Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness

Let’s discuss captivity.  It certainly seems like the right time for it.  The UK has been under lockdown since the start of this week, and I’ve been on enforced working from home for over a fortnight.  No gym, no haircuts, no socialising and no food in the supermarkets: welcome to my first pandemic.  But, in all this, perspective must remain a constant companion.  I have a job and a home I can do it from, so things could be much worse.  I live in a wealthy country with an infrastructure that might just about be able to cope (if we all stay in), which is more than can be said for billions of other people around the world.  All I must undergo is some temporary hardship.  I must confine myself to my brand-new new build.  I forego physical contact with all friends and family.  But thanks to the internet, I have unlimited entertainment and education at my fingertips.  I can and shall occupy myself while counting those blessings.  And it is indeed this same blessed internet (and its bedfellow, Netflix) that has brought something incredibly entertaining to the UK’s captive audience in recent weeks: Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.

It's occupied our number one spot for some time now, so, like a rampant infection, it was only natural that I too should fall to its appeal.  In fact, those seven episodes formed something of an uncharacteristically irresistible binge for me.  I devoured them all in a matter of days.  I suppose I do have more spare time as I can’t go outside (beyond my single government-approved exercise window per day – thanks gammon-in-charge Bozza), but I just had to know what was going to happen next and what possible conclusion it could all draw to.  The colon in its title is a pointless adornment; they had me at Tiger King.  Big felines have long filled me with terror, despite being a flag-waving cat person from a cat family, with only indifference for dogs and mostly antipathy for their owners (with many exceptions).  As a child, I had a recurring nightmare of being trapped in Chessington World Of Adventures, desperate to drag my family away from the lion enclosure before they emitted deadly roars – yes, I was more scared of their barks than their bites.  A recent trip to South Africa saw me taken to a lion park by cousins I hadn’t seen for 27 years.  Rather than try and front a brave-man act as the pride chased our vehicle to the exit, I totally lost my cool and even refused to open my door (or take off my seatbelt) once we were all clear of the safety barrier.  I love wildlife, but will from now on only encounter the dangerous ones via a screen on Our Planet or Seven Worlds, One Planet.

However, I can’t resist the constant tension of some stupid human sitting next to a deadly tiger or lion without any protection beyond their own sense of ego.  It makes for a fascinating Louis Theroux documentary (2011’s America’s Most Dangerous Pets) which features scenes that still haunt me, mostly because Theroux was so visibly uncomfortable around dangerous animals.  And rightly so.  Here we are, years later, dealing with the same character at the heart of the same subject: Joe Exotic (Schreibvogel-Maldonado-Passage).  If the ever-present threat of a mauling isn’t compelling enough, our Joe has all the qualities that render any viewer physically incapable of wrestling their eyes from the screen.  Redneck and proud of it, Exotic boasts a peroxided mullet, cowboy tassels and a multitude of other adornments that scream attention-grabbing.  Some piercings dangle sadly, his middle-aged skin’s elasticity the victim of smoking, sunshine and drugs, yet we can only imagine the state of his Prince Albert as he takes us through his collection of weighty padlocks for attaching to it on an impromptu tour of his very untidy bedroom.  Part The Office’s David Brent (for the music videos alone), part S-Town’s John B. McLemore (only with a manifestly lower IQ), Exotic is the gun-totin’ ringmaster of an Oklahoma petting zoo.  Only these aren’t bunnies and ponies, these are lions and tigers (and their curious dual-heritage offspring, ligers).

Guests are protected by nothing more than Exotic’s own self-belief – and it’s powerful stuff.  It convinces him to run for state governorship and for president.  It guides his acoustic tastes – the only music he likes to listen to is his own.  It propels him to celebrate a three-man marriage in a very conservative state.  It renders him impervious to animal rights groups that advise that maybe you shouldn’t breed tiger cubs simply for sale as pets, or for stroking by punters until they’re too old to be cute and are euthanised, that you shouldn’t feed them out-of-date supermarket meat and roadkill, that you shouldn’t confine them to cages.  Thus arises the key narrative of the documentary series: Exotic’s primal rivalry with fellow big pussy fan and arch-nemesis, that lovely flower garland-wearing, slow-cycling Carole Baskin down in Florida (“Hey all you cool cats and kittens”).  She mandates that these animals shouldn’t be petted, or bred for petting, or kept in captivity at all.  Running a sanctuary for rescue animals, she inspires her social followers to join her in pressuring Exotic and his pals to right their wrongs.

She might sound angelic, but one of the most delicious parts of Tiger King is not knowing who’s worse.  Rumours circle Baskins like lions stalking prey.  What happened to her very wealthy first husband?  How and why did he disappear?  Why didn’t his family get anything?  Are the rumour true that she fed his body to her tigers?  Most evil of all, she runs her park using unpaid volunteers only (Exotic pays his in petty cash and trailer-park living) and masks her origins in captive cat breeding, though she is very open about her incredibly ironic cat allergies.  In her tit-for-tat conflict with Exotic, you sit there paralysed about who to root for.  The answer is neither.

Instead, you can dismiss them both on the quality that unites them: their complete lack of taste.  From leopard-print leggings (well, leopard-print everything) to neck tattoos, big cat people are drawn to anything tacky.  It evidences their pursuit of status: you can swing no bigger dick than having the king of the jungle as a house pet.  Most sinister of these egos is Bhagavan “Doc” Antle.  Proving correct the theory you should never trust a man who has a soul patch and a pony tail, polygamist Antle is not (yet, at least) directly embroiled in the feud-propelled crimes at the heart of Tiger King, merely commenting as an onlooking character witness.  Yet his passion for attention drives some of the best humour in this otherwise serious matter, directing the documentary team to feature him only in the most flattering of set-ups.  His ego is more fragile than the tigers’ natural habitats.

I’ll finish up by considering the most compelling moment in the whole thing.  I was going to focus on the footage of Exotic getting dragged around a cage by the foot after some cologne on his shoe prompts an aggressive reaction from one of his big cats.  In a split second, the underlying tension bursts to the surface and we are seconds from death.  Or there’s the moment his campaign manager witnesses a colleague die, with his reaction captured on CCTV.  This will chill you.  But the winning moment is in fact the footage of “businessman” James Garretson thinking he looks cool while doing water sports.  For some reason, there is nothing more compelling than a fat man with a bad haircut on a jetski.

Let’s be honest, Tiger King is fairly exploitative, delivering up white trash on a stick, but I couldn’t get enough of it.  Some more intriguing details are cruelly glanced over: what exactly happened to Saff’s arm, why does Exotic have a knee support, why is John Finlay topless for most of his interviews, what happened in Jeff Lowes’ Las Vegas petting van etc?  Instead, way is made for endless footage of big cats receiving questionable treatment, enough that you eventually feel almost disappointed that there aren’t more scenes of humans being attacked.  Not because you wish ill on any member of the public, but because these big cat people are clearly the most dangerous predators in the animal world.  Maybe it’s time for them to experience some of this captivity first hand.

The Office US

Not being funny, but this blog is kind of a big deal in America.  Well, sort of.  The US is actually the biggest audience for my self-indulgent, mistyped ramblings that loosely relate to a series of obscure (mostly) British boxsets.  It’s more or less neck and neck with the UK, but the nation with the blonde-haired mess as a leader has pipped the other to the post.  What?  Oh.  Meanwhile, in third place, we have the Ukraine, so maybe it’s click farms and chatbots driving my numbers after all.  Either way, it’s gratifying to us, the internationally insignificant Brits, when some of our culture is taken on across the Atlantic by a bigger boy.  The Office remains the standard by which we measure all subsequent UK sitcoms and I think about it most days.  Partly because I work in an office and, after a decade of doing such, am slowly turning into David Brent (I did no [sic] get an agenda), but also due to its artistic merit.  It captured everything about the banality of working life yet made it hilarious as a result of its everyday tedium.  It found its own global audience but could go after even broader appeal translating itself into versions for other markets: The Office US was born.

Thanks to our inferiority complex (get over the empire, guys) the Brits sneered at the dumbing down of our sophisticated humour for great unwashed audiences of Yanks.  It was with that same curiosity that I inspected the first season.  A near blow-by-blow replica of the UK programme, the show makes a few swaps (cue Scranton for Slough, Dunder Mifflin for Wernham Hogg) and therefore it plays out almost the same content with different accents.  Even the layout of the actual office looks like an exact replica.  For some reason, it didn’t work for me.  Years later, I noticed a dear friend in the office spending his lunchtimes watching episode after episode.  “It’s quite good actually,” he said in his Blackpool brogue.  Again, I scoffed.  Anyone who could spend their lunch hour at leisure clearly wasn’t busy enough, as the only acceptable behaviour is to shovel food into your unwitting mouth while trying to clear emails, inevitably losing substantial quantities of foodstuffs in the cracks of your keyboard.  But, earlier this year, I needed a new comedy show to play now that I had finished South Park.  There, deep in my Amazon Prime browser, stood The Office US.  No pressure, just there.  I decided to give it another go, just in case it was “quite good actually.”

And without further preamble, I can confirm that it is definitely quite good.  While the first season feels straightjacketed by its UK progenitor, and the second wobbles a bit in places as the stabilisers come fully off and it feels all billy-big-bollocks about striking out on its own, The Office US soon develops into some of the most delicious sitcomery anyone can hope to find in their TV on demand platform.  My first shock was that the whole US thing ran for nine seasons, many of which were at the full length of over 22 episodes.  When we British aren’t scoffing at others, we’re busy making hardly any instalments of our favourite TV shows.  I wondered how I would ever get through it all.  But my strategy was well honed: four episodes could be nailed during Sunday-night food prep, another each night over dinners at home, and at least two in my weekly bath (please note I shower in between, but the bath is with special salts as I am a highly tuned athlete).  The programme became a close companion and constant life partner.  And here’s what it offers:

Great lead characters

Along with David, it’s hard to imagine success without Tim, Dawn and Gareth.  But their US iterations, especially with longer to develop, easily become just as beloved.  While Michael Scott’s constant stream of attention-seeking irritates just as deeply, there’s an innocent charm to Steve Carell’s portrayal that makes you root for him more than you’d expect.  Pam and Jim embody a true love story but with the added subversion of their competitive pranking preventing things from ever being too saccharine.  And the target of their pranks, Dwight Schrute, is mined endlessly for the butts of jokes.  Rainn Wilson clearly revels in his awkward, human-hating lines, but also lives for shouting aloud the various German Schrutisms that delight the linguist in me.  These four form an awesome core…

Great supporting characters

…but it’s those we could dismiss as the peripheral characters that multiply The Office US’s charm beyond anyone’s expectations.  With each episode, my favourite changed, from Phyllis’s wonderful understatement, to Meredith’s hard-partying approach (and disastrous approach to casual Friday).  Creed often rose to the top with his abstract asides, looking more surprised than anyone still to be in a job, and I could never get enough of Toby whining nor of Darryl trolling his colleagues.  But it’s in the accountants’ corner that my heart truly lies.  Kevin, perhaps the first to become a caricature of himself as the seasons rolled on, is a joyful creation (enough for Holly to assume he has special needs) and his response to Baby Philip is pitched perfectly.  To his right, Oscar enjoys feeling superior to his colleagues while they blunder from faux pas about his sexuality to faux pas about his Latino heritage, while, opposite, Angela loudly disapproves of everything while worshipping her cats.  As Oscar and Angela’s storylines develop, they end up locked in embittered rivalries that alternate with moments of being there for each other: such apt office conflict.

Silliness

I’ve been clear on this blog many times before (see post on Miranda) but silliness in a boring office is crucial to survival.  Here, we have an absolute excess of silliness to feast upon.  Sometimes straying beyond realistic mockumentary into played-for-laughs buffoonery, The Office US is as comfortable with ridiculous dialogue as it is with pure slapstick.  I first realised this during the notorious fire drill episode (Stress Relief), containing a never-ending sequence of sillier and sillier moments of physical comedy (until a cat and then Oscar fall through the ceiling tiles).  I laughed for days.  There’s also an excellent parkour moment with Andy and a cardboard box whose genius is matched only by its fleetingness.

Lifelong friends

As the show draws to its end, it reiterates an emphasis on friendship.  Just as you can’t choose your family, you can’t choose your colleagues.  Well, in fact, you can, just leave and work somewhere else.  But what they mean is that you end up spending all day everyday (apart from weekends) with a bunch of strangers, and you end up sharing so much of your lives that they become dear friends.  It can’t be helped.  Even Stanley, who never finds his co-workers anything other than irritating or funny to laugh at (not with) finds a moment of poignancy.  The final seasons, coping well enough with a lack of Michael Scott, begin to investigate how the employees of Dunder Mifflin will cope when the documentary they’ve spent nine years making finally airs.  While the mockumentary trope is sometimes stretched pretty thin as the action plays out, it does help things turn meta as the cast consider themselves on camera and reflect on the time they have passed together.

Like Parks & Recreation (which is very similar and I have no way of checking which came first but instead I will just love both), finally finishing The Office US was a bittersweet moment.  These characters had become my real-life friends, and their absence would leave a space in my life.  I suppose I better talk to my real colleagues again, then.  They’re quite good actually.

Game Of Thrones (Season Eight)

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Towards the end of the final episode of Game Of Thrones, there’s a moment where Drogon, after a very long shot of his dragon-face where we are supposed to be able to intuit his emotions and thoughts based on nothing more than looking at him, breathes blisteringly hot fire all over the Iron Throne (instead of over Jon Snow, even though he has just stabbed Daenerys while snogging her).  In a short space of time, something as iconic as that seat is transformed from a unique, imaginative, well crafted, revered and original piece of artistry to a hot steaming pile of molten mess.  I don’t know if the producers intended this, but it’s the perfect summation of where season eight fits in with the other series in the Game Of Thrones canon.  It’s still some of the best television ever, but it’s a poor imitation of what has come before it.

Let’s be realistic, though, the final series was never going to please anyone.  Hardcore fans, no matter the ending, were always going to struggle with exactly that: they didn’t want it to end.  In season four, it looked like the storylines could never be resolved, yet season eight dispatches conclusion after conclusion with the nonchalance of a housecat knocking ornaments off a windowsill.  After the peak of season six , and the exceptional contribution of season seven, it really hurts.  Season eight took a long time coming, breaking from the annual cycle of its predecessors only to premiere when it was good and ready.  Again, we didn’t have ten outings to look forward to: there were just six episodes.  But each was nearly feature length.  More budget would equal more entertainment, surely.  But no, Game Of Thrones lost its beauty of being the best use of TV as a format ever, and instead felt like a themed hexalogy of straight-to-TV movies.  At the time, despite needing to witness the biggest event to occur in television broadcasting, I found myself ill-prepared in a non-Sky household.  Each Monday night I would need to voyage across London to different friends’ front rooms to make sure I didn’t risk going into the office the next day without being completely up to date on the latest, until settling on a particular friend whose location, set up and hospitality suited the best.  He’d never even watched the programme but indulged me drawn curtains and complete silence for each subsequent instalment.  I was enraptured to find out how it would all end, and therefore in no frame of mind to give it any serious analytical thought.  But, re-watching this final series for the first time in order to write this blog, I found myself slowing down in my ability to sit through back-to-back Game Of Thrones.  I must have seen season one five times now, yet this second sitting of the eighth series proceeded slowly, losing out to The Walking Dead’s epic tenth season, some Broad City and the last season of Bojack Horseman.

So, what’s not to like about it?  The first thing is that it all feels very rushed.  What unfolds in each episode would have filled a season by earlier standards.  Things could have been drawn right out and nobody would have minded.  Sure, it’s good pacing to build momentum to a final climax, but the characters’ behaviour becomes surprisingly erratic, squandering hours’ worth of foreshadowing with contrived moves that prevent any delay to finishing the stories.  I’ll refer us to two other sources here who go into more detail about the two greatest flaws in season eight.  The first video here from Screen Rant cleverly labours the fact we have no explanation for this rush.  When such clever quality has come before, it seems inexplicable that this would suddenly run out.  The second is an article here on the blog of the Scientific American which attributes our disappointment to a change in the storytelling itself.  Before, Game Of Thrones’ storytelling was sociological: we could clearly see that the actions of Cersei or Daenerys, while violent, were informed by external factors such as their upbringing, the prevalent culture, the environment, belief systems etc.  Sociological storytelling is rarer because it is harder to do quickly, though it often solicits great acclaim, such as our reception to The Wire.  Hollywood favours psychological storytelling, with people doing things because of how they think and feel internally.  Somehow, this pollutant gets into the bloodstream of season eight and makes everything stricken and uncomfortable.  Tyrion, Arya, Jon Snow, Daenerys and even Drogon have to emote at the camera for longer than usual, pulling faces to convey inner turmoil whereas before their actions and words in response to other factors would have clearly shown and justified these moves.  It’s cheap and lazy and less than Game Of Thrones fans deserved.

The internet is already awash with this sort of opinion, so there’s little more to add, but the geek in me finds closure in being able to pinpoint what should have been done differently.  It’s still epically ambitious telly.  The first half of the season builds to and culminates in the final battle against the Night King.  The sense of impending doom and hopeless odds is maintained well throughout, peppered with longed-for reunions among key characters, netting these three episodes higher IMDB ratings and the final instalments (though still much lower than all the episodes before).  It’s no surprise that the Night King comes at night, but I’ll again have to show a lack of originality and join the ranks of those that cursed the battle in The Long Night for being too dark.  I adjusted my screen settings three times while watching it and still had no confidence that I was seeing things properly.  It was only afterwards I realised that I should probably have googled for advice on what settings to apply on a 55” LG OLED, but maybe someone at Thrones HQ could have watched the ep back and realised it was overly concealed by its own shadows.  Nevertheless, it’s still a thrill-fest from start to finish.  We gasp as some of our faves are dispatched (Edd, Berric, Lyanna Mormont, Jorah Mormont, Theon) and cheer when Arya finally ends the whole thing with one stab of the pointy end.  It’s hard to believe it’s over.  Just like that, a problem like the Night King is solved and we’re into the second act, off to King’s Landing to deal with that naughty Cersei.

But it all starts to go wrong again for our Daenerys, with Missandei coming so close to surviving the whole thing and another dragon getting offed.  She’s understandably miffed.  Cue The Bells, the televisual equivalent of the world’s biggest wank as we’re forced to watch King’s Landing get incinerated by a vengeance-mad Targaryen atop a dragon.  Street after street is flooded with fire, burning alive men, women and children, most of whom end up exposed after tripping over Arya while she staggers about for no reason.  She’d be chewing the scenery if there were any left.  Yes, we’re meant to believe that actually Daenerys has been bonkers all along.  Look at her face, yeah, that’s how you know.  She mad.  Oh, she mad.  We lose sympathy for her quickly.  Gone is the Thronesian trope of making us root for morally compromised characters.  We’re now being told clearly who’s a baddie and who’s a goodie.  Peter Dinklage has to act his absolute socks off to bring anything good to the whole sorry affair and Tyrion’s remorse and disappointment are bitterly palpable.  But is he cross about the burning, or just furious to be involved professionally in the whole affair?

Among the burning, you can spot further Hollywood hacks woven into our previously precious story-telling.  I give you: two leading men having fisticuffs.  This ideally takes place amid jeopardy (for example, a collapsing Red Keep).  It’s a pet hate of mine in films and explains my lack of interest in superheroes.  No matter what has come before, the final stakes are decided by enemies punching each other.  It’s just not interesting as the good one has to win eventually.  As King’s Landing gets roasted, Jaime takes on Euron in a dirty beach brawl for the right to get side eye from Cersei.  Upstairs, the Clegane brothers finally have at each other because, by the way, Sandor is much angrier about Gregor burning his face when he was a child than we have realised at any point up till now.  The Hound’s fight with Brienne in season four was elevated above this nonsense by all the genuine baggage each character brought to every bone-crunching punch, but the elaborately choreographed set pieces that play out here leave me so cold I’m surprised they didn’t put out the dragon’s fires.

I’m feeling guilty about trolling this all so much, but I’m not even done.  After so much post-massacre faff (and me wondering where that massive Targaryen banner came from and how any Dothraki have survived this far at all) I almost felt like I would stab Daenerys to death if Jon didn’t hurry up and do it.  There was no guessing, no surprising.  It was coming a mile off, only it was limping and had a leg off.  For this act, Jon Snow, our hero, is banished back to the Night’s Watch.  Now this does get a strong reaction, as it seems like unjust punishment.  But his final shots show him ranging beyond the wall with Wildling kin and we realise he’s now about as done with Westeros as we are.  Everyone decides Bran should be king (he’s not arsed), despite a brief moment of considering parliamentary democracy (LOL), while Sansa at last achieves secession for the North from the other six kingdoms.  Arya is teed up for her spin off, The Amazing Adventures Of Arya Stark, by sailing off the edge of the map, and, with that, we’ve said goodbye to each of the surviving Stark children.

Don’t get me wrong, this is all still an amazing achievement in television.  No show has ever got so big before that its final season could only be delivered through feature-length episodes.  The cinematic ambition is never lost.  Our eyes can still feast on a richly imagined world.  Every shot, every set piece, every scene is carefully executed.  The end of Game Of Thrones is triumphant by anyone’s standards.  But this dazzling doesn’t distract from a damaging lane change.  By dialling down the storytelling craft and hurrying to get things over with, any fan can’t help but feel jarred.  There’s short change in this final visit to Westeros, simply because the standards set before were so high.  Leaving us on an IMDB rating of 4.1, despite reaching 9.9 more than a handful of times, Game Of Thrones is best remembered for its other seasons.  Just pretend it never ended.

Best newcomer

Even as the population of existing characters dwindles, we’re not given anyone new that’s significant enough to mention here.  Instead, I just want to question who the extra ones are back in the dragon pit when the fate of Westeros is decided.  They get to say “aye” I suppose.

Most valuable character

While Arya does indeed save all mankind from death, it’s Jon Snow that ultimately gets left with all the hard jobs.  Galvanising everyone to fight the dead when nobody believes him is one thing, but then having to be the one that kills his own aunt (that he’s in love with) to eliminate her from ruling, and then being punished for it with banishment, all while being the rightful heir, just shows what a stoic martyr he is.

Best death

It’s poor Lord Varys that sticks in my mind here.  Conleth Hill provides consistently understated performances in every season, but he even manages to bring nuance to Varys’s dawning realisation that the queen he’s risked everything for isn’t going to live up to his expectations and be the best choice for the realm.  This is despite the looky-looky nature of the season eight dumbshow that guides us through what is happening with sheer obviousness.  Scheming (for good) till the end, he is led finally to be fried with a final dracarys and we can only be glad that he outlive arch-rival Littlefinger.  Second place: Qyburn getting his head smashed in by the Mountain.  Splat.

Jaw-dropper moment

You can’t get much more Thronesian than a flaming sword, so when Melisandre ignites the blades of Daenerys’ Dothraki hordes as the Night King approaches Winterfell we marvel at this cinematic sequence, if only because it provides some much-needed illumination to proceedings.  What follows is the slow extinguishing of every last flame as Daenerys’s loyal soldiers ride into the fray.  We’re in for a long night.

Game Of Thrones (Season Seven)

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Seven Hells!  Suddenly there were only seven episodes in this seventh season of Game Of Thrones.  Sure, they were mostly longer than usual, but the overall effect of fewer, bigger instalments compared to the normal format was that there was a lack of the complication in which all other series have revelled.  Thrones’ beauty is often in its complexity, and its fierce refusal ever to compromise on this: no detail is dumbed down to promote accessibility.  In 2017, international expectations for the series were unprecedented, so it was unlikely any nascent viewers would require catering for.  This was for the fans, and by this point, there were millions of fans worldwide.  The web woven round Westeros by season six was indeed as intricate as any ensemble story-lining ever attempted.  Sixty hours of background meant that every encounter and re-encounter between characters was drenched in an excess of history.  Should this season, then, have continued to mine that deep vein, painstakingly inching things along?  Perhaps, but, instead, season seven ramps things up in a way we have never seen before.

Nevertheless, progress requires departure from the way things were done before.  In that sense, this series overhauled the old approach to big set pieces: building up to the most explosive action for an episode nine free for all (like the Battle Of The Bastards in season six).  Instead, breath-taking sequences were peppered throughout, a lavish garnish of production budget, particularly when compared to earlier seasons’ clever navigation of not being able to afford a thousand Wildlings to sweep the battlefield.  Whether it’s the Lannister forces facing a dragon attack while absconding with Tyrell gold from the Reach, or the Unsullied taking Casterly Rock, in both an imagined and a real sequence, we are spoiled in the eyeballs for untold extras in expensive costumes running generally amok.  The show is elevating itself from the biggest boxset of all time to a sequence of Hollywood blockbuster films.  This is a stroke of luck for the action fans, but the beginning of the end for what has up to now been exceptional storytelling.

Amid all this destruction, though, we begin to tally up how many prestigious families have been totally wiped out.  The Targaryens have been over since before season one, but the Tyrells get done, the Greyjoys are nearly over, the Martells mostly stabbed and the Starks are only just emerging from complete annihilation.  This leads us to one of the best threads of the whole season: the Starks getting their groove back.  We’re treated not only to Bran finally returning to Winterfell, but Arya also finally comes home after the longest time a child has ever gone out to play for without telling her parents where she is going.  Of course, Jon pops off to Dragonstone (more on this later), so it’s almost a one in, one out policy, but our hearts soar as Sansa gradually reassembles her surviving siblings around her.  Bran, however, isn’t that arsed.  He stares blankly ahead, telling people he’s the Three-Eyed Raven as if this is a Westerosi equivalent of declaring “no offence, but” before saying something awful.  He is immobile as his sisters hug him.  You start to wonder if he’s the first case of late-onset Asperger’s in the Seven Kingdom.

Nevertheless, once he has cruelly dismissed the wonderful Meera after totally mugging her off for all her help, he observes as tension seems to fester between his two sisters.  There follows the most delicious intrigue as it seems Petyr Baelish is successfully playing the Stark girls off against each other.  We’ve come so far, yet it all seems poised to fall apart.  That is, until a scene in the hall at Winterfell when Arya is brought before her sister, apparently to answer for her crimes.  The moment Sansa artfully directs proceedings to accuse Littlefinger instead of her sibling, and his subsequent oilier-than-ever squirming to get out of the situation at any cost, constitutes a huge story arc pay-off that has been built series on series before finally rewarding us as fans.

The other big reunion is the assembly of Westeros’s biggest lads for a bit of a stag weekend north of the Wall.  Berric Dondarrion, Thoros of Myr and the Hound team up with Jon Snow and pals to range into the snows to find and capture a soldier from the Night King’s army for the sole purpose of some show and tell with Cersei in order to encourage her to support them in the coming war against the dead.  Even Gendry (not seen since season three) gets to come along for a bit.  I’ve spoken before about my issue with people not wearing hats in the snow, but these lot face blizzards and zombie polar bears with loose locks blowing irresponsibly in the breeze.  That said, the whole of Beyond The Wall is one of my favourite episodes, but their recklessness extends beyond anything we could ever have imagined.  In the end, it costs a whole dragon to get a dead man in front of Cersei.  The same dragon ends up resurrected on the side of the baddies (melting the Wall in a climactic finale), while Cersei has no intention of supporting her fellow living beings.  Maybe Daenerys could have popped up there on the dragon in the first place, preventing such a big fail, but I suppose that wouldn’t have led to such exciting action.

So let’s talk about Dragonstone.  Formerly Stannis’s gaff, before Brienne offed him in season five, Daenerys moves in to a castle that seems to have been done up in the meantime.  This may be down to more daytime scenes this time around, and fewer occasions of burning relatives alive on the beach to appease the Lord Of Light, but I can’t believe they didn’t throw out the tacky old Westeros map table, or at least put some windows in that room what with all the stormy weather.  Either way, much is made of the walkway between the castle and the beach, so some location scout must be very pleased with their find featuring so heavily.  It provides plenty of vistas for Jon Snow to brood over, not to mention serving as the perfect platform for intimidating dragon flyovers.

One corner of Westeros that gets plenty of attention this time around is Oldtown, with the workings of the Citadel expanded on further through the eyes of Samwell Tarly.  For a graduate trainee, his immediate appointment to personal assistant of the Archmaester seems a bit suspect, but it at least brings into our lives the wonderful addition of Jim Broadbent’s performance.  Even with the rest of the cast’s incredible strength in their roles, it’s always smashing when another household name joins in on the fun.  Even if that fun is ignoring Samwell’s pleading to deal with the Night King or refusing to have Jorah Mormont’s greyscale treated, focusing instead on having Jon’s pal empty endless overflowing bedpans.  All being said, this element fits in seamlessly to the rest of our stories’ richness, exemplifying the fact that Game Of Thrones is now operating completely in its own universe.  While viewers can revel in the bolder action, our sense of the coming end makes inevitable our resistance to things resolving.  Just as all men must die, all good things must come to an end, and Game Of Thrones, even when not at its peak, is one of the best.

Best newcomer

This was easier back in season two when new characters popped up all the time.  This penultimate season proves to be less of an opportunity for great new faces, so I’m going to cheat and bring in someone who actually debuted in series six.  Euron Greyjoy still counts as a bit new, doesn’t he?  Either way, his goading of Jaime Lannister creates a great chance to dish out shade-throwing lines about Cersei liking a “finger up the bum” while we can also credit him with superb enunciation of the word twat.

Most valuable character

While this series is dominated by Queen Cersei’s resurgence, it’s the Night King who’s the best monarch.  Undying loyalty from his subjects?  Check – they’re already dead.  A crown that can’t be taken off?  Check – it’s quite literally growing out of his skull.  A great throwing arm?  Check – he can take out an airborne dragon with just a quick toss of one his spears.  He gets extra marks for consistency too, quietly offering an underlying, simmering tension to everything else that has unfolded, we’re now poised for his time to shine and he couldn’t be more ready.

Best death

Despite Tyrion’s protests, Daenerys incinerates two generations of the Tarlys after taking both Dickon (not Rickon) and Randyll prisoner.  Unwilling to swear loyalty, their obstinacy leads to a great dracarys moment, and we all know that Samwell probably isn’t arsed.

Jaw-dropper moment

I’ll finish with another discussion about bollocks.  Our Theon finally finds an advantage to forced castration when a disobedient Iron Islander refuses to follow his leader on a mission to rescue Yara from Euron following the epic sea battle that turns the tide against Daenerys.  Theon gets the salt kicked out of him, but it’s not until he’s able to withstand several huge blows to the crotch unaffected that the tables turn and the rascal takes another step to redemption.