too hard when Lovejoy delivered lectures about how “not killing people” was definitely a more rewarding way to live than “being a massive murderous bastard”. But Sandor is who he is. If this involves — as one of the Brotherhood Without Banners discovered this week — having your boots robbed by Sandor mid-way through him killing you, well, so be it.
The actor Rory McCann delivers such wonderful depth to this gruff and ostensibly hateable character. Sandor is oddly vulnerable, permanently scarred by his past, dismissive of human warmth, but with tiny flickers of light to show that the old Sandor, from before his brother shoved his head in a brazier, still remains.
In other likeable sociopath news, viewers were thrilled in this week’s episode to see Cersei re-find her love of blood. Only one of those hideous preachy Sparrows have been decapitated by Cersei’s patchwork death machine, The Mountain, but it’s a strong start. Sadly it wasn’t Lancel Lannister, who has proven for Cersei to be the world’s most un-riddable ex-shag. Why did I waste hours this series watching the siege-that-fizzled-out at Riverrun, or 11 helpings of Arya being duffed up by resting-bitch-face-girl? I would happily instead watch a full 120 minutes of The Mountain bashing Lancel by the ankles against a wall and The Hound, please God, skinning Roose Bolton little-by-little with a potato peeler.
Fortunately, Arya’s tedious voluntary incarceration in the land of poor lighting and bad dialogue has drawn to a close. It is worth mentioning that all of the internet-spun fan-imagined plotlines I read last week, that speculated how Arya would survive being stabbed six times in the stomach, were stronger than the one we were offered.
Apparently the statuesque actress, whose life Arya spared, was simply as good at putting entrails back into bodies and sewing them up as she is at being a jealous girlfriend. I love you, Game of Thrones, I really do, but this was a feasible as the plot cul-de-sac you three-point-turned me in when Samwell Tarly decided the safest place for Gilly and the baby was with his father Randyll, who he had last seen when Randyll had threatened to murder him in a staged hunting accident, which subsequently led to Samwell finding “a safe place” hundreds of miles north in a ceaseless blizzard inhabited by zombies, staffed by ex-rapists.
That said, the insurmountable problem Game of Thrones has faced this season is that, now we have seen the White Walkers, seen the cut of the horned one’s icy pelmet and met the gnarly horseman of the snowy-bollocked apocalypse, it’s a lot harder to care about Riverrun, what’s happening in Dorne and who’s King of the Hill at Winterfell. These matters of land registry and who should kneel for whom feel increasingly like watching feng shui consultancy on the sinking Titanic. Thank god Daenerys has got her dragons back in some semblance of order. We know what the emperors of ice and their bony frostbitten armies have in their sights. The only thing that can save the world now is lots and lots of fire. THE INDEPENDENT
Fortunately, Arya’s tedious voluntary incarceration in the land of poor lighting and bad dialogue has drawn to a close. It is worth mentioning that all of the internet-spun fan-imagined plotlines I read last week.