A Song of Tolling Bells and War Crimes

George Turner in reply to James K says:

I’m pretty sure Cersei didn’t care if her own soldiers were at risk from self-inflicted accidents.

She had more time to come up with counter-dragon measures than Jon had to come up with a supply of dragon glass to fight the white walkers, form a new alliance to mine that supply, and turn it into an arsenal.

Cersei’s spies had kept her informed of Daenerys and the three dragons, and she knew that Daenerys was coming to claim the iron throne using those dragons, and she’s known it for a long long time. Yet she apparently didn’t even bother to try and come up with any counter or any stratagem, and the only weapon she used had fallen into her hands because an egotistical jerk who wanted to bed her happened to have a fleet that already used a potentially viable anti-dragon weapon, almost certainly for ship-to-ship combat. If Jon Snow knew his army would have to fight dragons, he’d have figured out practical ways of going about it.

And that brings us to some of the episode’s failings, as far as I can discern.

What did the audience need from this episode? What did they expect?

1) A battle of good versus evil.
2) An epic confrontation between two evenly matched opponents, a battle of courage, wits, and cunning.
3) A resolution in which our eight years of hating Cersei are rewarded by watching her horror as she’s picked apart, dethroned, and basically exiled to the lower depths of hell where her soul will be tormented forever.
4) For everyone to realize that Jon Snow is the superior commander.

We went zero for four on those.

1) It wasn’t a battle of good versus evil, of courage, innocence, justice, and strength of heart triumphing over the forces of chaos, ego, arrogance, and vile cowardice. No, it was a battle of really unhinged evil over pure evil, with everyone good left powerless and running for cover.

2) and 3) The epic confrontation was no confrontation at all, just death from above and mindless, undirected, and random slaughter, like a feeding frenzy on Shark Week. This wasn’t Cannae, Waterloo, or Gettysburg, with large units making coordinated moves in a high level chess game. This was a drunken urban sports riot with edged weapons, with main characters like Jon Snow running down main streets and into back alleys trying to figure out where he is or where he should be. And none of it even mattered because Denaerys decided to use the nuclear option.

Worse, Cersei had no coherent plan, and perhaps no plan at all.

A large body of her troops stood outside the front gate, which makes no sense because if you’re not going to take advantage of the high walls and gate, why have a castle at all? What was their plan if they got forced back by the superior numbers of attacking infantry, beg to be let back in while being over run? In short, WW-I soldiers didn’t repel attacks by crawling out of their trench and standing in front of their own barbed wire. They either attack the enemy’s position or they defend in their own trench. Castle defense is the same.

But that’s just a mistake, and both sides are allowed to make mistakes without affecting the arc of the story. Indeed, often those mistakes are the story. But in this case, was Cersei the one who even decided to position her troops there? We need a confrontation between two great foes, but one foe didn’t seem to be involved.

Cersei didn’t take part in the battle. She barely even watched it. All the events of the series had been leading up to this great showdown between Daenerys, Jon Snow, and Cersei Lannister. So on the great getting’ up morning, Cersei hardly bothered to get out of bed. She just stood in her castle, looking out the window, like a detached observer with no skin in the game nor authority to direct the defending troops, and no inclination to try and affect the outcome.

She seemed less emotionally invested in events than a student at a college basketball game, who at least deeply feel the ebb and flow of events. But Cirsei didn’t seem to even understand what was happening, or who was winning and who was losing. She might as well have been someone’s deaf aunt with Alzheimer’s who was dragged to the game to get her out of the house, and who doesn’t know one team from another, and who waits for her niece to tell her what the outcome was. At a basic level, the writers forgot to include an important role for the pivotal character. Cirsei, who is supposed to be one of the episodes protagonist’s, turned out to be just another audience member.

What we needed was to see Cirsei out there giving it her all, slowly realizing that she’s losing, doing everything in her power to prevent it, and losing some more. We needed to see her lashing out at her commanders, at messengers, and individual units, damning them for retreating, damning them for failing. She needs to find that everything she does, every blow she tries to land, is easily predicted and countered by an adversary possessed of far more skill and determination, leading an enemy army that’s more highly trained and motivated, executing a better plan being run by commanders who are clearly far better than her. She can’t own the defeat, she can’t feel it as a personal defeat, if she’s not even involved in the action.

Going back to much earlier episodes, all she’s doing in this battle is the same as sitting in her royal box watching her champion, the Mountain, fighting in a judicial duel. She doesn’t really much care whether he wins or loses because she’s not the one in the arena. The viewers got no emotional payoff from those judicial fights, and there was no emotional payoff in this one, supposedly the great epic battle, because the main villain just sat in her royal box instead of getting her head slammed into the dirt, over and over again.

And finally, her castle crumbling around her, Cersei wanders down to the crypts, runs into her brother, and gets comforted before a rock drops on her head. The scope of her army’s defeat hardly dawned on her, other than it’s inconvenience regarding her personal family situtation. It was less than satisfying. Way, way less.

4) Jon Snow didn’t get to prove himself at anything. I’m not sure most soldiers even knew he was there. He had no more effect on the battle than Sansa did, and she wasn’t even there.

So to my mind, the writers focused on the wrong elements of the story. They put all the emphasis on Daenerys turning to the dark side, when she was already dark as can be, so that wasn’t even much of a character reveal. In doing that, they sidelined the apex of the story, Cersei getting slapped in the face with stark, bitter defeat and humiliation, payback for all the pain she’d inflicted during her cruel time upon this world.

The writers let things meander all over the place.

The fight between Clegane brothers was irrelevant to the story, yet was the biggest fight scene in the episode, getting much of the focus and screen time. The Mountain was never a major character to anyone except his brother, and that’s just an long running sibling spat that wasn’t even relevant to Arya, much less any other characters, much less to the audience.

Then they wasted a lot of screen time on a fight between Jamie Lannister and Euron Greyjoy. Why? They’re both on the same side, defending Cersei and King’s Landing. There wasn’t a reason for conflict. Greyjoy had no reason to hate Cersei’s brother, and Jamie didn’t have a real reason to hate his sister’s newest flame, who she was of course using because she had a temporary need for his fleet.

To produce an emotional payoff from killing Euron Greyjoy, the writers should have killed him with an angry, vengeful dragon ridden by Daenerys, because the dragon and Daenerys had a reason to hate him. They came close when the dragon torched his fleet, but refused to let that blow land, shafting the audience yet again. Instead we had the pointless confrontation under the cliffs, which just ate screen time without establishing or resolving anything, or even affecting the story. It would have been just the same if they’d had Jamie temporarily delayed in a subway turn-style while he dug through his pockets for the correct change.

And those were pretty much the episode’s only two fights between major characters, if Euron and the Mountain can even be considered a major characters.

So much wasted opportunity, so little emotional payoff, so little resolution.

But other than all these minor quibbles, it was a great episode!Report