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.

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* Better, I thought.

* The first episode’s biggest problem, it seems in retrospect, wasn’t exposition so much as introductions. I mean, the two go hand in hand to an extent, yeah, but it was simply the need to name each new face that bogged down the dialogue and gave the proceedings an unpolished feel from time to time. Here — with the exception of goggle-eyed mute executioner Sir Ilyn Payne in a scene where stopping everything to tell another character who he was made perfect dramatic sense — that need was gone. Instead of meeting the characters, you’re living with them now, and unsurprisingly the show benefits from familiarity.

* This episode also saw the pilot’s brief flashes of delight blossom into more sustained ones from time to time. Tyrion’s conversation with/interrogation of/lecture to Jon Snow is the strongest example: a self-consciously showy yet controlled performance from Peter Dinklage of a character using his bitterly earned smarts to dismantle another character. I actually laughed out loud in sheer enjoyment, the sort of thing I associate with the great HBO revisionist-genre dramas of yore. Fingers crossed for more of that.

* On the other hand, I think last week I was too easy on Michelle Fairley as Catelyn, if anything. The way the character was rewritten is still the major problem — the fact that she started out as the concerned mama bear makes her post-Bran behavior feel less like the nervous breakdown from which she desperately needed to recover that it was and more like par for the course — but I think there’s still enough wiggle room in there for an actor to do something, anything we wouldn’t see coming. Fairley just alternately tears up and crackles her voice or stiffens up and sounds clipped and posh. Actually, I’m not sure “predictability” is the right rubric here; after all, Sean Bean is playing Ned Stark exactly the way everyone, the show’s creators included, pictured Sean Bean playing Ned Stark ever since the idea first crossed their minds, and he’s a blast to watch. You can see him coming, but beneath that I feel like there’s a big chasm of thought and emotion and conflict. With Fairley’s Catelyn, it’s all on the surface. I was happy to see the savagery of her response to the assassination attempt, it felt like a glimpse of a new, more vital Catelyn, but then bam, back to noble, protective, boring Catelyn, now with Hardy Boys investigation action. Bleh.

* The Dothraki…man, the Dothraki. I wonder if the filmmakers’ idea is that the Dothraki “race” is an assemblage of conquered and assimilated. I’m struggling to come up with any other explanation for the United Colors of Vaes Dothrak casting decision besides laziness. I mean, they have to know that we can see that there’s a bunch of white people and black people and brown people ruled by a Hawaiian — it’s not like they’re trying to sneak it past us. Right?

* The Daenerys/Drogo relationship is not going to get any less problematic for viewers who had a problem with it in the pilot, that’s for sure, whether their objections were based on sexism or Orientalism or both. Even if Dany’s making-the-best-of-a-bad-situation approach is a perfectly realistic way for a young woman sold into a marriage as a form of slavery to deal with her plight, it’s going to be hard for people to get on board with the progression from rape to sex-as-power-play to genuine enjoyment to actual love. In response, for example, USA Today’s Whitney Matheson’s pilot-episode indignation has evolved into condescending sarcasm. As always it bums me out to see people, especially professional-critic people, mistake the depiction of a thing for an endorsement or celebration of that thing, but on the scale of cosmic injustice, “being unnecessarily concerned with potential misogyny/racism in pop culture” doesn’t even register. We’ll all live.

* Moreover, maybe it’s the show’s fault after all. I don’t like to purport to speak for people who haven’t read the books — I’m not a mindreader — but I think Adam Serwer may be right that whatever the nature of the sex/gender (or racial) stuff in the book, and whatever the intentions of the filmmakers, the end result just isn’t getting across to viewers who are new to the story. It’s much tougher for the television show, with its limited screen time and inability to access interior monologues and lengthy ruminations on history and culture, to convey that (say) the Dothraki’s idiosyncracies really aren’t any more or less “civilized” than those of the Westerosi, or that the treatment of women is essentially a war atrocity rather than some grab-your-nuts-and-grunt-like-Tim-Allen, John-Norman-Gor-novel pandering to slavering fanboyism. On HBO itself, shows like The Sopranos and Deadwood have directly addressed the misogyny of their protagonists and the society in which they live without being read by very many people as misogynist themselves. If Game of Thrones, based on a series that upon my current re-reading strikes me as being in large part about misogyny and gender inequality’s detrimental effect on everyone involved, can’t get this across, perhaps it’s on the show, not the viewers. I have enough faith in the strength of the original material to believe that eventually the real point of it all will be hard to miss for everyone who either isn’t dopey or doesn’t have their mind totally made up about the show, but that eventually’s a killer.

* This is less about the show than it is about talking about the show, but I’m really bummed out by Douglas Wolk’s recaps so far. Douglas is one of my favorite critics, because even when he’s writing about something with which I’m totally unfamiliar (this happens frequently with his music criticism) or articulating tastes that diverge dramatically from mine (this happens frequently with his comics criticism), I still feel as though he’s speaking to me in a language I can understand — he roots his writing in clear points of reference within the work being discussed, and thus you can get something out of his criticism even when you disagree with his conclusions or, literally, don’t know what he’s talking about. In both cases, that’s an exceedingly rare gift. And that’s why it’s so disappointing to watch him crack half-hearted jokes and pour snark all over a show that it’s pretty clear he’d be perfectly happy to never watch again, rather than either really engage it for all its faults or simply write about something else. I find myself wondering who the target audience is for this sort of thing: Fans of the show will be turned off by the rimshots in lieu of analysis, while detractors have probably stopped watching and thus have no need to keep reading. I understand that the hit counts must be kept up, but I feel like there’s probably a better way for everyone involved to spend their time and resources. To be fair, it’s not all played for the yuks: The comparison between Joffrey Baratheon and Ziggy Sobotka was fun, and calling Dany and Drogo’s sex life “the quintessence of Orientalist camp” is a perfectly legit critique. But the piece ends with an invitation to finish a dirty limerick rhyming “Targaryen” and “barbarian.” Y’know? And even some of his actual analysis goes astray in really obvious ways: It’s not a function of the fantasy genre’s supposedly inherent elitism that makes Lady’s death more affecting than that of the butcher’s boy, it’s a function of how every human being on earth reacts to the death of animals in fiction.

* Anyway, back to the show. In the books, the Hound comes across instantly as probably the scariest dude going, no matter how bad Sansa’s POV chapter says Sir Ilyn freaks her out. But in the show, we first “meet” him in long shot as he engages in some good-natured ribbing of Tyrion; next he comes across as the slightly less scary mass murderer compared to Sir Ilyn; and even his murder of the butcher’s boy is presented as an awful but all-business act, rather than the act of a guy who kills children and laughs about it. As with Cersei, the Hound got hisself humanized.

* Mark Addy is enjoyably “predictable” in the same way that Sean Bean is: He’s what you thought Robert would be, right down to the flash of ugly, sneering might-makes-right savagery when he mocks Ned for his compunctions about having Daenerys killed.

* I want Iain Glen to read me a bedtime story. So soothing!

* Do you think the final shot is enough of a cliffhanger for people? Do you think people understand what it means?

Alright, fuck it, this is for people who haven’t read the books, or at least haven’t finished reading them.

I realized that with minimal tweaking, the post I wrote for my dedicated A Song of Ice and Fire blog could just as easily appear over here. Since perhaps there are people who haven’t read the whole series but would like to discuss the show over here, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Keep in mind that by “NON-SPOILERY” I mean “this review will spoil nothing that takes place after the events depicted in the pilot.” It will, of course, be SPOILERY for the pilot itself. I’d like this to remain true for the comments, please — stick only to the events of this episode.

So if all you’ve seen or read of all this is what aired last night, here you go!

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* Quibbles up front! And yes, they’re pretty much just quibbles.

* I think my biggest problem with the pilot episode, and given how much of that problem arises from changes the filmmakers made to the material from the book we can perhaps extrapolate that to the series in general, is Michelle Fairley’s Catelyn Stark. There’s nothing wrong with her performance, I suppose; she’s just doing what she must with the material, and there’s the rub. The combination of aging all the characters up and changing her motivation in this early part of the story — in the book, she wanted Ned to take the job as the King’s Hand, thinking his increase in power and prestige would make the family much safer than they’d be if he had the stones to turn his friend down — makes Cat’s character a lot less interesting. As a woman in her mid-thirties who was married off during a time of war and basically got right to work bearing her teen husband some heirs, and who then advocates for her husband to take an influential, potentially dangerous gig in the capital rather than risk the equally potentially dangerous dimunition of prestige and power that not taking the job would entail, and who worries after a brood of children none of whom are older than sophomores in high school, Book-Catelyn feels a lot more vital and interesting and difficult to predict, and her plight less familiar, than her middle-aged mama-bear TV-Catelyn counterpart. It’s very early yet, and things may change, but nothing Fairley has been given in the pilot or in any of the previews I’ve seen have enabled her to complicate the character or do much more than play the warm but concerned and stern protective mother and loving wife. She’s a dramatically inert character, far too easy to get a handle on versus pretty much all of the other major players, and that’s no good, because her relationship with her family is the emotional heart of this volume, and we need to find her interesting so that we find that relationship interesting as well.

* The aging-up bothered me more across the board than I thought it would, actually. In re-reading the series, I’ve found that everyone’s relative youth makes their plights so much more powerful. Book-Ned is supposed to be, what, 35? My wife’s 35, and we just had our first child, who’s still negative two weeks old; imagining the two of us with five children, two of whom are teenagers, is one of the book’s most rewarding frissons for me. So too is Book-Bran’s young age—thrown out the window at what, eight? And Book-Robb, who’d be the Lord of Winterfell if Ned takes the job, is what, 15? And so on and so forth. I miss all of that.

* And I miss the subtle message that this medieval lifestyle forces you to do a whole lot of living before you live very long, too. For a long time my mind had a hard time wrapping around the idea of the Targaryen’s as this storied dynasty given that they were only around for 300 years; I was used to Tokien’s millennial timeframes. But when girls are married off the moment they get their first period, and when the cream of your soldiery is 17 years old or so, and when people are considered very, very old at 65, 300 years is an awful long time.

* The critics were right—there was a lot of exposition in this episode. Fewer long stories and explanations of relationships than I anticipated however. For the most part it came in the form of ADR dialogue like “That’s Jaime Lannister, the Queen’s brother!” So it was more clumsy than boring.

* The Dothraki were a bit ad-hoc, no? Perhaps the intention was to avoid any stereotyping of a specific ethnic group, so they cast people from many different ones and combined them. This is what Peter Jackson did with the scary natives in King Kong, if I recall correctly. And in that sense, okay, fine, but when so much care is given to the details of the Westerosi societies, the Dothraki look a bit too much like a casting call for tan-skinned actors.

* If you’re going to call them the White Walkers exclusively, doesn’t that increase your obligation to actually make them white? Don’t get me wrong, they were creepy as heck, but it’s still a bit odd. (In the books, they were mostly called the Others, which I guess the show felt it couldn’t do due to Lost.)

* Finally on the quibble front, Ramin Djawadi’s score was about half-very good (the spooky scenes, the opening credits) and half-“you’re kidding, right?” The “heroic” music when the King’s party enters Winterfell…I was hoping a few of them would be clip-clopping along with coconut shells.

* That said, well done overall.

* Obviously the big critical question raised by nearly everyone who’d seen the pilot early is whether or not newcomers to the material could follow it. It feels weird to be able not to address this central issue, but since I’m not a newcomer, I really can’t. It seemed easy enough to follow to me; yes, there are a lot of characters, but surely serialized television has taught us it’s okay not to have everyone straight by the end of the first episode. But I’m not going to stake my take on the episode on a yay or nay proclamation on this score.

* With that removed from the equation, I can focus more on what I liked best about it: the acting. It’s as though both the filmmakers and the cast realized how hard their task was in this first episode, and went out of their way (Cat excepted) to give everyone little bits of business to separate them out from fantasy cliches. I loved the “shaving Jon, Theon, and Robb” scene with its weird forced intimacy between three very different kinds of “sons” to Eddard Stark and the jokey, casual, but fraught with tension locker-room relationship that’s evolved between the three of them. I loved Daenerys’s dead-eyed stare as she endured first her brother’s inspection and then the scalding water of her bath—these are eyes that have seen too much and prefer to look inward. I loved Viserys’s foppish trot and alarmed exclamation as Drogo rode away without a word. I loved the opening shot of the ill-fated Night’s Watch trio, waiting for the gates to open, already playing the roles they’ve selected—smug, grim, hyper-alert—to help them survive in this world. I loved Tyrion’s unique, booze-seasoned combination of arrogance and self-loathing in his conversation with Jon. I loved Jaime’s “I heard you the first time” to Cersei at the end, already knowing what she wants him to do, trying in vain to put it off, coming to grips with knowing that he’ll do it anyway. There’s enough of all that sort of thing to give me a lot of confidence about the rest of the season. When the exposition and introductions die down, the material will have more room to breathe, and if the cast and crew keep filling the space with these idiosyncratic moments, we’re in good shape.

If you have read all four volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, I invite you to read my thoughts about last night’s premiere episode over at my ASoIaF blog, All Leather Must Be Boiled. As always, the post contains some spoilers for the books if you haven’t read them, so please beware.