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.
