Weekend Open Thread: Comparing Game of Thrones to Political OC

By
Greg Diamond
– April 13, 2019Posted in: "The OC", Fresh Juice

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Some of us have been waiting for this weekend for a long, long time.  So it is only appropriate that we have a GOT WOT.

Like many Game of Thrones fans, I’ve been rewatching some — just a smattering, really — of the previous seasons’ episodes in psychological and literary preparation for the show’s Season 8 finale.  I’m looking forward to this endgame like I did those of The Sopranos and Lost — for both I’m in the minority who thought that they were brilliant — and I’m sure that this will be great.  But we have to face the prospect of disappointment, because frankly — regardless of [spoilers!] the comeuppances of the Sept of Baelor, Littlefinger, Hodor, and Viseryon — the last few seasons give one ample cause for concern.

I’ve been a defender of all of GOT’s seasons as they’ve unfolded.  But there’s no question at all that the later ones are nowhere near the show’s high-water mark — which I’d say was reached near the end of Season Three with the Red Wedding and all of the other amazements occurring at around the same time.  This is true even before the show went off-book.  (Daenerys’s time in Meereen, most of the Sand Snakes material, and much of Bran’s  tedium were all “on-book,” after all.)

An essay on the site The Ringer helped me understand the problem.  The show was once about the consequences of actions, especially the bad consequences of well-intended actions.  (Eddard Stark may be able to tell us a thing or two about that.)  The actions in question may have been risky, but they were generally noble — or at least understandable.  Later on, the intentions of the actions have often verged on being so stupid as to erase whatever tint of nobility they might have had — Jon Snow’s charge in “The Battle of the Bastards” being a prime example — and the consequences of taking extremely foolish and unnecessary gambles are generally absent.

Read the essay, if you’re interested, and then we can discuss it — and what GOT analogues exist in OC.  But this is your Weekend Open Thread, so you can talk about that or whatever else you’d like, within reasonable bounds.

 

About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)