SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.
* It’s a mug’s game for people who’ve read the books to try to figure out what people who haven’t read them think of the show, but I’ll tell you what, this episode made me wish I were in their shoes more than any so far. Not even for the bigger developments necessarily, but for…well, the bit I keep coming back to is Gregor Clegane grabbing his sword and decapitating his own horse with a single blow. What would a tyro make of that, I wonder? I think I’d have done a comical spit-take with the beer I was drinking.
* And this episode was laden with visual hooks of that sort. The Eyrie: its high-fantasy layout, its mad ruler and her breastfed boy, its three-walled sky cells. Theon Greyjoy’s wiener. Renly and Loras’s foreplay-by-way-of-barbering. Tyrion bashing that tribesman’s face in. The enormous dragon skull. Jory’s knife in the eye. In positing it as the best of the series so far, much of the writing I’ve seen about this episode focuses on either the increased action quotient or the fine new scenes added by the writers, as well they should, but these visual moments of “whoa” were what stuck with me as I went to sleep.
* Moreover, both Gregor’s Godfather impression and the whole Eyrie sequence went a long way to rectifying my main complaint about last week’s otherwise excellent episode, the way completely understandable constraints stripped the spectacle from settings like Vaes Dothrak or the Hand’s tourney. Clearly the Eyrie of the books, with its multiple ascending fortresses connected by precarious stairways and winches and leading to a mountaintop stronghold it takes a full day to reach, wasn’t going to work with the time and the budget available to a television show. But unlike Vaes Dothrak, where the art department realized it couldn’t portray an ad hoc assembly of pillaged architecture and artifacts from all over the world but didn’t do anything to compensate and just saddled us (no pun intended) with a bunch of tents, the Eyrie is different but still suitably spectacular, with its towering arches and soaring dome construction and gorgeous weirwood throne. The tournament, meanwhile, still feels way smaller than the Westerosi Super Bowl it ought to be, but having a giant chop his own horse’s head off after losing to a dude with the most ornate armor you’ve ever seen, then duel with his burned brother nearly to the death, goes a long way toward making the event as memorable to viewers as it’s supposed to be to the in-story spectators.
* The new scenes were well worthwhile. Robert and Cersei’s conversation did the necessary work of simply demonstrating how their marriage works and why hasn’t had the other killed yet, but for my money the best of the bunch was Littlefinger and Varys’s duel of words/dick-measuring contest in the throne room. Just a pleasure to watch Aiden Gillen and Conleth Hill be sleazy with an undercurrent of genuine danger.
* After the stagey Dothraki wedding fight, the battle with the hill tribe, the Clegane duel, and the Stark/Lannister massacre went a long way toward reassuring me that the show can handle action properly. It’s worth noting, too, that both of the major battles ended with shots of the survivors standing (or kneeling) amid a pile of bodies. Action’s a bloody, murderous business in this world, or at least it should be, and those shots reinforce the way swordplay is depicted as people swinging huge sharp chunks of metal at each other in the hope that they’ll cut something off of their opponent.
* This episode once again used the show’s penchant for rapid-fire scene transitions to illustrate just how byzantine the court intrigue can be. In back to back scenes, Varys meets with Ned to warn him that the king is in danger and keep him on the trail of the Lannisters; Varys meets with Illyrio to warn him that the Starks and Lannisters are fighting and that Ned will soon discover Jon Arryn’s secret, complicating their ostensible shared goal of overthrowing Robert with the Targaryens at their own pace; Varys meets with Littlefinger to talk shit and maneuver against one another; a few scenes later, Varys sits in the Small Council, encouraging Robert to have the Targaryens murdered. We don’t have any more of a prayer of untangling the Spider’s web than Ned does.
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, reviews, TV, TV reviews
Here’s a question that might well be explained better in the books but since I’m (for now) just watching the show you might shed some light on. It seems to me that Eddard Stark’s objections to not killing the Targaryens are ill-conceived, but only because there’s a really big reason that no one mentions: any whiff of foul play in the Targaryens death would be tantamount to an act of war against Khal Drogo and his very belligerent people. Since the whole point of the conversation is to figure out a way to minimize the threat from the Dothraki, it is odd that no one argues against the plan on those merits.
Exactly what I thought. Can’t remember if that point’s raised in the book.
I think the Small Council isn’t worried about that for a few reasons. First, they believe Drogo and Daenerys’s marriage to be one of political expediency. Drogo has no great desire to take his people in boats across the sea to attack a land he’s never seen and seize a throne he doesn’t care about, so if you remove the Targaryen siblings from the equation, why would he bother? He might be angry in that assassinating his wife and brother-in-law is an affront to him, but it’s not like he loooooves her and will now stop at nothing for vengeance, at least as far as the Council believes. Second, Drogo alone is much less of an existential threat to House Baratheon’s claim on the Iron Throne than Drogo with a trio of Targaryen heirs. They have a potential legal claim to the throne, enough to give cover to lords who don’t like Robert and need someone to rally behind, and enough to win the hearts of nostalgic peasants too. Drogo’s just some scary foreigner no one will be very happy to see. Plus, if he did come over without the Targaryens for revenge or what have you, that’s the sort of thing you could probably ride out, for real this time — he’d sack places and eventually go back home rather than seize the Iron Throne for himself, whereas with Viserys, Daenerys, and little Drogo Jr., he’d stay put in order to keep them in charge.
I’d considered the legal and populist case you outline, Sean, and I think it’s a strong one, but the fact remains that they’d at least have to consider the possibility that Drogo might be a tad miffed about someone killing his kid, a potential heir, depending on sex, to his Khalship.
Personally I think the counter argument was excluded to bolster Ned’s moral case because Ned would have had to be the one to deliver it and that would have necessarily weakened the character’s right to the moral high ground. The showrunners want Ned to be seen as a guy who doesn’t compromise on questions of honour and morality, had he started going on about the negative after effects of an assassination attempt then he would have been just as guilty of utilitarian thinking as the rest of the council.
Martin wants him to be seen that way too, I would say–he didn’t offer the practical counterargument in the books, either.
There’s still another factor at play in Ned’s utter rejection of the assassination, I tend to think, but that’s best left for my other blog.
Yeah, that’s true, Martin wants him to be seen that way too, and it makes for fun drama.
I’ll look over there for the other explanation. I thi-i-ink I might know what it is.
Ugh, I hate to have deleted a whole bunch of perfectly reasonable comments, Tim and Zom, but the discussion was edging ever so slightly into “the shape of things to come”-style implicit spoilers, so I hid it away. That said, I agree with Tim that Ned’s objections to the Targaryen assassination plot are reflective of his personality in both positive and negative ways.
That’s totally fair enough, Sean.
I agree with the positive and negative assessment too, in case that wasn’t clear, but it’s difficult to explain why without going into BIG spoiler territory
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