Game of Thrones for Noobs XI |

The Story Thus Far

Aaaaaaaand we’re back! That’s right, nerds—it’s Game of Thrones for Noobs! Your weekly recap of everything that went down on the HBO fantasy show from the guy who has no clue what’s going on, who anyone is or why anyone is doing anything at all! Note that spoilers follow like crazy, but when we left off, shit had gotten real for everyone, like so:

The moon-faced Arya Stark had trained to ditch said face with the House of Black and White, a clandestine face storage facility that presumably is all about assassinating assholes.
Cersei Lannister had turned to this homeless dude for help with, uh, some … thing, and then the dude turned against her and paraded her around town with a shitty haircut and fully nude while some bitchy nun shouted, “Shame!” over and over. Ba-doom.
Sansa Stark had married Ramsay “Rapey” Bolton, who then looked at everyone like a goddamn crazy person with his spooky eyes and was all mean and scary.
Tyrion sailed someplace in a box at the behest of Varys the Spider (he’s the Matt Pinfield-lookin’ dude) only to pretty much turn right around and start coming back (I think) but then get sidetracked with some other guy who took him to see Daenerys “Dragon Tits” Targaryen.
Dragon Tits herself, Daenerys Targaryen chained most of her dragons away in the basement of her Egyptian-like palace, but the one who got away was busy dragon-in’ it up elsewhere, until he wasn’t, and that’s when he came back and set a bunch of jerks on fire.
The Ice Zombies cameth and lo, they did fucketh up everyone’s shit.
That metal band Mastodon played extras in some episode. Also, there was a giant.
That one lady knight and her young squire were doing something … it’s hard to say.
Jamie Lannister and his friend Baron Chinstrap traveled to Dorne (which is kinda like Persia) to find the Lannister incest offspring. They found her. Ta-da!
Stannis “No Nickname” Baratheon burned his daughter alive because a witch told him to. Yuck.
Jon Snow rose to power, and his pudgy pal what’s-his-face found a woman. Then Snow died. Or didn’t. Look, all we know is we saw blood pouring out of him onto the snow. Jeeze.

The Gist
We’re now past the point of George RR Martin source material, so none of this stuff happens in the book. And before you flip out over that, take solace in how Kit Harington’s name flashed on the screen in the opening credits, so we know he’ll appear in one way or another. In fact, we open on his frozen corpse, and this guy I don’t recognize is all, “Oh no! Jon Snow! Why?” Guess he didn’t hear that Snow was doing a shit job as the president of anti-Ice Zombies. The witch shows up and is, like, “Yeah, he’s dead all right,” and everyone stands around being bummed.

Meanwhile, elsewhere along the Wall, the leader pro-tem of the Night’s Watch explains to everyone that Snow sucked and stuff. His reasons boil down to how Snow wasn’t prejudiced against the Wildlings, so I guess he’s some kind of racist or something while Snow goes down in history as a nice guy killed by jerks.

We rejoin Ramsay Bolton, who’s bummed that his girlfriend died. Sure, he’s married to Sansa, but Myranda was great at sex and stuff. I may have said it before, and I’ll say it again—if they’re trying to humanize this dude, it’s way too late. He makes her dead body promises that he’s gonna hurt people and then tells his butler to feed the girl to a dog because her dad was the kennel master. Yeesh, homeboy has problems.

Not the least of which is that Sansa and that guy Theon/Reek are totally running away from home through snowy fields and icy rivers, and they’re cold, and there are wolves after them. Sansa continues her grand tradition of whining and telling everyone she’s weak (which mostly proves once again that this show is weird about women), but it sure is pretty in the woods in the snow.

Sansa is cold as all get-out, and Theon/Reek is just like, “The wolves won’t see us stopping here to watch their woods fill up with snow.” They get caught in about two seconds and—wait a second! Didn’t he kill someone she loved? Is that all that happens in this show? Cool. Anyway, Brienne the lady knight shows up and stabs/throat-slashes all the bad guys. Even Theon/Reek gets in on the stabbin’ fun. Man, is this guy a dick, or is he good?

Brienne is like, “Hey Sansa, do I remind you of Charlie Bucket, and can I work for you again?” and Sansa is like, “Yes. To both of those things.” I’d say things are looking up, but everyone who lives around there seems to be caught in some kind of nightmare loop.

Cersei, meanwhile, is totally making her prison-acquired haircut work and would be perfectly comfortable at home, enjoying a night on the town or hitting up Coachella.

She tears up to see her dumb brother (who she nailed before, by the way … gross), and it seems like maybe their incest daughter is dead. Did that happen last time? It did? Hmmm. OK, so that little idiot is dead even if I don’t recall that happening, but that’s OK because, again—gross. Plus, that’s pretty much what Jamie Lannister gets for summering in that Gods of Egypt movie. Seriously. He deserves even worse for that.

We join Margaery, who is in that prison run by the homeless guy. He’s clearly got some kind of nightmarish psycho-sexual thing going on with the concept of sins and sinning, and we’re left to wonder why Cersei had to get her hair cut and how Margaery retains her bodacious locks.

Over in Dorne, the current king spouts a bunch of sloppily expositional shit about how he could have had adventures if he hadn’t stuck close to home to help his people. His brother’s widow is like, “Good Lord, you suck at being a king!” and stabs him while her hot daughter throws knives into people’s skulls. Homeboy bleeds out on the floor while the widow is like, “You were always weak, jive turkey.” The other daughters take care of the king’s son with a good old-fashioned spear to the back of the head that goes through the face. Classic.

Finally, Dinklage appears and takes a tour of the poor neighborhood with Varys the Spider and discusses how Meereen is not as pumped on Daenerys as they once were. The city looks pretty run down, which is a drag for Tyrion, since someone set all the ships in the harbor on fire, and he’s gonna be stuck there for a while.

Daenerys is still missing too, but her bodyguards are on the trail and trying to undermine one another’s confidence. The one guy, Jorah, I think he’s called, got touched by those stone demons last year, so he’s turning into a stone demon himself, but he doesn’t wanna tell anyone. There’s almost a kind of honor in that.

While this is going on, Dragon Tits is about a bazillion miles way having been kidnapped by the equine aficionados themselves, the Dothraki (I thought they were friends?). It’s a little weird, because wasn’t she hangin’ with that dragon of hers? Why didn’t he help her? What a jerk. She walks in silence as they call her names and whip her and talk about banging her, and she understands every last word because she used to date that one Dothraki dude, Aquaman. That probably pissed off her parents.

Anyway, they take her to their leader, who debates whether seeing a woman naked for the first time is as good as murdering people. She blows their minds by being tough and speaking the language and is like, “Take me home, and I’ll give you a bunch of horses.” They think she’s dumb.

Arya, meanwhile, is hanging around in the seaside city of wherever-the-hell with her eyes all cloudy and her former boss’s daughter givin’ her shit about being blind and beating her up in some kind of Karate Kid-esque bid to train her how to fight blind. When did she go blind? Am I missing something? Aw, who cares? She’s blind. Big deal. Stevie Wonder is blind, and there’s no end to his majesty.

We then cut around the land to see a few other choice moments, including Ser Davos glibly talkin’ shit to some jerks and that one witch removing her necklace o’ youth, which shows us she’s actually old and gross. Gross.

Pros:
We catch up with pretty much everyone, there’s some serious face-spearing, the writers seem to have stuck to their guns and left Snow dead.

Cons:
It seems like maybe some stuff happened between seasons they’re not explaining. Or I just forgot, hard to say. The jumping between stories happens so quickly that it’s hard to absorb everything or get a sense of what’s going on with everyone. Seriously, the longest scene was probably two minutes max.

The Grade: C
We’ve now run out of George RR Martin material, and the show’s story is being tended by HBO itself. This could go either way, obviously, but the first episode of season 6 falls victim to one of the main issues Game of Thrones always has, which is that it cuts from story to story so quickly it’s hard to gain a strong sense of what’s going on in any one area or for any one person. We’re up to date on a lot of the questions we had at the end of season 5, but with so much new information to explore, it would have been cool to get longer glimpses into certain characters’ situations. Maybe it’s everything to do with modern audiences and their lack of patience, or maybe it’s just hard to be the caretakers of such a beloved story, but by the end of the episode, it sure seemed like we saw a whole hell of a lot of nothing happen to a whole hell of a lot of people. Sorry about Jon Snow, you guys, but it looks like he’s dead for real. Drag, right? Still, in a land of ice zombies and giants and witches who use necklaces to create the illusion of perfectly symmetrical boobs, someone coming back to life doesn’t seem that far-fetched.

Santa Fe Reporter

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