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Thursday, August 02, 2012

RANDOM THOUGHTS #105

Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself about the HBO series GAME OF THRONES.

1. This was recommended to me by several friends. We don't get HBO so we had to rent the DVDs, and could only get the first season so far. We liked it, a lot. Good acting, good story, magnificent sets. I always love shows with war, sex, politics, and business. I don't remember the names of all of the characters and don't plan to go look them up, but I think anyone who saw the show will have no problem following me. (I did buy the book and read it. The movies followed the book magnificently, but the book has more detail.)

2. The complexity of alliances and interest groups is mind boggling. The brothel guy was great to hide Lady Stark and then betrayed Lord Stark. The CIA guy (the bald eunuch) did what he thought was best for the realm. Nobody seems to have figured out why Jamie and the Queen are such buddies. The evidence that Prince Joffrey (king as of episode eight) is not the son of the fat king is dubious but, ok, I'll buy it. The Lannisters want power but I'm not really convinced they're bad people. (I want absolutely dictatorial power over the US government and I am a very nice fellow who only means the best for the country.)

3. I love the Night's Watch. It makes a great deal of sense, in so many ways on so many levels. Lords can send surplus sons up there to prevent power struggles in the future. Those sent there cannot have children precisely because so many surplus lordlings were sent there, and the children might not be willing to volunteer for a lifetime of duty. It has to be a lifetime because otherwise people like Ned could go there for exile and come back later. I do hope when they shut down 16 of the 19 castles that they stacked very large stone blocks in the 16 abandoned tunnels.

4. Ok, so we have a small group of wildings who somehow got south of the wall. They said they came south (and want to go as far south as they can) to escape the trouble that is coming. Which seems to indicate that we're about to see a mass migration of wildings trying to get south of the wall. So how come nobody asked the one surviving girl how the heck her group got past a 700-foot wall? Ok, I can tell you how they did it. They tied a few logs together and paddled around the end of it, starting and ending their sea voyage or river crossing just out of sight of a terminus castle. Time to start patrolling those beaches!

5. Wait a minute. The wall was built 8,000 years ago and in all that time nobody has seen any advance in technology? I mean, no gunpowder, no aircraft, no internal combustion engines? Nothing? At all? Really? Are these people just stupid or do they have no imagination at all?

6. I had no idea (but a fond hope) that dragons would be reborn, but I got a pretty good idea they were coming when I saw that blonde Khaleesa (Daenerys) burning candles around them day and night. When she started laying them in the fire, I knew that she knew she could awaken them, and knew how to do it. When her hands did not burn, I remembered her getting into that hot bath when we first saw her.

7. Someone asked me who my favorite character was. I liked Sean Bean (of Sharpe's Rifles) and will miss him. I love the imp, who steals every scene he's in. I love the horse clans! (Jason Momoa was on Stargate Atlantis.) That's how you run an empire of nomads! I love the queen Cersei. I knew I had seen that actress but had to look her up to figure out that she had been a queen on 300 and was the lead on Sarah Conner Chronicles.

8. The White Walkers seem to be some kind of zombies. Ok, cool, I like zombies. Blue eyes, black hands, got it. But apparently shooting them in the head won't work, you have to actually burn them.

9. Leanna was watching when we ran into 10 minutes of girl-girl sex at the start of episode 7 and she stopped the disk to exclaim "This is porn!" Well, yeah, ok, so it is, but it's nicely done porn.

10. From what I could see reading the "complete guide to Westeros" on the disk, there are a lot of interesting places with a lot of interesting plot hooks out there in the future. I am now reading the book and it seems to track amazing well with the movie.

I have very much enjoyed the book and the HBO series and can almost hear myself discussing some of my relatives with my father: "Heads, pikes, walls. Dad, I've got it."