Massive Lore Reveals and Something Super Sad in Game of Thrones This Week

I think we should always be a little suspicious when things seem to be going even somewhat all right in Game of Thrones. Granted, if the series isn't going to be gut-punch bummer in the end, there's got to be some kind of turnaround, but given the stakes - Ice Zombie invasion, to be specific - some of the more mundane political problems are going to need to get resolved in some way.

Season Six has definitely been pushing in the direction of resolving major storylines, and today we got some clarifications and serious developments on a few fronts.

Let's talk about them after the spoiler break.

A Stephen King Tweet That Might Spoil A Huge Detail About the Dark Tower

So yeah, spoilers. I'm going to be talking spoilers from the end of the final book (which, you know, twelve years old, so I could make a statute of limitations argument here) and also a recent tweet by Stephen King that probably won't mean anything unless you've read that book, but also could give us details about the upcoming movie, details you'd still not really understand unless you knew how the final book ends.

We good?

Spoilers:

Contemplating the Upcoming Star Trek Show

Star Trek was a cult-classic TV show in the 60s that lasted only a couple seasons but developed such a rabidly enthusiastic fanbase (including Martin Luther King, who loved egalitarian future the show envisioned and convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on as Uhura because she was a positive role model for both people of color and all women) that it became one of the biggest science fiction franchises in the history of the genre.

Revived in a series of feature films in the 80s (well, the first was in the 70s,) mixing well with the new Star Wars series, Star Trek returned to television in 1987 with The Next Generation. TNG, to be frank, sucked in the first couple seasons, but by its end (thanks in large part to a great cast led by Patrick Stewart) you could argue that it surpassed the original series (given that I was born in '86, Next Gen was Star Trek to me.) The success of Next Generation spawned two other series that overlapped, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. After the end of Voyager, there was the prequel series Enterprise, which I actually think was not terrible (though its opening credits music, which traded symphonic classical arrangements established by the earlier shows for a maudlin soft-rock piece of garbage absolutely was,) but Enterprise didn't catch on, and actually the Star Trek television armada fell apart just as the Golden Age of Television was getting started.

It's actually this factor more than anything that makes me extremely curious about the new Star Trek show.

Obviously, Paramount is capitalizing on the success of the new JJ Abrams movie series. But while there's fun to be had in those movies, they really don't have the kind of puzzle-like sci-fi storytelling or deep-nerd world-building that works so effectively in a TV format. I also think that the fact that it's an alternate-universe retelling of Kirk, Spock, and company really demonstrates that they're going more for brand recognition than showing us something new (Into Darkness was particularly guilty in this sense.)

But Star Trek works better as a TV show than movies (consider the Next Gen movies, of which maybe First Contact is good, and Nemesis almost made Tom Hardy quit acting. Yes, did you know he was the bad guy in that movie?) And given that it's Bryan Fuller who is running the show (previous works include Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and the insane work of gruesome genius, Hannibal,) there's reason to be excited.

TV audiences these days are far more into long-term storytelling, something that Star Trek flirted with in the past, but rarely committed to. The closest we saw was Deep Space Nine, which had an arc about the Dominion for over half of its time on the air, but still mostly stuck with episodic plots for individual episodes.

I'd still expect some individual space adventures - not every show has to be novelistic as the Wire or Game of Thrones - but given that audiences are far more comfortable (and in the age of Hulu, capable) of keeping up with an ongoing story, we could see some deep plotting with a new Star Trek show.

There's also the opportunity to explore issues that are more public today than they were even fifteen years ago. On Enterprise, Dominic Keating, who played Malcolm Reed, said that he wanted to play his character as a gay man, but that the producers insisted that he be straight. In a fairly short amount of time, the cultural tide has shifted massively, and the idea that Star Trek's utopian egalitarian future wouldn't have openly gay people serving in Starfleet is laughable. Hell, the Secretary of the Army in the United States right now is gay, and unless we undergo some horrible backslide into medieval fanaticism, it seems like we'd have way more gay people on Starships in the 22nd, 23rd, or 24th Century.

Given that Bryan Fuller is himself gay, I can't imagine they aren't going to address this.

The other really big question for this series is when. Well, that coupled with "which timeline?"

The movies exist in an alternate timeline - making it technically not a reboot of the series and not wiping out everything that Trekkies have loved since the 60s. (I guess Enterprise would still be canon in both, given that the event that splits the timeline happens after that.) I wonder, then, if Paramount is going to try to push more of that, allowing them to tie the show with the movies in a kind of shared cinematic universe (something they of course did already with the 90s-Trek.)

But I know that the big Trek fans (myself included) would prefer to see more of the familiar timeline. We don't want to go through all the same stuff we saw before. In fact, I think a more radical departure - perhaps jumping ahead to the 25th Century, much as TNG jumped a century beyond the original series - would give the writers plenty of wiggle room while still being able to use stuff that came from earlier shows. We could get little updates about what's going on with the defeated Dominion, or what the state of the Borg are after what Janeway did to them. And of course, even though Star Trek '09 is mostly in an alternate timeline, in the original one, Romulus was destroyed. Holy crap would it be cool to have a Romulan crew member who has to overcome the distrust of his or her crewmates after the Romulan survivors were spread to the winds.

This could be a really cool, modern update to the Star Trek universe, and hopefully one that is truer to the spirit of the series than the recent movies have been.

Leveling Up In Game of Thrones This Week

Saw this week's episode a bit later than usual, but here's what we've got:

Game of Thrones is one of those stories that is so long that the tight plotting of the earlier installments was captivating but as one gets farther in, it starts to feel like the show is holding out on you. Really, I think the dirty secret of all storytelling is that the beginnings of stories are better than the endings. Season one got to hint at things like magic, dragons, ice zombies, and pull the rug out from under us with the death of the protagonist. You could argue that the story has been a slowly-unfolding tragedy, but if you look to Shakespeare, you'll notice that even in his tragic tales, the bad guy also gets what's coming to him. Hamlet dies, sure, but so does Claudius. Othello does kill Desdemona, but Iago has been caught and exposed for the treacherous bastard he is and is due for a hanging or whatever method of execution they used in Venice at the time.

So the early tragedies of Ned's death and then the Red Wedding have stoked the fires, making us yearn for vengeance. Sure, Joffrey, Tywin, and many other villains have died, but their deaths have been largely just the catalyst for new problems. It's not enough that the villains pay - we want to see our heroes empowered.

Spoilers for this latest episode beyond the cut.

Slower Developments in This Week's Game of Thrones

After last week, in which the most anticipated thing in the series happened, things slowed down by a bit. We're definitely getting things set up for future conflict, and while there was a serious tease of revelations to come regarding R+L=J theories, we didn't get the answers we were hoping to get (though we did get to see a pretty badass fight-scene.)

Spoilers to follow.

Captain America: Civil War

Given the current political climate, the idea of superheroes battling one another instead of obvious villains makes sense. The country is extraordinarily polarized, and we've seen people who earlier were willing to compromise and moderate their stances veering off to the extreme ends of their political wings (something I contend is happening far more with one side than the other, but that's a discussion for a different day, and probably not on this blog.)

Thankfully, Captain America: Civil War doesn't make it too simple to choose a side. Ultimately the movie seems to land more on the title character's side of things, but there's reasonable arguments to be made for either side, even if there are flaws in execution.

It's also not really analogous to right-wing and left-wing either. Whatever your political persuasion, you might find yourself siding with one side or another. The two central heroes who are in conflict do kind of represent different sides of America - Tony Stark is the Libertarian hero worthy of an Ayn Rand novel while Steve Rogers is a New Deal Brooklyn kid who fights fascists and likes to stick up for the little guy (having been the little guy, he's very much a "lift as we climb" kind of hero.) But their positions, and specifically their actions in this story, complicate the simple political affiliations that also happen to sync up with their costumes' primary colors.

Before I get into spoilers, I'll say that Marvel has pulled off an impressive feat. This is a movie that has nearly every big-screen hero from the MCU (minus Thor and Hulk, and of course the Guardians of the Galaxy) and adds more to the mix, yet manages to avoid becoming unwieldy by grounding it in personal relationships.

While there are some massive fights in the movie, the spectacle really serves the characters. This might be the most character-driven Marvel movie to date, which makes sense given that the main conflict is between Cap and Iron Man. I still might like Winter Soldier better, but this one is definitely a good addition to the MCU.

So let us now go spoilery.

A Good Twist, a Bad Twist or not really a Twist? Regarding Recent Television Events

Lots of stories have big twists. The thing is, there are good twists and bad twists.

There are degrees of goodness to big twists, and degrees of badness. The worst are the ones that don't make sense and don't affect the story in any meaningful way - or alternatively completely invalidate the entire story you've been watching.

The best, I think, are the ones that you can predict if you're paying a lot of attention. Aw jeez, we're really going to have to go to a spoiler cut. So, meet me behind the cut.

Game of Thrones Cuts to the Chase in Episode 6.2

One of the dangers of serialized storytelling is that big moments often require a build-up to land as important, but too much build-up can feel like stalling. Dany's stay in Mereen has infamously (even in George R. R. Martin's opinion) felt like stalling for her inevitable invasion of Westeros.

Let's talk about tonight's episode after the spoiler break.