Bethlehem Says

GAME OF THRONES SPOILER ALERT. I don’t know why I’m bothering—chances are, if you were watching at all, you’ve seen the finale by now. If not, good for you, being too high and mighty to watch a so-called fantasy show. Yep, those were dragons in that jaw-dropping last scene, a very Wagnerian set-piece that made the mythic past very real, while throwing the entire future of the series into sharp relief. But in the show that Game of Thrones has been up to this point, a dragon is first and foremost about military, and socio-political, consequences. Khaleesi Daenery’s three little screeching loose nukes, revived from the realm of pure fantasy with only the slighest bit of foreshadowing, was Game of Thrones finally acknowledging its genre at the most basic, non-negotiable level. Eric Freeman wrote that Eddard Stark’s death was at once shocking and totally predictable. Game of Thrones was just that kind of ruthless fiction, a land of knights and princesses that was both modern in its psychological detail and unflinching in its fuck-conquer-kill worldview. The casting of spells that episode was the real news.

Premium cable shows generally start by re-defining their genre (The Sopranos  and the mob; The Wire and police procedural; Deadwood as revisionist Western), and then building out from there toward universality. Game of Thrones, while unmistakably HBO, spent most of this first season keeping its genre’s basic tenets at arm’s length, or at least beyond The Wall, in the distant past, and otherwise out of any real notion of its time and space. The show danced around its genre, convincing us that we weren’t watching fantasy. Game of Thrones covered an immense amount of thematic ground, but none of it depended on, or dealt with the implications of, traditional fantasy elements. The Sopranos or The Wire addressed and reformulated this stuff in the first few episodes. It took until the last scene for Game of Thrones to emerge—like Kelisi from the ashes—with its dragons. Instead of moving to transcend genre, it’s put itself squarely back in the middle of it.

This is anything but a miscalculation; it’s nearly brilliant. The audience, fully convinced of the show’s richness, is now forced to acknowledge that fantasy can be reinvented, even the dragons and magic. Had it come too soon, it wouldn’t have hit in quite the same way; it might even have undermined all the credibility the show built up. Closing the first cycle with a naked lady suckling baby dragons forced us to admit that sometimes, a naked lady suckling baby dragons is a lot more than just that.