‘The Bastard Executioner’: No Sons, All Anarchy
The funniest scene in The Bastard Executioner is a little shade aimed right at Game of Thrones fans. It’s a quick sight gag, deep in the first episode — we see one of the evil fourteenth-century noblemen (this show has loads of those) hiding in a discreet corner of the fortress, banging the daylights out of one of his young manservants. When the coitus gets interrupted by official business — sorry, Your Lordship, but it’s time to sign off on slaughtering some peasants — the manservant turns around, tosses his curly hair and blinks his long black eyelashes into the camera. Dude looks exactly like Jon Snow. And don’t think for a minute that’s a coincidence. Kurt Sutter, the Sons of Anarchy auteur, is moving into Game of Thrones territory with his own mega-violent medieval saga. And this scene is just his way of telling the competition, “Winter is coming.”
The Bastard Executioner patrols a very different corner of space-time than Sons of Anarchy did — Sutter brings all the head-bashing gore of the California biker-gang melodrama to medieval times. Welcome to fourteenth-century Wales: A nasty place, where beheadings are the main mode of social interaction. The sadistic English barons ride across the Welsh countryside. When the peasants revolt, they get drawn and quartered. Skulls get smashed. Throats get cut. “Bloody work is the Lord’s,” says one of the Welsh rebels piously. Did somebody say the peasants are revolting? You keep expecting Mel Brooks to show up and reply, “You said it — they stink on ice.”
The concept is clever: the SAMCRO bikers go to Westeros. The battle scenes definitely evoke the Sons bikers, with all their gun-running, rib-cracking, eye-gouging, Harley-stradding, artery-severing ways. So it figures Bastard would take the same chop-’em-and-mop-’em approach to an even gnarlier time, the Middle Ages. It’s a real fuck-you to Game of Thrones, all its precious literary trappings and hoity-toity nobility — and even if you love Thrones, there’s something admirably punk rock about how Sutter gives the formula such a hostile pulp make-over.
But Sons was always a Shakespearean family battle at heart — I loved it because it was a generational cagematch with the Sixties vs. the Nineties in modern California. It was Charlie Hunman’s Jax, such a Kurt type, vs. Ron Perlman’s Clay, such a Dylan, with Katey Seagal’s bad-ass matriarch Gemma pulling the strings behind their backs. In the first few episodes, Bastard doesn’t have the same emotional resonance, because there’s no family conflict going on behind the violence — no parents, no kids, no siblings. Lots of anarchy here, but no sons.
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