“…if I might beg just one drop of the Mother’s mercy.” For all that the High Sparrow likes to talk about the laws of gods and men, the truth is that no life in Westeros or the wider world of which it is a part is lived within an ordered set of rules. Whatever the […]
“Sometimes a person has to choose. Sometimes the world forces his hand.” We do so much because we feel it is impossible to do otherwise. Straying from destiny’s path, we fear we’ll show the world where to find the gaps in our armor. Spare your daughter and the throne slips through your fingers. Give up […]
“I’ve seen the army of the dead.” Me too, Sam. Holy hell. ‘Hardhome,’ written by showrunners Benioff and Weiss and directed by Miguel Sapochnik, could easily coast on the strength of its stupendous final quarter, but instead it delivers a melancholic and anxiety-producing hour of television that doesn’t so much scale into insanity as it does […]
“Have you ever sowed the field, Lady Olenna? Have you ever reaped the grain?” Everybody in ‘The Gift” is trying to lend a helping hand, but from the irascible Olenna to the desperate ser Jorah they’re all operating with one eye squeezed shut against the unpleasant realities of their world. As Myrcella informs her uncle/father Jaime […]
“What do we do with the bodies after we clean them?” Two people are bathed in the course of ‘Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.’ One is a corpse being laid to rest in the House of Black and White while the other is Sansa Stark, betrothed of Ramsay Bolton. Arya discovers that the bodies of those who […]
“Every time you wear something you made, you can remember her.” Myranda’s phony words of comfort to Sansa pluck uncomfortably at something every human struggles to reconcile within themselves. What claim do the dead have on us, and is it more important to honor their memory than it is to work toward a better future? […]
“I could say that our minds are temples to the Seven and should be kept pure, but the truth is, I don’t like the taste.” Laws are what we make of them. In the High Sparrow’s self-deprecating explanation as to why he doesn’t drink wine is a deeper, darker truth: we obey laws for our […]
“It’s only a name. Quite an easy burden to bear.” Let’s start with a temple. Its priests have no names, its god has no prayers, and the house jam is Mandel and Altman’s “Suicide Is Painless” on endless repeat. The High Sparrow is a paranoid, spine-tingling, and grotesquely enjoyable episode of television in which identities […]
“Now matter how many times you call her “mhysa,” she is nobody’s mother.” Being a woman in Westeros is a raw deal. Whether you’re a lowly wildling or a queen you’re going to live under the constant threat of abuse, war, kidnapping, and worse. No matter how high women climb, no matter how hard they […]
“The future is shit, just like the past.” Tyrion Lannister punctuates his brief thesis on the value of life by bending over to vomit. In an episode that begins with a young Cersei slogging through what looks like a mixture of mud and offal and ends with a man being burned alive after leading his […]
Last night Damon Lindelof, co-creator/showrunner of Lost and much-maligned screenwriter of sci-fi movies that really got your goat, tweeted a link to a Deadline article reporting that his new HBO series The Leftovers had just been picked up for a 10-episode season: In his follow-up to Lost, Damon Lindelof has received a 10-episode series pickup by HBO for drama pilot The Leftovers,which was directed […]
