Does Jon Snow Become Azor Ahai

If you're a Game of Thrones fan, you know that one of the subplots involves Melisandre's belief that Stannis Baratheon is the reincarnation of the legendary hero, Azor Ahai. The books emphasize that subplot to a greater extent than the series. With the death of Stannis, it's pretty clear that he's not Azor Ahai, and... who else is left but Jon Snow?

So perhaps in some sort of parallel to Danaerys's survival of her husband's funeral pyre, we're headed toward the very dead Jon Snow, arms crossed on his chest clutching his sword, set ablaze... and coming back alive not as "Jon Snow" per se, but as Azor Ahai.

The evidence for this theory would be a cross between what would turn out to be exceptionally manipulative statements by the showrunners that Jon Snow is dead, and the fact that Kit Harrington has been repeatedly seen around the Game of Thrones set, including observation of his participation in a massive battle sequence. Let's be honest: if he's in a massive battle, it's not going to be a flashback.

It's not entirely clear what it would mean for Jon Snow to become Azor Ahai, save for it being difficult to believe that it won't come across as corny. Also, as popular as the show is, I don't think that its necessary to manipulate the audience to create buzz.

Sorry, Game of Thrones Fans: Jon Snow is Dead

Was that clear enough? Let me say it again, just to be clear: Jon Snow is dead.

Please, no more need for recycling the same old theories about why he is alive. That ground has been thoroughly covered. That horse is as dead as Jon Snow.

Of course there actually are some decent arguments for why Jon Snow might somehow be resurrected. That possibility seemed quite plausible in the books, with Melisandre's presence at the Wall providing for a means of bringing Snow back from the dead -- and when Melisandre made her retreat back to the Wall as Stannis's army fell it seemed fair to ask why else she would be there but to save Jon Snow. The books also resurrect... book spoiler warnings Catelyn Stark. The books introduce a character, Coldhands, who seems to be a different form of living dead from the other creatures found north of the Wall.

In both the show and books Gregor Clegane, The Mountain, is brought back as some sort of zombie. Beric Dondarrion is resurrected several times before (in the books) passing his power onto Catelyn Stark. There would have also been the possibility of glamouring, as we know that Melisandre can make one character appear to be another. The book also emphasizes wargs, with some theorizing that Jon Snow could have warged into his direwolf before his body died (never mind that there's no obvious way back to human form, and that we've been told that remaining too long in an animal host will cause you to lose your human character).

Also, it seems like an incredible waste of a very interesting character to kill Jon Snow at this point in the story. The relationship you form with a television character is different from that you form with a character on the printed page, and the loss of Snow seems all the more stark (no pun intended) in the series. Why spend all of that time and energy building him into an interesting character only to kill him off, with nobody else of similar charisma to fill his shoes? Why drop conspicuous hints about his "real" parentage if he plays no role in the end game? From a literary standpoint, why kill off the principal point of view characters who could play a central role in the conclusion, while keeping alive others who can't possibly be on the winning team? Will people, readers or viewers, care about events at the Wall without Jon Snow?

At the same time there's one consistency to Martin's writing: If you're a noble, virtuous character who puts the well-being of others ahead of your own, you end up dead. Do you really think that Snow's body will be hidden and frozen for a year, so that he can be resurrected in Season 7? (Jon Snow on Ice.... Is this a Disney production?) From the standpoint of good storytelling, as questionable as it may be to kill Jon Snow at this point in the narrative, a secret, frozen Jonsicle would seem to be worse.

I suspect that the future story anticipates that readers won't care about the Wall post-Jon Snow, and thus won't be surprised or offended when the army of the dead defeats the remaining members of the Night's Watch (and any Wildlings who might have inexplicably continued to support their efforts in the wake of Snow's death), creating the context for a major conflict between the advancing White Walkers and the dragons of Danaerys. (That story line would seem a bit... predictable. We'll see.) Also, particularly if Jon Snow has the royal blood that many plausibly believes used to run through his veins, we can expect Melisandre to have some interesting visions in the flames of his funeral pyre.

The primary evidence for Jon Snow's death comes from the show, (and if it needs to be said) not the as-of-yet unfinished, unavailable sixth book. The show did not renew Jon Snow's contract for Season 6. It's one thing to give a character like Bran a year off, without much concern for whether the part will have to be recast in a future season -- children and adolescents change a lot, and few would be surprised to discover that Bran looks different after a year of communing with ancient trees -- he'll look different even if they keep the same actor.

While daytime soap operas of old used to switch out adult characters without much concern for appearance, and Game of Thrones has done the same with at least one small part (Gregor Clegane) and with a smaller role before it became larger (Tommen Baratheon) I don't think that audiences will accept a different actor as Jon Snow. He could come back among the undead, perhaps as a hooded Coldhands-type character, but he would both be dead and be a very different character -- what would be the point? If the show wanted to be sure that Kit Harington would be available to play Jon Snow in Season 7 or beyond, given the difficult production schedule, it is highly unlikely that they would risk his taking other jobs that would prevent his participation.

The show understandably shares Martin's affinity for killing off characters -- but sometimes the reasons for a death seem different, such as to simplify story lines and perhaps to control the show's budget. The death of Ser Barristan Selmy (a character whose story line died a slow on-screen death even before the showrunners made it final), the death of Mance Rayder with no glamouring, moving up the death of Shireen Baratheon and the defeat of Stannis Baratheon, not bringing back Catelyn Stark, killing Myrcella Baratheon (who at this point in the books was only missing an ear)....

The showrunners could easily have carried Jon Snow's character forward into season six, perhaps drawing on the chapters dealing with his management of the Wildlings or delaying the death of Stannis Baratheon while having Jon Snow announce the rescue mission that precipitated his death on the printed page. But they instead chose to bump Snow off during the last episode of the season, saving themselves a big chunk of change to apply to hiring other actors, building sets and producing special effects.

If in light of all of that you still think Snow is coming back, what do you think the dialogue would be upon his return in season seven? "Hey, folks, I'm back. Did I miss anything? Ooooh... are those dragons?"

So stop watching the length of Kit Harington's hair -- it's going to get longer and shorter over the coming year because (assuming an occasional haircut) that's what hair generally does. Stop arguing that if you turn your head sideways and squint, you can see proof of Snow's survival because his eyes almost imperceptibly change color during his death scene. "We shall never see his like again, and now his watch is ended."

Would You Even Want a An Apple Watch

In what I expect to be another entry in my unbroken record of making incorrect predictions about future Apple products, why not comment on the rumored "Apple Watch" and the rumored 100 engineer team working hard to get one to market?

Interestingly, we're also told that Apple's chosen to rework the full iOS to run on the watch instead of building up the iPod nano's proprietary touch operating system — although the previous nano was already watch-sized and seemed like a great starting point for a wrist-sized device, Apple's betting on iOS across product lines.

If Apple actually figures out a way to get a useful interface to iOS onto the face of a watch, all the more power to them. I expect Siri would play a huge role... if you have an Internet connection.... But I find myself thinking back to my youth. Sure, the few remaining people who read the comic strip thought Dick Tracy's watch phone was cool, but the craze of the day was the digital watch. I recall the efforts to put more and more features into watches, including an effort to make a TV watch and any number of successfully marketed calculator watches. Tiny screens, tiny buttons. These days, the cool watches are once again analog.

I have to admit a personal prejudice: The only piece of jewelry I wear is my wedding ring. I have a watch, but I don't like to wear it. The idea of wearing a "smartwatch" of some type is not appealing. The more battery life you give it, the more you try to make it a primary device instead of a secondary device, the more you are going to load up the watch band with batteries, antennas and the like. For the advantage, I suppose, of being able to easily look at a tiny screen and perhaps make Dick Tracy-type FaceTime calls. I'm again taken back to the expensive, overly featured digital watches of my youth - wearing one could be cool, could indicate that you had money to burn, could prove that you're on the bleeding edge of technology, but was otherwise not very practical.

What about exercise? You are on the stepper at the gym or out jogging. You're seriously going to run your headphones to your wrist? An oversized wrist band isn't going to feel sweaty and gross? Granted, not everybody exercises, but.... Google glasses, by way of comparison, seem much more practical (although they face the same sort of issues if you try to make them a primary device as opposed to drawing their data from your cell phone.)

And what about heat dissipation?

Obviously Apple has time to resolve these issues, just as it had to when it reworked OS X to work on the iPhone instead of building up the iPod's operating system in the late 2000s. And it should be motivated to resolve these problems quickly: financial analysts are already starting to latch onto watch rumors as a growth opportunity for Apple's battered stock price since the fabled TV project looks increasingly unlikely in the current media climate. (That Bloomberg report is headlined "Apple's Planned 'iWatch' Could Be More Profitable Than TV," in case any investors missed the underlying subtlety.)

I used to wonder more about the Apple TV before I saw how my daughter interacts with her iPad. We already have Apple TV - a personal screen that supports streamed video - the parts that are missing are the licensing agreements that would make it a viable alternative to premium cable, and the software interface that would let you quickly and easily filter your options. I would not be surprised if Apple has a strong concept for the software, but without a licensing agreement there's not really a good reason to push beyond what we see in iTunes or the actual Apple TV product.

If analysts are anticipating that Apple's next big breakthrough is going to be a fancy wristwatch, even with due consideration to how popular wrist devices reportedly are in Japan, I think their focus is misplaced. Let's see... that gives Apple about six or seven months to prove me wrong.

Netflix Strategy and House of Cards

Seth Godin makes the argument that Netflix made a marketing mistake with its release of the entire first season of House of Cards:

HBO understands this, and used shows like the Sopranos to build subscriptions. The day after each episode, people at work would talk about what happened the night before. Not two days later, or four days later, but the very next day. If you didn't watch or didn't have HBO, you felt left out....

Today, of course, we don't wait for work the next day. We talk about it now. And the mistake Netflix made was that they didn't drip. They didn't queue it up for their viewers, didn't coordinate and sync the buzz. In short: they didn't tell you WHEN to talk about it. If "spoiler alert" comes up too often, then we're afraid to speak and afraid to listen (depending on where we are in the viewing cycle).

While I agree that Netflix might have generated some buzz by releasing the episodes on a weekly basis, and that the buzz could draw in new viewers, I think that they both recognized the different expectations of their viewers and also the difficulty of establishing the required level of viewership and buzz in that manner. For example, I've read a number of reviews in which the writer commented that he didn't really get hooked until the fifth or sixth episode. Also, it's not particularly unusual for Netflix to provide TV content, one season at a time, so it has viewers who are used to the luxury of being able to watch all of the episodes from a particular season over a short period of time.

If Netflix releases the entire second season of House of Cards at once, I'll agree with Godin - they don't "get it". But if, as I suspect, they start releasing their original material on a week-by-week basis, I think it's fair to say that the release of the complete first season was a strategic move. While Godin may be correct that an HBO-style strategy would have been better from the outset, I think a compelling case can be made that Netflix needs to establish itself as a producer of high quality original programming and get its members hooked on its original, streamed content before it shifts to a more traditional schedule for releasing new episodes.

What if the New Apple TV Is...

The Apple TV? Seriously, it makes more sense to me that Apple would be improving their device that can be added to any TV set than it would be for them to be attempting to enter the consumer market and trying to compete with products that have established distribution networks and, in most cases, razor-thin margins.

But could it be more than that? Certainly. What if the new Apple TV is... the next generation iMac. Put it in any room as a computer that can substitute as a second TV and use it as a media server to the rest of the home, just as you can through your existing desktop Mac and Apple TV, with the exception being that you can feed your cable through the iMac or through a simple add-on device that allows you to distribute all of your media to other sets in your household via your wireless hub, whether or not they're connected to cable, as long as they're connected to the current Apple TV box or its successor product. Get people used to accessing their program through the Apple TV with the Apple remote (or iPhone and iPad apps), serving audio and video from a central (Apple) computer, renting movies from Apple instead of their cable provider.... (A quick check suggests that I'm far from the only person thinking like this.)

As we can expect to see the next version of the Apple TV unveiled shortly after noon tomorrow, and may see the next iMac at the same time, you'll probably soon know if I'm maintaining my long history of bad predictions about Apple. I'll add to that list, if a new iMac isn't unveiled tomorrow I suspect that they're planning a significant upgrade, not just the incremental updates we've seen over the past few years.

The Most Exciting Superhero Since "Too Much Coffee Man"

I don't know how the concept ever occurred to them, but....

Movie star and politician Arnold Schwarzenegger is developing a TV show and comic book with Spider-Man co-creator Stan Lee.

The Austrian-born star told Entertainment Weekly that the project would be called The Governator.

A Squared Entertainment, which will help produce the show, said it would focus on a superhero living a double life as an ordinary family man.

By night he would be an "ordinary family man"... perhaps under a name like Harry Tasker. By day he would be a suit-wearing, pencil-pushing, bureaucratic hero who would occasionally get angry and attempt to bypass the legislature but otherwise not solve even one difficult problem.

"I will use my incredibly dull superpowered scissors to chop through this red tape. It's stuck. Why isn't my scissors working?"

In a menacing voice:

"You don't bring soda water to a tea party."

Exciting!

Perhaps he can enlist somebody like Michele Bachmann to play his sidekick, "Nutwing".

Lost Ending (Spoiler)

Not that I am usually inclined to post spoilers, but given that last night's episode all but gave away the "nature vs. nurture" theme on the corruptability of man it doesn't seem like I'm giving much away. So here's a climactic moment from the script for the final episode:

The scene opens with a fight between Jack and Sayid. Sayid knocks Jack to the ground and starts to strangle him. Hurley and Kate rush over to try to pull the men apart.

Jack: [gasping] It was an experiment... to see how our lives would turn out... Jacob and the Man in Black arranged it... they made a bet.

Hurley: I'm afraid it's true.

Kate: I believe him, Sayid.

Sayid: Jacob and the Man in Black... ruined my life... over a bet? For how much?

Jack: A drachma.

Sayid: One drachma... fine. That's the way they want it? No problem.

A delightful revenge plot then develops during which Ben ends up in a Polar Bear costume, locked in a cage with an amorous, long-forgotten island resident, while the castaways trick Jacob into believing that the Island is nothing more than a dream sequence in which characters from the HBO series Deadwood have been transposed into a sequel to Carnivàle. Jacob releases the Man in Black from the island, and a grinning Sayid hands Jack a drachma.

The episode closes with the entire cast, hand-in-hand on the beach, singing "Freewill" as the sun sets behind them.

An Apple Branded Television?

Dream on.

Apple will be adding an Apple-branded television set to its lineup by 2011, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. Such a device would have media-management features -- features currently found in the Apple TV settop box -- built into it, as well as a DVR and subscription-based content viewing, according to a research note to clients covered by AppleInsider....

"We see potential for Apple to offer best-in-class software and hardware and charge a premium," Mr. Munster wrote.

I can see Apple trying to partner with television producers to integrate iTunes, or rejuvenating its set-top box. But an actual Apple-branded television? I just can't see it. The "best-in-class" television hardware market is pretty narrow, and I have a hard time believing that consumers will happily jettison their, let's say, $2,500+ televisions every three or four years when the CPU's, RAM and hard drives prove inadequate for the next generation of TV operating systems, or when parts necessary to "Apple TV" but extraneous to the operation of the television start to fail.

I recently purchased a television, the first new television I've ever bought. I got a clearance model. It included a notice that it had built-in support for an online service that was no longer available. Brilliant, building that technology right into the TV and remote. Boy, that worked out. (I mean, in a sense it did - you don't really notice that the feature's missing, and its absence probably helped me get a really good discount, but you get my meaning.)

I do think it's likely that the world of televisions and the world of computers will continue to merge, with more streamed content and content purchased through sites like iTunes being watched on televisions. Apple's never been good at sharing, but perhaps they'll partner with some television manufacturers to offer an "Apple Inside"-type of feature - let the third party build the technology into its set, and let it display an Apple logo in the manner of the "Intel Inside" campaign. But if you're planning on keeping your television for a good many years, or if you're planning on using a variety of competing online services through your TV, I suspect you'll be much better served by a set-top box, or even hooking an inexpensive computer up to your television, rather than paying a premium for technology that is likely to be extinct long before your TV itself stops working.

Given my track record on anticipating Apple's moves, though, many will take this post as proof that Apple's going into the TV business. ;-)

Kids and Television

Today in the Post, an author describes her concerns about young children and television. After introducing the idea that it is possible to let your kids watch TV or DvD's while avoiding commercials, she states,

You probably think that these parents are doing the right thing - avoiding commercial advertising while selecting programs expressly made for children. For years, that's what I thought, too.

The avoidance of commercials is a good thing. To say "it's not the end of the story," is fine, but consistent with the rest of the editorial it should be remembered that small children have trouble distinguishing when programming ends and when a commercial begins - that's the intent of advertisers - and also that for all the talk about programming designed for specific age groups, commercials involve some very sophisticated psychological techniques directed at children within the target market, often far more sophisticated than those used by producers of "age appropriate" programming.

But a flurry of new research says we have more to learn. The problem: We're assuming that our children can make sense of what they watch, no matter how old they are. We're forgetting that huge cognitive leaps occur between the ages of 1 and 7.

Who's this "we"? Is it the "royal we"?

Researchers, it turns out, doubt that a 1-year-old can even make sense of the sequence of information on the screen, let alone pick up the wholesome messages in "Sesame Street." There's almost no evidence that children under 5 are picking up on the moral lessons in "VeggieTales," not to mention the supposedly character-building themes of many Disney movies. And the children's shows on PBS may be more educational, but that doesn't mean that they're always getting through to young children.

This extends to pretty much everything. Babies understand very little of what we say to them, yet still we talk to them. Babies and young children may very much enjoy having a story read to them, but that doesn't mean that they understand the story, let alone their "character-buiding themes" or "moral lessons". Should we also refrain from reading to children until we are sure they will be able to fully understand not just the story line, but also any moral the author intends them to draw? Should we hold off until they can also grasp all of the allegory within a story? How far do we take this? No Teletubbies or SpongeBob until the child is old enough to independently assess dubious claims that certain lead characters are gay?

You may ask, "Where's the real harm if our kids don't 'get' the shows they watch?" If adults are there to provide context, point out new things and shake their hips to the Wiggles, the worries are few. But for most families, TV becomes a babysitter. Would you knowingly hire a babysitter who, no matter how smart, mistakenly leads children astray?

So the story here is, if you're not going to pay attention to the messages your kids are receiving, even if you're pretty sure they're safe and wholesome, make sure those messages come from something other than television? What other sources of messages are acceptable, and why are they superior to television? Or is it that you should let your small children play, unsupervised, or sit quietly in an unstimulating environment, so as to save them from the potential perils of seeing a T.V. show they cannot fully understand?

I've heard lots of parental stories about late nights spent comforting children who were frightened by something they saw in a supposedly innocuous children's show, even if - or maybe because - they didn't understand what it was about.

Are we to believe that this phenomenon is unique to television? Personally, I remember finding the story of Abraham and Isaac rather disconcerting. Is this a quantity thing, based upon the assumption that kids watch lots of TV and don't get any comparable exposure to age-inappropriate material from any other source?

Video is a part of our children's lives, and I'm thankful for it. But as they grow up in a multimedia whirlwind, they'll need us to manage not only how much time they spend with TV and video but also what they watch. That means that parents, TV producers and educators alike are going to have to be aware of what our children will actually be absorbing when the screen lights up.

And that's not such a bad approach to take. But again, why limit it to television?

TV of the Future

In the future, will your TV viewing be of on-demand video, accompanied by commercials automatically selected to match your anticipated interests, perhaps also offered in custom lengths, formats, and at custom intervals? Quite possibly.

I'm not sure what that would mean for the Superbowl.