The Bells
The most recent episode of Game of Thrones, Season 8 episode 5, The Bells, has caused quite a stir. It was, apparently, the worst reviewed episode in the programme’s history and a quick dip into social media reaction was sufficient to make one leap straight back out again. Season 8 generally has attracted vociferous comment, much of it negative.
I thought the episode was terrific.
I’m not going to write a lot here but what I do write will contain spoilers, so if you’re saving yourself for the boxed set look away now.
Investing in the characters of Game of Thrones, whether in the books or on screen, has a consequence that isn’t always appreciated: you are also lulled into investing in the world the characters inhabit. From the perspective of immersion in the world this is, of course, a good thing, but immersion in the world and the characters means that the world isn’t always questioned in the way it should be.
It is a commonplace that GRR Martin took early inspiration from the England of the Wars of the Roses and modelled other key scenes, such as the Red Wedding, on events in British history. But he has taken in more than just events and reshaped them towards his purpose, he has also taken in a series of cultural assumptions, key among them being a feudal society and a hereditary monarchy under God sustained by military might. Within that context, the rule of engagement was explained clearly by Cercei Lannister to the honourable idiot Ned Stark in season one episode seven: When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.
We have now had eight seasons of opening gambits and positions, an extensive middle game which has seen the removal of many key pieces from the board, and we are now in the endgame. Over the course of the eight seasons we have followed the development of the key characters and been led to see them in certain ways, but this has, I think, been misdirection on the part of the writers, including GRR Martin, because it has kept our eyes on the pieces and off the board.
In The Bells, Daenerys Targaryen goes full-tonto mad queen. This has been there as a possibility all along, but she has usually been pulled back from the brink of her preferred ‘burn them all’ solution by wiser counsels. But all the wise voices have gone, save Tyrion, whom she does not trust, and Jon Snow whom she thinks has betrayed her and is, in any event, not too bright. This has upset and outraged Dany ‘fans’ who have expected to see her take her rightful place on the throne without descent into tyranny.
But what claim does Daenarys have to the throne except parentage and airpower? Her rise has been marked by the ruthless application of lethal force in pursuit of her sense of entitlement and manifest destiny, of her right to rule kingdoms and peoples she has never met or lived amongst. She freed the slaves while crucifying and incinerating those who stood in her way. Yet as the white saviour of enslaved coloured people she got a free fan pass, a shiny ticket that said for her the ends justified the means.
In The Bells she defeats Cercei who has been set up as cruel, calculating and manipulative, which she is. But, at least in outline, Cercei and Daenerys have parallel backgrounds: both had abusive childhoods and were forced into marriages by men in their families; both experience the loss of children; neither is a stranger to incest; neither has any hesitation in resorting to mass murder to achieve her aims.
And Daenerys wins the encounter through overwhelming firepower, not through any outworking of a moral or ethical imperative or principle. This is not a fairy tale, this is Game of Thrones, and you win or you die. There is no middle ground. It is Shock and Awe.
The fires in King’s Landing push the point home; Cercei is in the Red Keep watching events just exactly as she did at the end of season 6 when she lit the wildfire under the Great Sept of Baelor taking out the Tyrells and the High Sparrow. Afterwards she tells Septa Unella that it felt good to watch them burn. Amidst the dragonfire we see occasional explosions of wildfire, linking Daenerys’s attack both to her father, the Mad King, and to Cercei. Daenerys and Cercei are shown to be morally equivalent.
And that is the genius of The Bells, with which we can assume GRR Martin is content since he told Benioff and Weiss how it ends some time ago and we have no reason to think they’ve departed from that ending. The Bells reveals Daenerys’s journey, like that of Paul Atreides in Dune, to be a longform subversion of the Hero’s Journey, the triumph of an antihero by the overcoming of obstacles in her path. Daenerys is just Cercei with airborn napalm. This subversion has been expertly done, and the extent of the reaction is itself evidence of that; it is the exact opposite of bad writing.
I should also mention a second part of the genius of the episode, and one that, I’d like to think, points to something deeper thematically. Back when Daenerys burned the ships of the Masters in Traders’ Bay at Meereen, Tyrion said it always seems a bit abstract doesn’t it, other people dying? The Bells dropped away from the concerns of the noble houses and their strategems and focused on the carnage from the eyes of the population who were busy doing the dying. This removed the abstraction and showed exactly in what the Game of Thrones really results. Forget medieval history, the final scenes of the charred corpses of the population reminded me a lot of another time arrogance and entitlement backed up by overwhelming aerial firepower met fleeing people, on Highway 80 from Kuwait to Basra.
How it will end next week? I don’t know, except I doubt it will be a fairy-tale ending of any kind.
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