‘When you play the game of thrones you win or you die.” The malicious Queen Cersei’s words form the leitmotif of HBO’s monumental fantasy series, though rarely have they been more thoroughly realised than in the season five finale, shown on Sky Atlantic yesterday. Death came to several key characters, or a humiliation akin to it. And, in a final twist, the hero we’d been led to believe could save mankind from ineffable evil received six stabs to the gut for his ambitions.
I wept at Jon Snow’s death. I also wept at Princess Shireen Baratheon’s in the episode before. And I wept at the beautiful, much exploited Sansa Stark’s rape back in episode six.
Snow’s death, although a shock, won’t be controversial: it was an assassination in a dark corner, men attacking another man. I mention the other two instances because it was they that stirred up a wail louder still than those that greeted previous series of this gory programme: that the violence in Game of
Thrones is gratuitous – and misogynist.
To this I’d answer that those keynotes of cruelty were vital in making this series the most moving so far. And our empathy for the women involved meant that, far from our being anaesthetised to the violence meted out to them, our recognition of their suffering was inescapable.
Season five hasn’t been the best. There’s not yet been a scene to match the operatic grandeur of the “Red Wedding” massacre in season three. Adrenalin was lacking for a number of episodes. But if every Game
of Thrones series consists of large chunks of plodding narrative, only to suddenly sock you with a scene that leaves your jaw hanging open, the moments that surprised us this time were less those of shock and awe than ones of piercing sadness.
Shireen, in a scene lifted straight from the Ancient Greeks’ story of Iphigenia, was burnt at the stake as a sacrifice to allow her father Stannis Baratheon’s army to move to meet his enemy. The idea of a little girl being put to death is unbearable, and we’d spent time getting to know this disfigured child in earlier scenes. We weren’t shown her death but we heard it, the better to break our hearts. Which is also what happened with Sansa’s rape at the hands of her sadistic husband Ramsay Bolton. Sansa is a character familiar from the first episode of the series, the closest thing left to a heroine. The scene was tragic.
There isn’t a moral centre to Game of Thrones. Morality features now and then; it colours our responses. That Stannis lost his battle (and his life) after killing his daughter to fight it felt satisfying. But the only right reaction to Snow’s murder was despair. Perhaps in this age of ultraviolent computer games and torture-porn films, a series that hammers home a moral point wouldn’t have been the hit that it has been. But what we shouldn’t forget is that the creator of the original novels, George RR Martin, and the
Game of Thrones writing team (they’re now making major deviations from the books’ plots) have the sophistication to make us care. And I for one never thought I’d find common cause with characters from a world of dragons and zombies, and cry for them so keenly.