A Game of Thrones: TV's greatest epic is back, here's why

I was never an epic fantasy reader per say. I did read Terry Brook's Shannara series which I always thought could translate well to film with the right director, screenplay, and actors. Pretty much the ingredients needed for any movie venture.

George R.R. Martin's 1996 Game of Thrones book title (GOT hereafter) has captured my imagination enough to vault it to the top of mandatory viewing list. I will not go into a fascinating regurgitation of characters/actors in the seven kingdom fantasy world of Westeros. The names are confusing - unless you are a fantasy reading know-it-all - but what fascinates about this show, compared to all others, is it adoption of techniques rarely combined well, making GOT the number 1 pirated-show in the world. Shakespeare would even approve of this being done.

Season 3: War Preview

1. Sex, blood, and Middle age rock and roll. The first two seasons satisfied with Rome-like sex and blood lust that had purpose. While sex and prostitution was a staple of that Rome's series - now crossing over with Mance Rayder added to the GOT cast - the whores and women nude in GOT serve more that just jump off points to a scene. The sex shows the bad guys at their very worst; the conflicted souls at their tenderest of moments. And the quips made about the cockless, secret information man, well, are priceless. Blood - have a head, might travel - gets more gruesome that at Rome's peak possibly. And what's an epic without two rock and rollers getting bit parts - Coldplay's  Will Champion and Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody.

2. No place is home. This story travels to destinations with a feel that you are never going to go home again. The characters have to interact with their environment in such ways - that you feel Westeros really does exists on the map. Northern Ireland, Malta, Croatia, Iceland, and Morocco were the real locations - meaning some travel expenses must be really racking up in this epic. The dress and castle keeps and ice, desert, river runs, make this a breathing show via locale alone.

3. Characters that all have 3-dimensions. Rare that series has more than 1 or 2 characters with major arcs that need fleshing out over the course of the show. GOT though has 15 characters (just a number) that have huge conflicts to be dealt with: from an incest-made brutal teenage king who is the most despotic on TV; the new dwarfish Hand of that King (HOTK) that quips and calculates to TV perfection ; a revenge-through-war son-of-that-fallen King's hand who now loves a doctor that patches up his men; a once-timid "Dothraki whore"-to-a future dragon queen growing darker by the day; or the conflicted on The Wall bastard son of dead HOTK Ned Stark, whose life choices will be made against white walkers, or tied to family concerns. A young girl-made boy-girl cup bearer that has rewritten the child role forever as a killer who has to now hide amongst her fiercest enemies of her family. A crippled son of that HOTK, whose dire wolf and castle keep are all he's got - both at danger at every turn.

4. Lights, camera, ACTION! You get no break of action amongst this substantial cast. No one comes on the set without a purpose - whether to kill a lead character, to deliver the bad news, complicate the intriguing and messy plot, devise a new self-serving plan, deliver an evil spirit baby, or protect a tyrant's bride-to-be who has to hold her tongue, or die. GOT does not use long drawn out stares, or wishy-washy sub-characters to get from point A to point B, or C.

GOT uses action to move people - where there is quiet moments, it is to show characters revealing deep thoughts to others - doubts that make their actions before and after better cinema, if conflicted to their words, all the better.

5. This Realm Needs A King, A Leader True. You feel like this in everyday life. Who is our world's best leader? What will they do to improve on our hopes for the betterment of man? So each of these characters set out to be that leader, or maker of the leader they wish for. Fighting for their places at the table of power, or setting up the weakest among them. Sounds like a United Nations free-for-all, after aliens pop in - with the possibility of a fairy creature dropping in to make stuff really interesting. (Aliens=Dragons)

Peter Dinklage as HOTK Tyrion Lannister: Leader True?

I will be glued to GOT Season 3 opening. GOT will make the winter wait worthwhile if at least one head rolls, a whore gets some get back, a child undermines a powerful man, or a "halfman" takes a non-bastard king and tosses him to a dire wolf.  All will come true! It's Game of Thrones!

Futurism: Avoid Becoming Egregiously Electronically Eggheadish or Face Catastrophic Loss of Control

Chapter 5 of Back to My Future: My Life and Times at Purdue University

Two four six eight time to differentiate. D to the x, dx/dy d to the y/dy. Three point one four one five nine. Cosine, tangent, inverse sine add an asymptotic line that’s the egghead battle cry. (Modified Northwestern chant from the 1980s.)

Yes, the number crunchers of the world – the software/app creators who simulate, model, and devilishly devise cool-until-they’re-not financial derivatives, along with the World of Warcraft – do rule the world. We now love them – “hey, I can socialize with this cool plastic holding LED box in my palm” – whereas, just thirty years prior, we made John Hughes-like films that poked fun, then hugged them for being, “our strange, little, geeky friend.”

Coming back to a campus loaded with technocratic guys and gals-in-training (given my old major as an engineer), to be a liberal artsy fartsy is a lesson in humility. (Another lesson – yep, get those too much.) The cool people used to be easily defined via the American ideal sold Eskimo-style via modern mass media: the leggy blonde that just needs a rubber band for the hair, and she’s good; the V-shaped guy with abs of steel created with iron, calisthenics, and huge scoops of Creatine. I get that. Or, I got that, as is the case.

Nerds, now, not so much.

Now, in my mid-life, all these Java-scripting, data mining, Flash-and-beyond gurus are awfully full of themselves. The world works to their skills, and suddenly, I’m redundant in actions and conversations. (An Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) would put things back to a more manageable level…like 1600.) There is this tendency to come at you (the nerds’ approach to friendship): hey, do you know this programming language or how to hack (or reengineer) this application? You don’t, well you are not worthy of my nanoseconds. Because I don’t build apps or do apps, or buy every type of hand-held, my- world-is-complete tool, I must be uncool, oddly ancient, and seen as an artifact of a bygone time.

Figures.

Just when I finally get to the point of an odd, trial-by-fire assuredness in self, I am now considered solely a sinusoidal function of my technological knowledge and consumerism acquisition – which, if you knew my life recently – one would understand mere survival was a 1,000 terabytes more important that iPoding, iPhoning, and iPading my way back to the lower-middle rung of the American social ladder. Such is the globalized nature of these ones and zeroes – they control every transaction, interaction, transportation, and social act humanity seems to engage in daily.

And here I come back to university for history, political science, economics, and management (yes, some tech stuff in there) and I’ll-be-damned if the world has not gone and got itself into a harried and frenetic rush to be more Neo, Johnny Mnemonic, Keanu Reeves-like. Not exactly the category I’d take for 1,000, Alex. The majority may deem this the primrose path; I deem it the course to devolving into very wooden, two-dimensional, on/off, as-the-circuit-board- decides-based-on-the-program people. You are not ‘the one’, people.

Tell me: what happens when this machine awakens? Or if not that, what if electricity/electronics goes awry? How about making all that power for 9 or 12 billion inhabitants, or more? Do you like being able to do things for yourself – consider it a right – then look out, that will be changing in the apps-for-all-tasks future. Facebook and Google are stepping stones. Likely as not, we are two to two-to-the-nth power generations away from an Alpha-to-Epsilon Brave New World. I do not know when, but 2540 is not as far from now as it seems. (Just as Huxley wrote in 1932…about a future that is closer to today than it was in his generation. Exponential growth of the ghost in the machine, I deduce.)

By now, my poking-fun-at-nerds to digressing-satirical-rant may seem at odds in the halls of ‘higher learning’, but it reflects the purposes we are fueling are not as wondrous as those that make them daily come together think. They are flawed. Nerds take note. While all the cool stuff does amused, it is the financial models, the personality testing/modifications, the medicines that contort behaviors from age six, the genetically-modified food, the technology-dependent structure of society that will shudder one day to a halt, as we have invested too much faith in the machines, the codes, the flickering of tubes, the diodes, and the 10,000-page equation someone (or a team of brilliance) worked really hard on, but forgot the necessary backdoor, thus the butterfly cum epic tsunami.

It won’t happen in my lifetime, I regret to inform.

But nothing happens quite in the time frame one projects.

Avoid becoming too tied to these new systems. Somehow, the Earth got along pretty well for 99.999999999% of its existence without a diode, transistor, or machine code to tap into for instructions. The instructions we petty humans were given (and not followed) worked well when man played with poo, worshiped all manners of beast and bright star, to a conclusion that was never deterministic. Not even realistic – given their faith-based technology.

What I am saying is: I wish for my good ol’ simplistic days, too.

Just that line does not suit the technocrats, computer scientists, and doctors of electrical mayhem very well.

They always need more data…

Pop Culture Careers: But I don't wanna be a Pirate!

I think we all have our dreams of what we would really do if we had unlimited time, resources, and could get out of our own way. The alternative to the 9-5, clock-in, clock-out, wax on, whack-off routine we often surmise is periliously close to insanity while in a world full of inept managers and co-whacker sycophants. Instead, we sit down at night, and maybe check out what our alter ego lives might be - if we understand those boobs aren't real either, and their acting chops aren't necessarily all that. But these are a few of the work situations I wanted to be in for a while:

Lawyer. It isn't very droll to be a man of the law. To seek out the truth, Perry Mason style, and get your killer to breakdown on the stand in front of millions of people. But Raymond Burr did it for a long, long time - longest in history. He did it so well, that the Oz man (Ozzy Osbourne) cut "Perry Mason" in tribute.

Who Can We Get On The Case?
We Need Perry Mason
Someone To Put You In Place
Calling Perry Mason Again, Again

ER Doctor. There's a long history of putting medical shows on the tube - to increase awareness of how hard these people work, and their lives on the front lines of tragedy, technology and dating gymnastics. As shows go, I liked ER the best. Supported by a real life doctor, Michael Crichton, who seems to be nearly a success at everything, including techno thriller writing, ER has finally ran its long course, long after "The Clooney" (right) parted for mega money, power-ball style on the big screen. (Michael Clayton...gotta see. Leatherheads, well, I might be interested. ) But the role of doctor on this show usually involves using some fast action to keep a patient flopping, and then later, some horizontal bopping with a very smart, but seemingly unaware of the doctor tango, nurse or nurses. Granted, it keeps the show on the air, since sex sells, but are all ER Doctors, that interested in the female anatomy of their coworkers? (Since I've seen some not so pretty nurses...)

Medical Examiner. I want to say Quincy, M.E. was the first of his kind, TV wise. The crime fighting examiner of the after the crime took place was CSI before really cool technology was around. I was only a young kid, but I thought Jack Klugman was pretty cool doing his due diligence in actually getting to the bottom of a situation. He was an ass chaser too - not that that should be a perk - but that was only after he got his man or woman.







The corporate clog. Yes, this is what Uncle Sam and the Illuminati want us to be. The good ole push-the-broom, run-the-copier-machine, type until carpal tunnel takes over worker bee that keeps the taxes flowing in and the misery flowing out. Where a feudal lord at heart never gets too upset to see his peasants doing the tasks assigned to make the coinage come in. Working was a TV show that I related to in that sense. (Since I was just starting out on the Road to Never-Do-Wellville.) This comedy made so much sense to me...that it probably meant I had no cents. (Or sense...)
But Devo had a nice revival on the TV Theme Song, "Working in a Coal Mine":

Well I been workin' in a coal mine
Goin down down
Workin' in a coal mine
Whew about to slip down
Five oclock in the mornin'
I'm up before the sun
When my work day is over
I'm too tired for havin' fun

It is not that I really wanted to be a corporate clog...but it is so easy to slip into that little drainage ditch of society. We breed and teach this at an early age, the whole, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" Tons of books on it too. I read some of them. Learning about Flight Engineers, Astronauts, Firemen, Lawyers, Business Managers, Baseball Players, etc. On CNBC, they have a show called the Millionaire Inside where a rich real estate lady pretty much summed up the idea that people were indoctrinated to work for betters, for the good of their will and their ideals from almost birth. We are educated that way.


And lo, what light through yonder window breaks, but your ass working for THE MAN.



So when asked again, "what do you do for a living?" Say, "I'm a Pirate. I cut throats for me gold and don't serve any master." (Then, prepare for the committal to your local Bellevue mental ward.)



But you could just say, "I Don't Wanna Be a Pirate!" and go on watching TV and pretending you are not just another bee in a hive. And Uncle Sam will check his numbers, and see, that yep,
134, 567, 891 people are slogging away on his fuedal farm...Gotta love Capitalism!

Devo's song: