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.

*The entire Tyrion trial sequence, from jail cell to exit, was really well done. It was also perhaps the single most faithful-to-the-book sequence in the series so far. The backs and forths, the mind games, Tyrion’s desperate scramble to stay one mental step ahead of his captors while not looking desperate — that’s all straight from the book. The sequence has a forward momentum all its own, one step after another, one maneuver leading to the next, leading eventually to mortal combat and a man’s death. The filmmakers really let that momentum carry the scene, so that you barely notice the moment when wordplay and medieval legal wrangling slip into the kind of situation where a man gets stabbed through the collarbone and tossed out a trapdoor to oblivion. Now that I think of it, that’s sort of the magic trick of the whole series: Beneath words and codes, blood.

* I think what’s undoing the Dothraki material is scale more than anything else. Their Savage Other-ness would seem a lot less shabby and boilerplate if they weren’t just a couple dozen random half-naked brown people in some tents, but the vast horde of the books, in their city of art and architecture pillaged from a hundred cultures they smashed, with their dozens of old widowed queens presiding over a ritual conducted at the intersection of a mountain and a lake instead of in someone’s barbecue pit. Even the shittiest, most venal or brutal Westerosi — and we’ve met several contenders — takes on a certain grandeur by virtue of living in these massive, beautifully designed castles and keeps, surrounded by disciplined-looking troops by the score. The Dothraki just look like a bunch of topless dolts by comparison, every bit the primitive savages Viserys constantly mocks them as. Intellectually we can see that eating a horse’s heart really isn’t any more savage than the notion of trial by combat, but the visuals are constantly telling us otherwise.

* That said, the material in Vaes Dothrak still worked for me here, on the strength of the performances, especially Harry Lloyd as Viserys. He has arguably the least sympathetic character in the show on his hands — well, him and Joffrey — but in a handful of lines with Ser Jorah Mormont in Dany’s tent, he makes us realize why he’s so awful. He was crushed by the weight of great expectations before he even began to live. At this point he’s realized just as Dany did a couple weeks ago that he’ll never be a true king, but acting as though he will be is all he knows. Worse, it’s all he has.

* That same exchange gives Mormont a line that sums him up pretty neatly. “And yet here you stand,” Viserys spits at him as the knight blocks his king despite professing that loyalty means everything to him. “And yet here I stand,” Mormont replies, throwing the words back in Viserys’s face, revealing that this is a man who feels the pull of honor intensely, but other things even more so. That’s how he gets into trouble.

* As for Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys, Alan Sepinwall gave me a real “in” to her performance when he noted that the heart-eating ritual revealed not just the Dothraki’s love for Dany, but Dany’s love for the Dothraki. That’s when I recognized Dany’s assimilation into the khalasar as being of a piece with any teenager’s induction into a group of weirdoes that allow her to be stronger and freer than her constricting family. Viserys might as well be watching in horror as Dany performs as Janet during “Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me” at a midnight performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

* The metallic clank of Viserys’s head hitting the floor gets my vote for best foley art of the show so far.

* Tonks laid it on a little thick in her debut as the wildling woman Osha, but Stephen Don as the wildlings’ ringleader sold that scene by doing the opposite. His menace was in how matter-of-fact he was about it. He didn’t seem like some bwa-ha-ha villain, but just a desperate guy willing to do what it takes to survive. His icy blue eyes didn’t hurt either.

* Robert punching Cersei–woof, that was nasty, and it really toyed with the audience’s sympathies. After all, we all hate her, we all wanted her to shut her lying mouth too. So they gave us what we wanted, only for us to discover we didn’t want it at all. Moreover it conveyed just how dissolute Robert has become. When a man like that is the best hope for keeping the kingdom together…yikes.

* This episode surprised me with just how much impact on the story the physicality of a performance can have even when you’re already familiar with that story’s basic contours via a medium where performance isn’t a factor. Mark Addy’s watery-eyed, burst-blood-vessel ruddiness and penchant for raising his voice in anger over the least inconvenience or slight, for example, does more to sell King Robert’s physical and moral downfall than prose can, while seeing Sansa sneer at Septa Mordane anchors that character in the kinds of sullen, spoiled teenagers we all know and love in a way that simply reading about her petulance and delusions can’t equal. (In fact, contra Todd Van Der Werff, I find Sansa a lot more palatable here than in the books. Here she’s the kind of kid I understand; there her short-sighted idiocy is so overpowering that it’s difficult to recognize.) And most importantly, the results of Ned’s wounding at the hands of Jaime and his men — the sheen of sweat he exudes on his sickbed, his limp, the way Sean Bean plays him with every move and step an evident labor — demonstrate the way King’s Landing has already beaten and broken him down. In the books, without seeing him, it’s difficult to separate his post-injury weakness from the vital man of the North we’d spent all our time with. Here, the break is obvious, and meaningful.

* Renly’s “Jesus Christ, enough is enough” freakout at Robert over the Good Old Days was another fine addition by the writers, fleshing him out as an alternative to Robert’s sordid macho bluster, to the Lannisters’ cold cunning, and to the Targaryen’s high madness. In his interview with Westeros.org, actor Gethin Anthony said that the key word for his creation of Renly’s character was “enlightened”; in scenes like this it’s easy to see how important that is to Renly’s self-conception.

* This isn’t to sell her short at all, I think she’s been doing good work, but I haven’t seen Maisie Williams as Arya in the revelatory light that many viewers seem to see her — but she played her mounting irritation with Syrio as he whacked her and taunted her until she could take no more beautifully. Chills from “There is only one God — and his name is Death,” too.

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.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from All Leather Must Be Boiled.

I’m struck once again by how Game of Thrones: The Show is establishing its aesthetic identity by what it does, for want of a better word, “wrong.” Episode Three’s breakneck scene transitions felt off versus what we’re accustomed to from television, yet complimented the byzantine complexity of this world’s alliances and rivalries. This week’s episode was one long violation of “show, don’t tell,” with character after character telling other characters lengthy stories about the past or filling them in on information about the present. Yet the conversations never felt boring or superfluous, because they told us so much not just about their ostensible topics, but about how this world works. The society of the Seven Kingdoms is held together by the stories its people, particularly people in positions of influence and power, tell each other. The victories and defeats of the past, the valor and ignominy of the competing Houses, the traditions that dictate the positions of men relative to women and the highborn relative to the smallfolk and knights relative to men at arms — in the absence of widespread literacy and with political power a precarious held-at-swordpoint thing, these stories are the glue that binds everything. Telling the right story at the right time can move the world in the storyteller’s desired direction.