Game of Thrones 6x5 'The Door': Hold the Door. Against our mistakes.

Game of Thrones 6x5 does more examination of the world's mistakes, and reveals the cost in a most tragic, personal way.

Reviewed while listening to Tülpa, which can be relaxing.

**SPOILERS. SERIOUS SPOILERS**

The world is well and truly vicious. People fight, die, fight again, the wheel spinning so erroneously and for so long that we forget the original reason we were fighting in the first place. Someone died from past fighting, and so there is more fighting to avenge them. These are the grander schemes of whole nations and powerful entities. Those with power and great intelligence, who even the best among them wind up serving the wheel. Game of Thrones is but a fantastical analogue of this tragedy. After all, isn't that the point of fantasy? To dilute the horrors of the real world into a story pulled from reality, to more easily internalize it? We fight, we die. We fight again.

Enough has been said, and more will be, about what the White Walkers represent. But ‘The Door’ further plunges into what they are by revealing how they had come to be in the first place. The reveal of the Children being the creators of the Night’s King was not in itself terribly compelling, and it was delivered in a hand-offish way that made it seem not all that relevant. Which is weird, given that they’re the main antagonistic force of the whole story. But it does make what they do more brutal and tragic. They were engineered and bred for vengeance. To kill for those who had been killed. The Children, in all their elder wisdom, are capable of being petty and myopic. And in the end, they are the architects of their own demise. They used power to create something terrible, and it turned on them. The White Walkers now are seen less as an intelligent greater force, and more a constructed design of endless killing, which makes them more frightening in a way. Their assault on the Forest is the full embodiment of the unstoppable wheel. The wheel is indiscriminate. The wheel began turning at the first fight, but is only itself death. To any who cross its path. The Children falling to the White Walkers then has an existential sadness to it. They were slaves to the worst parts of themselves, their vindictive fury, and now fall to it, at a time when the world needed their help in stopping that force.

That is sad. But that is not the tragedy. Because the Children were ones of power. The Children created the White Walkers, to fight the men who killed them and their trees, who themselves were driven by lust for power. The deaths of men and Children both are merely the result of this chaos spurned by those who had power and used it for war. And, ultimately, it’s the ones without power who suffer. Tyrion and Danaerys have broached the subject several times, the High Sparrow preaches it in his own solemn way. But it’s still always tragic to watch it happen. To see those without power suffer and die by the wheel turned by those with. To have the innocent, the lowly, the defenseless get ground up, chopped, and torn apart. In the endless fight, it is the most vulnerable who are least culpable. Yet it is they who pay the grandest price for the mistakes of others. It is they who are first in line, who hold the door.

Hodor, in his name and in his mental depravity, is the tragedy.

That final moment sticks like few others on the show or even television in general. Hodor is so much a part of the digital zeitgeist, mainly for comedic relief in an otherwise incredibly grim source material, that to see the creation of the most basic thing we remember Hodor for leaves a taint. And that’s good thing, in a dramatic way. For at least in the genesis of how a boy named Wyllis became only ‘Hodor Hodor,’ we have been able to draw something pleasant from a sorrowful inevitability (Remember the fake chapters told from Hodor's POV? those were great). Bran made a number of mistakes, honest admittedly, but mistakes regardless. These mistakes brought the White Walkers to the Tree, killed the Raven and the Children, and caused blood to be shed. He’s the reason why the door had to be held at all. But it’s the mistake of being lost in a dream, of catching Wyllis as a harmless, blameless boy up in the strange magic of warging, that leads both to Hodor’s birth and death. The moment that Bran is at Winterfell in the past, just as the White Walkers attack the Forest, is the moment his errors mark Hodor as fey, his death fixed in time and entirely unavoidable. He becomes Hodor for one purpose. To hold the door against someone else’s fight. That is the tragedy of this story, played over and over again. But never has it been this personal or surprising.

For that, ‘The Door’ has done what many had thought the show no longer could. It has both shocked us with a real loss, of someone who is completely blameless, and it has done so with the grim but very bare reminder that Hodor’s sacrifice was to borrow time for a society bred and fed by evil people who know only mal-intent. Even the better people of that society must take responsibility. Danaerys has been too long and too far removed from Westeros to remember the details of ruling responsibly. Because she had little power to begin, her priorities have been getting power. She’s well-intentioned, but more than willing to take the shoot first approach. The show has subtly handled Danaerys as a card to be played against the White Walkers later on, without letting us know what type of card she'll. At the end of the day, is she really fit to be the kind of ruler she wants to be? Able to break the wheel? Because so far, the show has revealed how much blood she is willing to shed. Yes, she frees slaves and speaks of the injustices of the world. But she has yet to prove that she knows how to stop the fighting when she’s done. She’s a woman of power now. And she is not blameless.

Neither is Tyrion, who is the compromiser. After all, it’s not his children and loved ones who will be slaves for seven more years, nor who are slaughtered on the streets. And he won’t be one of the ones targeted for blasphemy when the NEW Red Woman, Kinvara, goes a bit zealous. He needs her to instill the people’s faith in Danaerys. And Kinvara will, but she has an agenda, one that essentially sees a fufiller or prophecies, i.e. the Mother of Dragons, above all else. Lesser people can suffer and die, so long as the Queen fulfills some ancient words. Tyrion is putting a band-aid on problems that bring great suffer to others, because, as Missandai explained last week, he has not experienced enough to understand the plight of the people he's responsible for. He is a great man, and one of the best people in power around. Yet still, ‘The Door’ reminds us of the price that is to be paid. And the fact that Tyrion will not be the one holding the door if his mistakes come back to haunt him, if and when Kinvara truly becomes zealous.

Even Sansa, also technically on a good side, is focused solely on violence to reclaim what she feels is hers, Winterfell. Which in all likelihood was taken from the Children and one of the root causes of the White Walkers’ birth in the first place. She’s willing to work with another with blood on her hands, Melisandre, who has improved considerably over time but still has way too much to answer for. Shireen, Renly. That poor Maester Cressen way back. Theon is not much different. He has redeemed himself more than Melisandre, and is more remorseful, but one cannot forget how much death his own work has caused. He sent Winterfell into its first turmoil. Yes, he is home and trying to do right. Cock or no cock, let’s all agree he’s probably the best man the Ironborn have. The rest would’ve sacked Winterfell and done more. Theon is lite compared to them. They ignore Yara as a woman and deliberately drown people just to prove something to themselves, before going out and slaughtering innocent other people cuz they’re ‘not strong enough.’ Thus, naturally, they choose Euron Greyjoy for King, who speaks of nothing but boasts that he can take a woman in power, cuz he’s this great big man with great big ships, and promises of conquering the world. He’s a bit fuzzy on the details, but who cares, says the misogynist Ironborn. He’s saying what we’re all thinking!! And HE’S A MAN!

Let me be clear, I hate the Ironborn threads of Game of Thrones. Both in show and in book. They don’t add anything truly compelling to the narrative, and they’re despicable as a culture even by Westeros standards. So the Kingsmoot has little drama going for it. But the show at least made it sort of fun, though I think it was unintentional. Because I’m sure Martin and the showrunners wanted us gripped by this medieval presidential debate. But it comes off as just ridiculous, and an absurd- but strangely enjoyable- dialogue on Hillary, as a woman, versus Trump, as a thing that came out of nowhere and talked big about wiping people off the earth and everything being great and conquering the world. #MAKE THE IRON ISLANDS GREAT AGAIN!! That’s all Euron is essentially saying. He is Trump incarnate, and he wins the Iron Throne because his culture is so immersed in taking from others deemed ‘weaker’ and spilling whatever blood they want. All they know is power and death. They are fine servants of the wheel. Not unlike the Faceless Men, who all but confirm that the kill for a God who doesn't give good reason for who they kill. And that's supposed to be right.

These are the people, in a broader but legitimate sense, that Hodor is protecting. That he is literally giving his body for and that he gave his mind for as a child. He lost the ability to truly live, trapped in a singular moment that was both the beginning and the end. Fey without hope. All he could say was Hodor, and be there to hold the door against Bran’s mistakes for people more powerful and far worse than him. ‘The Door’ is the tragedy of the little person, who was told they could not aspire to great things because they were meant to mend stables and just exist for others. With the kingsmoot wrapped in its mock American debate, this episode, whether intended or not, draws parallels to society now. A reminder of how imbalanced it all is, as the wheel crushes the door down. It’s an episode that leaves tears in its sad reality, as good people fight, and die, for others. Game of Thrones will have its distractions, with too many plots and so little time. And its oft times ill-handling of social issues. But at the end of the day, it knows what it’s saying. And it knows how to intimately make us hear it, and feel it.

Hold the door, Hodor. Give us a chance for something right to come of your lifelong service.

Grade: A-

After the Review (since everyone has post-show shows now)

-I would also like to add that Sansa’s speech, for lack of a better word, at the beginning of the episode is probably exactly what the show has needed to reprimanded its past mistakes on rape. A victim of rape telling someone who could not possibly understand what is so terrible about the act. She interrupts Baelish in his mansplaining, and it’s wonderful and necessary. Because he can never understand. And because she needed to state these things in her right to reclaim what was stolen from her. And in the process, she decides whether to take what he calls help. She decides who and what she will let into her life. Hopefully, this is but a sign of things to come. An upward trend on the show’s shoddy sex politics (I am also not a victim of sexual violence so there’s also probably more here I cannot comprehend).

-Here's what basically happened in Mereen:

Kinvara: 'I'm an Inquisitor. Inquisitors gonna inquisit.'

Tyrion: 'No wait!! religious pluralism!! We welcome all faiths!!'

Varys: '... This is bullshit.'

-That shot of the Raven as he turned to black mist was beautifully rendered. Great effects, and somber in its beauty.

-Summer also died. Too many wolves dying. That was almost as bad as Hodor.

#TV #Review #GameofThrones