Westeros Community College: The Secret Targaryens

Spoiler Warning:  This post contains spoilers for all broadcast seasons of HBO's Game of Thrones, all published volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, references to interviews, set reports, informed by wild speculation, and both fire and greenseer visions. 

Did you know that there are secret Targaryens in A Song of Ice and Fire and HBO's Game of the Thrones?  Well, officially there is one secret Targaryen, young Aegon, who has only shown up in George R. R. Martin's most recent novel, A Dance of Dragons but there is widespread doubt about his legitimacy.  The idea of secret Targaryens in the story is wrapped up in a couple of prophecies, both the foretelling of the "Prince Who Was Promised," which may or may not be related to the return of the mythical hero Azor Azai and also  Rhaegar Targaryen's elaboration on that prophecy that the "dragon will have three heads."  These are widely thought to mean that the end of the story will involve three Targaryens, one for each of Dany's dragons and that the Targaryen trinity will be involved in the  climactic battle against The Others.

So who are these three Targaryens?  Clearly, Dany is one of them.  The books would have you believe that this new Aegon Targaryen is one also but there is good reason to believe that he is an impostor propped up by Varys and Illyrio as part of their conspiracy to restore the Targaryens and competent leadership to the throne with an "even better than the real thing" impostor.  So, it is likely he is the "Mummer's dragon" about which Dany was warned.

For reasons that I have previously described, I believe Jon Snow is the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark.  Given this fact, and his importance to the story, I believe that he is the second dragon.  So, who is the third?

The popular guess is that Tyrion Lannister is, in fact, the third dragon in this scenario.  This is based mostly on sketchy book information such as his fascination with dragons, his light blond hair, and eye color.  Of course, Tyrion, is perhaps the most beloved character on in the series and with Dany and Jon, part of a trio of protagonists so it is natural to want to see them all ride dragons together into the sunset but this feels like wishful thinking to me.  Tyrion as a Targaryen would be a cheap twist that would undermine a lot of what has made the character compelling, namely his relationship to his house and father.

The only solid evidence from which this theory is drawn actually supports another character, or pair of characters.  In the books it is relayed through that incorrigible old gossip, Barristan Selmy that the mad king Aerys Targaryen was taken with Tywin Lannister's wife, Joanna, (the mother of Jamie, Cercei, and Tyrion) and even "took liberties with her" on her wedding night.  Some have speculated a long-standing affair in support of their Tyrion Targaryen theory but we just don't know.  All we do know is of one incident on Tywin and Joanna's wedding night.  It would seem then that it would be more likely that the twins would be secret Targaryens than Tyrion.  Beyond the "evidence," from a character and narrative point of view, this would be a much stronger and more dramatic choice.

For Tywin, it would explain a lot of his actions and attitudes toward the Mad King, which we pick up in bits and pieces throughout the books.  The two had once been close but seemed to have a complicated, antagonistic relationship later in life. According to the books, their conflicts were largely attributed to power struggles over Jamie and Cercei's roles at court. Not only did Arys refuse to marry Cercei to his son, Rhaegar but he drafted Jamie into the King's Guard essentially stealing him away from Tywin and denying the Lannister patriarch his chosen heir.  Ultimately, it was Tywin Lannister's actions at the end of Robert's Rebellion that led to the Mad King's death at Jamie's hand. It's not hard to imagine Tywin arranging things so that Aerys would be killed by his own son as a final response to the Mad King's initial insult of fathering a child on his wife.  This would be the Tywin Lannister version of a mic drop.

If Jamie and Cercei are not Tywin's children (although still Lannisters though their mother) then Tywin's only true born son would be Tyrion.  This explains some Tywin's frustration and anger with his children.  Of the three, the only one that is his trueborn is (in his eyes) unfit to be his heir because he is a dwarf.  Being Tywin, he is forced to put on a good face and present them as his own children.  Instead of undermining the Tyrion/Tywin relationship, this choice would actually enrich it with depth and dramatic irony.

Throughout the books, characters comment on how much Tyrion resembles his father in skill and intellect.  His aunt, Genna, even goes as far as to point out to Jamie that Tyrion is Tywin's "true son." In an offhand way, Tywin comments on his children's parentage on a couple of memorable occasions. He grudgingly tells Tyrion that he "cannot prove" that Tyrion is not his son.  On the surface, this simply means that as much as he would like it not to be the case, Tyrion is trueborn son.  It is interesting that this is something that he would even say.  Can he prove that his other children are not his own?  Tywin's famous last words to Tyrion, "You're no son of mine" are often interpreted as a confession that Tywin is not actually Tyrion's father but these words take on more power if Tyrion is Tywin's only trueborn son.

For Jamie, in particular, this theory  changes things.  He would have unknowingly killed his own father. He and Tyrion would have that experience in common.  He becomes Kinslayer as well and Kingslayer and his story takes on a new depth.  He and Cercei already share some Targaryen qualities such as a penchant for arrogance, incest, and madness.  Certainly, Joffrey would have fit right in with Aerys and the worst of the Targaryens.

This also means that for all of Robert's efforts to destroy the Targaryen line, there was one sleeping next to him every night, and Targaryens would sit on the Iron Throne after his death.  It also means that Cercei and Dany-two women who seem to be on a collision course in the story-are actually sisters.  Much more than the Tyrion as a Targaryen theorgy, the Targaryen Twins theory, infuse Martin's work with a sense of  the epic old-school Tragedy that is already part of the eclectic mix of ingredients that make up A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones.

Patrick Garone
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The Force Awakens Has Me Worried

Can you feel it?  There has been an awakening.

Last night a new trailer dropped for the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens.  Most people seem really psyched about it but it actually has me less excited than I was after the previous ones.  I have a nagging feeling that this movie is going to be a long fan-wank for middle-aged Star Wars fans (a group which includes myself.)

There are several things that stand out to me.  First, the villain, Kylo Ren, is apparently obsessed with Darth Vader and collects Vader memorabilia, including his charred helmet and talks to his Star Wars collection.  Not only that, be he seems to be a Darth Vader cosplay enthusiast.  To put it mildly, this is very dumb.  Look, I love Vader, everyone loves Vader but he's dead, move on and create new villains, not wannabes. Especially not wannbes who are in-universe Star Wars collectors.

This new trailer also tells us a little bit about the world that has developed in the wake of Return of the Jedi.  Apparently the events of the Star Wars Original Trilogy have passed into legend and are spoken of in hushed tones by the people of the galaxy.  The heroes of the Rebellion are legendary and probably also have fans.  The subtext of this movie seems to be, "Star Wars is awesome, let's Star Wars!"  There is something annoyingly meta about it all.  

Also, there seems to be a new Death Star on the poster, which, ugh.

Mostly, I'm worried because of Super 8 the 2011 J. J. Abrams movie that was a "love letter" to the Amblin movies of the 1970's and '80's but was really just a self-indulgent hodgepodge of all the things you liked about those movies and little new and original.  Abrams loves Star Wars but I don't want to watch a movie about how great Star Wars is, I want to watch a great Star Wars movie with new and original ideas.  This is precisely why Abrams did such a great job on his two Star Trek  movies: he wasn't a fan.  He approached it as an outsider with a fresh take on the world and characters unburdened by fandom.

I hope I'm wrong.  I hope, The Force Awakens is great but I have concerns.

Patrick Garone
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Retro Review: To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar

In retrospect, it is obvious that the 1990's were a weird and transitional time to be gay.  Back then, a lot of us thought that we were living in a progressive socially cutting-edge era, certainly compared to how it had been in the prior decades for gay rights and visibility.  Very few of us imagined how far we would come in two decades.  For example, I don't think any of us expected there to be legal gay marriage in all fifty states in our lifetimes.

Naturally, the gay movie landscape has changed with the cultural landscape and while there were a number of big gay Hollywood movies in the 1990's some of them are really only interesting as cultural artifacts of a bygone time.  The 1995 comedy To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar straddles being entertaining on its own and being a weird relic of 1990's attitudes about gay life.  Not only is it a gay movie starring ostensibly heterosexual actors but a movie about drag queens, a subculture within the gay community that a lot of gay men are not even familiar with. Certainly, it is a movie that would not be made the same way today.

It's actually puzzling that the movie was even made at all.  Certainly it was a response to the success of the earlier Australian movie The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert  to which Wong Foo  is often unfavorably compared.  (One way Wong Foo is superior to Priscilla  is in it's appealingly diverse cast, whereas Priscilla is jarringly and aggressively racist).

It is as though a Hollywood producer decided that they wanted to jump on some non-existent drag queen movie bandwagon but also went to great pains to keep the movie light and accessible to general audiences.  Whereas Priscilla also features a heterosexual cast, the movie still feels very courageous and authentic in its story and the way it treats its characters.  In comparison, To Wong Foo maintains a sitcom feel throughout much of the movie but often awkwardly and abruptly switches to a dark or "serious" tone, like a Very Special Episode.

Also, with the exception of the opening sequence, we don't ever see any of these drag queens out of drag.  They are on a cross country car trip and they are in drag the whole time.  This movie should be rated D for Day Drag.  In that way, To Wong Foo seems to confuse being a drag queen with being transgendered (despite expositional dialogue to the contrary) or it is too scared and or lazy to deal with the fact that the movie is about three gay men on a cross country road trip.

There is also some weird gender politics going on with the Patrick Swayze character.  Well into the movie he is accused of being a drag queen because he "couldn't cut it as a man," and we see by his reaction to this statement that he believes that it is true.  This, combined with the fact that the three characters are always in drag sends a confusing message about drag queens and gay men.  For most drag queens, being in drag is a job (and a physically exhausting and uncomfortable one) and as soon as they can, they get out of drag.  Most don't do drag because of gender issues but because drag is their chosen method of performance and artistic expression.

I harp on the fact that the actors are all outsiders to the community that they are portraying on screen because of the way that the movie briefly features and sidelines actual notable drag performers such as Lady Bunny and Candace Kane in its opening sequence at the ceremony for the Drag Queen of the Year (Ugh) pageant.  Even RuPaul, who brought drag into the mainstream for the first time in the '90's is given a small speaking part.  This is a shame for a number of reasons, not the least of which is if not for RuPaul's popularity at the time, Hollywood would not have even dared to make this movie. So, I can't help but think that there is a little bit of a diss in the way that the movie treats actual drag performers.  Especially since RuPaul is genuinely funny and could have easily nailed either Swayze's or Snipes' role.

If they made the movie today, of course, it would be a very different story.  Not only are filmmakers a little more savvy about how they portray minority communities but America has been exposed to a lot more drag, again thanks to RuPaul and his hit competition show RuPaul's Drag Race which has been running for seven seasons and seems to get more popular every year.  Not only has the show exposed us to what it is that drag queens actually do and how much work goes into their artform but we have seen a huge variety of drag styles, approaches, and performers.  If they were making a movie like this today, the main casting problem would be choosing three performers from all of the talented candidates.

To Wong Foo, imperfect as it is, was an important stepping stone in both gay movies and movies about drag,   Despite the movie's flawed portrayal of drag and drag queens there is a lot of fun to be had with the transformations of the three actors and transformation is part of what makes drag such a compelling and fun art form.  Wesley Snipes, in particular, seems to be having a ball and really commits to his character in a fun and surprising way.  John Leguizamo was no stranger to drag having turned in some memorable and fearless performances of female and trans characters in his early one-man shows and his character in the movie feels like an extension of those characters. And that's a really good thing.  These performances and some good one-liners really help to salvage the movie from the weak script and generic direction.

Patrick Garone
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How To Make A Good Terminator Movie

The Terminator Franchise is in danger of termination.  Prior to the release of this summer's Terminator: Genisys there were big plans for a trilogy of new Terminator movies featuring a new cast and a rebooted story but after dismal US box office performance (but impressive foreign grosses) the studio is now re-evaluating it's plans.  After two beloved movies, a good but too-quickly cancelled TV show, and three unsatisfying sequels, where is there to even go with Terminator as a franchise?

The only way to go is back.  The best of all the Terminators was the original 1984 movie, a wonderfully stripped down low-budget flick that straddled Sci-Fi and Action.  With the success of Terminator 2, the franchise was irrevocably moved into action/blockbuster territory much to its detriment.  The subsequent movies have been trying to ape the T2 formula ever since and have all failed miserably at it resulting in overly long, bloated, action movies.

The way to save Terminator is to go back to its roots with a small to mid-budget movie that gets at what made the first movie so successful: horror.  Despite the gun play  and Sci-Fi plot, the original Terminator was a movie that tapped into a very universal and primal fear: being stalked by an unstoppable pursuer, the idea that something is out there and it is looking for you.
This idea is the heart of what made the original movie so great and while it was explored in the Sarah Connor Chronicles TV show, it has been largely abandoned by the movies in favor of noisy action, convoluted plots, and burdensome mythology.  The only hope for the series is to let all of that stuff go and go back to basics with another simple, lean and mean Terminator movie, something in the spirit of Mad Max Fury Road,  another back-to-basics entry from a left-for-dead franchise.

What would this movie look like?  For one, it leaves behind the things that have holding the franchise back: no Sarah or John Connor, no Arnold, and no time-travel shenanigans.  This new Terminator should be laser focused on the experience of surviving an unstoppable killing machine.  It probably should be set in the present, although the idea of a gritty Terminator set in the Old West or the Middle Ages could be interesting side stories, too.  Since so many Game of Thrones actors have been in Terminator projects, it would only be fair to bring Terminator to a GOT-type setting.

But for the sake of our mission to make a roots Terminator movie, lets set it in the present.  There is a Terminator and a target.  Following the formula of the series the Terminator makes and attempt to kill the target but fails.  The target escapes into the city or country and the rest of the movie exists with this fear that the thing is out there and going to find you.  This is a point in the story that the later movies gloss over in favor of detours into "mythology" but it is interesting area for storytelling. 

One of the things the new Terminator movie has to do is to make the Terminator scary again.  He's not cool, he's not your buddy who understands "why you cry."  He's a terrifying Other.  The best recent example of a character rehab like this is not actually with a movie but a video game.  The recent Alien Isolation game took Giger's Alien which had been exploited and watered down over the years and brought it back to its scary roots delivering an experience that was in the spirit of the first Alien movie.  We need to do that with a Terminator. 

Our number one rule in this endeavor:  No good Terminators.  The idea of reprogrammed "good" Terminators was just a way to keep Arnold involved in the franchise.  This idea muddles the Man against Machine theme that is central to the franchise.  I know people love T2 and it is not a bad movie but I can't help feeling that it jumped the shark a bit with the way that it treated the Terminator.

We need to see some new scary behaviors from our Terminator that we haven't seen before.  What if after the Terminator fails to find its quarry it allows itself to be arrested and sent to jail in order to draw it's target back.  I'd like to see the police involved in the story where they are not just getting in the way.  Perhaps one of the protagonists can be a police detective and the story is largely from his or her point of view.  Maybe we don't get all of the context that we get from Kyle Reese in the first movie and the Terminator and his targets activities are treated like crimes until the Terminator's true nature is revealed.  Maybe the Terminator and its quarry are put in the same facility and the film is partially a prison movie and the last act has the protagonist evading the Terminator in a high security detention facility.  The point is, let's see some things we haven't seen before and maybe explore some fun sub-genres in the movie.

These are just a few examples of new and interesting things you can do with the series on a low budget and in keeping with the spirit of the first and best Terminator movie.  What they shouldn't make is another big bloated movie that rehashes the same action movie elements as T2.  More than another blockbuster, if this series is ever going to be credible again, it needs to deliver a really good movie. Most importantly, this is a series that needs to re-engage its fans and generate excitement for another movie.

Patrick Garone
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A Star Wars Retrospective: The Phantom Menace (1999)

The Force Awakens is a couple of months away, so like any dutiful nerd, I have pulled out my Star Wars Blurays and decided to revisit the two Star Wars Trilogies, starting with Episode I: The Phantom Menace.  Never before had a movie been so eagerly and desperately anticipated.  The trailer for Episode I was literally the first thing to ever break the Internet.  Not only did fans use the Internet see the trailer and get news about the movie but they later turned to this new medium to engage in a bit of heated group think about the film and its merits.  It is important to note that while the movie got great reviews upon release and was a huge hit, "fans" turned on the movie in the weeks and months after its release and it has garnered somewhat of a bad reputation in the years since.

While, The Phantom Menace is clearly flawed in several important ways, it is far from the worst Star Wars movie (hello Return of the Jedi and Attack of the Clones).  In a measured, and realistic assessment,it is clear that the movie has some serious problems, the most glaring one being that it is about twenty minutes too long.  Secondly, Jar Jar is an annoying and problematic character.  Thirdly, Jake Lloyd is poorly directed.  Finally, there are some alien character choices that are questionable.  None of these performance problems are the fault of the actors but of George Lucas who has always been less than interested in directing actors.  For me, none of these flaws really sink the movie.  The Phantom Menace is still a fun, imaginative, visionary, adventure that greatly expands the Star Wars universe.

Perhaps one of the movie's greatest strengths is what doomed it with fans: it dares to be very different from the Original Trilogy.  It is a very plot heavy movie; there's no smart alec Han Solo character; it depicts a galaxy that is shiny and new as opposed to the grungy aesthetic of classic Star Wars; much of it takes place in the halls of power and there is a lot of talking, etc.  Lucas was never interested in making another Star Wars just to make it and repeat what he had already done.  He was interested in telling his story and it was by necessity different than the movies that had come before.

Because the movie is so much maligned, let's take a look at ten reasons The Phantom Menace is a great addition to the Star Wars Saga.


10. The Special Effects

I was rewatching this movie and it occurred to me during the big Gungans/Droid ground battle how good the effects looked even after sixteen years.  While it was obviously all CGI and impossible and the blocking was a bit cartoony, the droids and Gungans all had a real weight and reality to them which is more than you can say for certain shots in recent movies like Avengers: Age of Ultron. Also, as annoying as Jar Jar was, that character and Ahmed Best's work on him helped to create the art of performance capture for CGI characters and without him there would not have been any Gollum or Ceasar.

9. Ewan McGregor

Another great casting choice and one that paid dividends in later movies.  McGregor did a great job of inhabiting a much younger version of one of the most beloved Star Wars characters.  The movie does a good job of showing Obi-Wan as both a product of the stuffy Jedi culture and his more freewheeling Jedi Master, Qui-Gon Jinn.  The movie is also not afraid to make him a little callow and unlikeable with his snarky comments about picking up "pathetic lifeforms."  Here we see him starting the journey to becoming the wise and compassionate Jedi of Star Wars.  For a whole generation of Star Wars fans, Ewan MacGregor is their Obi-Wan and lets hope we get to see him in some more movies now that Disney is making spinoffs.

8.  The Story

While Lucas lacks skills in directing actors and writing human dialogue, he is a genius at the broad strokes of storytelling. In Episode I, begins his tale of both the corruption and decay of Galactic society and of the Jedi Order.  It's pretty dark stuff for a kids adventure movie.   In Palpatine, he has created a wonderful scheming villain who orchestrates a crisis in order to get himself into a position to be able to create a war that will tear the Galaxy apart so that he can rebuild it the way he likes.  People criticized the movie for not telling the Clone Wars story that they had been waiting for but The Phantom Menace sets up the Clone Wars in a very elegant way.



7. Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman is a very talented actress as her larger body of work and Academy Award winning performance in Black Swan proves but her work in the latter two Star Wars prequels is saddled with some of the worst dialogue and scenes in the whole saga.  In The Phantom Menace however she turns in a fun performance as both the very stylized and formal Queen Amidala and her alter ego, the plucky handmaiden Padme.  This is dual identity is a fun subplot of the movie that not even the Jedi pick up on.  Which brings us to...

6. Costumes

While there are a handful of simple iconic costumes that the movies are known for, Episode I  is really the one Star Wars movie where the filmmakers got really adventurous with their costume, hair, and make-up.  While there are some interesting costumes throughout, Queen Amidala wears some truly weird, wonderful, and beautiful outfits throughout the The Phantom Menace.  Like much of Star Wars, they are wonderful for being a interesting hodgepodge of various world styles and influences.

5. Design

Design is an area that people seem to have issues with this movie.  Whereas the OT mostly featured Imperial ships and bases, grungy Rebel outposts, and a few industrial and frontier areas, The Phantom Menace really showed you a much more expansive look at the Star Wars world and one that was set in a more elegant time.  That being the case, Episode I features a lot of designs that were sleeker and hearkened back to classic sci-fi such as the chromed Art-Deco looking ships, the Baroque Naboo architecture and design, the glimmering underwater Gungan city, or the dizzying futuropolis that Coruscant.  The Phantom Menace not only showed us a lot things that we had never seen in a Star Wars  movie but a lot of visuals we had not seen before, period.


4.  Liam Neeson

It is a testament to the actors in this movie that some of them were able to turn in good performances despite being directed by George Lucas.  Neeson's wise and earthy Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn helps ground the movie in the same way that Alec Guiness did in Star Wars.  In the world of the movie, he is an interesting character, one who stands apart from the other Jedi for his worldliness and compassion.  The great tragedy of Anakin's story, is that Qui-Gon might have been the mentor who would have been able to guide him through his later difficulties and help him avoid his dark fate.

3.  Light Saber Battles

This movie was out first chance to see fully trained Jedi Knights in their prime and Lucas really upped the ante in making the light saber battles dynamic and active.  The climatic three-on-one battle between Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan and Maul is possibly the finest fight in the series (with the Luke/Vader Empire fight edging it out for dramatic impact).  I challenge even the most ardent Prequel hater not to get goosebumps at the start of this sequence.

While largely lacking the "banter" that characterized the OT saber battles, this fight is beautifully choreographed and full of revealing character moments, such as when Qui-Gon meditating and Maul prowling during the quick moment they are separated by the ray shield in the Naboo reactor core.  All of this featuring a terrific piece of music...

2. The Duel of the Fates

This section of John Williams score plays during the film's climax, accompanying the dramatic light saber/space/ground battle and stands among the greatest pieces of Star Wars music, period.    While it is showcased most prominently in The Phantom Menace is is present throughout the Prequels.  Even the title is perfect as it poetically sums up Anakin's complicated path.

1. Darth Maul

The star villain role in the new Star Wars movie was always going to be a challenge to George Lucas. After all, how do you follow up what is the most iconic villain in movie history?  Instead of rehashing a Vader-like design (ahem, The Force Awakens), the filmmakers decided to do something completely different with an unforgettable and very organic design that seems to have sprung out of the fevered imagination of some far Eastern demonologist.  While Maul could have used a bit more character development in the The Phantom Menace, he lives on in The Clone Wars series (literally) and has taken his place in the Pantheon of Star Wars Badasses along side Darth Vader and Boba Fett.