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One of the most charming and irritating things about the “Star Trek” franchise, ever since its inception in 1966, is that it has always been oddly aware of itself. Unlike “Star Wars,” that other big space franchise, which purposefully places its narrative “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” to make it the stuff of myth and romance from the get-go, “Star Trek” takes place in our own future.

It is once again taking place in our future. Yesterday, CBS and Paramount announced a new “Star Trek” series to air sometime in 2017. Though there is a market for riveting appointment television, as “The Big Bang Theory,” “Scandal,” “The Walking Dead” and “Empire” regularly prove, CBS isn’t going for that. Instead it wants to build its All-Access streaming app audience with the lure of an all-new “Star Trek.” (What is the All-Access streaming app? It’s a thing that you pay $6 a month for to watch “The Good Wife,” because CBS won’t put its just-aired shows on Hulu.) This strategy, of putting a prime property on a minor platform, is also how the corporation built UPN many years ago.

But that was then, and this is peak TV.

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As most readers and viewers know, George R.R. Martin methodically built the world of “Game of Thrones” from the history up — his latest book, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” takes place a century before any of the events chronicled in the respective series — but there’s one challenge he wasn’t equipped to face, so when HBO decided to adapt his novels, they turned to linguist David Peterson to create living languages from the scraps of Dothraki and High Valyrian in the novels.

In his new book, “The Art of Language Invention,” Peterson describes the process by which he created those languages, and provides a template for neophyte “conlangers” — people who wish to invent their own foreign tongue — to produce their own. 

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Well, he certainly looks dead. Near the close of the fifth season of “Game of Thrones,” the shaggy haired, honor-bound Jon Snow -— lured out by the promise of finding his uncle Benjen – is repeated run through with swords. “For the Watch,” his assailants intone, and he’s soon flat on his back in the, uh, snow, blood pooling around him, eyes gone blank.

It’s hard to think of a clearer definition of “dead” than this. The actor who plays Snow, Kit Harington, told Entertainment Weekly that his character is dead and “not coming back next season.” The show’s co-creator David Benioff has talked publicly about “the death of Jon Snow.” That should probably be enough.

But at least since July, there have been rumors that Snow’s character is secretly alive, or coming back, or something. When Harington walked through the airport in Belfast – near where the show shoots – Vanity Fair declared, “The return of Jon Snow is turning into the worst-kept secret in TV history.”

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Ever since Jon Snow got the Julius Caesar treatment on the “Game of Thrones” season finale, there has been plenty of speculation that the Lord Commander isn’t actually gone for good. Rumors of Jon Snow’s resurrection has been fueled by the fact that his death makes almost no sense narratively (not to mention Melisandre’s conveniently timed arrival at Castle Black), as well as plenty of fan sightings of a long-haired Kit Harington on a plane to Belfast, where the show is shooting right now.

Despite so-called powerful female characters and apparent moral ambiguity, “Game of Thrones” and “True Detective” tend to resign themselves to the darkness  —  to the way things are. There may be an acknowledgment of the harm that living in patriarchy causes people, but more often than not, there is a real pessimism in how these shows frame oppressive systems. It’s easy to mistake scenes of human suffering with actual empathy for the suffering, but folks at HBO don’t spend $8 million on a battle because they want us to despise the idea of war. They want us to watch it in awe, tune in next week, be entertained, as more people and environments are destroyed.

And if a drama created by men repeatedly fetishizes the horrific actions of humanity, making millions while depicting “gritty” wars and sadistic acts of violence, we might ask: Is it truly interested in change? Or would it rather continue playing the same old game, where the rules are always weighted in favor of men?

Starting around the turn of the decade, rape on television morphed from a delicate topic to practically de rigueur. In the last two years alone, shows as vastly different as “Downton Abbey” and “Game Of Thrones” have graphically portrayed violent rape—typically, but not always, perpetrated by men onto women—to the point that depictions of sexual assault on television have become a regular part of the national discourse. “SVU,” “Outlander,” “Broad City,” “Inside Amy Schumer,”“Orange Is The New Black,” “Tyrant,” “Stalker,” “Shameless,” “Scandal,” and “House Of Cards” have all handled sexual assault, in their own way—either by depicting rape, exploring whether or not a sexual encounter is rape, or making jokes about how often rape happens. For a crime that has a dismal 2 percent conviction rate, it certainly is getting talked about an awful lot.

This is the punishment Cersei Lannister was subjected to in Sunday’s episode—but its roots run much deeper than just George R.R. Martin’s imagination. In the medieval period, adulterers were often subjected to exactly this punishment—a naked walk through crowded streets—not as torture but as a lasting consequence for their sinful behavior. The image of a publicly shamed adulterer is a thread that runs through medieval literature, as well. From Guinevere’s ill-fated romance with (no naming coincidence here) Lancelot to actual French customary laws, images that reflect Cersei’s ordeal are abundant. For in medieval law, the point of humiliation was to brand the offender, not with a burn but with a lasting reputation of ill repute. Cersei doesn’t bear a scarlet letter, but the shame is the same.

Last night, Cersei Lannister — hair shorn, stripped naked, head encrusted with blood — was led on a brutal, Medieval-style walk of shame through King’s Landing, as angry onlookers screamed insults at her and pelted her with garbage. It was a grueling scene to watch, and not an easy one to shoot, either. The scene was shot in Dubrovnik, Croatia, but it took a whole lot of negotiating with the Church of St. Nicholas, where the scene began, in order to be allowed to shoot there. It was also mighty expensive, with TMZ reporting that the scene cost $200,000 to shoot, including the 200 security guards hired to make sure no onlookers got a peek at the shoot (although of course, some did).

On “Fox & Friends” this morning, co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck was outraged by those criticizing Stannis Baratheon’s decision to sacrifice his daughter, Agamemnon-and-Iphigenia-style, to the Lord of Light. “There’s only one true god and his name is R’hllor,” she said, adding that “it’s a leader’s job to make the difficult decisions, and he should be applauded for doing so.”

In the wake of someone’s death, it’s common to console the bereft with the idea that those who’ve passed on exist now “in a better place.” It’s a strange consolation in the best of times, given there’s no guarantee of any sort of existence beyond the one we currently inhabit and, even if there is, it’s cold comfort to think someone we care about would be better off somewhere else. Yet on “Game of Thrones,” when an innocent is taken out of its brutal, hateful, world, you can’t help but feel a sense of relief that their suffering has come to an end and that they’ll no longer serve as merely a pawn in someone else’s chess game.

There has been a lot of talk about the brutal, often gratuitous depictions of sexual violence on “Game of Thrones,” particularly in the wake of Sansa’s traumatic rape two episodes ago. As our own Sonia Saraiya wrote at the time, “the problem, as ever, with ‘Game Of Thrones’ rape is not that it exists but that it fails to adequately justify why it exists.”

For nearly 20 years in the middle of the 20th century, a small group of men met twice a week in the British university town of Oxford. They drank, they smoked, they told the occasional off-color joke and they sang a lot of very old songs. They also read aloud to each other from works they’d written, stories and papers that they believed to be radically out-of-step with their time. Everything about the greater world around them conspired to persuade them that what they valued and enjoyed was either doomed or already obsolete. One of them happily described himself as a “dinosaur.” Yet they would go on to shape global culture in ways we still feel today.