Debarred by fate from military prowess, Tyrion has never been able to influence events except with his brain, and his trial is the show’s clearest proof that, in an unreasonable society, to have reasoning power guarantees nothing except the additional mental suffering that accrues when circumstances remind you that you are powerless. Your only privilege, even as the son of a noble house, is to understand the fix you are in, and to express yourself neatly when neatness can avail you nothing. Tyrion has enough influence to secure for himself, among his outsized supply of paid mistresses, a woman he genuinely loves: the camp follower Shae, touchingly played by Sibel Kekilli. But he can’t save her from harm, so even his best quality, his natural tenderness, becomes his enemy. Tyrion is the embodiment, in a small body, of the show’s prepolitical psychological range. A perpetual victim of injustice, he yet has a sense of justice: circumstances can’t destroy his inner certainty that there are such things as fairness, love, and truth. Those circumstances might lead him to despair, but he takes their measure by his instincts. To raise, for an uninstructed audience, the question of what comes first, a civilized society or an instinctive wish for civilization, can’t be a bad effect for an entertainment to have; although we might have to be part of an instructed audience ourselves in order to find that effect good, and we had better be protected by the police and an army from anyone who finds it trivial.
Philosophical conundrums aside, there is the matter of Tyrion’s indispensability; and here, surely, we finally come down to a certainty that there is one character the show can’t do without. We felt shock when Ned Stark was decapitated, and when Tywin Lannister was killed. But we could survive those shocks, and might even have been able to bear it if Ned’s darling daughter Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), after seasons of being protected like a caged nightingale from the casual rapaciousness of the dreaded Joffrey, had been not only raped but killed, just as, in real life, some daughter, equally precious, is raped and killed every day of the week. Besides, to put it as compassionately as I can, the dramatis personae contain plenty of characters we wouldn’t have minded seeing the back of.
Of those we come to love, there are many, but we have been ready to see them go. Young Arya, for example, braves so many fatal hazards with so tiny a sword that it would not have been surprising to see her pinned by her own toothpick like a cocktail sausage. Clearly, the main thing keeping her alive was the showrunners’ determination to fascinate us with the process of her maturation, but from our own lives we know that the wish to see someone grow and thrive can be thwarted by chance. Everyone in the show is dispensable, as in the real world. But without Tyrion Lannister you would have to start the show again, because he is the epitome of the story’s moral scope. His big head is the symbol of his comprehension, and his little body the symbol of his incapacity to act upon it. Tyrion Lannister is us, bright enough to see the world’s evil but not strong enough to change it. ♦