Beware spoilers, obviously. If you haven’t yet seen Sunday night’s episode of “Game of Thrones,” look away now.
Have you noticed something funny about the High Sparrow on “Game of Thrones”?
It struck me Sunday night as I was watching this ascetic, barefoot cleric confront rich, powerful Jamie Lannister, scion of the richest family in Westeros, in the temple.
And I thought — there’s something familiar about this guy.
The tousled, thinning white hair.
The genial, slightly goofy grin.
The big coat sleeves that flap whenever he gesticulates.
The moral certitudes.
The threats of divine retribution against the rich, wicked and powerful.
And then it hit me.
The High Sparrow is Bernie Sanders!
“Every one of us is poor and powerless,” he warned rich Jamie as they met in the temple. “But together we can overthrow an empire!”
Westeros needs a revolution! Look out, millionaires and billionaires!
More: Updated Game of Thrones Season 6 Predictions
OK, so maybe I’m reading waaaay too much of this. Or maybe I’ve been marinaded in our own national game of thrones for so long that it’s pickling my mind. Heaven help me, but when Cersei Lannister made a gratuitous comment about gold being her daughter’s best color, I wondered if this were an oblique remark about Hillary’s controversial golden Mao jacket.
The good people at HBO had no idea that their own magic-and-Machiavelli melodrama would have to compete this season with a real-life version.
But which one of these characters is Donald Trump?
Meanwhile, at the other end of the kingdom, Yara Greyjoy is now the rightful heir to the Iron Islands. Right?
Not so fast, one of the elders says. We have to find out if the men of the islands will accept her as… er… their commander in chief.
OK, OK, let’s get to the big news.
As everybody knows, the trick with all drama is to keep the suspense as long as you can. Which brings us, naturally, to last night’s Big Gigantic Reveal and Shocker. And I don’t mean the cameo by the senator from Vermont.
Yes, Jon Snow is alive! Hooray! Let their be dancing in the streets, and so forth.
The Red Hot Witch/Scary Old Crone Melisandre brought Everyone’s Hero back to life. Series heartthrob Kit Harington thus spent all of one episode on the sidelines, and the big question from the offseason seems to have been settled (until maybe he dies again, who knows?).
Am I alone in thinking this was some poor story writing? They couldn’t drag this out for more than one episode? And what on Earth was that resurrection scene? It’s no big surprise when the ending is painfully obvious about a minute away.
Outside the room, Ser Alliser Thorne was discovering one of those great lessons in leadership: It’s about a lot more than just being named “leader.” After persuading the Night’s Watch to break their vows and assassinate their leader, he found that their entire esprit de corps had been shattered. At the first sign of overwhelming odds they just gave up and laid down their weapons. They no longer believed in the Night Watch.
Elsewhere, there was a delightful moment of suspense when evil and cunning Roose Bolton embraced his evil and crazy son, Ramsay, and one of them fatally stabbed the other. It took a few moments to find out who had stabbed whom, and it shows you just how evil this pair were that it could just have plausibly gone either way. In any event, Ramsay proved even crazier than Roose was cunning, and now the bastard son has seized power — and fed his stepmother, and new baby brother, to the castle dogs.
The great mystery was how someone as brilliantly ruthless, cold and clever as Roose Bolton could not see that his son was as crazy as a barrel of monkeys. In this perversely Faustian series, every betrayer gets betrayed in turn. If Ramsay’s downfall matches his crimes, it will be a doozy.
This was originally published on Marketwatch.
