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.
* Goodness, but George R.R. Martin sure carved himself a big slice of cake by choosing (?) to handle this episode! He said on his blog that the material with Tyrion and Bronn and Shagga early on was a holdover from a previous episode written by the showrunners that was moved here during editing, but that aside, he still had to handle the massacre of all the Winterfell staff in King’s Landing; Syrio’s standoff and Arya’s escape; Sansa’s capture and attempts to ingratiate herself with/blackmail by the Lannisters; Barristan’s firing; the Dothraki raid on the Lamb People, Dany’s defense of their women, Drogo’s wounding, and the introduction of Mirri Maz Duur; Jon’s insubordination against Thorne, the wight attack, burning his hand while saving the Lord Commander, finding out about Robert and Ned; Tyrion’s arrival at Camp Lannister with the tribesmen and their subsequent arrangement with Tywin; the scenes with Varys and Ned; Catelyn’s rejection by Lysa; some Bran business; and Robb’s entire march to war. That is a lot of ground to cover. I don’t really wanna use the word seamless, but, well, there you have it.
* The bloody business at the beginning was quite effectively staged. After the on-screen gore of the initial sneak attack on unarmed Northmen by the Lannister goons, the rest is all implied, which somehow makes it even worse by making the viewer complicit with the deaths we don’t see — since we don’t see them, only infer them, we’re the ones cutting the throats of Syrio Forel and Septa Mordane. And the scene in which Arya flees from Syrio’s standoff only to stop short as she hears the screams and sees the shadows of the combat raging what had been her home that very morning was somehow the most brutal bit of all. You can’t go home again.
* Good for the show for giving Septa Mordane a moment of bravery. In the book she’s just a foolish old woman with a bug up her ass — you imagine this coming to her as a total shock to her conception of proper behavior, an affront to her sensibilities. Here she seems like someone who knows how the world works, knows what’s happening and what’s about to happen, and faces it anyway. I like this Septa Mordane better!
* I didn’t see this coming: The Stark daughters’ most unpleasant actions during the downfall of their father were both significantly altered. Arya’s killing of the stableboy was changed from a clumsy but still deliberate act to an accident, and Sansa didn’t narc on her father’s plans to send her back to Winterfell. I actually don’t think I have a problem with either of these. In Arya’s case, for both her and the stableboy I think the outcome is pretty much the same. In Sansa’s, I think the audience would have had a really, really hard time not just forgiving her, but even watching her scenes from then on out. (I worried about that before the show premiered.) But moreover, I couldn’t figure out how the timing would have worked out. The way it’s all conveyed in the show, it seems clear that Cersei springs into action the moment Ned tells her he knows about her and Jaime and warns her to leave before Robert returns. Sansa’s snitching would have been not just unnecessary but confusing unless the show took time it probably didn’t have to explain the precise timing. Heck, I just read through the relevant chapters and even in the book I can’t quite understand why the Lannisters saw Sansa spilling the beans as the just-in-the-nick-of-time intervention that saved their collective bacon, what with Ned going directly to Cersei and Littlefinger’s susbequent doublecross.
* Zombies need a pop-cultural season of rest worse than any other monster, so kudos to the show for figuring out a way to still make one unpleasant and uncanny and dangerous. I’m glad he was fast, and I’m glad that he moved a bit like an automaton, a terminator. Jon’s lamp toss was well-played as well.
* You’re going to lose some of the visual impact of the younger characters by aging them up, and that’s certainly true of Robb, who seems young but not a high-school sophomore suddenly placed in charge of a war. But his physical appearance still manages to work in his favor, with actor Richard Madden’s big brown eyes constantly widened with emotion — fear, anger, uncertainty, grief, whatever. He looks like someone who’s new to all this, doing his best but still very very new to it.
* Greatjon’s fingers — great stuff. That was the “What do you mean I’m funny?” of Game of Thrones.
* Every once in a while, the Monty Python-ness of it all hits me in an amusing way. The Greatjon sounds like one of John Cleese’s broader accents, while Shagga looks like Tim the Enchanter. And obviously, the Holy Grail rule of being able to tell who the King is because “he’s the only one who hasn’t got shit all over him” is very much in effect.
* It’s unfortunate that we haven’t seen enough of the Westerosi way of war yet to realize that the depredations of the Dothraki aren’t a mark of their intrinsic savagery, but a mark of everyone’s intrinsic savagery. Generally speaking, that’s a problem the show is going to have throughout due to its decision to sort of half-ass its depiction of Dothraki culture relative to Westerosi culture. These kids of comparisons are just gonna be harder to make when one of the two cultures being compared is more sketched than drawn.
* Michelle Fairley as Catelyn….aaallllllmost won me over in this episode. It had to be her turn for the hardass that did it, I guess. The performance is still too one-note and Catelyn’s still too mother-hen, but being a mother hen by urging your chicks to launch themselves at bigger meaner birds is finally the complicating character trait that TV-Catelyn needed.
* I didn’t doubt Varys’s sincerity about serving the realm because “someone has to.” That really sounds about right.
* I have to admit, I get a kick out of Tywin’s acceptance of the tribesmen. Even though I knew better, I still expected him to reject these savages out of hand, but one of the things that make Tywin such an effective leader is that he’ll act against type if the means are justified by the ends. In this case, as pathetic as he finds Tyrion and loathsome as he probably finds his low-born new friends, he also recognizes effective (and useful) warriors when he sees them, and I don’t doubt that his compliments to their prowess are sincere as well.
* This episode had some of the show’s strongest images so far. Winterfell’s entire flock of ravens being sent out to all the bannerman was beautifully done, and something I wouldn’t have thought to show at all, sort of like how the lighting of the beacons in The Return of the King went from a throwaway event to one of the most talked-about sequences in the whole series of films because Peter Jackson came up with an interesting way to shoot it — well, because he chose to shoot it at all. But I think my favorite image was of Sansa kneeling before the throne, her sleeves and gown pooling down around her like silk chains. She looked sad and little and deflated. And that was a nice little visual pun right at the end, closing an episode called “The Pointy End” by having one of the points of the Iron Throne slowly swallow the screen.
* Rickon’s scene was sad and creepy. It reminded me of Newt at the beginning of Aliens: “It won’t make any difference.”
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, fantasy, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, reviews, TV, TV reviews
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