This post discusses plot points from the June 9 episode of Game of Thrones. During this week, I’ll publish a series of posts on a number of aspects of the third season, but in this piece, I’ll focus on the third season finale.

The title of the third season finale of Game of Thrones is “Mhysa,” the Ghiscari word for mother, and the title that’s given to Dany by the freed slaves of Yunkai at the end of the episode. But it’s a fitting title for an episode that’s substantially concerned with what it means to be family, whether you’re born into it, chose to affirm it, or build it from the ashes of your shattered life. And it’s also an hour of television that’s a powerful reminder that what happens in family, and who counts as family, always emotionally powerful questions, matters rather more in a system of governance based on hereditary monarchy, and one that begins to explore the emotional and governance risks of building a family that’s the size of an entire nation.

The nightmare of a family you’re born into, especially when that nightmarish family has become entwined with the state, is never more clear than in the small council meeting where Tyrion learns of Robb Stark’s death. “Write back to Lord Frey,” Joffrey says, thinking not of the implications for his nation, but of his personal vendettas. “Thank him for his service. And command him to send me Robb Stark’s head. I’m going to serve it to Sansa at my wedding feast.” Tyrion, who’s extended his protection to Sansa Stark at their wedding in the matter of their bedding, with help from his father, tries to intervene again, and provokes another nasty confrontation. “Everyone is mine to torment,” Joffrey declares. “You’d do well to remember that, you little monster.” “Monsters are dangerous,” Tyrion shoots back at him. “And just now, kings seem to be dying like flies.” And Tywin, once again, backs up his son, telling his grandon, “Any man who must say ‘I am the king is no true king,’” then sending him to bed without supper.

But the decision that follows, about the moment when Tywin decided he would accept Tyrion as a Lannister, and make him part of the family, is so painful it’s almost not worth scoring the points with Joffrey. “A good man does everything in his power to better his family’s position, regardless of his own selfish desires,” Tywin order Tyrion to get Sansa pregnant–he doesn’t care about the young woman’s trauma, just securing the Lannisters’ interests. And he finds himself musing to Tyrion about what those ties mean to him. “The day that you were born. I wanted to carry you into the sea and let the waves wash you away. Instead I let you live. And I brought you up as my son. Because you’re a Lannister,” Tywin tells him. Blood means overcoming even disgust.
Read more

This season of Mad Men hasn’t done much for me this season, something Sean T. Collins and I discussed at length in an episode of Bloggingheads earlier this week. But one scene has lingered with me, bright among the haze of marijuana smoke and misery: the sight of Don Draper taking a seat by himself at a table for two at Bobby’s summer camp, and watching his ex-wife, Betty, with her new husband, Henry Francis. The day before, Don ran into a newly-slim Betty at a gas station where they’d both stopped for directions, and the two of them had staged a sexual reunion in one of the cabins. Where previously, that might have been an act of self-loathing on Betty’s part, the way she sought out an anonymous stranger for sexual affirmation when she and Don were still married, and an expression of Don’s overpowering charisma, the polarity between them was reversed. Don sought out Betty, who in previous seasons had called him on the phone as if she missed him. And where Don had always meandered home from his sexual liaisons to a resentful Betty, this time Don was disposable, a fling, someone to indulge and discard. Like an inverse vampire, Betty was fresh, rejuvenated, and flirtatious at breakfast in the morning sun with Henry, while Don, stuck against the wall and in the shadows, seemed drained. The sexual power that had once been exclusive to Don in their relationship was now Betty’s, too. And without that advantage, Don was at a loss, experiencing, for the second time in the season after Sylvia broke it off with him, what it meant to be cast off as he’d disappointed so many women before.

The sequence, more so than any other image of Don looking drugged, or miserable, or at a loss this season, was powerful because it illustrated not just that Don is unhappy, but why he’s unhappy and unmoored. Much like Roger Sterling discovering that his smooth lines don’t work on a woman who’s drugged out of her mind, and for reasons that seem incomprehensible to him, has picked out a shorter, less impressive man for the evening, Don Draper is learning that, absent the forces that conferred extra sexual and economic power and freedom on him simply because he was born a certain gender, it’s a lot less fun to be Don Draper.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about the show’s heavy reliance this season on the characters reacting to the welter of historical tragedies that marked 1968, “Ostensibly, Mad Men is a show about ‘the ’60s.’ But stories ‘about’ particular times almost never work. Stories about people work.” And the way to make stories about eras work is to explore what happens to very particular characters as they’re buffeted by world historical forces. That doesn’t mean that the characters have to stand in for their demographics–in fact, precisely the reverse. Details like Roger’s embrace of acid culture, or Joan’s decision to preserve the myth of Greg as her son’s father in part because of Greg’s service in Vietnam lends him a glint of heroism he never really deserved work because they’re human and particular, grounded in the characters we’ve come to know so well. But it does mean that the forces of history are more interesting when they’re writ large than when the characters are checking off boxes, reacting to political murders, racist assassinations, racially-demarcated riots, and protests against the war in Vietnam.
Read more

The June 2 episode of Game of Thrones has already become broadly notorious for an event that in the George R.R. Martin novels becomes known as the Red Wedding. At a celebration of the wedding of Edmure Tully to the daughter of Walder Frey, a notoriously unpleasant major lord who controls a strategically important crossing—a union that makes up for the fact that Robb, who’s named himself King In The North, broke a promise to marry that same daughter—things go disastrously wrong. Despite the fact that Walder Frey has extended his protection to Stark, Stark’s pregnant wife Talisa, and his mother Catelyn, it turns out Frey’s cut a deal with the rival House Lannister, and to avenge the slight Robb gave the Freys, he has them all murdered.

This burst of violence was shocking because it resulted in the deaths of characters who were fan favorites, but one of the killings has produced particular revulsion among some viewers of the show. Talisa, who is pregnant, is stabbed repeatedly in the abdomen, a method of murder that’s intended to make sure there’s absolutely no chance her fetus could survive her own death. Game of Thrones hasn’t shied away from violence against women, whether Sansa Stark, Robb’s younger sister, is being beaten and stripped by King Joffrey Lannister’s guards while she is imprisoned in King’s Landing, or Ros, a former sex worker who became a gifted spy is being ordered to beat another woman, or ends up shot full of arrows, both acts the result of Joffrey’s fusion of sexuality and brutal sadism. But the attack on Talisa seemed to stand out for some viewers even in this context as uniquely stomach-churning, evidence that the show is participating in some of its characters disgusting enjoyment of violence against women.

Though Talisa’s murder is unspeakably cruel, it didn’t read that way to me. Rather, the decision to kill her by killing her fetus made, within the astonishingly cold-blooded context of the Red Wedding, a great deal of sense. A comprehensive attempt to make the Starks extinct would include an attack on everyone in their family line, born and unborn. And as an attempt to make Robb Stark feel unspeakable emotional pain before his physical death, an attack on his wife and his unborn child that he has to witness while he is physically incapacitated is a twistedly brilliant thing to do. As Talisa died and Robb held her, the focus was on their faces, and their shared pain, just as they’d shared joyful glances during Edmure’s wedding vows, and flirted during the banquet. Our sympathies and focus were on them, rather than on a pornographic contemplation of the violence to which they’d been subjected.

But Talisa is part of a larger tradition of television women who die during childbirth, or are subjected to terrible violence during pregnancy or labor, something Jessica Valenti highlighted on Twitter on June 4. I collected the conversation that resulted from her observation below:

Read more

This post discusses episodes 17 and 18 of the first season of Veronica Mars.

I’ve really come to believe that Veronica Mars is at its best when it’s a show about Neptune, and “Kanes and Abel’s” and “Weapons of Class Destruction,” both separately but particularly when they’re taken together, get at two important aspects of the town. In throw-away exchanges, we learn more about the extent to which Neptune, which also has Hollywood kids like Logan, has been shaped by the tech boom, as personified by Jake Kane. And in both episodes, we see the effect that the parental pressure to achieve has at kids at Neptune High, for good and for ill.

Amelia DeLongpre, Abel Koontz’s daughter, provides Veronica with an important piece of context when she explains that “Jake Kane cheated him out of his streaming video project,” a disagreement between those families that embittered Koontz, and that provided a cover for something more sinister. What Amelia believes is a legal settlement between her father and Jake Kane over the allegations that Kane stole Koontz’s streaming video technology, Veronica is coming to think of as a payoff for Koontz, who is terminally ill, to take the blame for Lilly Kane’s death.

And in the next episode, Norris (Theo Rossi), a former bully who becomes the target of a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms sting after web chatter suggests he might be planning a school bombing, explains why his family has access to things that aren’t widespread in Neptune. “My dad’s a programmer over at Kane software, so we get all the latest technology,” he tells Veronica, who came over to his house on behalf of the ATF to try to search it for a pipe bomb. “We were one of the first households in the country to have wifi.” That technology is part of what makes Norris a suspect, first by giving him an online life that made him an easy setup, and second by giving his family access to the finances that let him pursue things like a weapons collection or a trip to Japan, harmless preoccupations that were made to seem suspicious.
Read more

I love this piece from my Slate colleague Laura Helmuth on why, following the announcement that Matt Smith will be leaving Doctor Who, the next Tardis-traveling Time Lord should be a woman. She argues that there’s nothing about the Doctor that is essentially male, and that finally flipping the Doctor’s gender during one of his reincarnations would help solve one of the show’s most significant flaws, its use of women as companions to the Doctor, who in recent years have become more in need of rescue on ever level. She writes:

The Doctor’s essential characteristics, the ones that show up in every reincarnation, are intelligence, courage, cleverness, adventurousness to the point of recklessness, and a sentimental affection for humans. The Doctor also has two hearts, but there’s no reason he has to have a penis.

We know it’s possible for Time Lords to switch genders when they are reincarnated. When the Doctor woke up in Smith’s body, he patted down his legs and face to get a feel for his new form, and he confirmed that he was a male by grabbing his … Adam’s apple. This would have been funnier if he hadn’t seemed so relieved.

There’s one point she left out that strikes me as important. If the Doctor is traveling around time and space in part in search of new experiences, it’s awfully incurious for him to keep reincarnating as a man, and as a white person. Wouldn’t he be curious, after all this time, to wonder what it’s like to occupy a woman’s body and to see what it’s like to live with a different set of gender roles (really, many different sets of gender roles)? Aren’t there some circumstances and societies where it might be more advantageous for the Doctor to be female or non-white? If the doctor was set up as an explicit exploration of masculinity, cycling him through all kinds of men’s bodies would make more sense, though it wouldn’t explain the Doctor’s continuing whiteness. But it’s not. And keeping the Doctor white and male over and over again is a contradiction to the show’s sense of wonder and exploration.

This post discusses plot points from the June 2 episode of Game of Throne.

“And why would I let him do that?” Walder Frey asks Catelyn Stark at the culmination of what will come to be known as the Red Wedding, the massacre of Robb Stark, his wife Talisa, the child Talisa is bearing, and many of the Stark’s closest allies, when Cat begs him to let her son go, and foreswears vengeance if only he’ll grant her that mercy as a mother. “On my honor as a Tully, on my honor as a Stark, let him go or I will cut your wife’s throat,” Cat, who was quick enough to spot the other woman hiding under a table and to grab her, and put a knife to the younger woman’s throat. Instead of being shocked or cowed, the older man shrugs. “I’ll find another,” Walder Frey says.

More than anything else that happened in this episode of Game of Thrones, or really, that has happened this season, that profoundly callous remark is a perfect encapsulation of a medieval mindset. And it’s a reminder that we are visiting a world that’s meant to be a harsh critique of our sentimental romance of an era of knights and chivalry that’s as persistent in us as it has been in Sansa Stark.

The Starks’ disastrous visit to the Twins begins with a ritual that constitutes a promise: Walder Frey offers the Starks bread and salt, they eat of it, and with an air of extreme boredom, Frey tells them: “My honored guests. Be welcome in my walls and at my table. I extend to you my hospitality and protection in the light of the seven.” Fittingly, for an episode centered around vengeance for the breaking of an oath, “The Rains of Castamere” is full of promises made and broken, and subtle, beautiful moments about what those promises mean to the people who offer them and destroy them.

“By the sight of the seven, I hereby seal these two souls, biding them as one for eternity,” the Septon at Edmure Frey’s wedding ceremony begins the service. It’s one of the only ceremonial acts in the episode that will actually hold. “I am hers and she is mine,” Edmure, gratified by the beauty of his bride, says with an actual sense of reverence for once, as Robb and Talisa exchange glances, still newlyweds in the moment when they recall their own vows, said furtively in a warcamp tent, and compare them to this charade made happy by Edmure’s pleasure in the woman selected to married him.
Read more

AMC’s crime drama The Killing has had an unfortunate history. It began as a promising entrant into a television field that was feeling exceptionally clogged by male anti-heroes, marked by a particularly strong performance by Mireille Enos. But that promise seemed short-lived. The show failed to resolve its season-long mystery in the first season finale, and it seemed to descend into lurid genre cliches. By the time it was cancelled at the end of its second season, the decision seemed justified. But after speculation that The Killing might be revived by a streaming service like Netflix, AMC brought the show back. And this weekend, you’ll have the option of deciding whether or not you should come back, too.

This year, Holder (Joel Kinnaman) is still working for the Seattle Police Department, and moving up the ranks in prestige, wardrobe, and girlfriend (Whedonverse alum Jewel Staite). Sara Linden (Enos), however, has burned out, moved to Vashon Island where she’s working a low-wage job, dating a nice, placid guy, and appears to have significantly relinquished her son to the custody of his father. When he catches a body, however, Holder goes looking for his former partner because of the killing’s similarity to a case Linden solved some time ago, putting Ray Seward (Peter Sarsgaard) on death row, where he’s manipulating guards, and generally causing trouble. And in Seattle, Bullet (Bex Taylor-Klaus), a young lesbian living on the streets, tries to keep her friends safe, but gets increasingly anxious when her friend Kallie (Cate Sproule) disappears.

Whether you want to keep watching may depend on your tolerance for watching violence against women. The Killing is a lovely show, but it has to lavish technical ability on a gash in a dead girl’s throat, or a bog full of women’s bodies wrapped in pink plastic. The show wants to demonstrate the real dangers that street kids face in Seattle, but I couldn’t help feeling, watching the first two episodes of the new season, that The Killing chose that population because of its propensity for dramatically interesting danger. It’s hard to invest in a character like Rebel, who has enough attitude to order Holden off the block she sees as her own, when it seems inevitable that she’ll land where she does early in the season, with a man holding her down, telling her “You think you’re hard. You think you’re a man. You’re just a little bitch that needs to be broke like the rest.”

And it’s difficult to see Linden broken, telling Holder “Not every victim’s worth it. You start caring. You end up like me, working minimum wage on a ferry,” her voice cracking during a toast to a lesbian couple who are getting married, brutally informing her nice, fellow ferry-operator boyfriend, that he doesn’t know anything about her at all. To a certain extent, Linden’s reaction is the rational one—and it mirrors one that I think many viewers at home are experiencing, feeling that they can’t make emotional commitments to characters who will end up brutalized, or maybe that, like Linden, maybe we need to walk away entirely. But at the same time, there’s something curdled about The Killing‘s idea that crime has driven Linden mad, as if she’s too delicate and empathetic to stay sane. That characterization is a bit of a piece with shows like Bones and the forthcoming FX series The Bridge, both of which feature female cops who are somewhere on, or within distance of, the autism spectrum, as if their problems feeling keep them from falling apart under the weight of persistent, violent death. The Killing isn’t a bad show in its third season. But it’s a long way from being the distinct contribution to anti-hero drama, or to the representation of women in the genre, it once seemed like it could be.

The Hollywood Reporter’s roundtable with the actresses who are likely candidate for lead acting Emmys has a lot of fascinating insights into it, including that Breaking Bad Anna Gunn would like to have been on The Wire, which has made me picture her as Rhonda Pearlman’s best friend. But I was particularly struck by Kerry Washington’s part of a conversation about how the women in question handle looks and casting, prompted in part by a story Parenthood‘s Monica Potter told about not getting cast for something because she hadn’t lost the weight she gained during pregnancy yet:

[Connie] Britton: I agree. I’ve never had somebody say to me that I needed to look a certain way for a role, but I’ve always lived in dread of what that would be like. It’s our responsibility to play these full-fledged women, and to play women who look like people we actually see in life. It’s more interesting, and I think audiences appreciate it, too.

Washington: It’s a little bit different for me because I’ll audition for something and they’ll just decide that they’re not going “ethnic” with a character, which I hear a lot.

THR: Casting directors still use the word “ethnic”?

Washington: If not “black,” then yeah. People have artistic license … that’s what casting is: fitting the right look to the right character. Whereas you could maybe lose some weight, there’s not really anything I can do, nor would I want to, about being black.

I would be totally fascinated to hear said casting directors’ explanations to Washington, if she’s ever asked, for why a character can’t be a person of color, or why it would be the wrong decision for the show for that character to be not white—or for that matter, Irish or Jewish, identities that are ethnic within the broad racial category of whiteness. Actual color-blindness in casting would require directors and showrunners to have to meet as a high a standard to explain why a character should be white as for any other race or ethnicity. But as long as whiteness isn’t broadly as anything other than an invisible, neutral state of affairs that all non-white people deviate from and disrupt in some way, we’re likely to get Hollywood’s version of colorblindness, where non-white people can be on-screen sometimes, as long as their non-whiteness is decor, rather than substance that might risk making some people uncomfortable.

Last week, inspired by former White House speechwriter and 1600 Penn creator Jon Lovett’s commencement address at Pitzer College, I wrote a piece for Slate about a strange consensus we seem to have reached with regard to tone in popular culture. Darkness, whether in the form of violence or unhappiness, seems to be considered more authentic than happiness, and worthier of cultural prestige. Now, there’s no question that, say, the execution of the drug war in Baltimore has a greater impact on the happiness of a larger number of humans than the romantic travails of a Manhattan advice columnist, but Leslie Knope arguably improves the lives of more people on a regular basis than Tony Soprano makes miserable. This isn’t a question of social seriousness or worth. It just appears to be a conclusion we’ve reached, and it’s something I’ve struggled with.

So I was gratified when someone who’s made a conscious decision to make art about happiness, How I Met Your Mother star Josh Radnor, who’s directed Happythankyoumoreplease and Liberal Arts, jumped in with some thoughts about why it is that we’ve made that choice, and why he’s pursuing a different one. I Storifyed our conversation:

I really do think there’s something to the idea that marginalizing or debunking happiness is a way to manage envy. Walter White is both more badass in a competent sense, and much, much more miserable than both of us will ever be. It’s a relief not to have his life, even if it means possessing genius. And if you’re angry at Hannah Horvath for stealing the maid’s money and presuming to be the voice of her generation, none of us would probably want her ruptured eardrum, her haircut, or Adam as boyfriend-cum-savior.

This post discusses the fourth season of Arrested Development, released on Netflix last weekend, in its entirety.

“They sound like terrible people!” George Michael Bluth (Michael Cera) tells Rebel Alley (Isla Fisher), the actress that he has been dating towards the end of the fourth season of Arrested Development after she describes attending a dinner party with a conservative politician (Terry Crews) who brought a prostitute to dinner. The joke, of course, is that said prostitute is actually George Michael’s aunt Lindsay Bluth Fünke (Portia di Rossi), who is dating said politician both as an act of political sabotage, and because she’s attracted to the fact that he’s attracted to her, and that Rebel’s own date to this dinner was George Michael’s father Michael (Jason Bateman). “Oh, they were,” Rebel tells George Michael, and that it’s not clear if her statement is confined to the other couple, to herself and both Bluth men, or to everyone in the Arrested Development universe is precisely the point.

I agree with many of the criticisms of Netflix’s resurrected version of the show, which was cancelled by Fox in 2006, including the arguments that the episodes and the scenes go on too long, prompted perhaps by the tight schedules of the cast, that the episodes seem clearly constructed to set up a movie, rather than to produce a satisfying arc on their own, and that the new episodes rely too heavily on cameos and repeated jokes. But the revived Arrested Development is an interesting experiment in what makes a comedy work, and how long privilege can be interesting to watch.

The classical definition of the forms means that in comedies, everyone will be all right—if by all right you mean hitched—by the end, while in dramas, things are destined to conclude poorly. But the best sitcoms have a talent for tricking you into forgetting that their characters’ predestination. I have been utterly convinced by Cheers that Norm might permanently drop out of the workforce, by Community that Abed Nadir might not survive his encounters with the social rules of the wider world, by 30 Rock that Liz Lemon might be crushed by Jack Donaghy, and later that their friendship might not survive some of the obstacles flung in its path.

But Arrested Development is a story about people who are privileged in the most basic sense: no matter what happens to them, and no matter the circumstances in which it happens, they’re always going to be all right. Land in prison for securities fraud or commandeering the Queen Mary? You’ll find your way in with a prison gang—and in Lucille’s case this season, maybe even onto a reality show. Have your assets seized? There’s money in the banana stand, or a rent-free model home to which you can retreat. Reduced to prostituting yourself out to your wealthy, vertiginous neighbor as Michael does in the first episode of this fourth season, proposing to Lucille Austero (Liza Minelli) that they have sex as a substitute for repaying a very large loan? The very presence of a Lucille Austero in the various Bluths’ lives is a rather odd form of good fortune, but there’s no denying that’s what it is.
Read more