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.”

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.

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.