Now that our watch is ending, we’ve come together with
a few of our favorite YouTubers to bring a special collaboration event:
‘The Best of Thrones’.
Each channel does a deep analysis of one episode from the whole series.
We’re really excited at this chance to work with some great creators,
to celebrate the last eight years of ‘Game of Thrones’ –
and also to pay some attention to the form of the TV episode.
As an art form, the ‘episode’ doesn’t usually get much critical attention,
but there’s so much to unpack: the structure, the title,
interconnection and echoes between the interwoven plot threads,
and how the episode pays off previous foreshadowings
or plants seeds for the future.
We’ve linked to the ‘Best of Thrones’ playlist
in the description below –
so after you watch this video, make sure to check out all the others.
And if you feel inspired, make your own video
about any episode that interests you.
If you tweet it to us, we’ll add it to the playlist.
And now, here’s our take.
“The young prey on the old.
Take what they want and beat us if we resist.”
‘Game of Thrones’ has certain moments and events
that are still burned into our shared cultural mind years later –
but if we had to choose the most thematically coherent episode as a whole,
we’d pick, ‘The Children’, written by show creators
David Benioff and D. B. Weiss and directed by Alex Graves.
The finale of Season 4 is almost smack dab in the middle of the series,
separating the first half of seasons from the second half.
And it’s a major turning point whose repercussions
can still be felt at the end of the series.
The loss of three of the most capable men in Westeros –
with the death of Tywin and the escape and defection of Tyrion and Varys –
starts the gradual shift of power and strength away from the Baratheon-Lannisters
towards the Targaryens.
“You may not have killed Geoffrey, but you killed Marcella, you killed Tommen.
No one would have touched them if father was here.”
What’s impressive about this episode’s writing and structure
is pretty much every scene relates to its central themes
and the title that ties it all together: ‘The Children’.
“Shaming your father has always given you pleasure.”
Throughout the episode we get interconnected stories
of children and parents, whether literal or figurative,
and the picture that emerges is one of bloody conflict
between old worlds and the new ones.
“The young may rejoice in the new world you have built for them,
but for those of us too old to change, there is only fear and squalor.”
The story tracks the frustration and confusion
of elders as young life rises up
and refuses to be controlled, rudely declaring its own agenda
and overthrowing the established rules.
“This whole season is about learning hard lessons from your ruthless elders.”
We open with Jon visiting Mance Rayder, the King Beyond the Wall who’s become
an unexpected father figure to him.
Jon has come here to kill his new father, representing that he’s determined to serve
the world he vowed to serve,
“I was loyal to him.”
even if that means destroying what he really loves.
Just as he considers whether he can really follow through on this,
Stannis Baratheon shows up, effortlessly defeating the Wildlings
with his better-equipped army.
Stannis is there to evoke Jon’s old father.
“Your father was an honorable man.”
“He was, Your Grace.”
So this opening sequence shows Jon’s old world reckoning with his new one.
“What do you think he’d have done with him?”
“I think my father would have taken him prisoner,
listened what he had to say.”
He negotiates to help the Free Folk – these people who have moved him
and connected with him in a way he never expected –
but he’s fearful for their survival, because he understands just how rigid
and, behind its civilized manners, brutal the world of his old fathers is.
From here we get three scenes of the Lannisters
that show Cersei making a play for her own power and independence.
First we see her giving her lackey, Qyburn,
the go-ahead to turn the Mountain into an even more
powerful zombie version of his former self.
“The process may change him, somewhat.”
“Will it weaken him?”
“Oh, no.”
And this upgrade to Tywin Lannister’s
so-called ‘mad dog’ signals that the daughter
is becoming even more dangerous and cold-blooded in her means of violence.
The following scene shows the father failing to reign in his daughter,
who at last openly rebels against his control,
refusing to marry Loras Tyrell and go off to Highgarden.
“And if you recall…”
“I'm not interested in hearing another one
of your smug stories about the time you won.
This isn't going to be one of those times.”
We know that the most important thing in the world to Tywin is:
“Your legacy which you love so much more than your actual children.”
He’s previously defined what family really means to him,
“The house that puts family first will always
defeat the house that puts the whims and wishes
of its sons and daughters first.”
it’s explicitly not what any family member feels or wants:
“It's what remains of you when you're gone.”
He shoves the idea of legacy down his children’s throats so forcefully,
their way of getting back at him is to destroy their house’s reputation.
“I will burn our house to the ground before I let that happen.”
“And how will you do that?”
“I'll tell everyone the truth.”
This scene unpacks the contradiction of Tywin’s legacy obsession:
“How can someone so consumed by the idea
of his family have any conception of what
his actual family was doing?”
He purports to be doing everything for the Lannisters,
yet he doesn’t know his family.
“One real look at your actual children and you would have known.”
And it’s this blind spot that by the end of the episode
will destroy him for good.
“Everything they say is true, about Jaime and me.”
“No..”
Your legacy is a lie.”
Here Cersei shocks Tywin a little because she so effectively channels his own skills
of coercion and control.
As she told him in Season 3, she’s the child who’s been internalizing all his lessons.
“Had it ever occurred to you that your daughter might be
the only one listening to them, living by them.”
Yet as she expresses her paranoia about
Margaery and Tywin manipulating Tommen,
“Margaery will dig her claws in, you will dig your claws in,
and you'll fight over him like beasts until you rip him apart.”
her problem isn’t truly that someone will strong-arm her last living boy,
it’s that that person won’t be her.
So she is very much her father’s daughter in repeating his mistakes, too –
caring truly about her own best interests over her kids’,
while paying lip service to the idea of family.
And, as we see in the next scene when she visits Jaime,
she’s also inherited Tywin’s idea that it’s okay
to exclude from your idea of ‘family’ those relatives you don’t like.
“I would do things for my family you couldn’t imagine.”
“Tyrion is your family.”
“He is not.”
“You don’t get to choose.”
“I do, so do you.”
Her emotional expression of a renewed love for Jaime
is a jubilant declaration that the children dare to claim their own lives.
“I don’t choose Tywin Lannister, I don’t love Tywin Lannister,
I love my brother, I love my lover.”
But as Cersei consolidates her rule, we’ll see that the fundamental worldview
that she’s keeping in power is still her father’s.
She represents to the other characters an old-world style of doing things,
which the visionaries and revolutionaries want to upset
and replace with a new-world order.
Next we catch up with the symbol of that new order:
Daenerys.
A former slave she liberated asks for a return to bondage,
“I ask you to let me sell myself back to Master Mighdal.”
which underlines how difficult it truly is
to persuade people to embrace a new way of life,
even if they have been oppressed by the former system.
“I am not alone.
There are many outside waiting to beg the same.”
This man’s desire to be exploited piques Dany’s sense of injustice –
but as ‘mhysa’, or mother to her people,
she decides to accept her children making choices
that she doesn’t agree with.
“But freedom means making your own choices.”
Her next visitor turns her attention to a problem
concerning her other children.
“He came from the sky and….”
And she makes the painful decision to reign in her dragons.
This crucial moment is a marked contrast to Cersei
who refused to check her monstrous son Joffrey.
“It’s hard to put a leash on a dog once you’ve put a crown on its head.”
In the sequence that follows at Castle Black, Maester Aemon Targaryen says words
over the bodies of the fallen brothers,
“And now their watch is ended.”
a scene that will later be echoed when Aemon himself dies.
“And now his watch is ended.”
Jon discusses Ygritte with Tormund,
“She loved you.”
“She told you?”
“No, all she ever talked about was killing you, that’s how I know.”
and he goes north of the wall to burn Ygritte’s remains with reverence.
These scenes connect to letting go of the past,
and putting to rest the dreams you once had
of a different destiny.
Bran and his companions finally make it to the Three-Eyed Raven –
“Now you've come to me at last, Brandon Stark.”
but first they’re ambushed by wights and meet a Child of the Forest.
“The First Men called us ‘The Children’, but we were born long before them.”
The fact that these ancient people were termed ‘children’
has an interesting symbolism to it,
that implies that new life actually represents the will of something age-old and sacred –
just as children often instinctively know more than their parents,
who may have forgotten important truths.
The children being ancient implies that the war we’re witnessing in this episode
between past and future isn’t a line, but a circle, a cycle that repeats.
We later find out that the Children are parents of sorts, too, of the white walkers.
So they represent the horrors of having created someone or something you detest.
The Child of the Forest tells Meera:
“Come with me or die with him.”
and this is similar to what we’re seeing all over the episode, as Dany’s subjects
and Jon’s Free Folk and Night’s Watch friends,
all face choices between living in the new world
or dying in the old.
“You’ll never walk again, but you will fly.”
The Three-Eyed Raven prepares to be
a spiritual parent to Bran in this next phase of his life,
as he transforms into something radically different and more powerful,
but which will be frightening and confusing to those who knew him before.
And it's fitting that we finally meet the Raven
in this turning point episode,
because the Raven itself is the bridge between past and future –
mankind’s living memory.
Brienne runs into Arya, the very girl she’s seeking, by chance.
Brienne tries here to fulfill her vow to protect Catelyn’s daughter.
But she has to fight Arya’s current protector-of-sorts.
“And that's what you're doing? Watching over her?”
“Aye, that's what I'm doing.”
After their brutal fight, Arya hides from Brienne
and leaves the Hound to die,
sending the message that she chooses no adult protection.
Given how much she’s been failed by the adults of this society,
“I swore a sacred vow to protect her.”
“Why didn't you?”
she concludes she’s better off on her own.
The Hound begs Arya to put him out of his misery but she won’t do it,
in part because his unconventional real-world tutelage has made her hard.
At the same time, Arya’s choice reflects her mixed feelings about the Hound,
"I wanted him to suffer. I hated him.”
"A girl lies to me, to the Many-Faced God,
to herself."
as over time she’s grown to love this man,
who here fought to the death to try to keep her safe.
“He was not on her list anymore. She had taken him off it.”
“Why?
Didn't she want him dead any longer?”
“She did and she did not.”
Even if the Hound wasn’t as honorable or ideal a father as Ned Stark,
when Arya leaves him behind we feel confident
she will survive on her own,
largely because his teachings have prepared her
to face the world without him,
“That's where the heart is.”
and that’s one of the most important gifts a parent or guardian can give a child.
Back in King’s Landing, we get the final unraveling
of Game of Thrones’ most formidable father –
all thanks to the ungrateful, incorrigible children.
Jaime smuggles Tyrion out of prison,
“Thank you for my life.”
showing that he does choose Tyrion as his family,
even if his sister and father don’t.
Before escaping to freedom,
Tyrion can’t resist visiting his father one last time.
He’s shocked to discover his former lover Shae in his father’s bed,
calling Tywin by her former pet name for him.
“My lion.”
After she attacks him, Tyrion kills her, and the Lannister patriarch’s betrayal
that spurred this crime of passion is all the more
strikingly cruel because Tywin forced his son
to drive away this woman he loved, and then stole her, despite caring nothing
for Shae himself.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?”
“She was a whore.”
Tyrion wants answers about why his own father
has always hated him so deeply.
“All my life you've wanted me dead.”
“Yes, but you refuse to die. I respect that.”
Tywin’s responses are smooth and diplomatic.
“You’re a Lannister. You’re my son.”
He backtracks on his many attempts to disown Tyrion.
“Since I cannot prove that you are not mine.”
“He doesn’t believe that this can be the end,
it’s not gonna end like this.
A Lannister man does not die sitting on a toilet.”
But Tyrion won’t be taken in by these glib reassurances.
“I am your son and you sentenced me to die.
You knew I didn't poison Joffrey, but you sentenced me all the same.”
And when Tywin doesn’t take his son’s warning seriously,
“Say that word one more time.”
“And what you’ll shoot your own father in the privy?”
Tyrion makes good on his threat.
“You’re afraid of a dead whore…”
His last words, “You’re no son of mine.”
reflect total parental disappointment – the father looking at his child,
mourning for the future.
But Tyrion’s final words to his father,
“I am your son.
I have always been your son.”
illuminate the patriarch’s short-sightedness.
“Harren the Black thought this castle would be his legacy.
The greatest fortress ever built.
Look at it now. A blasted ruin.”
All the theories about Tyrion’s possible Targaryen parentage aside,
Tyrion is his father’s son, he’s intelligent, pragmatic and strategic;
he loves playing the game of ruling.
“You enjoy the game.”
“I do.”
If Tywin had only accepted Tyrion,
he would have had an ally and true spiritual heir
to cement the Lannister line, but again, this is his blind spot:
refusing to look directly at the children who are his legacy.
He set out to better his house as a reaction to his own weak father,
"A weak man who nearly destroyed our house and name."
and this is a very common mistake parents make:
fixating on the past trying to correct
what their parents did wrong, when in reality, it’s crucial to view what’s in front of
us
without prejudices and assumptions left over from a long-gone era.
Tyrion sets off for a new phase of his life, and the episode ends on Arya deciding
to voyage east as well.
It’s symbolic that ‘The Children’ finishes with
this character who was cheated out of a childhood,
kick-starting her evolution into an independent adult.
“I don’t need saving.”
At first she tries yet again to return to a family member,
“I want to go north. To the wall.”
but the opportunity that shows up is for her is
to journey farther away before she can go home again.
“Where’s home?”
“The free city of Braavos.”
This might make us think back to when Jaqen H’ghar
first invites Arya to come to Braavos with him in Season Two –
at the time, she turns down the offer because she’s trying to find her family.
“I need to find my brother and mother.”
But now, having lost so much, she accepts fate’s invitation.
“Valar morghulis.”
“Valar dohaeris.”
She rushes to the bow of the ship, showing she’s looking only forward.
So the ending of ‘The Children’ symbolizes
a new beginning for the younger generation –
a more free, empowered chapter, as they rise up
to claim this world and make it over in their image,
even if it takes conflict, sacrifice and suffering
for the children to free themselves
from the chains of their ancestors, the message this episode leaves us with is:
The kids are alright.
“Going it alone, you won't last a day out there.”
“I'll last longer than you.”
Hi guys it’s Susannah and Debra, we are ‘The Take’.
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