If you think it’s all about sex, dragons and slaughter you might just be wrong. It’s also about apocalypse and that I find rather fascinating.
I watched the whole of Series 8 in a few short days and remained gripped throughout. And not just because of a pretty girl and her pet dragons.
It is bloody, gory and pointless slaughter all the way but perhaps that is the whole point. Perhaps that is what life, human and otherwise, has always been and perhaps that is why apocalypse is rather attractive.
Attractive because it means it’s all over. The world has come to an end, everyone is dead or dying. And in a very strong sense that can come through as an enormous and cathartic release. The struggle is over. It is all finished, no one left to kill . The meteor which put paid to the dinosaurs has struck again and we are all wiped out.
No more bills, tax collectors or trips to the Co-op. No more crushing dullness. Does the phoenix rise from the ashes? Do we want it to? And if it does will in usher in more of the same or some brave new world? Sadly, as likely as not, the former. More violence, greed and struggle for existence. More bills, more tax men and more entreprenooooors thrusting useless junk down consumerist throats.
But that is why I find apocalypse attractive – at least in celluloid. Or is it now digitoid? It always seems a huge relief when the monsters take over, the aliens land. The immense, turgid, dull routine is swept away and as a member of a group of bedraggled survivors I can trudge off to some mountain hideaway and huddle up in a cave never to visit the Co-op again. Never to have to see or see some fool politician’s face or that of Philip Green who did so well for BHS’s pensioners.
Never to hear any bad news because there is no internet and no newspaper. And probably no news anyway.
But of course the “Noble Savage” is merely a dream. There never was a time when the hunter gatherers went about their vegan way, nibbling nuts and glugging palm oil. In peace and harmony.
But watching those dragons breathing fiery death, just for a moment, you think it all might be different next time.
Weltanschauung 