Word came down over the weekend that Iwan Rheon, who played Simon on the wildly inventive dark British superhero series Misfits, has joined the cast of Game of Thrones. And some folks are speculating that he may play Ramsay Bolton, the illegitimate son of Roose Bolton, the lord sworn to Robb Stark who entered the show last season suggesting it might be a good idea to flay some of the enemy host, loosening their skins as a way to loosen their tongues. I hope that’s the case. Rheon is a fantastically chilly actor, and I think he’d bring something special to a role that I think is one of the most important in the Game of Thrones universe. Folks who haven’t read the books and are averse to spoilerdom might not want to read further.

Ramsay plays a pivotal role in the plot of Game of Thrones going forward. It’s he who takes Winterfell from Theon Greyjoy at the end of the second season. But instead of restoring the Northern alliance from the threat of conquest by the faction of the Greyjoys who want to carve out an addition to their kingdom on the fertile mainland, his possession of the castle turns out to be a dagger in the hopes of Northern consolidation. His family betrays the Starks and Ramsay, at the end of A Dance With Dragons, appears to have lured Stannis Baratheon into what may be a fatal trap, a battle in the midst of a blizzard.

But even more importantly, he’s an example of two themes that are critical to George R.R. Martin’s novels: the dangers of unchecked appetite, and the transmission of sin from generation to generation. While Joffrey Baratheon is one of the most hateful and frightening characters in the early novels and seasons of Game of Thrones, Ramsay Bolton easily eclipses him in A Dance With Dragons. Joffrey may order Sansa beaten, but he asks for her face to be preserved: he continues to see her as human, even if he wants to violently control her. Ramsay, on the other hand, is in the business of turning women into non-persons. He hunts them like game, rapes them, flays them and murders them, the order depending on his mood and the quality of chase they give him. And if they are particularly feisty, Ramsay names his female dogs after his victims. Ramsay doesn’t just want to control women, he wants to obliterate what makes them people, turning them into chunks of meat or animal. He represents appetite unchecked by social norms or conventions. When he does marry, Ramsay has no concern for rumor, locking one wife in a tower to starve to death and subjecting the other to particularly brutal marital rapes. Ramsay’s utter lack of shame or need for approval is one of the most monstrous things Martin presents us with, and this is in a world that includes zombies created by nature and man, dragons of legend, and the routine cruelties of feudal tyrants.

And while Ramsay is an unprecedentedly terrible monster, his monstrousness is not sui generis. As I wrote for my essay in Beyond the Wall:

In A Storm of Swords, Roose admits to Catelyn Stark that Ramsay’s “blood is tainted, that cannot be denied.” While he undoubtedly means that his line has been polluted by having to divert it through an illegitimate son who is half-peasant, Robett Glover provides an alternative explanation in A Dance with Dragons: “The evil is in his blood. He is a bastard born of rape. A Snow, no matter what the boy king says.” While it may be decidedly anti-modern to blame children who are the product of rape for his parents’ sins, there’s something to the idea that unpunished rape is a sin that carries implications far beyond individual victims and perpetrators, a crime that comes back to haunt the society that permits and enables it. This is the one moment in the novels when the characters acknowledge an argument that Martin’s been building for us all along: rape produces damage that lingers beyond a single act, a single victim. It can produce monsters that contribute to the destabilization of entire societies.

Ramsay Bolton isn’t the only child who is the unintended consequences of his parents’ sins. Joffrey Baratheon inherits his father’s entitlement and taste for clumsy sexual violence, Robb Stark his father’s emotional sense of duty, the Sand Snakes their father Oberon’s impatience and strategic wrath. Ramsay’s just the worst example of how violent indifference can flower into murderous sadism, at a cost to nations.

Before NCAA president Mark Emmert handed down the sanctions last week, I was not as fiercely opposed to the idea of punishment as others, including Dave Zirin and Pat Forde, two writers I admire and respect. Though I agreed with both that NCAA sanctions were a generally bad idea, I viewed it as inevitable that the NCAA would do something because, as I’ve written before, to do otherwise would have seemed, to most, like a dereliction of its duties.

Regardless of how anyone feels about the NCAA’s decision to punish Penn State, though, it is undoubtedly worth a look at the implications of that punishment and how it was determined, delivered, and carried out, and whether the punishment of Penn State should be aimed at simply punishing the institution or at generating large-scale reforms at both Penn State and within college sports as a whole.

If you think the point of punishing is simply to be punitive, you undoubtedly support the NCAA’s decision, and any questioning of that decision is likely to look like a blustering defense of Penn State. That’s fine, I guess, but it seems to me that the focus on punishing Penn State has lost sight of the fact that punishment isn’t enough. Punishment should not come for the sake of punishment, it should not come to make us feel like we’re doing right, and it shouldn’t come because not punishing would cause a public relations nightmare. Punishment needs to be rehabilitative, and it needs to be aimed at preventing similar situations in the future.

The NCAA’s method of punishment, however, is too often astounding in its ability to be punitive and equally astounding in its inability to be effectively punitive. That is, it focuses too much on the punishment and not enough on rehabilitation and prevention to ensure that similar actions aren’t repeated imminently thereafter.

Take past NCAA sanctions as examples. In the 1980s, the NCAA gave Southern Methodist University’s football program the “death penalty” and leveled the University of Kentucky’s basketball program over impermissable benefits provided to players and recruits. Less than a decade ago, it hammered Baylor University’s basketball program for its role in a massive cover-up of the murder of a former player. In the last decade, the NCAA has placed sanctions on both Florida State University and the University of Georgia due to academic fraud that took place in their athletic departments.

And yet, little has changed. Multiple big-time programs — most notably the University of Alabama and University of Southern California — have been hit over impermissable benefits received by players since the SMU and Kentucky scandals (Kentucky, incidentally, repeated similar violations in its football program a little more than a decade later). The NCAA is currently investigating the University of North Carolina in what may turn out to be the biggest academic fraud case in the history of college athletics. And Penn State spent more than a decade covering up major crimes, undeterred by the Baylor sanctions.

I don’t trust that the NCAA’s treatment of this scandal is any different. This scandal happened at Penn State, and as such, the focus has remained on that institution. But this scandal could have happened and could still happen in hundreds of other programs, and because of that, focusing on Penn State’s culture isn’t enough. If we want to prevent a similar scandal from happening elsewhere in the future, it’s worth examining the similar “sports first” culture that persists throughout top-tier college sports and how the NCAA, the punisher in this instance, helped create, foster, and incentivize that culture.

If the point of the punishment is simply to be punitive, the NCAA’s actions will almost certainly accomplish that goal. But if the point is to generate the type of culture change that is desperately needed not just at Penn State but throughout the NCAA, I’m afraid the organization’s unwillingness to acknowledge its own place in that culture will cause it to fall far short of that aim.

The trailer for Skyfall, Sam Mendes’ James Bond movie, which arrives in theaters in January, sure looks pretty even if it doesn’t give even a hint of what the movie will actually be about, beyond some British flag-draped coffins and a trip to China:

At this point, Bond movies rise and fall for me on the quality of their villains. Casino Royale worked so well because it abandoned Cold War jockeying, something that had translated poorly as the movies tried to substitute China for Russia in Tomorrow Never Dies, for non-state actors like terrorists and their financiers, warlords, and freelance bombmakers. Rather than giant explosions and stupid doomsday devices, we had bruises and blood, crude methods of torture, conversations across tables between bitter enemies. Bond killed face-to-face. He, and we, felt the deaths he caused. After decades of Bond movies distancing us from the conflicts that birthed him, Casino Royale made them immediate and consequential again. Quantum of Solace wasted that momentum with a retreat to the generic, motivationless cabals that dominated the post-Berlin Wall period.

Part of the challenge, of course, is that the big, genuine rivalries in our geopolitics these days (as opposed to our entanglements) are economic rather than military. It didn’t matter if Bond movies demonized the Soviet Union because it wasn’t like the economics of the movie business required Bond to do substantial overseas gross there. Today, as movies jockey for access to the rapidly expanding Chinese movie market, which allows in only a limited number of American movies, studios are willing to bow to Chinese preferences and requirements, ranging from having characters speak Mandarin instead of Cantonese or moving shooting away from dissident-heavy locations. The economic incentives are for integration and collaboration on-screen in service of integration and collaboration in the real world, rather than exploration of tensions and challenges present on a broad scale.

More closely-kept conflicts would solve that problem and preserve a sense of Bond’s capabilities as realistically impressive rather than utterly cartoonish. And if the last decade of our geopolitics have taught us anything, it’s that big things have small beginnings, and the shadowy cabals behind them are lethally specific, rather than blandly anonymous.

I thought last night’s episode of The Newsroom was an improvement in its portrayal of the actual process of reporting and the kind of mistakes writers can make in both sourcing and tone when they’re in the heat of a broadcast, if not in Ladies Knowing How to Do Things, or Having a Modern Understanding of The Internet. But there was one thing I thought was disconcerting about the episode: the divide between the way the show talked about Will McAvoy’s father’s drinking and abusive behavior, and the way The Newsroom has consistently portrayed Charlie Skinner.

I’ve been bothered for a while by the way The Newsroom treats Charlie. He’s ostensibly on the side of the angels, and we do see him protecting News Night’s editorial independence. But the show also treats his heavy daytime drinking as if it’s an amusing character quirk, rather than a problem, something that leads him to get so angry at his colleagues at lunch that he’s spitting in their faces as he rants. And we often see him in full-throttle holler mode, going after his employees with an indignation that seems less passionate than abusive, and after executives in a way that seems less strategic than unhinged (speaking of which, where is Leona with the scheming?). Sloan’s screw-up tonight was obviously significant, if motivated by concerns about both the truth and the safety of Japanese people who live near Fukishima. But Charlie’s response, calling her “girl” rather than treating her as if she’s a professional who make a serious error, was bullying rather than a demonstration of commitment to high standards of journalism.

And it came in an episode where we learn that Will’s father was a physically abusive alcoholic. It was an interesting kernel of a revelation, meant to tie together Will’s response to the sorority girl questioner from the pilot and Will’s treatment of a black, gay aide to Rick Santorum, a callback to Chris Matthews’ on-air showdown with Robert Traynham. But instead of showing this and letting the revelation really sink in, The Newsroom chose to tell us in a therapy session Will finally attends after flubbing a show sign-off because he isn’t sleeping. It’s interesting to know that Will has a protective instinct, but given that he’s never demonstrated it to anyone other than MacKenzie before last night, there was something awfully tidy about suddenly making Will Sloan’s Kindly Brother in the story where we had this revelation. And just as The Newsroom’s told us that MacKenzie is a brilliant producer and thinks that means it never has to show her booking a guest or editing a story, the show seemed content to tell us that things had been bad and use that admission to drive plot rather than to make plot clear and to develop characters further.

A show with a stronger sense of drama might let us build to this conclusion and do work to set up Will’s journalistic relationship with Sloan rather than shoehorning it in when necessary to tell a story. A more searching one might even have questioned both Will’s instincts to bully and to protect as insufficient, given that saving women, especially by encouraging them to lie about their intelligence, is not the same as supporting them. And a more consistent one would recognize that certain behaviors are damaging whether exhibited by off-screen abusive fathers or shouty, grandfatherly news executives.

Television executives can get skittish about the strangest things, as I wrote earlier this summer about the Maxi pads, sex on kitchen tables, and the Lord’s name taken in vain that freaked out NBC suits during the Must See TV era. And one of the most striking differences between cable and network shows this last week has been the way people making programming for mediums talk about the role of standards and practices in their work.

“I think the only note we’ve gotten so far that makes it more of a network show than a cable show came from Standards this morning,” said Josh Berman, creator of NBC’s Mob Doctor, which stars Jordana Spiro as a young female surgeon who works for the Chicago mob when she isn’t pulling rotations. “We got a note that said ‘When you show the character’s urine, make sure it’s not too yellow, because too yellow violate network standards.’ So other than that, we don’t really differentiate between [making a show for cable and making a show for network.]” It turns out Standards okayed paler yellow urine in the scene. But it’s revealing that standards and practices at NBC thought something this minor was worth its creators time and attention. A show may not lose its artistic integrity through these tiny cuts, but it speaks to a profoundly conservative approach to standards. It’s hard to defend a large vision or a new approach when you’re freaked out by the color of a liquid standing in for urine in a test tube that’s momentarily on screen.

By contrast, Louis C.K. said that his interactions with Darlene Tipton, the vice president for standards and practices at FX and Fox Cable Networks, had been oriented towards a larger goal. “She said that her goal is to keep my show free and that she has a better sense of where the lines are,” he told the reporters at the Television Critics Association press tour. “Her department knows where the phone calls come from and…what fuses you’re more likely to break and where they are. So she keeps me within there. Because if I step too far over and I piss a group off really terribly, then I’m going to get curtailed beyond, you know, lower than I am now, if that makes any sense…So I always look to me, it’s a service to me, the standards.”

And that’s how standards and practices should work: serving the audience by serving the creative interests of creators, writers, and actors. It’s on the audience and critics to provide incentives, in the form of viewership, acclaim, and awards, for content that’s more diverse, or less harmfully sexist, or crude and dumb about gay people, or religious people, or any other kind of people. But standards and practices should treat creatives as their main clients, rather than interest groups. And they should want to preserve as wide an aperture as possible for their clients to do their jobs in, rather than narrowing it, a urine-filled test-tube millimeter at a time.

This post contains spoilers through episode three of the fifth season of Breaking Bad.

“You’re looking at it wrong,” Jesse tells Walt, disgruntled over the costs of standing up a replacement to Gus’s meth operation, towards the end of this episode of Breaking Bad. “We maybe cleared less money, but we got a bigger piece of the pie. It’s like you said. We’re owners not employees.” I’ve talked a great deal this season about how chilling it is to see Walt twist the truth such that he’s a victim and his targets are cast in need of forgiveness, as he’s done with Skyler, and as he does again tonight. But there’s something even more unnerving at play. Walt doesn’t want to have to think about people other than himself, but he doesn’t like considering his own actions too closely either. He’s becoming what Michael Chabon in Summerland referred to as a Hollow Man, a person who gets so caught up in an infernal task and the sense of accomplishment it provides him, that he loses moral perspective and humanity, becoming a thinned-out facsimile of a person.

This was a largely expository episode of Breaking Bad, but even as it explains how Walt, Jesse, and Mike are setting about reestablishing their meth business, it sets up a battle between Mike and Walt that Mike wins. The hour begins with Mike laying down his terms for Markowski, one of his men who is incarcerated (it was very funny to see him pose as a paralegal). “The deal is the deal,” Mike tells him, encouraging the younger man to stay strong in prison. “You will be made whole.” Mike tells Walt, prior to their hunt for a new location to cook, that he needs absolute authority over their business affairs. It’s a canny play, one that lets him fulfill his promise to Markowski, and provides us with a terrific scene that lays out the operation of the new business and puts Jesse in a position to decide, once again, between Mike and Jesse. “Transportation is worth 20 percent? $275,000 worth of risk? What did Gus pay his mules?” Walt grouses about distribution costs, then complains of Mike’s men “What are they doing to further our interests? So we’re paying them why?” When Jesse offers to put up the money to forestall a fight, and because he appears to agree, at least to a certain extent, with Mike’s assessment that you pay “Because it’s what you do,” Walt steps up. But he’s forestalled the gunfight, not won it. “Listen, Walter. Just because you shot Jesse James don’t make you Jesse James,” Mike warns the man who’s tried to come after him before, without success.

With Skyler, Walt’s offering too little—and maybe even the opposite of “a little” in the form of Scarface and pizza—far too late, given that shaming your wife for an affair to distract from the fact that you manufacture and sell an exceedingly corrosive drug definitely counts as beyond any reasonable hour. When Skyler melts down after Marie lectures her, first about her occasional smoking, then about planning a celebration of the life of a man who’s making hers miserable, Marie tries to use Skyler’s distress to leverage some form of truth out of Walt. He, of course, sees it as an opportunity to make even more people see him as noble and put-upon. “It wasn’t ongoing or anything. Skyler and I have been trying to put things back together,” he tells Marie. “Then the accident happened and she got—I’m begging you, please. Keep this to yourself. I don’t want Hank to think less of her, or me.” Walter White may not ultimately prove to be a successful crime lord, but he’d make one hell of a terrific political campaign manager leaking things to the press to cause maximum damage.
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