SPOILER ALERT: if you haven’t yet watched Game of Thrones Season 6, Episode 5, titled “The Door,” and you don’t want to know any plot spoilers (yet), don’t read any further.
In the opinion of a majority of the show’s audience, Happy Days became unwatchable when Fonzie jumped over a shark on water skis, taking the tough-guy persona from being somewhat difficult-to-believe well into the theater of the absurd. The idiom “jumping the shark” became famous soon thereafter, and was used to describe the point in any television series when far-fetched plot twists began being included merely for the sake of novelty, which tended to mark the beginning of a sharp decline in the show’s quality of writing.
To be brutally honest, I’m afraid that Game of Thrones jumped the shark in last night’s episode.
For whatever reason, I was reminded of that approximate point when Twin Peaks stopped being interesting, and started getting stupid.
Now I suppose I’ll eventually watch “Blood of my Blood” (the next installment in Game of Thrones) out of morbid curiosity, and the hope Ramsey Bolton might be killed off, but the plot twists in last night’s episode pretty much ruined the plot line for the entire series, in my opinion. I don’t know how the writers can fix it.
In essence, Bran Stark learned that the Children had created the either the first White Walker or the Night’s King by shoving what looked like a wooden blade deep into a captive human’s chest. But then asked to explain why they had created the first White Walker, the spokesperson for the Children claimed that their reason was to stop human beings from destroying the environment, or some such nonsense. For the sake of argument, for the moment let’s say that’s a plausible plot development.
So why then were the Children helping Bran Stark, and protecting the three-eyed Raven? Is it because the Night’s King had turned on the Children? Are the Children really the bad guys?
Last night we learned that the Children created the White Walkers to fight humans, but now they’re helping humans fight the White Walkers. Why?
It just doesn’t make any sense.
Then there was the absolutely ridiculous and wasteful death of Summer the direwolf, possibly to save the CGI budget for dragons, which really ticks me off.
Summer basically committed wolf-suicide by charging a horde of zombies for no apparent reason, when he should have remained at Bran’s side to protect him. His death made no sense as far as the plot was concerned, and must have been for budgetary reasons.
It seems like they always pick on the dog, or wolf as the case may be. This was the second direwolf killed this season. At least Shaggy Dog was killed off to illustrate the depths of the Umber betrayal. Summer died for no good reason at all.
The scriptwriters also killed off Willas (a.k.a. Hodor.) At least the mystery of his name was finally resolved, revealed to be a mangled abbreviation of “hold the door”, his heroic final act of self-sacrifice.
Here’s the biggest problem with last night’s turn of events — Hodor was in the process of being killed by the army of the dead as Meera and Bran were escaping. Bran is a paraplegic, and can’t walk or run. So how far do you think Meera will get dragging Bran behind her without any help, with about a gazillion zombies hot on their trail?
Especially if the amazingly strong Hodor is now one of the zombies trying to kill them? Or even worse than that, a zombie Summer?
So in the next episode of Game of Thrones, we can probably look forward to be another unbelievable plot twist (a “good guy” White Walker helps Bran and Meera, like Cold Hands from the books), or one of the primary characters of interest will be killed off without ever really having a point to his entire storyline.And if Bran Stark gets killed off next week, several year’s worth of storylines would all have served no purpose, except for misdirection.
That would be most annoying. Maybe even as bad as killing a direwolf.
Speak Your Mind