This week’s Cultureteca looks back over the first episodes of the first season of Game of Thrones; notes an interview between Richard Herring and Louis Theroux; and depicts the final Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Then after a brief thematic gif compilation on ‘Stasis and Flux’, there is a Robyn & La Bagatelle Magique minimix, and DS2 commentaries courtesy of Future.
Re-watching Game of Thrones Season 1
A few months ago I bought an Apple TV: one of several competing small media devices which sit underneath or plug directly into your television, and allow you to stream a variety of content. It has proven a better purchase than I expected, bringing together services – including Netflix, MLB.TV, and the WWE Network – which I previously had to access separately, and often providing increased options and improved functionality. For the first time, I find watching YouTube via the television a reasonable proposition; and as I’m not fond of watching long-form videos on a laptop, this has opened up a wealth of online interviews and documentaries. The Apple TV works especially well because my partner and I have iPhones and a MacBook Air, allowing us to push whatever content we like straight onto the bigger screen.
With HBO Now emerging in April, and initially exclusive to Apple TV – this week it became available on Chromecast, with support via Roku still to come – I signed up and for the first time began re-watching episodes of HBO’s Game of Thrones. While I am up to date with the fantasy drama, which completed its fifth season a couple of months ago in mid-June, I had previously seen every episode precisely once: never skipping, but also never returning between episodes or between seasons. Re-viewing Game of Thrones from the very start is an interesting process, given the entanglements of the show, and what may be its central idea and aim: beyond its interest in concepts of family and substance, the thought that Game of Thrones most seeks to develop is that our inclinations and motivations and actions are rarely understood; and that with this against a context of ever-shifting power dynamics, it is impossible to consolidate good and evil.
From the first episode of Season 1, ongoing fans of the show get to spot some of the intimations which have been followed through or picked up in ensuing seasons. Most overtly this involves rumours of activity ‘Beyond the Wall’. The season opens, before the first credits, with three rangers of the Night’s Watch confronted beyond the wall by White Walkers; while across the early episodes the Starks repeatedly emphasise that ‘Winter is coming’. Indeed, ‘Winter is Coming’ is the title of the first episode of the season. As Game of Thrones progresses, for much of the next two or three seasons this plot takes a backseat: a menacing constant, but secondary to the warfare which rages over the Iron Throne, and to the politicking at King’s Landing. But in Season 5, the danger Beyond the Wall – arguably for the first time since this initial pre-credit sequence – became the focus of the show.
More brief and subtle, in Episode 2, ‘The Kingsroad’, we are given our first sense of the confusion regarding Jon Snow’s parentage. Ostensibly the bastard son of Ned Stark, and therefore rejected by Ned’s wife Catelyn, the development of this narrative in Season 5 allows us to look back at some of the storytelling in Season 1 more questioningly. In Season 5 Stannis Baratheon asserts his doubt that Ned would have fathered an illegitimate child; and meanwhile across the Narrow Sea we come to be given a more rounded picture of the spectre Rhaegar Targaryen. In light of this suggestion that Snow may not be Ned’s son after all, Ned’s reluctance to broach the issue in ‘The Kingsroad’ – both with Jon and with King Robert Baratheon – retrospectively seems like more than modesty.
As well as reminding us of such intimations, of such small hints prefiguring potentially pivotal plots and occurrences, re-watching these early episodes works in the opposite direction too: we get to relive what at the time seemed crucial, but which ended up somewhat forgotten amid the thrust of events. The Starks begin the first season of Game of Thrones a more-or-less happy family, all together at Winterfell. As we witness their headlong dismantling, we see that at every stage their downfall rested on acts of deceit, and their own impetuous inability to uncover them.
The letter Catelyn Stark receives from her sister, Lysa Arryn – suggesting that Jon Arryn, the former Hand of the King, was in fact murdered by the Lannisters – impels Ned Stark to make the journey south to become the new Hand. We only find out casually in Season 4 that Littlefinger and Lysa herself were responsible for poisoning Jon Arryn. But while this shapes the subsequent course of events, putting Ned in harm’s way, it is the attempted assassination of the young Bran Stark, as he lies crippled in bed, which will ultimately cause Ned’s death.
The dagger used by the would-be assassin causes Catelyn to blame Tyrion Lannister, who she subsequently finds and takes prisoner. Tyrion’s own protestations and our developing sense of his nature make him an improbable suspect: but Game of Thrones never confirms who was behind this assassination attempt, and we come to see Ned’s death more as the inevitable consequence of a power struggle than as the result of any specific and avoidable course of action.
Through all of this, watching again these early episodes we also reflect on and reconfigure our relationships with assorted key characters. Jaime Lannister, now one of the most upstanding and sympathetic personalities in Game of Thrones, is perhaps more cruel and callous in the first episodes than we might remember. Does this owe to the close proximity of his sister; or does Jaime undergo a fundamental change when he loses his hand? Alternately while we enjoy Tyrion from the outset, watching the show the first time round, his frequent name-calling and the aspersions cast against him made us unsure quite where he stood. Now the linchpin of the show and more than any other character its moral bastion, re-viewing from the start it is hard not to pull back what we know, and to perceive him more clearly.
Then there is King Robert. One of the most complex and unfulfilled characters in the show, we get to view the arc of his life but not of his character – because his life will unravel before us, but his character never does. He is tied in knots, between his status as King and his fearsome reputation based on past glories; his fraught relationship with his Queen, Cersei, and the rest of the Lannisters; and his friendship with Ned, which has him frequently but only ever momentarily – and therefore sometimes jarringly – reverting back to old moods and gestures.
Emotionally Robert has never overcome the loss of his love, Lyanna Stark, taken from him by Rhaegar Targaryen. Because he is essentially backward-looking, while every other character in the show is embarked on some present quest, and owing to the sharp changes in mood exacerbated by his heavy drinking, the character sometimes seems out of place across the opening episodes of the first season: outsized, too bold and inconstant. But a quiet scene in the fifth episode of the season, ‘The Wolf and the Lion’, featuring just Robert and Cersei, provides both characters with depth and sensitivity. This scene was apparently a last-minute addition to the season, written quickly and designed to be inexpensive to film, when the producers found themselves needing more footage but without any budget left for large-scale, outdoor shots.
* * *
Richard Herring Interviews Louis Theroux and Vice Versa
On the subject of YouTube interviews, British comedian Richard Herring recently uploaded an entertaining podcast with the documentarian Louis Theroux, hosted at Leicester Square Theatre. Herring’s pornographic proclivities render him the interviewee for a significant stretch of the podcast, but Louis is engaging whether asking or answering questions, and offers insights on his background, his working methods, and some of his most notorious subjects in Jimmy Savile and Max Clifford.
* * *
The Final Daily Show with Jon Stewart
After more than sixteen years, on Thursday night The Daily Show with Jon Stewart aired its last episode. America’s bastion of political satire – craftily questioning not only the extremities and insufficiencies of America’s political parties and processes, but also working to undercut the sensationalist reporting of mainstream news outlets – Stewart led the Daily Show with a personal integrity which itself served to affirm the value of careful, empathetic political thought. The Daily Show is to persevere, with South African comic Trevor Noah as Stewart’s replacement, and his run to start next month.
The clip below recaps Stewart’s final week, culminating in his final show, which featured a fond tribute courtesy of his former colleague Stephen Colbert.
* * *
Stasis and Flux
* * *
Robyn & La Bagatelle Magique Minimix
Robyn & La Bagatelle Magique – a collective consisting of Robyn, keyboardist Markus Jägerstedt, and the late producer Christian Falk – released their mini-album, Love Is Free, on Friday. It is really fantastic, and this minimix has been put together – with footage from the recent Love Is Free party held at the Red Gallery in London – cut to segue between each of the album’s five songs, ‘Set Me Free’, ‘Lose Control’, ‘Love Is Free’ (feat. Maluca), ‘Got To Work It Out’, and the Loose Joints/Arthur Russell cover ‘Tell You (Today)’.
* * *
Future DS2 Track-by-Track Commentaries
Finally, just as he has been throwing out free mixtapes of an outstandingly high quality over the past year, so with the release last month of his third album proper, Dirty Sprite 2, Future has taken to offering a wealth of exceptional video material via his YouTube channel. Official videos for singles such as ‘Blow a Bag’ sit happily alongside efforts for bonus material including ‘Real Sisters’; and on the heels of a documentary series, ‘Like I Never Left’, this week Future provided a five-part commentary, looking at DS2 track-by-track.
