Hi, it’s Ser Exposition again, refreshing your memory and doing some theorizin’ ahead of the new season of everyone’s favourite swords-n-realpolitik TV show. So far we’ve covered the Lannisters and Dany and the Gang. Today it’s House Stark, and it’s a long one because there are so many Starks still alive! That can’t last, can it?
Partway through Season 6, Jon states his goals succinctly: he wants to unite the North so he can face the White Walkers with a united front. Sure enough, by the end of the season, Jon and Sansa are in Winterfell, having defeated Ramsay Bolton. Jonny Snowpants, working his way through the checklist!
In the trailer, Jon’s at to-do list item #2, as we see Jon and an assortment of legendary badasses (Beric Dondarrion, the Hound) fighting wights and Walkers. The presumption is that this is north of the wall: is it? Winter is here, after all, and if the walkers don’t breach the wall at some point, they’re not the existential threat they’re made out to be. This could be further south.
Season 6 ends with Littlefinger trying to convince Sansa that she’s the rightful leader of House Stark, not Jon. (I’m so tempted to just call her Salsa from now on: sometimes autocorrect is right.) How far will this potential conflict go? The trailer itself seems to downplay it, as it ends on a line from Sansa, repeating something her father said: “the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives”. But only a fool judges a show by its trailer. They wouldn’t have set up this storyline if it wasn’t significant.
Let’s not forget about Mystic Stark, the Branster. Season 6 ends with Cold Hand Benjen dropping him and Meera off near the wall, and in the trailer – shocker – he’s going through the gate. We also see him at a Godswood, but who knows if it’s the one by the wall, or the one at Winterfell. Bran is carrying a knowledge bomb, after all: that Jon is the bastard son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, and thus the rightful heir to the Targaryen line, not Dany. Will Bran get to deliver this payload, and when? It seems almost too simple that he would team up with his remaining siblings and have a big group hug. But clearly, from the trailer, he’ll be needed to fight the Walkers by warging into crows and shit.
Just a little idea bubble: what if he tells Salsa about Jon’s parentage, and she keeps it to herself?
And then there’s Face-stealing Ninja Stark, Arya. At the end of last season she’s back in Westeros, having just thrown House Frey into disarray by assassinating its head and baking his two most likely successors into a pie. Is she part of the group hug too? Even if so, she’s got to get up to some other stuff – it sure will be dull if she hangs around saying, “yeah, good idea” to whatever Jon and Salsa say. I would expect some assassination missions instead, and the likely target is Cersei.
Before I move off the Starks, I’m a little curious about what will happen in the Riverlands, the war-torn area caught geographically between basically all the other areas (see map below). It was ruled by the Tullys until the Red Wedding put the Freys in charge, supported by the Lannisters. We just saw Jaime take Riverrun for that alliance in Season 6. The likely move is that Littlefinger and his army of Vale Knights kindly volunteer for the job of wresting the Riverlands from what’s left of House Frey. If Edmure Tully can be found, liberated and trusted, they could install him as a Stark-aligned leader. But will that ensnare the northern forces in the battles of the south? Riverrun is likely to get caught in some back-and-forth between Lannisters and Targaryens.
Final thought. Do we really think four Starks are going to make it to the finish line? I don’t. But I’m basically stumped at which ones are most likely to drop off. No, I don’t think Jon’s legendary status gives him plot armour; in fact, I think it makes him a liability. If you have thoughts, hit me up on twitter! Link in the footer.
Red is weird. So it seems like they want to release a smartphone-based camera system. Makes sense given their business and the state of the industry (smartphones have eaten the low- and even mid-range camera market). But the press release-cum-pre-order says its “modular” and what you’re buying for $1200 here isn’t actually a camera, it’s a fancy phone gussied up with features and/or marketing buzzwords like “holographic”, “nanotechnology”, and “multi-dimensional audio”. Further “modules” not available at launch (Q1 2018).
But I still remember how skeptical people IN THE CAMERA INDUSTRY were about the Red One before it came out, and they delivered. (thanks Karim!)
Welcome back to a bit of table-setting for the upcoming season of Game of Thrones. So far I’ve covered the Lannisters. Today we dragon.
There’s a lot in the trailer for the Targaryens. Dany lands in Dragonstone, engages with the Lannister forces, and fights a naval battle (maybe against Euron?) that looks like a Targaryen loss. Reading between the lines, it looks a lot like a secondary force led by Tyrion captures the Lannister home base of Casterly Rock, way over on the west side of Westeros, using Tyrion’s insider info. For all we know this could be Dragonstone or Storm’s End or some other eastern castle, but Tyrion did dangle the prospect of attacking Casterly Rock rather enticingly in Season 6.
And oh yeah, Drogon is fuckin’ HUUUUUGE now.
Dany’s inner struggle is two-sided. On one side she is the responsible, caring ruler, “Mhysa”. On the other, she is the vengeful, bloodthirsty conqueror (team slogan: Fire and Blood™). The responsible ruler, once getting the lay of the land in Westeros, would immediately go to the aid of the Northerners, who are fighting the true threat to the realm. Dragonfire would be invaluable against wights, and dragonglass – the obsidian that is mined on Dragonstone – is needed to kill the White Walkers. Not only that, there is a shot in the trailer of Jon and my boy Davos on a southern beach somewhere, which could indicate the Starks trying to forge an alliance with Dany for exactly that purpose.
I don’t think it’s gonna happen – at least, not this season.
Game of Thrones is full of villains becoming, if not heroes, then at least a lot more sympathetic to the average viewer. Think Jaime, or Theon. It’s a little light on heroes becoming villains. But think of how the Targaryen forces will be viewed when they show up in Westeros. You have the daughter of the infamous Mad King. She has actual dragons, which are the GoT equivalents of nuclear weapons. She has an army of slave soldiers, a number of mercenaries – of low repute in Westeros – plus the Dothraki, known for rape, pillage and enslavement, and a force of equally rapey Iron Islanders. Her main advisor is the infamous Tyrion Lannister, publicly considered a demon and blamed for killing his nephew, the king. Many Westerosi are going to see her as an invading villain – and are we so sure she isn’t? The lore of the show and books features a few occasions of “dances of dragons”, meaning rival Targaryen claimants destroying themselves fighting for the Iron Throne. Typically these feature a Blackfyre, whose sigil is a black dragon. Guess who else dresses in black and is kind of a dragon really? Right guys? In many ways the main point of the show is how we humans fight amongst ourselves while the real threat, environmental catastrophe, creeps inexorably closer. What could sum that up more perfectly than Dany and Jon fighting, despite being kin?
That said, Dany’s dark side, and Tyrion’s, gets a lot more play in the books than has happened in the show so far. I think Danny will waste a season torching up pretty much everyone in Westeros, but eventually she’ll come around.
Interesting tidbit about dollar-a-year men (reminds me of Steve Jobs). Also description of a huge air raid on Berlin, which notes it was the 53rd, reminds both of how sustained the allied air game was at the time and also of where all the US industrial production was, in large part, going.
I’m going to do episode recaps of GoT this season. Why? To see if I can, and plus I’m totally obsessing about it anyway.
Before we get there, I just want to go over where we stand before the season starts, what we can deduce from a close reading of the trailers released to date, what the books might hint about things, and where we might imagine things will be going.
So: don’t read this if you aren’t up to date in the show, or if you’re trying to avoid the trailers, you precious trembling jewel you.
I’m going to break this into separate posts by house. Let’s start with the Lannisters.
For your reference, here’s the latest trailer, which contains the most stuff:
Onwards!
Team Lannister
Cersei has eliminated all her enemies in King’s Landing, lost her remaining child, and taken the crown herself, with Jaime standing grimly by her. Now she must defend herself from her various external enemies: the Starks to the north, the Martells and Tyrells to the south, who are now allied with Dany Targaryen, who is closing in to the east. Plus we have Euron Greyjoy’s Iron Islands to the west. That said, smart money is on a Lannister-Greyjoy alliance, as in the trailer we see Greyjoy ships in King’s Landing, and they don’t look like they’re fighting. We do see multiple shots of Lannister forces fighting Targaryen-allied Unsullied and Dothraki. And we see a field of fire with Jaime galloping through it alone, not happily, which makes me suspect at least one battle goes poorly for the lions.
In the books, the witch’s prophecy about Cersei states that a) she will see all her children die and b) she will be killed by her brother. Given a) has borne out, if b) happens, which brother? In the books she assumes it’s Tyrion, but consider the irony if Jaime does it. It would make him a king-killing kinslayer twice over. What fresh atrocity must she be planning for him to go through with it? And how long does she have left?
My guess is Cersei lasts until the final season. This season we can look forward to Cersei taking on the Tyrells, Martells, and Dany. Think how nasty things are going to get between her and Tyrion, and how torn Jaime will be.
Canada makes a dramatic appearance on page 38, gunning down some U-Boats. And FDR mixes some threats toward unions in with his threats about the Nazis. Does make you realize just how much of an urgent war footing the US was on already.
An action-musical-romance this time instead of an action-comedy, Edgar Wright’s first solo writing credit is a fun, hyperactive pastiche that falls down in the romancy bits but excels almost everywhere else. Music-obsessed driving savant Baby (Angel Elgort) lends his virtuoso wheelman talents to a series of increasingly dangerous heists planned by Doc (Kevin Spacey), to whom he owes money. After Baby meets Debora (Lily James), the proverbial waitress with the heart of gold, he wants to get out – but crime keeps pulling him back in.
The plot sounds a little weak, and it is. But that’s not the draw here. Rather, Wright brings his montage game to new heights. The car chase scenes have bullet-fast editing timed perfectly to the music, and the music selections are all tight and form a soundtrack even greater than its parts. It’s the non-moving parts that need an upgrade. The macho criminal posturing dialogue is kept more or less entertaining by a deep selection of supporting cast, including Jon Hamm, Jon Bernthal, Jamie Foxx and of course Spacey. But the boy-meets-girl stuff is not up to code. The movie takes itself increasingly seriously as it goes on (common with most Edgar Wright films), and the dullness of the romance is an increasing drag that the action bits struggle to carry. (Indeed, the film is weak on female roles in general.) However, the driving scenes and the soundtrack are powerful enough to make this film worth seeing – even if it seems like it is doomed to be the B picture to Drive when the inevitable double bills of “Soundtrack-Heavy Driving Movies Featuring a Brooding Near-Mute Hunk” start showing up.
