This story contains plot details from the most recent episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones.
Game of Thrones doesn’t much care for the unwritten rules of TV. It will kill babies, and you will like it.
“If you acquire a reputation as a mad dog, you’ll be treated as a mad dog,” Roose Bolton told his sadistic son Ramsay in last night’s (May 1) episode, moments before Ramsay offed his father and set a pack of mad dogs onto his newborn brother. Ramsay wanted to attack Castle Black, a rash move that Roose cautioned against, as it would unite the other Northern houses against the Boltons. Ramsay, the petulant psychopath that he is, then stabbed his father in the chest.
Roose had just fathered another child—a boy—and Ramsay, a bastard, was worried that the newborn would take his place as heir to the North. So what do psychopaths do when threatened by an infant? Murder the infant, of course.
Ramsay lures Walda, the child’s mother (his father’s wife and an important member of rival house Frey), who’s carrying her newborn, to the kennel where he keeps his pack of slavering, vicious dogs. He then, casually, unleashes the hounds onto them—we don’t see the slaughter directly, but we hear the guttural bellows of the dogs, and Walda’s screams.
One of the unwritten cardinal rules of television is that infants don’t die. Everyone else is fair game, but you just don’t kill a baby. It’s not completely without precedent—but it’s almost always implied to have happened (rather than shown or, in this case, heard), and is the result of something non-violent, like an illness. Certainly, this was the first time a baby has ever been eaten by dogs.
On any other show, this would be a preposterous turn of events. But Game of Thrones makes it living scoffing at taboos. In the very first episode, for instance, a young child is pushed out of a window after he catches an incestuous couple having sex. For Ramsay, the cartoonishly evil, genital-mutilating serial rapist and murderer, this was just another day at the office.
Game of Thrones has long been criticized for its excessive use of violence, which sometimes seems done purely to provoke a reaction in its viewers. It is far from the only popular work of fiction to deal in extreme violence, but this scene in particular lacked the philosophical undercurrents of a Cormac McCarthy novel, or the silly, intentionally over-the-top violence featured in a Quentin Tarantino film.
Certainly, some TV taboos deserve to be broken. Game of Thrones has shown gay sex even though it doesn’t explicitly appear in George R.R. Martin’s source novels. The show isn’t afraid to kill off beloved characters, as long as the moments are earned and make sense within the narrative.
But perhaps other taboos are taboos for a reason. There aren’t many scenarios where killing an infant via dog mauling actually advances the story in an organic, interesting way. Let’s leave the babies alone.