This is going to be a depressing week for Trevor, because Game of Thrones, Louie, and Fargo are all ending fantastic seasons. Then I’m stuck with goddamn summer TV. Tyrant better be good. Anyway, we’ll get to Louie and Fargo throughout the week, but now let’s talk about “The Children,” which was, as David Benioff and D.B. Weiss promised, the best finale that Game of Thrones has ever done. With GoT‘s tried-and-true formula of having a crazy-ass penultimate episode, the finales, especially last season’s “Mhysa,” always seem anticlimactic, but that wasn’t the case here for two reasons: 1, “The Rains of Castamere” was a better episode than “The Watchers on the Wall,” so “The Chilren” didn’t have the same high bar to hurdle, and 2, it was a damn good hour of television.
“The Children” accomplished a very difficult task when dealing with a cast of this size – that is, it was able to check in on almost everyone without making the episode feel cluttered. A big part of the episode was the unraveling of not only the Lannisters, but the power structure at King’s Landing. Cersei, refusing to marry Loras Tyrell, venomously admits to Tywin that the rumors about her and Jaime are true, then she goes into the other room to jump Jaime’s bones. Lena Headey is great in these scenes, and it’s nice that she has something more to do than scowl at Tyrion.
Speaking of Tyrion, Jaime shows up in the middle of the night to help him escape (good thing he got laid, evidently it put him in a good mood). The two brothers say goodbye, and this is probably the last time they’ll be on screen together, which is a shame. The best part of Tyrion’s imprisonment have been the scenes between him and Jaime, and I’ll miss seeing the two of them together.
Tyrion makes a hell of an exit too, sneaking into the Tower of the Hand to find Shae in his father’s bed. He doesn’t take too kindly to this, as he strangles her to death, in a scene ominously devoid of dialogue. No one speaks until Shae is dead, and Tyrion lets out a meek “I’m sorry.” He has more words for Tywin, though, as he finds the man on the privy, probably the only time since we met Tywin in season one that he’s looked anything but menacing. Tyrion shoots him twice with a crossbow, and this scene too is harder than it should be. There’s very little of the catharsis we got from Joffrey’s death, because this is Tyrion’s father, and he tried to have Tyrion killed. And naturally HBO played this episode on Father’s Day.
Ultimately, Tyrion escapes – with Varys, which should make for some nice buddy comedy. So Tywin is dead, the king is fourteen, and Littlefinger and Varys are gone. King’s Landing is about to become a real shitshow.
It’s hard to say what my favorite part of “The Children” was, but honestly the honor might go to Bran Stark. Viewers – and the show itself – have shied away from Bran’s storyline, because it is by far the most metaphysical subplot in A Song of Ice and Fire. There are dragons in GoT, sure, and even some form of magic via Melisandre, but for the most part the show avoids conventional fantasy tropes, so it’s a bit jarring (in a good way) to see skeletal warriors rise up out of the ground like we’re watching an R-rated Jason and the Argonauts. They pose an actual threat, too, killing Jojen in the process (he will be missed). But Bran finally gets to meet the titular Children of the Forest, the original inhabitants of Westeros, as well as Ser Brendyn Rivers, the three-eyed crow. “You will never walk again,” he tells Bran, “but you will learn to fly.” Consider me very interested.
We also have to say goodbye to Arya and the Hound, the latter of whom gets into a knockdown-dragout brawl with Brienne that lacks any of the grace or emotion of Oberyn’s fight with the Mountain. The Hound is left bleeding and broken, trying to goad Arya into killing him – which she doesn’t, remembering (and reminding viewers) that for all the redemption the Hound went through, he’s still a bad man who deserves a death like this. Arya makes her way to Braavos, or to put it another way, the show’s most badass characters takes a boat to the land of assassins and water dancers, and Game of Thrones expects us to be okay with waiting until April 2015 to see what happens.
Which brings me to my final point: it’s hard enough to wait for Game of Thrones, but it’s going to be doubly hard now. It’s effectively a different show than it was in season one or two, with an almost entirely new cast of characters. It takes vision to pull that off, and HBO deserves praise for trusting Benioff and Weiss with the task. Season four was good-to-great, and even though I’ve read the books, I find myself wondering what will happen next.
Season Grade: 4 1/2 Stars
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