Letting the devil win

When Martin Amis, the eminence grise of British arts and letters, was asked what he learned from his mother, he replied that she taught him to be unshockable. Since 2011, HBO’s Game of Thrones (GoT) has been doing to millennials what Amis’ mom did to him: teaching how to be stoic one bonkers episode at a time.
 
However, if the just concluded Season Seven is any indication, it’s increasingly falling prey to the thumb rule that most popular American TV series that are too big to fail are guilty of: it was great until it started pandering to all its bases.
 
(Before I go any further, please note that this column will be riddled with major spoilers.)
 
The latest season was super safe, almost like a gentrified neighbourhood in any major city. No primary character dies, a dragon’s death is the closest it comes to a sense of doom and Khaleesi canoodles with Jon Snow in the very next episode instead of mourning the death of her “child”.
 
It’s heartening to see Daenerys, Cersea, Arya, Sansa and Ellaria breaking the Westeros glass ceiling in the same season but all goes in vain.
 
Too much happened in this season too soon. In the past, each strand of the narrative took some time to establish and that organic nature has been defenestrated for the sake of, no puns intended, skull-cracking action. What used to be deliciously grotesque and blackly comic is now a pale shadow of its glorious past.
 
Maybe the show’s writers want to mask the fact that they don't have any more written material from George R R Martin with ridiculously weird visuals. 
 
Will I be watching the next and final season? I’ll be more of hate watching it. It's blindingly obvious that the white walkers will be defeated and it only remains to be seen if the viewer is required to make an emotional investment.

A poster of Game of Thrones Season 7

However, what really pushed me into a slough of despond this season was that HBO was held to ransom by a few pesky hackers. The industrial level of viewing of these leaked episodes that happened reminded me of “anarchist calisthenics” — a beautiful concept invented by Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University.
 
In his book, Two Cheers for Anarchism, he mentions his gap year spent in Germany and how he witnessed that pedestrians at the traffic intersection of a small town called Neubrandenburg wouldn’t jaywalk until the green light comes, even if the whole street is devoid of any motor vehicles.
 
“One day you will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay ‘in shape’ so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is anarchist calisthenics.”
 
That's why watching those leaked episodes felt so wrong to me. Those hackers could have worked for a lofty purpose (like exposing the American alt-right) instead of asking HBO for a bounty of five million dollars. Indulging these terrorists is a dangerous act and we should never give them any credence. 
 
Also, if you want to experience another series that is as visceral as GoT used to be, you ought to immerse yourself in the Italian TV series, Gomorrah. This a cracking tale of crime, drugs and gang warfare in Naples about the rift in an organised drug mafia, written by Roberto Saviano, evokes the airless claustrophobia of a drugs den.
 
The Savastanos control the drug industry in Naples but pater familias Pietro doesn’t see the impending danger coming in the form of his henchman, Ciro. The former’s son, Genny, is forced to take over the mantle from his father under trying circumstances and fights his father’s fight against Ciro. Deaths, and very important ones at that, happen all the time but unlike GoT they happen with much less fuss.
 
I was pleased as punch to notice that Tata Sky shows Gomorrah in India. We need more foreign series to make the leap here. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck with miseryfests like GoT. 
 

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jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in