Game of Thrones - "Winter is Coming" (Rifftrax)

Episode Year:  2011
Genre:  Soap opera, fantasy
Director:  Tim Van Patten
Starring:  Sean Bean, Emilia Clarke, Lena Headey, Peter Dinklage, Jason Momoa, Mark Addy, Kit Harrington, Mark Addy, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Iain Glen, Harry Lloyd, Sophie Turner, Maisie Williams, Richard Madden, Alfie Allen, Issac Hempstead Wright, Jack Gleeson, Rory McCann, Aiden Gillen...THAT'S IT, I'M NOT TYPING OUT ANY MORE
Rifftrax Year:  2016
Riffers:  Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett

The Episode

*I HAVE SURVIVED WATCHING THIS EPISODE UNRIFFED*

I'm probably going to rustle some jimmies with this one, so I hope everyone braces themselves for my Game of Thrones hot take.  For those who are preparing retaliation:  yes, I am a moron; I deserve to die; I'm not smartest enough to watch a show as brilliant as this; I should eat shit, shove it up my ass, fuck off, and a bunch of other colorful expletives; and any other insult or threat you might throw my way.  I agree with all of this.  After all, Game of Thrones is 4eva, and I'm just a nobody with a blog about bad movies and a puppet show (and yes, I fully realize that puppet show has far less viewers than Game of Thrones, so thank you for pointing that out).

Okay, now that that's out of the way...Game of Thrones kind of sucks.

Granted, I haven't watched the whole series.  I may try and finish it one day, but I've watched the entirety of the first season and for the life of me I just did not give a shit.  Every character that was introduced, I didn't give a shit.  Every plot twist, I didn't give a shit.  Every swing of graphic violence thrown at the viewer, I didn't give a shit.  I like boobs and blood as much as the next guy, but this show is a goddamn chore to sit through.  I understand this series is a slow burn, and the characters are supposed to be intricately detailed, but with every piece of of the puzzle that comes into place, I found myself not wishing to follow these characters at all.

I'm not going to review the entire season, because we only have the first episode here, so I might as well stick to that.  Plus I last watched all of this years ago, and I barely remember anything that came after it.  I do remember watching it way back when and thinking to myself about how much it didn't grab me.  It bored me for about an hour, then rewarded me with the "twist" of incest and pushing a little boy out the window, as if I was supposed to care when the episode itself didn't make me care that any of this was going on.  When it finished I thought to myself "This is what everyone is obsessed with?"  It seemed to me that it was a barely anything showcase of sex and violence that just shouted "PLOT TWIST" in my face at the end.  When I finish the first episode of any series I ask myself if I want to watch the next one.  With Game of Thrones, the answer I gave myself was a resounding "No," but I plowed through it anyway to see if once characterizations started to become familiar then maybe I'd be taken by it.  That never happened.

What is Game of Thrones about?  Judging it on this first episode, it isn't really about anything (a premise goes into motion later on).  It's a fantasy story about kings and stuff.  Sean Bean is here as the obvious celebrity who is cast because he's going to die before the end of the season (I'm not posting spoiler alert, because I fucking called this the minute I saw him onscreen), and he's a king.  Former Fred Flintstone Mark Addy is here too, and he's a king.  Pre-Aquaman Jason Momoa is a king too.  They do king things, like raise wolves and set up arranged marriages and hump Emilia Clarke and stuff.  That's pretty much the entire episode.  There's a slight storyline of a king's hand being murdered, but we follow very little on it by the hour's end.  There's so much going on, but I literally feel like I'm watching nothing.

Watching this again all these years later, I feel a tad softer on it.  It might be because I watched it through the Rifftrax lens, which gave it more entertainment value than I initially gave it credit for, but for the most part this isn't a great pilot.  It introduces too many characters and throws me into too many things, and I'm a bit lost in the shuffle.  I'm a firm believer that television episodes should stand on their own, which is something that happens less and less as television becomes more serialized.  In the case of "Winter is Coming," there are a lot of plot threads that just...start.  The episode itself is not a whole entity, as it's just introduction, introduction, and more introduction.  That doesn't win me over.  If you're sucked into the generic fantasy world it tries to build, then you'll enjoy this more than I did, but it just collapses under its own weight for me because it's doing too much and forgetting it has to tell a story too.

The opinion I find myself having of watching a Game of Thrones episode, and I can say it for this first episode in particular, is that it's drama doesn't gel with me because it's basically a fantasy themed soap opera, as it's a lot of uninteresting melodrama of a bunch of dickhead characters that I dislike.  The only real difference is that the backstabbing is literal as opposed to figurative and we get to see the boning instead of implications.  Oh, and there are dragons, I guess (eventually).

I can't judge the series because I haven't seen the whole series, so I can only speak for what I've seen.  Maybe the show got better, I don't know.  I've been told it does.  But If I'm going to watch a seventy hour movie, be underwhelmed by the first ten hours, then ask someone "when does it stop sucking?," and they respond "Hour twenty-three...then it starts sucking again around hour sixty-five," why should I bother?  Personally, I'd rather pop in an episode of Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul if I want compelling serialized television.  And if we're talking HBO shows, Westworld can suffer a few of the same faults that Game of Thrones does, but at least its story elements, characters, and themes are far more interesting and pronounced than this.  Game of Thrones may have been groundbreaking in it's own way, but it never earned my love nor my respect.

Minor Note:  This episode was directed by Tim Van Patton.  If he sounds familiar, that's because he's good ol' Max Keller from the Master Ninja series.  Since Master Ninja he became a TV director, and he landed the gig of launching this popular series.  Max Keller movin' up in the world!

The Trax

"Cinemax is so sleazy."

"Uh, this is HBO."

"WHAT ARTISTIC BRAVERY!"

When Rifftrax first started they tried to do some riffs of early episodes of popular TV series like Lost, Heroes, and Grey's Anatomy.  They drifted away from that, though I'm not sure it was a conscious decision.  But TV show riffs have made something of a comeback as Kickstarter rewards, which is leading them into watching latest flavor of the month shows like The Walking Dead, Daredevil, Westworld, and Stranger Things (and if you're fanraging about my Game of Thrones thoughts, just talk to me for five minutes about Stranger Things, then you'll be really angry).  But, unlike previous TV riffs, these are only one episode and an hour in length.  Which is a shame, since this riff is consistently funny.  If they had gone on to episode two, I'd probably have watched it.

"Too soon to know who's a major character and who's just an extra, so she plays it safe and avoids eye contact with everyone."

My main concern would have been the chaotic narrative and the slow pace of the episode might weigh them down.  However, the fact that this is only a single episode of the series, in-and-out, really keeps them from following it too closely.  The fact that there is very little happening is almost a virtue, because it comes off as a series of character and aesthetic riffs.  The episode is about nothing, so they can turn it into whatever they want.  They'll see a knight in a wolf type armor and quip "Furries were scarier back then!" and it just fits this silly world.  It's like molding clay into whatever form you want.

Of course, the fact that the series is so damn stoic makes the jokes just a little bit funnier.  I always feel the perfect straight man for the Rifftrax crew is a film/series that takes itself so deadly seriously, and Game of Thrones thinks it's real serious business.  Unless you take the show so seriously that you wouldn't dare watch a parody of it, I wholeheartedly recommend this riff.  It's light, but efficient and effective.  Something that the series itself isn't.

"He's stalling for time, struggling to remember who any of these people are."

 Me too.

Good