All posts tagged "Game Of Thrones"

The vicious fight for survival and power among disparate kingdoms and clans may have led some ancient people to evolve facial traits more quickly than others, a study said Thursday.

Now that Mad Men is over, I have some space freed up to talk about the last three episodes of Game of Thrones. Scott Kaufman has recapped last night's shocking episode here, so I won't be doing that, but I want to add a couple of thoughts about the themes of justice and revenge in that episode. It's common for many viewers of GoT to think of the show as more escapist than most "prestige" TV, and its shocks are more akin to a horror movie's than those of more elite, literary shows. Having read the books, I can see why it's easy to dismiss the whole enterprise that way, since George R.R. Martin favors a pulpy, overblown prose style to a more literary one. But, I think, last night's episode served as a reminder that there's something deeper going on with this show, and while the themes might be harder to ascertain than, say, those on Mad Men, they are still important and fascinating.

Last night's Game of Thrones was a masterpiece, it really was. (SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT.) It worked even more perfectly than I guessed it would have, having read the books and known what was coming. I'm going to leave the in-depth recapping aside---Scott does a great job of it here at Raw Story---and just talk briefly about how the final scene played out. The audience at home is made to endure Joffrey's ugly and mean-spirited play where a bunch of little people do a comical re-enactment of the War of the Five Kings. Joffrey and his supporters chortle horribly at the deaths of their enemies for many long minutes, many more minutes than you would ever have to endure in most TV shows. After awhile, you start to squirm and actually feel the discomfort of Tyrion, Sansa, and the Tyrells at this unseemly display of pleasure in the deaths of you enemies. You can't wait for it to end. It's really terrible, all this gloating over death.

The makers of the Walking Dead games are bringing the world of Westeros to consoles, but plenty of other shows deserve the same treatment

Though George R.R. Martin's "Game of Thrones" books have been out for more than a decade, many viewers of the popular HBO show based on the books found themselves traumatized while watching the now-infamous Red Wedding episode last week.