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.
* Charles Dance as Tywin Lannister brings a certain steely intensity to the role, which granted isn’t super-tough when you’re introduced as you butcher a stag. (I’d bust the show’s chops for laying the symbolism on a little thick, but as a Law & Order judge might have said to George R.R. Martin when he kicked things off with a stag and direwolf killing each other, “You opened the door, counselor.”) As far as new scenes go it was a fine one in that it allowed Tywin to advance an alternate system of morality to the one espoused by Ned: Since your house is all that will last, it’s all that matters. It also enabled Nikolaj Coster-Waldau to make Jaime look like a frightened, wide-eyed little boy around dear old dad, which did more to convey the man’s menace than skinning a dead animal did.
* It’s a shame that the “sexposition” technique the show uses to convey backstory while someone gets their tits out has worn out its welcome by now, because Littlefinger’s turn with this technique was its best and most appropriate use so far. If anyone is in a position to coach people on how to lie for a living, it’s Littlefinger. And even if you strip away the extra layers of meaning, his little walk-through of the thought process by which johns delude themselves into think they’re the one who finally showed this whore the time of her life was simply a well-done bit of writing on the subject.
* Moreover, the filmmakers cleverly set up some echoes of American Psycho’s similarly staged threesome (“Play with her arse” is the new “don’t just look at it, eat it”) to convey the idea that Littlefinger is concealing something vicious under his mask of smarm. Littlefinger unnerves me more and more the more I think about him, so the flat beady-eyed way he said he wanted “Oh, everything” got under my skin.
* And on a practical level, I feel like his monologue sold me on the apparent age difference forced by the casting of TV-Petyr and TV-Catelyn-and-Lysa versus how those women were portrayed in the books. I buy Littlefinger as a just-into-puberty kid when he first fell for Catelyn, who by then was an older teen.
* You know, I’m a bit surprised that Robert’s fatal run-in with the boar was kept off screen. I thought they might show it, because I could think of some fun and dramatic ways to stage it. Perhaps it was best to keep it off screen, though, since that’s how most of our major players experienced it.
* Wow, Ser Barristan’s life is really not working out the way he thought it would, is it?
* It occurred to me in thinking about the Dothraki in light of the many complaints about their portrayal here that they and all the other “foreign” (i.e. non-Westerosi) cultures in the series have the disadvantage of archaiac and idiomatically different speech patterns above and beyond any other problems they have. It’s hard to think of anyone from across the Narrow Sea as a normal person when they talk funny, you know? So Khal Drogo’s little “let’s braid each other’s hair and talk about invading Westeros” chat with Daenerys went a long way toward humanizing him. He wasn’t quite speaking regular conversational English (via subtitles), but he was given the opportunity to banter and smile and be warm and even correct his wife’s linguistic muff-up. It reminded me a bit of the scene several episodes ago when Dany’s handmaiden and bodyguard sat around jawing with Jorah. It made them feel like people rather than props.
* I’d imagine that for some people, Drogo’s big declaration of war came off a bit too much like a locker room pep talk, but I bought it. It looked and felt like a guy fanning the flames of his own perfectly understandable anger about someone picking on his special lady in order to psych himself into doing something extravagantly dangerous, dangerous enough to feel commensurate with the underlying anger. (Loved the gratitude on Dany’s face, too.)
* Some funky shooting here and there in this episode, no? I didn’t think that POV shot of Cersei approaching Ned and looking down at him with the sun behind her worked. I was a bit more favorably disposed toward the tight close-ups during the wine merchant scene.
* As everyone I’ve read about this episode has said, the Wall scenes trod familiar territory: Jon is simultaneously arrogant and self-pitying until someone points out how good he really has it. Honestly, Jon simply has less to do during the first book than any of the other main characters, so the filmmakers are up against it if they want to keep showing him to us. That said, man, the Wall is well cast. Thorne, Sam, the Old Bear, and Maester Aemon look and act pretty much exactly how they ought to.
* I said this last week, and if anything it was even truer this week: Seeing Sean Bean hobble around with a cane and stooped shoulders and a pained look on his face amid more vital characters ranging from Renly to Joffrey shouts “This dude’s in serious trouble” a lot louder than simple prose could.
* I wonder: If Ned had gone along with Littlefinger’s suggestion to back Joffrey with an eye toward installing Renly eventually, would Littlefinger still have betrayed him?
* It was nice to see the Hound in action in full regalia, however briefly. Without his menacing origin-story speech to Sansa to go on (in the show it was delivered by Littlefinger instead), I’m not sure that viewers will get the message that the Hound’s the scariest motherfucker in King’s Landing.
* Ned’s long walk toward the Iron Throne, his forces arrayed against Cersei’s, was wonderfully done — it looked for all the world like the making of a stand-off, and then surprise! It’s a massacre.
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, reviews, TV, TV reviews
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