Stick ’em With The Pointy End

May 5, 2019 | Goggle-eyes

In which I refer to

• Avengers: Endgame
• Game of Thrones: The Long Night
• American Gods: Moon Shadow

There are spoilers for Game of Thrones so look away if that’s not your thing.

A couple of months ago (Higher, Further, Faster Baby) I wrote

I’m not really interested in the Avengers franchise and wasn’t especially impressed by Infinity War which I thought was more spectacle than substance.

That didn’t stop me going to see Endgame and I’m glad I did. It was, as my daughter said, entirely the perfect amount of over the top. I was sceptical going in but won over by the end. That’s not to say I didn’t think there are problems with the large cast and how the story lines are handled, but in the end resistance is futile. And it was quite funny too.

A difficulty the makers might not have expected is that Endgame was released a couple of days before Game of Thrones delivered the third episode of season eight: The Long Night. As, I think, everyone will know by now, the entire episode was consumed by the great battle with the Night King. The final battle in Endgame was epic for Marvel values of epic, but The Long Night easily topped it by focusing up close and personal on hand-to-hand conflict, varying the pace and tone from time to time to keep the viewer engaged in the overwhelming spectacle of it all.

I found myself wondering over a coffee about the function of the Night King and his army of the dead, about whether there is a deeper metaphorical value in play. Specifically, if defeat of the dead (assuming they’re defeated, there are still three episodes to go) operates as an unshackling of the past that informs the dynastic game for the throne. The dynasties and houses are part of the dead past, and thus the eventual occupant of the throne, assuming the throne is still a prize worth having by the end, may well be representative of the change, someone other than a member of the traditional Houses. Defeating the dead overturns the rules we thought we were playing by. It’s the same change that sees Brienne of Tarth knighted against the rules that governed the past, perhaps foreshadowing what is to come.

The dead are also, in their way, an operative manifestation, a personification, of Deep Time, but I haven’t thought that one through at a thematic level.

Having said all that, I’m not sure if that way of thinking is how Benioff and Weiss approach this. GRRM might, particularly the GRRM of the first three books in the series, but the subsequent books have been meandering messes.

And then there was the final episode of season two of American Gods. The latter half of the season was better to the first, but it was nowhere by comparison to Endgame or The Long Night; it didn’t have the style, the substance, or the entertainment value of either. I stuck with it in the hope that something might engage me (in the way that Laura Moon and Mad Sweeney did in season one) but it didn’t. I hope they sort themselves out for the next season, but I may bail on it in the way I eventually bailed on Supergirl.

Other viewing entertainment last week was to revisit

• John Wick
• John Wick Chapter 2
• Guardians of the Galaxy 2

All entertaining and, in the case of GOTG2, better on a second watching.