In the middle of it all, Sam delivers a speech about death and mortality in which he argues that death is a form of forgetting, and that without remembering who we are and what we’ve done we may as well not even be human.
It’s an interesting time to bring that matter up. We’re in the final season of what’s been a notoriously very violent show, a show that’s killed off a lot of characters — a lot of characters that had so much life in them before they died. One of the effective and brilliant things about Game of Thrones is that the characters are alive right until the second they die. Death is just around the corner for everybody. If you took a death like Oberyn Martell, it so looked like he was going to succeed — then death came round the corner [and] sucker punched him, and nobody could have predicted that. That’s what life’s like. You’re never far away from being completely gone.
Sam touches on the idea that you’re around on the earth for 72 years and then you’re gone forever. If you think of the entirety of time, you’re alive and having an impact and living and breathing for such a small portion of that, and for the rest of the time you just don’t exist at all. So it’s all about leaving a mark and leaving something for future generations to remember you by.
You could think that we take the idea of life and death very lightly. Hundreds of people get killed. People have gotten killed ever since the very first moments of the very first episode. You can think the show has quite a casual attitude about death because of that. But in school, I was taught quite a depressing lesson. I think I was only about 12. The teacher drew a line on the board, and he said, “This line represents your life. The only thing you don’t know is where on the line you are at the moment.”
When you think about it in those terms, you think, Wow, life is actually precious in Game of Thrones. When Sam says something like that, about the true meaning of death and being gone and what life means, it makes you reevaluate the show’s attitude toward death all along. You think of the Robbs and the Catelyns and the Neds and the Oberyns and all these characters you’ve loved who have died, and you think, Ohhh, I see their deaths in a slightly different light now. They’re gone. Who knows which of these characters standing around that table are going to be gone next week?
When it comes to raising kids and dying and saying good-bye to people and all of these things, you just want to not have any regrets. Sam’s trying to do whatever he can to do right by the people he loves, and not become an old man looking back and thinking, Ah, I really fucked up there. I could have done everything differently. Why didn’t I think of this? Why didn’t I spend more time with this person? Why wasn’t I braver? Why wasn’t I willing to fight for them? To see yourself as an old man, looking back on what you’re doing now and not approving, is a painful thing. Looking forward to your older self in the moment and thinking, I’m going to eliminate any regrets that I might see in the future … I think that’s what life’s about.
I interviewed John Bradley about Game of Thrones for Vulture. He made me tear up!
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, asoiaf, fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, reviews, TV, TV reviews, vulture