House of the Dragon is a great reminder that the human race is a miserable species.

The world that has Westeros in it (A Song of Ice and Fire) is brutal. We saw this in Game of Thrones, which ended its historic run some four years ago. With House of the Dragon I'm reminded at just how grotesque the people are in this world. But my own naivete would be to think that this is abnormal. That the people of "Earth" couldn't be this gross, could they? But a little digging and a little delving into history (and into modern headlines about what's going on in Ukraine and Russia) makes me think that George R.R. Martin was (if anything) simply a really good study of history and human behavior. And just to be clear, modernity has not changed this. Humans in 2022 are just as gross as they were in 1222. In other words, all the incest, rape, and murder he puts on display in his stories is just par for the course as far as humans are concerned. We (human beings) are awful. Take for example some of the things we've seen just this season in House of the Dragon. This list of things are drawn from human examples.

For one, bastards popping up to cause problems with family dynasties is a reflection of real-life things that happened in kingdoms on Earth. Infidelity aside, siblings murdering other siblings was a real thing that people did in order to seize power. The character of Alicent, who was Rhaenyra's best friend when they were teens, got pushed into marriage with an older man (the king) by her own father and forced to have sex with him (leprousy and all). Imagine forcing your own daughter to have sex with a leper with oozing sores so that you could birth heirs to a throne. Who imagines this kind of thing? You don't need to because this kind of thing happened in real life history. She ends up having no friends and people (like her father) are manipulative to the point of getting both her and her kids into very dangerous situations. Add to this situation that she is "god fearing," and you understand why she is so hateful toward her former friend who get to bed whomever she wanted as opposed to what lay in store for her.

There's Daemon Targaryen played by Matt Smith. His monstrous behavior at killing his wife so that he can be free to marry another just smacks of King Henry VIII. The fact that one of his wives takes it into her own hands rather than let him decide to slice her up to save a baby that is in breach and just immolate herself to death seems...I don't know...realistic if not horrifically grotesque. Then there's the self-loathing knight of Ser Criston Cole who brutally murders the knight of kisses for pointing out that he knows that Criston has obviously bedded the princess (at least that is my take).

Self-loathing is so destructive. You see it in the gay community when a politician is gay but they are deeply closeted and married to a woman, denying everything about themselves. They may not murder someone, but the vitriol, anger, and hatred from a self-loathing man in this position is probably the most dangerous thing there is to the sustained well-being of a society. And I can't imagine how the family unit itself suffers. The man who is a closeted gay probably tells the wife that sex can only happen for procreation, hiding the fact that he secretly wants to just suck a dick. The obvious "my husband does not feel anything toward me sexually" causes more self-loathing in the woman, who thinks it may be that she isn't sexy, or is somehow gross. This leads to other problems like unnecessary plastic surgeries, more self-loathing, and mental illness. It's basically just beating someone to death like Ser Criston Cole did at Rhaenyra's wedding, only it takes years instead of a minute.

 A healthy "Game of Thrones" scenario seems to be benign neglect. This is what you would want to pray for if you were born a woman in this world. The other kinds of things that can happen to you in this world (if you are a woman) are terrifying. The short list is 1) getting married off to somebody triple your age (and hope they aren't diseased), 2) being tortured or enslaved because you were not born a boy, 3) or just getting raped directly. If you have children, then there's the added possibility of watching them getting raped and slaughtered in front of you before the same fate is visited upon you. When a future alien anthropologist happens upon Game of Thrones, The Handmaid's Tale, and The Walking Dead, it should become clear why the human race became extinct. We are a miserable species, and some of our greatest writers know it to the core.

The House of the Dragon spinoff feels less interesting than the original Game of Thrones even if it is a gorgeous production.

I've watched two episodes of House of the Dragon now, and I wanted to weigh-in on the Game of Thrones spinoff. However, it will be impossible to do so without spoilers. So, here is your spoiler warning.

House of the Dragon doesn't feel like Game of Thrones as much as it feels like Game of Thrones fanfiction, but maybe through the eyes of someone with less talent. The original story featured a huge cast of characters (many of them horrible), with each one starring in its own chapter or point-of-view. This technique allowed George R.R. Martin and by extension, the HBO team, to cliffhang each story and then go on to the next scene. With House of the Dragon the scene transitions are more like a regular tv series. They are just different points of view within the same large family. And the dynastic succession seems like a story that we've seen before. In some ways, having watched Game of Thrones, I wonder why any of these people don't see that the struggle for this uncomfortable chair that the king sits in is even worth it. Or maybe the ultimate lesson is that it is bad to be the King of Westeros.

That chair too has been changed a bit to make it more imposing. The steps leading up to it appear broader than they were in the original series. They are also covered in the littered remains of melted longswords and daggers no doubt taken from enemies and forged in a way to make the Iron Throne a bit of a contemporary art piece. The fact that the king regularly cuts himself on it and gets grotesque skin infections from the wounds seems lost to the common sense of those who should know better within the context of this fictional world.

The dragons as well seem a lot different. The ones that Daenerys rode were what I might consider to be a more traditional take on the mythological monster. Matt Smith from Doctor Who plays Daemon Targaryen, and his dragon appears to look more red and serpentine. Smith's character is utterly without charisma of any kind. This in contrast to Joffrey in the original who had charisma even if he was a psychopath. It almost feels like Matt Smith overacts in his Targaryen role so as to appear intentionally crazy, as opposed to the slow boil of crazy that we saw in other characters in the original series.

Where House of the Dragon does seem to land well is in the violence and gore that were hallmarks of the previous series. However, the original show covered quite a bit of territory. Seeking to maybe break new ground, the Westeros of centuries past shows itself in a tournament of bored knights eager to maim one another, and in a horrific birth scene that seems conjured to remind us all that many women prior to modern medicine did not survive a baby. And of course, there is plenty of social commentary on the state of the patriarchy in this medieval horror show, with baby boys clearly being more important than mothers and with a Targaryen in Harrenhal choosing a male heir over a female one.

Why anyone even continues to use Harrenhal as a dwelling is a question I never got answered either from the original series or the books. If you don't recall this specific castle in Westeros, it's a ruin of melted stone with many collapsed hallways and uninhabitable spaces due to dragon fire being used on its inhabitants. It would be little more than living out of a cave. There is always some noble squabbling over Harrenhal, yet no one ever gets around to renovating the place and fixing it up. I guess part of its ongoing appeal is its ruined appearance so that people can gape in awe and say, "This is what happened when Balerion the Dread melted the place." Balerion is the "big" dead dragon skull at King's Landing. I'm pretty sure Drogon ended up being that big at the close of Daenerys's storyline. 

The new cast of House of the Dragon may settle into their roles yet. But it is difficult to see how it will maintain the epic feel of Game of Thrones without a spooky bad guy (the White Walkers). In fact, it may end up being more of a medieval Dynasty (this was a popular prime-time soap opera in the 1980's that featured various squabbling modern-day nobles backstabbing one another while living off their oil money). Dallas is another one of these dynasty-esque shows. So, House of the Dragon then is just a gussied up Dynasty featuring dragons instead of cars and with white wigs on everyone. Watching this show makes me think of the phrase "lightning in a bottle." It's obvious that there is more hunger for Game of Thrones. But there may not be more Game of Thrones to be had. 

Sometimes, a good story is just that. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stretching it out to give more to the people has always been a problem. Look at Jaws and Jurassic Park. Both of these are examples where the brilliance of the original made people go looking to recapture that "lightning in a bottle." And it never worked, even if those attempts produced money. Being profitable is not the same as being good, and I think we are in that territory when it comes to House of the Dragon. The thing has millions of viewers, and it probably always will dominate the ratings. But the magic of what made the original unique is simply not there, at least in these first two episodes. It would help things a lot if they actually had a supernatural villain to worry about (like the Night King) as opposed to watching a family destroy its enemies, many of whom reside within the same walls. Ah well...if any family was interesting enough to warrant a series, it was the Targaryens and their dragon lords. 

Why did Bennioff and Weiss mess up Highgarden so much?

It's been a year since the series finale of Game of Thrones. It did end with a dull thud, and no one I know even talks about it. I've said pretty much all that I've wanted to say about it in multiple posts, but there are still a few things I think about from time to time.

Today, I'm wondering why they messed up the appearance of Highgarden so much. In the show, it was a bleak, unforgiving fortress. In the books and in statements from the Tyrells and others, Highgarden was a beautiful place. It was lovely to behold, surrounded by the fertile fields of The Reach. Under the rulership of the Tyrells, it would have been the one place in all of Westeros that I would have wanted to live (were I to be somehow magically cursed as to having to eke out any existence in George R.R. Martin's world). Here's a painting I found online that correctly captures what Highgarden was in the books. There are others for sure, but this one is my favorite. Why couldn't Highgarden have looked like this?

Instead, it looked like this:

Maybe, it's because there just aren't pretty castle cities in today's world, and they wanted to shoot from an actual location to add realism. But the castle in the series was gray and ugly. It wasn't anything like I thought Highgarden should look like. Here's the description of it from the text in the novels I read:

"Many consider Highgarden to be the most beautiful castle in all the Seven Kingdoms [...] Highgarden is girded by three concentric rings of crenelated curtain walls [...] Ivy covers the older buildings and grapes and climbing roses snake up the sides of statuary, walls, and towers. Flowers bloom everywhere."

I dunno...maybe this is an "Expectation" versus "Reality" thing. But honestly, they had the budget to do a good job of showing the home of the Tyrells by season 7. They could have even had a matte artist make something for them, and it would have been gorgeous. Remember how beautiful Rivendell looked when we saw it in The Lord of the Rings movies? At least that was done right.

A prequel money grab that didn't need to happen got canceled by HBO

When Game of Thrones ended, five possible prequel series got announced. Now it's down to one...tentatively...about Targaryens. I'm not sure who the intended audience is, but maybe there's just people who want to know more about Targaryens. However, the series that got canceled was going to tell the story of the Long Night and the Doom of Valyria...basically all the stuff I even had a remote interest in to begin with. Now, the only series that seems to be getting a "go ahead" signal of any kind is the one with the blond-headed imperialists riding dragons.

To be honest though, I'm not overly sad that the prequel series (set thousands of years before Game of Thrones's timeline) got canceled. Nothing about the show made any sense from the get-go. The events that happened 10,000 years in the past (from the perspective of the series) are pretty much irrelevant. It was a vague background window dressing at best. There would be no King's Landing court intrigue, no dragons, and only one or two major houses at best.

People might say, "Oh...but what about the White Walkers?"

Well the thing is...we have most of that mystery solved. We already know what the White Walkers are and where they came from...so there's no use going into that unless someone wants to tell that story again (I would recommend against it). The Children of the Forest are basically Native American placeholders or the standard "elf" in most fantasy literature...and everything else can be summed up as a bunch of petty feudal lords squabbling with each other.

So (in my opinion) why did the prequel in particular get canceled? Word is they even filmed a pilot for it, so they were pretty serious, right? How does this make any sense? Here's my theory: it turned out to be a lot more expensive than they thought. Also, studio execs got scared that going forward, there was going to be even greater expense due to the magical bronze age element of all the things. Money is usually what kills projects, so this is where I'm placing my bets on what exactly happened.

I'm actually more excited for the Lord of the Rings prequel series that Amazon is doing than anything taking place in GRRM's world from A Song of Ice and Fire. I think I'm pretty done with that story (and its offshoots). What say you?

Game of Thrones at its end was just the old bait and switch again.

What a con-job...the ultimate bait and switch. Why would anyone spend so much time creating fantastical backgrounds for characters (clearly designed to bait people into this narrative) only to have them go nowhere and be nothing? Who writes a story of Anastasia Romanov only to have her end up flipping burgers in a McDonalds in Kentucky and that's the end? This is what I don't get about people who are defending Game of Thrones. You all got conned! We got conned! Because make no mistake, this is exactly what happened. You were promised a seven course meal with all the trimmings, filet mignon, salmon, pies and cakes...and the list goes on and on. You (no, WE) were teased and tantalized for eight years! And then we got a frozen dinner from Stouffers. Why is anyone happy with this ending? Are you stupid? Are you used to being treated badly?

IMAGINE THIS SCENARIO:

Amazing Writer Person or AWP walks up to me (who is incredibly busy because life as a single person is hard) and begins to talk.

AWP: "Heyyyy...what's up my homie? Would you like to hear a story? It's suuuper good yo! Seriously."

Me: (Busy with about ten tasks that need to be done simultaneously)... "Eh?" I pause, thinking about that old mantra...don't let life pass you by; take time out to smell the roses. "Okay," I say. "I'm always up for a good story. Here take some of my money and now tell it to me."

AWP: "Thanks for the cash, broseff. Now I gots this story of a woman. She's from an ancient family that fled from an ancient civilization that fell to its doom when the ground upheaved underneath them in cataclysmic quakes. Beaten down, raped, and having lost everything including all the family she has left in the world, this woman walks into a frickin' bonfire with three rocks...and she comes out with three dragons! These dragons grow and become fierce just like she does. This woman conquers her naysayers and defeats all the wrongdoers of the world! She learns multiple languages, defies assassins, and is a leader whom everyone looks up to!"

Me: "Holy crap! Wow! That's a great story! Please, Mr. Amazing Writer Person, please tell me what happens? I've got to know!"

AWP: (Cleans fingernails idly). "Oh that's it. She ded. Her boyfriend stabbed her in the heart, and well...she ded. Domestic violence is poison, yo!"

Me: "What the f*ck? That's it? What about all that stuff you told me about her?"

AWP: "None of it mattered. But hey I gots another story for you? Gimme some more money and time and I'll tell it. It's better than that dragon lady."

Me: "Uh...okay...but this next one better be good I guess."

AWP: (Clears throat). "There's this guy who's a bastard. His father, see, dallied with a woman while he was at war, and as a result he was born out of wedlock. But in secret, he's actually the heir to a throne of seven kingdoms. All that stuff was a lie made up to protect him."

Me: (Clearly interested). "You're saying he's an actual king?"

AWP: "Damn straight, homie. And this guy goes north of this 800 foot wall that stretches from one shore to another on a continent with his dire wolf companion named Ghost! While there, they come across all kinds of evil undead and he actually faces off against a King Ice Zombie with the powers of a god and who rides a frickin Ice dragon! That ice dragon is so frickin powerful, it destroys that wall, and it all caves into the ocean! I mean damn! And he gets murdered by his own men and resurrected by a God so he can come back and save all of mankind like Jesus!"

Me: (Mind blown with the imagery). "This story is incredible! What happens to that guy?"

AWP: "Oh that's it. This guy just lives in a shack in the north now with his dog and drinks beer."

Me: "What the hell? That ending sucks. Why are you doing this?"

AWP. "Wwhhhat? You don't like my stories? You know...just because you go to Harvard and your last name is Kennedy, DOESN'T mean that you are going to be a senator or a judge! You can be a janitor and peak with a job at Taco Bell. That's what my story is about, you know! The extraordinary in all the ordinary!" Amazing Writer Person scoops up my money, having already taken all of my time, and says a parting, "F*ck you very much," and now he leaves.

Me: "But here's the thing!" I shout out loud. "I DON'T WANT TO LISTEN TO A STORY WHERE A MAN OR WOMAN WHO WENT TO HARVARD AND WHOSE LAST NAME IS ROCKEFELLER REACHES PEAK CAREER AT TACO BELL!!!!"

And that pretty much sums up how I feel about Game of Thrones now. All 73 episodes of it. What a dumpster fire and a disappointment. Endings matter, people. 

After watching season 8, I feel like I got conned by a grifter. It’s like how I imagine really bad phone sex must be where someone gets you all worked up and then all of the sudden you get a dial tone or a busy signal. Somehow, you manage to reconnect with the person and you ask them, “Did we just get disconnected?” and they reply, “Oh no...that was the end. That was the finale. I hope you liked it.” I mean...what the hell? Who does this?

It just makes me angry. It’s like I was teased this fabulous dinner and told to invite all my friends over and then the person that teased me showed up with frozen burritos, tossed them on the porch, and drove off shouting, “Bye, Felicia,” out the window never to be seen again.

What a con-job.

I hope Bennioff and Weiss and anyone else responsible for this ending (Martin maybe?) gets teased with a fabulous vacation and when they go to actually do the vacation, it ends up a huge disappointment with them staying in a Motel 6. "Yes, sir," I hear the customer service person saying to a complaining D&D (David Bennioff and D.B. Weiss). "The pictures in the brochure DO NOT match the actual product. You should be familiar with that little trick. It's called bait and switch. Bye, Felicia."

Here's a clip from In Living Color, which explains by example everything I'm talking about. Start the video at the 3:00 mark (which it should automatically do). 

Despite Daenerys burning King's Landing to the ground I maintain that anger and hatred are not mental illness.

This is a remarkable screenshot of Daenerys and actress Amelia Clarke who is showcasing extreme anger.

The aftermath of this anger is some of the most grotesque genocide humans are capable of inflicting.

So Game of Thrones went the way of every other fantasy series that has ever been written: the only one fit to rule or save the day is in fact a straight white male. I suppose that my disappointment at the final reveal is a culmination of feelings around the concept of "I thought this story was going to be different." It seemed different. It masqueraded itself differently. But at the end of the day it was just Dynasty or Falcon Crest but with dragons. It had its female villains like Alexis Carrington, but ultimately (and at the end of the day) these women do such horrible things that the audience has no choice but to beg for a straight white man to ultimately put these "mad" women in their place.

Sigh...I've seen this story before soooo many times. I'm tired of it...exhausted even. I guess I'm too well read for this crap anymore. People who haven't read the number of books that I have will find this story refreshing. Say a person who has read maybe five books in their life. That person is going to be so surprised by "White man is the best man for the job." I'm so disappointed in myself. I've been in denial if I ever thought that Game of Thrones showcased any diversity at all, and most of this was driven by the allure of such strong female heroic figures. But in George R.R. Martin's world, there is no such thing as heroes. Daenerys, however, came really close until "The Bells" happened. Boy did I get suckered in. I got P.T. Barnumed (famous for saying "A sucker is born every minute."). Yup, that's me.

However, I would be remiss if I didn't mention things about episode 5 of season 8 that got me thinking. For one, I'm interested in the mental gymnastics of how people go about justifying Daenerys's heel turn (thanks for letting me know what this term meant Pat). It reminds me of how people can take any passage from the Bible to validate just about anything they desire. "She crucified the masters." "She said she would take what is mine in fire and blood." Yes, she did do these things. But anger is a valid emotion...any of you seen the Pixar movie, Inside Out? Anger is not madness. And being angry and hating people who have wronged you or deeply wronged you is decidedly human. It is not mentally ill. It is not crazy or "mad" as in the "Mad Hatter" which is how people referred to the condition of "crazy" before the invention of the DSM.

It bugs me deeply that people use the terms "Mad" and "Crazy" and "Mental Illness" to describe someone who cannot reasonably deal with their anger or hatred. Hate is not a mental illness. It's a response to being insulted, wronged, or being violated. Hate can arise from being disenfranchised. It can come from places we least expect it to arise, but to wrap it up in a diagnosis of "mental illness" makes it easier to ignore. It becomes someone else's problem and allows a person to wash responsibility from their hands because "that other person is just crazy."

Daenerys is now the "Mad Queen." Blah...it makes me want to throw up in my mouth just a little bit. From my point of view she is a mass murderer and definitely no longer a hero because she has murdered tons of innocent people. However, she is not "cray cray." This isn't hip hop. "Bitches be crazy, ya know?" "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." "Women are so histrionic." "Women are so emotional." And so on and so forth. All of these one-liners going back hundreds of years are all rooted in misogyny, and it didn't need to be written that way unless the intent was to make Jon legitimate by shit-writing Daenerys. Make no mistake, folks. This is what happened here. She was a complete soaring hero up through the end of season 8 episode 3 that ended with the Night King's death. So in two episodes time, she's become a foaming at the mouth, carpet-chewing, burn them all "Mad Queen."

There are people who loved episode 5 called "The Bells." I have a red-pill friend who loves it, because, "with all of her betrayals, Cersei murdering her best friend as a big f*ck you at the gates, Cersei lying about sending troops, Cersei killing one of her dragons, the betrayal of Varys, and on top of that...getting rejected by Jon Snow [yes, I guess this is a legitimate reason for a woman to commit genocide...because...penis is so good, ya know?]...I don't think anyone, man OR woman, would have stopped or shown mercy...." I guess saying "No" really does have its consequences. Sigh.

I know incels who love it too. It fits their worldview of women, and what women do to men. I know people who are filled with bitterness and self loathing and have carried it so long it has morphed into diagnosable depression because that anger and hatred they have has no outlet. These people LOVED Daenerys burning King's Landing to the ground. "The Mad Queen!" they scream in delight.

I shake my head at the whole thing. Daenerys Targaryen was just extremely angry and packing a lot of hatred, and it just so happened that she was also packing a lot of firepower too and people paid the price. Answer me this: if the killers at Columbine high school had access to a dragon like Drogon and not assault weapons/guns, what do you think would have happened? What about the killer at Sandy Hook? What would he have done with his "dragon?" My guess is probably say "Dracarys" and burn a school to the ground and then start on the city. But what do I know?

So yeah...I'm grossly disappointed in Game of Thrones. But I also don't like how people use "Mad" and "Crazy" to describe anger and hatred. Hatred is not a mental illness, which is why mental health professionals will do nothing to stem the tide of mass shootings in our country. Hate and anger can't be dismissed, but addressing these emotions and the causes of them are probably too complex for people to want to take on unless there is no other choice.

I did love the special effects though, and I am going to finish this series by watching the last episode. I've come to far to quit now. I'm just glad it's finally over.

If I had known Game of Thrones was going to finish with such a depressing ending I wouldn't have watched the series.

Spoiler Alert and rant warning....

All my predictions have run out, and many of them proved to be not true. To say I'm disappointed in Game of Thrones's last season is an understatement. I feel like I don't even know these characters, that they have turned one-hundred eighty degrees from how I knew them to be for seven and a half seasons. I guess Daenerys is the only one strong enough to take the throne, and she is proving to be undeserving of that honor. Jon Snow is worthy of the throne, but he's not strong enough to take it, and he's completely uninterested in it. The Starks just want to be left alone. The North wants to be left alone. This whole thing just feels like a colossal waste of time.

I'm disappointed in all of the character arcs and the various plot armors that found their way onto certain characters just so that we could have ridiculous showdowns like "The Clegane Bowl."

Brienne deserved better. Jaime Lannister really went back to Cersei after all that? Blah.

George R.R. Martin spun some very interesting characters out of the ether. But if his one lesson told through the lens of a fantasy world is to say that it takes tyrants to unite kingdoms and that there are no happy endings and no true heroes, I guess I'm wondering what the point of it all is? Isn't fantasy a place where you are supposed to indulge things that don't exist in the real world? Since when did fantasy become a place to tell (and air) such depressing stories.

Ugh. The Iron Throne indeed.

There's one surprise that could be left in Game of Thrones and that would be making Jon Snow a benevolent Night King.

I want you to know that I didn't just "arrive" at this conclusion. I've thought about this for days, and I have evidence of foreshadowing that this "could" happen. I'm not sure as to exactly how it would go down though? I do know that Bran has seen how the first Night King was created, i.e., that a shard of Dragon Glass was thrust into his heart by the Children of the Forest.

So about that foreshadowing, which I thought was particularly heavy-handed within the confines of the script. First off there's Tormund who says to Jon before he leaves, "The North is in you, it's in your blood," or something very close to that as it may not be an exact quote. I've been thinking about that quote and wondering exactly what it means within the context of the show. Well, my conclusion is that Jon belongs North of the wall up there with his friends kinda like Uncle Benjen was doomed to stay up North.

Second, Ghost is in the North because "direwolves don't belong in the South." What kind of man abandons his dog/wolf? I know it sounds like I'm reaching, but I think that he and Ghost are going to be reunited. What better legend than the Night King and his faithful dire wolf wandering the wilderness of the North in the Lands of Always Winter?

Third, Sansa says, "Stark men get killed in the South." Well this seems like a lot of foreshadowing too. I think Jon Snow dies to become the Night King. I also think it foreshadows his eventual return to the Northern wilderness.

Fourth, the introduction of the last episode, "The Last of the Starks," didn't change. It showed the White Walker path going all the way up to Winterfell, which makes me think that maybe it's a hint that the "Night King may not be completely done."

Fifth, there are lots of moments where the Night King stares off with Jon Snow. It's like they are reflections of each other. Plus I don't think the Night King really had his heart in killing Jon Snow. I think he certainly could have chucked a spear at him or done some other thing countless times.

Sixth, Euron looks really surprised in the preview for this Sunday's episode. What could surprise him? A dead dragon with blue fire that is immune to their weapons, and a Night King on its back.

So now onto the "What is the motive for Jon Snow to become the Night King."

Well, first off, he doesn't want to live in the South and he doesn't want to be King of the Seven Kingdoms. That's rather obvious.

Second, I don't think that Daenerys can win this thing. The scorpion ballistas will not allow her living dragon to get close enough to King's Landing to make much of a difference, and I think we are going to see the Golden Company be super effective at decimating what's left of Daenerys's army. Dany is going to be on the brink of losing when Jon Snow becomes the Night King. He then raises all the dead on the field to fight and directs them to fight an Dany's behalf. He also raises Rhaegal (the dead dragon) which will probably be washed up on shore someplace at some point or maybe the harbor around Dragonstone isn't too deep. Jon as the Night King rides ice dragon Rhaegal, takes out Euron's entire fleet and then helps Dany to take the Iron Throne.

Then Jon bids farewell to Daenerys and returns to the North with his army of the dead. He's a Targaryen which means "Fire and Blood." He's the Night King, which means "Ice." So he is the Song of Ice and Fire.

A grateful and changed Daenerys becomes a benevolent queen to rule the seven kingdoms, and Drogon is the last of the living dragons.

Anyway, that's how I see it ending. I guess we'll see this week.

Everyone in the seven kingdoms is suddenly a mastermind except Dany's crew who are all morons now.

Ahead...there are spoilers...valar morghulis.

Sigh. Oh Game of Thrones, why must you end this way? I never thought I'd say this, but I'm really glad that this series is almost over. I'm invested to the end, and I think they've accomplished some great things in the epic fantasy genre. George R.R. Martin should pat himself on the back, because he's changed how everything works in entertainment from killing off beloved characters to inspiring others to follow his footsteps. However, my small criticisms of the show need to be aired out or my head will explode.

1) Why is it that Euron's fleet can just appear out of nowhere and apparently surprise anyone, even those flying in the air?

2) Why does it never occur to Daenerys to fly at Euron's ships from behind?

3) How did half the people in the north apparently survive the Battle of Winterfell?

4) Those balistas are super effective. Are balista bolts really that effective as medieval weaponry?

5) All the people went into the ocean and Missandei gets plucked out by Euron's forces? Of course she does.

6) Why is Bran not helping Daenerys by supplying her with sorely need information?

7) Sansa is terrible at keeping secrets, because...of course she is.

8) I'm still upset that the Night King is just gone. It feels like as if Harry Potter had killed Voldemort in the sixth book, and the seventh book was all about trying to take down Dolores Umbrage.

Anyway, criticisms aside, the third to the last episode ended up being pretty good. I'm kind of wondering what Jaime Lannister thinks he can do in King's Landing other than get killed by Cersei. And I'm kind of wondering why Cersei didn't just kill Tyrion. She had her chance. She paid Bronn to do it, but it was right there. What was stopping her? Maybe Jaime thinks he can kill Cersei, but I'm betting Arya gets her because she needs another name to cross off the list. I just hope it doesn't happen like it did with the Night King. In other words, Cersei is just about to triumph when Arya appears like a deus ex machina and kills her out of the blue. I don't think I'd be satisfied with that.

I guess we only have two more episodes to wait in order to find out. From here, writing this blog post, it feels like a long wait.

Game of Thrones will finish its historic run with three episodes of lazy writing by killing off the pregnant queen and the pirate and then end with a wedding between Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen.

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT for Game of Thrones.

The long anticipated battle of Winterfell took place in the unusually lengthy episode entitled "The Long Night," which aired Sunday. I guess an estimated 18 million people watched it live and this probably followed by hundreds of millions of people who will eventually see it through some incarnation or another. Game of Thrones is a modern phenomenon peeps, kinda like the Avengers, but in a similar vein I was left just a smidge disappointed in the third episode of season 8.

First off, it was a really dark and stormy night. Cliché aside, the writers could have staged this battle during anytime of the day. The writers set the pace for when the army of the dead actually shows up. They chose nightfall to make it more epic (and probably to save some on the special effects budget...let's just get real for a moment). Dany spent most of her time lost in winter storm clouds with Jon, they clumsily collided with each other when the odds of that happening seems pretty low to me, and they could see just about as much as I could see (which was, again, not much). Below is a screenshot of how dark the episode was about 50% of the time:

You are actually (as a viewing audience) supposed to be able to see this. I'm not kidding. The cinematographer of this episode came out defending his choices by saying, "You don't have your TV tuned right, and you are not watching it in optimal conditions." Okay, fair enough. But you could have told all of us via email to make sure our TV's had the right setting, whatever that may be. There could have been some kind of public service message posted on Facebook. Something. I think (personally) that HBO dropped the ball big time with this.

Second, I guess winter lasted some 82 minutes or something like that. We've been told that the Night King and the White Walkers were the big bad that threatened all of human civilization for seven and a half seasons. This is the epitome of over-hyping something. Don't get me wrong...I saw the dire dire circumstances of Winterfell, and I honestly thought, "How are they going to get out of this?" But I  never saw coming that it would just be all over in an instant because Arya stabbed the Night King out of nowhere with her Valyrian steel dagger. I didn't think it would end like that. I thought he would make it south and strike real fear in Cersei and her armies. But nope. He dead. Time to turn the page on this one.

I remember once that author Pat Dilloway gave me some feedback on an as yet unpublished novel that I killed off my big bad too easily...that it was over too fast. I'll get around to publishing that book someday and probably re-writing that scene to make it not be as fast. Pat was not wrong. However, if Game of Thrones does this, why can't I? I mean...it's like that Raiders of the Lost Ark scene where Indiana Jones is in the Egyptian market of Cairo and the crowd splits to reveal a huge man swinging a sword and doing all of these badass moves that you know is going to be an epic fight. Indiana Jones just shrugs, pulls his gun out, and shoots the guy. That fight is over; bad man is dead. Maybe all of us out here who want our bad guys to last longer are out of touch. Maybe people like the big bad to die just like that. It left me feeling unsatisfied, but I know a lot of people who thought it was great. Fair enough.

Third, the Dothraki are all dead in like five seconds. I don't understand this. We spent seven and a half years with these people, learning of their culture, seeing how fierce they were, and now they are all dead. I'm not quite sure I will ever understand the decision of doing this to such a huge part of the storyline. It feels very much like a colossal waste of time on my part, being invested in that whole storyline so that they could just all get swamped by a wave of undead during a charge in which none of their tactics mattered one bit.

All these years of theory crafting have been fun. I was right when I decided that Jon Snow was a Targaryen years before it was revealed and boy was that satisfying to see. I was right when I predicted that Valyrian steel could kill White Walkers and then we saw it happen in the episode called Hardhome. But with the Long Night, I think that this show is telling us that it is done hiding secrets from us. The Night King was exactly where Bran said he was going to be. He came for Bran in the Godswood on foot rather than rain blue fire down on that entire grove from a safe distance and just be rid of the cripple in the chair. So here's what's going to happen in the last three episodes.

Jon and Dany in love get married after they take the throne. He gives up his claim to her and she becomes Queen. Cersei is killed. The Mountain is killed by his brother the Hound. Tyrion and Jaime are killed by Bronn, because he accepted a bunch of gold to do the deed. Everyone hates Bronn for doing that, so he gets killed because people liked Tyrion and Jaime. It's lazy writing, and I think that's what we can expect from now on is lazy writing. It's like in those football games when there are just a few seconds left on the clock and the losing team just wants it all to end and just kinda pushes softly against the other team to allow the clock to run down.

And that's it. Night King dead. Pregnant woman and pirate holding the kingdom hostage are killed. House Lannister dies off, and Targaryens once again sit on the Iron Throne. It all seems easy and straight forward with no deviations or surprises. And I think that's how HBO wants to end all this. I'll still watch it, but I am disappointed considering the prior seasons were just packed full of theories that paid of in spades.

But, even with all this disappointment, it still is a great series, and it will be some time before it is ever upped by anything on television.

Game of Thrones cleverly showed us already that the Night King is not at the Battle of Winterfell.

Brandon Stark as the Three-Eyed Raven says that the Night King will come for him in the Godswood at Winterfell, so everyone believes him because he knows things. But the Game of Thrones series has already showed us that the Night King has flown south to destroy King's Landing on the back of Viserion, and there's nothing that King's Landing can do to stop it. When did they show us? A couple of places.

The first was in season two when Daenerys was in the city of Qarth in the House of the Undying. Here's a screen capture of the steps to the Tower where Daenerys's dragons had been taken by a necromancer named Pyat Pree.

When Daenerys entered that House to find her dragons, she was given several visions that up until about last night at 11 p.m., I'd assumed meant other things. And yes, I literally woke up and thought, "Oh my god...that's what that vision meant." I'm such a nerd, right? So in the vision, snow is filling the throne room and blanketing everything, and she's in kind of an awe about it all. A lot of people thought it was a metaphor..."Snow" meaning that "Jon Snow" would be sitting on the throne. But I don't think it was metaphor at all. It signifies the coming of the Night King to King's Landing to kill everyone and raise an army of a million dead.

If this weren't proof enough, there have been other, stronger hints. Bran had a vision in season four (I think) where he saw a dragon flying over King's Landing. I'll include the screen capture below for reference. I think all of us just thought that this meant the coming of Daenerys...that it would be her flying her dragons over King's Landing. This is a simple thing to predict. But the ominousness of the dragon's shadow seems to suggest that all of us probably misunderstood it at the time. It's not Drogon, but Viserion, carrying none other than the Night King on its back.

King's Landing is going to get completely destroyed either in episode 3 or 4. I expect there to be a dramatic cutaway to it as the surviving heroes of Winterfell look at each other and ask, "But where is the Night King if he wasn't with this army?" Where, indeed.

Knowing that Game of Thrones only had five episodes left for its entire run made me more aggravated at A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms than I should have been.

It's like I've become a bit of the Three-Eyed Raven, and I don't like it. I see the ending coming, I know how much time is left, and I want each second on screen to count. After last week's very slow episode in which much needed exposition took place, I was thinking that the last five episodes would move onto action akin to some of the biggest episodes that the series has showcased. So what we ended up getting in "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" felt a lot like filler. Honestly, it felt like a series of low budget, tight perspective webisodes to invest in characters than it did any kind of "cinematic." You know, the kind of webisodes that you click on to discover the backstory of a character that's killed off in the main show, but which you know has no special effects budget at all. This is what the entire episode felt like, albeit with beautiful set pieces.

I mean, they didn't get into any White Walker action so at least they could flash over to something that maybe Cersei was up to? But they didn't do that at all either. But my Three-Eyed Raven powers kind of "get it." Half to 75% of these characters won't survive the next four episodes, so it was a final opportunity for them to just sort of sit around and do whatever the hell they wanted. In Dungeons & Dragons, we call this kind of housekeeping "downtime." But here's the thing...if they wanted to do a lot of this, why did they only make six episodes for this season? They could have done a bunch of filler episodes and had a full season of ten episodes. It doesn't make any sense, and it's deeply frustrating. Sigh.

However, it was still a good episode, just an unsatisfying one. We did get to see Arya and Gendry get it on so that was kind of fun. And nothing beats the sloppy love stares of Tormund Giantsbane that are directed at Brienne. I also loved that Brienne was knighted by Jaime Lannister, an honor that she has deserved for a long time. Oh and nothing is ever going to get the vision of a naked Tormund in bed sucking on a giant woman's nipple out of my head. Nothing.

Random observations:

1) Did anyone notice the White Walkers all have dragon-slaying javelins now in hand?

2) I like Arya's staff. She practiced with one against the waif for so long, it seemed a natural fit. I bet she protects Bran while he waits for the Night King.

3) How the Hell are they going to stop Viserion from just torching all of Winterfell? This was a plan that they should have come up with. Something...anything...to stop the big undead dragon would have been nice to hear.

4) Does it bother anyone else that everyone is focused on "What comes after" when they don't know if there's even going to be an "after?"

5) I guess next week is when we see the biggest battle that has ever been filmed. It's been a solid lead up to it. But I think the remaining two episodes will feel like some kind of rushed cleanup. I am kind of disappointed that the climax will apparently be Winterfell and the White Walkers will probably get stopped there or all is lost. There really isn't time in two episodes to have them travel south in a path of destruction. At least it doesn't seem that way to me.

Here is my idea regarding the weird White Walker spirals we've been seeing for eight seasons now.

In the premiere episode of season 8 of Game of Thrones that aired on Sunday (it was called "Winterfell") we viewers got treated to yet another gruesome spiral of hacked limbs that was obviously created by the White Walkers. We know from previous episodes that the White Walkers (or the Others as they are called in the book) are 1) intelligent, 2) originally created by the Children of the Forest who wanted to use them to protect themselves against humans (but eventually they lost control of the White Walkers) 3) have magical powers, and 4) apparently are not too different from the race of humans they were created from. They ride horses, utilize tools (like chains), they wear clothing that is designed for them (and it isn't all nasty so this implies a cleaning regimen), and they are trained in swordplay.

So (thinking like a writer), I started asking myself what the significance of the White Walker spirals might be, and I decided that they might be a way for the White Walkers to create a latitude of consecrated ground (thinking that the power comes from a divine source) where they can bring the full force of their powers to bear. In other words, they might not be able to cause the dead to rise if they don't create one of these things, which may be an homage or sacrifice to whatever god that they worship (the Great Other?). And before you go on and accuse me of reading too much into this, both in the books and in the show, it has been pointed out that there may be only two gods that actually have any power on Westeros. The first god is R'hllor, who is a god of fire, and the second is the Great Other, who is a god of ice. And the series which includes the title book, Game of Thrones, is in fact called A Song of Ice and Fire. I'm even positing that the Night King is the High Priest of the Great Other, and that the White Walkers are also priests of a sort to their religion. Additionally, "White Walker" may be a kind of mantle that is assumed by those who worship this religion. In other words, the way new White Walkers are created is through a kind of infernal baptism...a touch by the High Priest...in what looks a lot like a ceremony.

And having now said all that, what do you guys think? Thoughts on White Walkers actually being priests? Anyway, lest I digress...

In the pilot episode that aired many years ago, one of the rangers investigating Wildlings north of the wall comes across a similar gruesome display made with hacked limbs (I'm positing that this is the first of many sacrifices made by these "priests"). It's after this event that the dead rise. So, it makes me think that the ground needed to be consecrated (by forming that symbol) in order for the White Walker present at that area of the map to call upon the necessary powers to make its own zombies. Similarly, another gruesome circle was found at the Fist of the First Men, which probably incorporated all areas of that latitude to enable the White Walkers to make the dead walk again. Once they went south of the wall, there weren't any fresh bodies to create a new symbol with until they reached Last Hearth. So having killed all the living there, a new spiral was ordered by the Night King and once it was done, they raised all the remaining dead to join their army. Nailing the Umber boy to the wall seemed more like a narrative piece, to throw us viewers a bone by having one of the men in the hall say "That's the Umber boy" so that we 1) understand the Umber boy did not make it back to Winterfell and 2) identify the castle they are in as Last Hearth.

We may never know if I'm right regarding this particular guess, but I think that as the White Walkers travel south, there will be more of these markers as significant points of latitude, and that they are done to consecrate that southern point with the full powers of the White Walkers.

Anyway, that's my idea. What do you think?

The record-breaking premiere of Game of Thrones season 8 set up the war to end all wars.

SPOILER ALERT: Talking Game of Thrones and the premiere of season 8 episode 1 last night.

So the long awaited return of Game of Thrones happened last night. There was a lot to unpack, and as predicted, record numbers of people tuned into the premiere. I saw one estimate that as many as one billion people worldwide were going to watch the season 8 episode 1 premiere through as many means as possible. That's a mind-boggling number, and it just reinforces in my mind how big this thing really has become. Everyone is talking about it...I myself hosted a Game of Thrones BBQ in my backyard before the premiere where we all wore Game of Thrones t-shirts and other memorabilia and my friend Farrah showed up with her daughter named "Arya" (and yes she's named after the character of the same name in the show). I wonder if George R.R. Martin ever foresaw how big his creation actually was going to be.

As far as the episode itself went, it was pretty typical of season openers which are usually "slow" and which focus around some housekeeping, getting characters together, and doing their best to tease the rest of the season. As it goes, I've never seen a first episode of any season of this show that 1) was very exciting and 2) left me satisfied in any way. First up there was a new introduction that put front and center the shattered wall, and then did its best to paint the momentous events and high stakes leading up to the iron throne.

With only five episodes to go, its a dramatic change to the introductions of prior seasons, which (more or less) just did a flyby of all the locations in which major characters and their narratives took place in. Then we saw Daenerys getting a bit of the cold-shoulder along with Jon Snow, mostly because the North had just crowned him King in the North and he gave it away to Daenerys Targaryen in order to guarantee her support. This is mostly due to the fact that for nearly all of them, the threat of the Night King is not real yet. But as the episode unrolled and the fortifications around Winterfell went up, it seemed to me that it started to get real for everyone as it was clear to anyone with eyes that this was going to be a battle that might decide the fate of all mankind.

And I'm kind of concerned that Winterfell might just end up being that. They should have some kind of fallback, someplace they can go back to if the Night King proves to be too cunning and his army too invincible to just take on all at once. In my head, I was thinking that the fight was going to eventually end up at King's Landing (which is a good deal south from Winterfell...about three months journey if I remember correctly). If they spend four episodes leading up to the battle of Winterfell, and then have the fifth and sixth episodes being the battle of Winterfell and then the series finale, I think I will be just a little bit disappointed. Winterfell really isn't all that far from the wall. The Night King should make it further than Winterfell, especially given the size of his current army. I also felt that maybe one big battle would take place in the Eyrie, since it was a fortress that was designed never to be taken.

The episode also treated us to more of the dragons. Jon Snow got aboard Rhaegal and flew him through a canyon while Daenerys watched him from atop Drogon. That was kind of cute and terrifying as well. A little joy before all the darkness descends is a nice thing to do. It reminds us that both of these people would make great inspiring leaders, and that there is a lot of beauty in the world of Westeros that is worth fighting for. Then the reveal that Samwell did when speaking to Jon Snow in the crypt regarding his lineage was something that Jon wasn't (at first) prepared to accept. But with the dragon flight out of the way, you could see that the ways in which Daenery's dragons responded to him had started to make sense. They know he's a Targaryen. I still look back on that reveal (and secret) in awe. George R.R. Martin wrote probably the greatest secret into these books that I've ever seen in fiction. Well done, George. Well done.

And last but not least, there's Cersei doing terrible things as she always has done. She's ordered Bron to kill both her brothers (I wonder if Bron will go through with it as he's rather fond of both). Cersei has got The Golden Company now (but no elephants). So she's got the greatest mercenary army in the world on her side. I think her greatest failing is that she continues to play the Game of Thrones when none of that even matters as long as the Night King walks the earth.

Oh, there's so much to think about. I can't wait for the remaining five episodes. 

The final season of Game of Thrones is less than 30 days away.

The final season of Game of Thrones is less than 30 days away as of this writing. It's been a long wait to see who will take the Iron Throne. Just to show you how much it has been on my mind, a frenemy (I realized after I was his friend that he was a narcissist and psychological abuser) that I haven't spoke to in over a decade died in January of kidney failure (I didn't really feel anything at the news, but I did wonder why someone even bothered to tell me). However, when I was told the news through an acquaintance (who I also haven't seen in person for over ten years--the message came through Facebook messenger of all places), the first thing that popped into my head was, "He doesn't get to see how it all ends." It seemed like a fate that was just salt in a wound, you know?

I hope that I never die when I'm about to finish something that's gripped my attention for years. And all this speculation of course is assuming that this frenemy even watched Game of Thrones. But, I had little doubt though that he did. When we were on speaking terms, it was apparent that we were passionate about the same things, and Game of Thrones has pretty much dominated all of fantasy fiction for the last decade. Kudos to George R.R. Martin to getting us so enraptured into the politics of some fictional kingdom whose ruler (I might add) won't even be ruler of the world of Westeros. Nope, they'll just be the ruler of seven smaller kingdoms on a continent that's smaller in land mass than the rest of the land on Westeros. It just goes to show you that politics and conflict can be small and yet remain incredibly interesting.

According to Entertainment Weekly in an article posted just a few days ago, each episode has an average final length of 72 minutes. Episode one is 54 minutes long, episode two is 58 minutes long, episode three is an hour and 22 minutes long, episode 4 is an hour and 18 minutes long, and episodes five and six are each an hour and 20 minutes long. The showrunners have also stated boldly that the final battle will put to shame any fantasy or fictional battle that has ever been seen on big screen or small. That includes the final battle of Return of the King, i.e., the golden standard known as the Battle of the Pelennore Fields. For what it's worth, April cannot get her soon enough. With my taxes already out of the way, April with Game of Thrones and spring and Avengers: Endgame is going to be the best month of the year.

Valar Morghulis everyone.

Season 7 of Game of Thrones already established that the White Walkers don't stand a chance against an army that knows its Achilles heel.

HBO announced that Game of Thrones is coming back for its final six episodes in April 2019. That being said, I've been rewatching the episodes a little bit at a time over the last few months to catch up a friend who stopped watching (life happened) back in season four. It's been a good refresher, especially where I think my theories of the Great War lie. For a while now, I've been thinking that there's just no way that the dragon-slaying Night King and his minions could ever be beaten. They bring a lot to the table, what with an ever expanding army of undead that rise from the living who are culled in ever-increasing numbers on the battlefield. However, the actual White Walkers are few in number, and apparently, all you have to do is kill the Night King and everything just dies. This plot device happened in the penultimate episode of season seven, when Jon Snow (attempting to capture a wight to take it back to King's Landing), was forced to use his Valyrian steel sword to end a White Walker who was leading a band of undead through a ravine. When the White Walker exploded into ice, all but one of the animated zombies also perished.

"Why do you think that happened?" someone asked Jon Snow. He replied, "Maybe that White Walker animated them. So when he died, everything he animated perished with him." Or something like that; it's not a direct quote. So that's the Achilles' heel of this whole plot. You kill the Night King, and the game is up. Sure, he's an obvious "Boss" within the rules well-established by video games, but could he stop a hundred dragon glass arrows? Could he best someone of Brienne of Tarth's sword ability (or Jon Snow's) wielding a Valyrian steel sword so that they don't get to cheesily unmake every weapon that you use against them? I think not. So kill that one guy...and the whole war is over. In modern terminology, if you sack the quarterback the game ends instantly.

So really, the White Walkers don't stand a chance. Imagine having the best army in the world but if you took out one leader who was always present on the battlefield, it was just game over instantly. Even with an ice dragon and an army of twenty thousand zombies, that just seems like really long odds. I wouldn't want to be on that side of a war. It's putting all your eggs in one basket, and it's just going to end up really bad for the White Walkers. This is especially true given that the Night King likes to strut around in the open with no shield or tank or anything. He just walks around, and he oftentimes can be found on a hill overlooking the battle. Could you paint a more obvious target on someone's back? Here...I'll place my most important piece that is the person who controls everything out in the open on this hill and he's just gonna stand there and make badass faces without any concern for shelter of any kind. I realize that in season 8, he may be on the back of a dragon which is significantly harder to get to, but Daenerys could always ram him with one of her dragons and when he fell off then all you'd have to do is shoot him with a hundred dragon glass arrows. If any one of them touched him, it's over.

So there you have it, unless something incredibly stupid happens, we already know how the Great War is going to be resolved. You are all welcome :).

Is there an inverse relationship with the quantity of dialogue a villain has and how otherworldly that villain is supposed to be?

Undead wights under the supervision of a White Walker using chains that they got from somewhere to pull the
dead dragon, Viserion, out of the frozen lake. 

I had this random thought on Friday night as I was trying to get to sleep: where did the White Walkers get the chains that they used to raise Viserion's lifeless corpse up from the frozen lake so that the Night King could resurrect the dragon into an ice dragon? If you don't know what I'm talking about, you probably haven't watched season 7 of Game of Thrones. Anyway, I don't know why it bothered me on Friday night. I wasn't watching Game of Thrones, but this kind of thing does vex me just a wee bit because I have a lot of faith in the Game of Thrones franchise and the detail probably has a source somewhere.

So here's what I come up with. The White Walkers probably got them from a ship at Hardhome, which they sacked sometime in season five. But it still doesn't answer how they knew to bring them along, so maybe they went back and got them or they just decided to bring them along.

Is it ridiculous to think that the White Walkers communicate with each other the same way humans do? "Hey, I think we should bring these chains along. You never know when they will come in useful." Or the Night King turns to one of the White Walkers and states, "I told you that these chains would come in useful," and then the White Walker shrugs and says, "Yup. I guess that's why you are the king." But having those kinds of conversations would get in the way of being big, bad, and scary if people could hear them.

For example, would Darth Maul have been so scary in the Phantom Menace if he had a lot of dialogue and banter with people? Probably not. But for what it's worth, the emperor in the Return of the Jedi had a ton of dialogue and his on screen scariness didn't diminish one bit. But then again, he looked just like a really old man (not otherworldly).

So it makes me wonder...are there certain kinds of villains that we just shouldn't hear speak because it ruins a suspension of disbelief? And what qualifies as that kind of villain? Maybe there's an inverse relationship with how otherworldly the villain is supposed to be to how much dialogue they should actually have in the script. As one goes up, the other goes down and vice versa.

What do the rest of you think?

The Game of Thrones animated series launches December 12 and it packs a lot of information even if the CGI is bad.

In the gulf that exists between now and whenever the final season of Game of Thrones arrives on HBO, we now have a storybook-style animated series called Game of Thrones Conquest & Rebellion. The first episode, which is about four minutes long, actually explains A LOT about Westeros that I never got from the books or from the television series. It's probably been explained by George R.R. Martin at some point in his encyclopedic books that he's put out, but I've only purchased those as gifts for other people and never for myself. It's one of the things I plan to change in the near future.

So, I watched the first episode. The animation is clunky but the narration is pretty great. It's narrated by actor Harry Lloyd whom (if you remember the first season of GoT) played Dany's brother Viserys who received a "golden crown" of death from Khal Drogo. For what it's worth, Harry Lloyd has excellent pronunciation, and I think I could listen to him for hours narrating word after word.

The whole mini-series is 45-minutes long and is available as a bonus gift for pre-ordering the Game of Thrones season 7 blu-ray. I think I'm going to just try and track the others down online and see if I can watch them.

You might be asking, what did I learn in this first four minutes that I already didn't know?

I learned a little more about the Doom that came to Valyria, and that everyone apparently could just fly around on dragons. I thought it was something that only the noble houses of Valyria could do. I also learned that the Targaryens somehow knew that the Doom was coming, and they fled ahead of it to the isle of Dragonstone. That was interesting. They brought with them the know-how to build the fortress and then Aegon and his two sisters surveyed the nation of Westeros from the sky in order to commission a gigantic map (you see it in Stanis's war room in Dragonstone). I also learned the names of the ancient great houses. I didn't know that the Starks were the oldest house. I suppose I could have put that together, but I never did. I just knew they were a powerful house and ruler of the largest kingdom of the seven (if not the most sparsely populated).

The episode is definitely worth a watch, and I've embedded it below for your convenience. Who knows? If it's popular enough maybe HBO will explore it in live action through another Game of Thrones-esque series in the same world.

Let's talk about all the ways Viserion and the Night King and the army of the dead can meet their end.

Viserion.
After Viserion's death from a magic ice javelin thrown by the Night King in the episode "Beyond the Wall," I think everyone knew that this was a game-changing moment. The shocking death aside, the fact that Viserion could make the wall crumble in upon itself with such efficiency was both beautiful and terrifying. Dragons are incredibly powerful, and I gotta say...highly unappreciated by the army of the dead. At least a living army would have experienced awe. The dead? Not so much. Anyway...I've been talking with friends (naturally) about the season finale, and here's what we came up with on the ways that Viserion might die.

1) Qyburn's scorpion (obvious).

Assuming that Gendry (the blacksmith that so conveniently showed up to run a marathon in "Beyond the Wall") can craft javelins/arrows/spears with dragon glass tips, and engineers can make one of Qyburn's scorpions...I think this is an obvious solution.

2) Melisandra of Ashai (less obvious, but really cool).

In the third episode of the seventh season, Jon Snow arrived at Dragonstone and Varys walked out to speak with Melisandre who was standing on the island's cliffs. She revealed to him that she was heading to Volantis (which is a free city in Essos that is the location of a prominent Red Temple), and she made an ominous declaration to him, "I will return, dear Spider, one last time," she said in reference to Westeros. "I have to die in this strange country, just like you." So it makes me ask, "What is so important that Melisandre would need to come back to Westeros to do that ultimately leads to her death?"

So here's the thing...and please bear with me on this...it doesn't look like to me that Viseryon was turned into an ice dragon. He's not a "different" species, although his fiery breath weapon is now blue instead of fire-colored. But if Viseryon is in fact a dead dragon brought to life through the Night King's power, there is nothing to stop Melisandre from bringing a dead dragon back to life through the power of the Red God.

Perhaps this is the part Melisandre has yet to play in this story. I'm thinking that she comes back to the Great War at a very dire point, and that she uses the power of R'hllor to bring Viserion back to life, snapping him out of the Night King's control and allowing the dragon to turn on its former master at the last second. And this is probably how Melisandre dies too.

Priests of the Red God R'hllor revered the dragons as "fire made flesh." I can see no greater insult to the red god than to have a dragon be enslaved to serve the Great Other (in the beliefs of Melisandre's faith there are only two gods...one of ice and one of fire. The one of Ice is referred to as 'The Great Other'). Anyway, it makes sense to me that R'hllor could use his priest to wrest control of the dragon from the power of the Night King.

The Night King.
1. Arya Stark. 

I like to believe that there are reasons for everything in a well-scripted show like Game of Thrones. So why does she have a dagger made of Valyrian steel? Hmm. Was it so that she could cut Littlefinger's throat in the season finale? Or is this some profound foreshadowing? In other words...we know that White Walkers are vulnerable to Valyrian steel. The dagger also has significance in that it was promised a death (Brandon Stark) but that his mother stopped the assassination in season one. Could this also be foreshadowing? Either way you look at it, the event of arming Arya with the dagger is probably significant...more so than just using it to cut Littlefinger's throat. There are a couple of ways she might possibly be able to do this.

She might be able to use her face changing powers to get close to the Night King, although it seems unlikely she would be able to actually get a face from one of the White Walkers as they burst (inconveniently) into shards of ice upon death. But I'm not exactly sure how her powers work, so I'm going to say that it may be in the realm of possibility that this happen.

The second way Arya may kill the Night King comes from a rumor that Brandon Stark is actually the Night King (which seems to be hinted at strongly in the show). Here are two clues that this may be true.

They wear the same style of clothes.

The season finale showed the army of the dead in an aerial view that looked a lot like the Dire Wolf sigil of House Stark (as they walked past the shattered wall).

Here's how the theory goes: Bran uses time-travel abilities to go back to the moment that the Night King was created by the Children of the Forest in order to intervene, but gets trapped within the body of the zombie lord instead. So, once people figure this out (namely Arya) it seems killing Bran will kill the Night King as the two are linked somehow. In which case, Arya fulfills the death that was promised to the dagger (and thereby satisfies the god of death whom she worships).

2. A dragon kills the Night King.
Either a resurrected Viseryon brought back by Melisandre (as stated above) or one ridden by either Daenerys or by Tyrion Lannister.

3) Jon Snow kills the Night King (obvious). This showdown has been brewing from season one. The White Walkers were always Jon Snow's storyline. Now that the White Walkers are an apocalyptic force bent on destroying all of humanity...what better way to take out there king by none other than Jon Snow himself.

The Army of the Dead.

1) Dragon Fire.
Daenerys still has two dragons. If she can teach them how to dodge ice spears, they could decimate a hundred thousand soldiers pretty quickly with dragon fire (especially given that wights are flammable). The problem (of course) is keeping the Night King from shooting them down with ice javelins.

2) Thousands of arrows tipped with dragon glass arrow heads.
This is what I'd do. I'd make so many dragon glass arrow heads and train people to just shoot high in the sky and have the rain of arrows come down on the army. Fill the sky with so many that it blots out the light of the sun. I think that'd take out a lot of the army of the dead in huge swaths.

3) Kill the White Walkers.
We learned from the episode called "Beyond the Wall" that the magic of animating the dead stems/flows from the one that did the animating. A lot of the animating has been done by the Night King. Kill him and probably 90% of the army will just fall to pieces.

Conclusion.
There are six episodes left, and they are all rumored to be of feature length (around the two hour mark). This may mean that we've got a lot of epic stuff in the works coming down the pipe from HBO. However this ends...will it be an apocalypse? or will it be a last ditch effort thrown by the living to conquer the dead? I'm sure it will be entertaining television. But it's clear to me in writing this post that the living does have many options to deal with what's coming for them. They just have to get busy and actively work to put their differences aside.

Is Game of Thrones going to end with an apocalypse?

Guys, in the Dragon and the Wolf, the season finale of the penultimate season of everyone's favorite tv show, I gotta say that I had hope. I had hope that Cersei somehow (either because Tyrion said the right things or because she had thoughts of the welfare of her unborn child) saw the light. That she recognized the threat of the army of the dead and the Night King. But when she turned around and decided to back-stab the alliance, renege on her promises, and threaten her brother Jaime (who might have just escaped King's Landing with his life), that little bit of hope I was feeling got snuffed out.

How are the living going to defeat the dead? Their army just keeps on growing, and they have an ice dragon now that took down the wall (kudos to my friend Kevin who predicted as much on my post on Friday). As a side note, I'm kinda wondering what's up with Viseryon's breath weapon. Is it fire or ice? Blue fire? Cold fire? Whatever it was, it sure made quick work of that section of the wall. And it looks pretty cool. I'm not certain why Viseryon's wings are all tattered now though (other than it looks cool that way). I'm just not sure why they would be so tattered after being pulled from the lake, but maybe all the undead knocked holes in them or something.

I'm not quite in full despair mode for the next season (rumor is that it will be two years from now with six episodes each two hours long). Here are things I really was pleased to see that give me some glimmer of hope:

1) Littlefinger's dead. I was kind of thinking that Bran was telling the Stark girls what was up with Littlefinger and making sure that they didn't fall into his trap. I was surprised when they turned the tables on him, and it felt good to see Lord Baelish finally die. At this point in the story, he was completely useless, conniving and scheming while an army of the dead was marching down on them all.

2) It was great to see (finally) that Jon is not a bastard and that his last name is Targaryen. That's going to make the last season very interesting as he's the legit heir of the iron throne. I always saw Jon and Dany sitting in King's Landing when it was all over. But now, I'm pretty much thinking that everyone is going to die. There just doesn't seem to be a way to defeat the army of the dead without Cersei (I'm thinking of Qyburn's "scorpion" invention here). They need that tech to fire dragon glass arrows at the frickin' ice dragon or they are all going to die quite fast.

This season was a pretty wild ride. The final season will soon be upon us, and I suppose the whole world will be tuning in to watch. But is it too much to ask that the world doesn't end in an apocalypse?