It’s back!! And unlike Jon Snow at a dinner party,
Game of Thrones is always welcome.
The wait between seasons seems
interminable, and yet, whenever Game of
Thrones returns, it’s like we never left Westeros at all. While other shows
ebb and flow in quality, this is the one series that maintains such a high
level of acting, writing, set design, costuming, and score, that it is simply
unparalleled on television.
As always, I am joined by Christopher Lockett, a dear friend and
colleague who is a professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland, and who
has read the books several times. He will fill us in on where the series
diverges from the books, what it does right, and in some cases, will explain in
more detail some background information that might enrich our viewing
experience. Since I have read only the first book, I will focus on the show
less as an adaptation, and more as an entity unto itself. Without further ado,
here we go!
Nikki:
Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good
place to start. In the opening credits sequence (which my husband insists will
be 10 minutes long by the time the show is in its tenth season, but which I
always love to watch), you are always given the places that will feature or be
mentioned in that episode. In this one, we are shown King’s Landing, The Eyrie,
Winterfell, The Wall, Pentos, and Meereen. Winterfell is finally no longer spewing out smoke, but notice it now contains the
rack upon which we see Reek (formerly Theon Greyjoy) tied to when Ramsay Bolton
wants to torture him. The new place, Pentos, is shown only sideways in this
episode, and considering Tyrion approaches the city while lying on his side,
and then is off-balance and drunk the entire time he’s there, this angle makes
perfect sense.
We open with two girls wandering through
the woods, one wanting to turn back lest they get into trouble, and the other,
golden-haired one a haughty little thing who forges ahead, insisting her father
is not a man to be feared. It doesn’t take long to guess that the defiant one
is a young Cersei, as much a peach in childhood as she is when she’s grown up,
and she’s going to see a witch who will predict her future. She will marry a
king, and will become queen. When she asks if they will have children, the
witch replies, “No,” and then says he will have 20, and she will have three.
The child looks baffled and says that doesn’t make any sense, but we viewers at
home nod knowingly — of course they
won’t have children, but she will have three children with her brother Jaime, while
Robert will populate King’s Landing with his bastards. But her reign as queen
will be short-lived: she will be displaced by someone younger and more beautiful,
who, she is told, “will cast you down and take everything you hold dear.”
You can just feel the adult Cersei
clenching her fists, gritting her teeth and muttering, “Margaery...”
What Cersei holds dear are her children,
and her family’s power. Margaery Tyrell displaced her as queen by marrying
Joffrey, and Margaery’s grandmother saw to it that that marriage wouldn’t even
make it to the wedding night (thank GOD for that). Now Margaery is about to
marry Tommen, displace her a second time, and we can only imagine what that
will mean. Olenna’s murder of Joffrey put the blame on Tyrion, who was locked
up and ultimately killed Tywin, so, knowing Cersei’s mind, she will eventually
twist the events in such a way as to trace the blame for her “beloved” father’s
death back to Margaery. One could be grateful that Cersei’s daughter, Myrcella,
is safe in Dorn, except for the fact that she’s in Dorn, which is the homeland of Oberyn, the man who was slaughtered
by the Mountain at Cersei’s insistence. Knowing that her daughter was being
married into his family, Cersei clearly didn’t think that one through.
“Gold will be their crowns,” the witch
tells her, “gold... their shrouds.”
And now we are in the present, with Cersei
climbing the stairs to see her father’s body, as it’s laid out just like her
son’s was, with Jaime standing guard nearby, “The Rains of Castamere” gloomily
playing, the statues of the Seven surrounding the corpse, and Tywin’s face
adorned with those stones that make him look like he’s still staring up at you,
and are about as effective and creepy as Richard Harrow’s mask on Boardwalk Empire. She blames Jaime for
Tywin’s death at the moment, because he freed Tyrion, which allowed him to
commit the act. “Our father is dead and that little monster is out there
roaming free,” she hisses at him. She tells him that the other families aren’t
their enemies (wrong) — it’s Tyrion. She shames Jaime, calls him stupid, that
he doesn’t think through the consequences of his actions (rich considering the
position in which she’s placed her daughter), and tells Jaime that their father
loved him most of all as she kisses the top of his head.
If there’s one thing Cersei is a master of,
it’s kidding herself.
And from there we move to a new place on
the map of Westeros: Pentos. Our diminutive hero has escaped the clutches of
Cersei, but he’s looking a little worse for the wear. Thankfully we have Varys
there to deliver the episode’s best lines, as always. What did you think of our
introduction to Pentos, Chris?
Christopher:
Ah, but we’ve been to Pentos once before, with the
same skew-wiffy map view, way back in the very first episode when we met a
young and scared Daenerys and her psychotic brother Viserys … in the very same
manse to which Varys brings Tyrion. Varys talks about his friend Illyrio, who
owns the place, and who has been his co-schemer in trying to save Westeros from
itself. (I was a little disappointed that Illyrio doesn’t make a reappearance,
as he was played by the lovely Roger Allam, whom some of you might know from
his role on the BBC radio comedy Cabin
Pressure, in which he plays sage and world-weary co-pilot to Benedict
Cumberbatch’s arrogant but inept captain).
Anyway … here we have one of our first big
divergences from the novels. In them, Varys does not accompany Tyrion to
Pentos—he just sends him on his way and disappears. Tyrion arrives in Pentos
and is delivered to Illyrio’s house, and it takes somewhat longer for him to be
read into the scheme. (In truth, I kind of like the brevity of this episode
versus the novel—Tyrion’s drunkenness and self-pitying gets very tedious very
quickly, and it goes on a long while). But here we have Varys to give his new
ward the 411.
I have to say, I really loved how they
introduced this scene, with Tyrion’s claustrophobic POV through one of the
holes in his crate. I can’t say I blame him for heading straight for the wine.
And the way in which Varys releases him to tumble onto the ground in a mound of
straw made me think of The Hobbit
when Bilbo releases the thirteen dwarves from the barrels after making their
escape from the Elven king.
And we get a handy little bit of exposition
here from Varys as Tyrion stumbles his way to the wine. From early on there has
been the hint of a conspiracy at work: if you’ll remember from season one,
there’s a scene in which Arya—chasing cats as part of her training with Syrio—chases
one into a basement room where they store the dragon skulls. There she
overhears Varys and Illyrio talking about the animus between the Starks and the
Lannisters, and worrying over the timing of the inevitable war in Westeros, as
Khal Drogo “will not make a move until his son is born.”
Now we learn more: there has always been a
cabal of plotters, “a group of people who saw Robert Baratheon for the disaster
he was,” who have been working behind the scenes to save Westeros from itself.
Tyrion, unsurprisingly perhaps, is having
none of it. It’s questionable whether he’s even listening to Varys, only
responding to him to contest his status as a lord. “I don’t think I am any more
… a lord,” he growls. “Are you a lord if you kill your father?” As I already
said, I’m happy that we move through Tyrion’s self-pity briskly—what’s on
display here is to be expected and, to a certain extent, darkly entertaining.
We hardly expect him to pop out of the crate bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but
GRRM really kind of overdid it in A Dance
With Dragons. Here instead we get a few moments of Dinklage-quality comedy
and pathos, and I quite enjoy the contrast between his cynicism and Varys’
earnestness. “Why stop now?” he asks when Varys observes that he drank all the
way from King’s Landing. “Because we are talking about the future of our
country,” Varys chides him.
I need to pause there and note how rare
such a sentiment is in this series: people talk about the “realm” at times, but
mostly what’s at issue there is the Iron Throne and the power it confers. Besides
that, the preeminent thing with which people identify themselves is family—or
with whatever major family they are sworn to. “Country” is not a term or
concept that has really appeared on this show, which is keeping with GRRM’s
fidelity to history—and the fact that such concepts as country and nation were
more or less alien to feudal societies. So to hear Varys speaking in such terms
sets him apart from the squabbling factions he’s hoping to unite, and shows us
that, for all of his scheming, he’s really quite the lofty thinker (certainly
much more altruistic than his erstwhile foe Littlefinger).
But again, Tyrion is having none of it.
“The future is shit,” he says, “just like the past.” And as if to punctuate his
words, he proceeds to puke up the wine he’s just drunk. And pours himself
another drink.
But then we cut to Mereen and the rather
spectacular toppling of the harpy statue, a moment of ecstatic symbolism—the
new queen ushering in a new order—almost immediately undercut by the murder of
an Unsullied at the hands of a masked assassin. What did you think of where
we’re at in Mereen, Nikki?
Nikki: Well, as you know, I pledged fealty to House Targaryen back in
season 1, so Daenerys has always been my Khaleesi, my Mhysa. Until last season,
she seemed to be the shoo-in for that Iron Throne. Who cares if you have the
family name or believe it’s your hereditary right or you have an army? This
woman’s got dragons. She has taken on
the role of The Mother wherever she goes: she’s the mother of dragons, and the
mother of her people. She frees slaves, they pledge loyalty to her and her
alone, and she builds up armies this way. She seemed unstoppable.
But if it were that easy, everyone would be
doing it. Turns out, when you free the slaves, you piss off the masters. Oh,
and they don’t live side by side very nicely. The slaves have nowhere to go, no
way of making money, no roofs over their heads. The slave-owners can’t function
without the help and the economy tanks. And those dragons? Freakin’ HUGE and
out of control. They’re swooping down from the sky and picking goats right out
of the fields. When Drogon, the biggest and fiercest (and, named after her
husband, the one to whom she is closest) went AWOL, Daenerys did the only thing
she could think of, and chained up her other two children in a dark cellar, for
their own good.
And now, things are falling apart. The
people want the fighting arenas back: it makes the slaves feel powerful, and
gives the slave-owners something to watch. Daenerys says no: it’s degrading and
she’ll have none of it, regardless of what anyone, including Daario, tells her
to the contrary. She doesn’t need to appeal to the lowest common denominator,
she tells Daario; she has power in other ways. But she is now finding violent
resistance in the form of the Sons of the Harpy — whom I’m assuming are made up
of the nobility who have lost their power — who are attacking the Unsullied.
As she points out, she has the Unsullied
patrolling the streets to remind people of her army. He scoffs, and tells her
that any wealthy person could buy an army of the Unsullied. “You’re not the
mother of the Unsullied; you’re the mother of dragons.” She tells him she can’t
find Drogon, and can’t control the other two. “A dragon queen with no dragons?”
he says. “Not a queen.” She descends into the cavern to find Rhaegal and
Viserion, the two dragons named after her late brothers — who, similarly, could
not be contained — and they attack her, breathing fire, screaming, and yanking
at their chains. They’ve gone feral, and see her not as their mother, but the
one who trapped them in this dark place.
Can Daenerys regain the strength she had in
earlier seasons? The episode opened, as you say Chris, with that stunning sight
of them taking down the golden harpy statue, which she means to be an act
signifying that the slaveowners no longer run this place, but her. However, the
statue is of a golden woman with wings — like a dragon — and I couldn’t
help but fear that it was foreshadowing what was to come: she will come crashing
to the ground just like that statue if she can’t find a way to regain control.
The harpy statue wasn’t the only moment of symbolism in the episode: In a
particularly brutal scene, we see a member of the Unsullied visiting a brothel.
As part of their training years earlier, the Unsullied were ripped from their
families, and stripped of anything that would ever make them enjoy sex. So he’s
not there for that; no, he’s there for something else. Later Missandei asks
Grey Worm what a member of the Unsullied would be doing at a brothel, and he
says he has no idea. But it’s clear from the act what this man wants: to be
mothered. He wants the woman to keep her clothes on and not make this act
sexual in any way, so let him lie at her breast as she strokes his head and
sings him a lullaby, to make him think that everything in the world will be
fine. This is perhaps why Daenerys casts herself in the role of the mother —
she is telling her people she will take care of them, that they have nothing to
worry about, that she will be the safety net around them as long as they remain
loyal to her. But, just as her motherly tie to her dragons has been snapped, so
too does White Rat lull himself into a false sense of security in the arms of
the prostitute, just as his throat is slit open.
Later, in the episode, Tyrion and Varys are
speaking, once Tyrion has cleaned himself up and is trying to drink himself to
death. (And thank you for correcting me on Pentos, Chris! The interesting thing
is, during this scene with Tyrion and Varys standing on that ledge, I said to
my husband that it looked exactly like the place where Daenerys had been
standing with Viserys! I just assumed it was similar, and didn’t realize it was the same place.) He tells Tyrion
that he is a compassionate man, and that what the land needs is peace, to be a
place where the powerful don’t prey on the powerless. He asks Tyrion if he’d
spread misery throughout the land were he to take the Iron Throne. Tyrion
scoffs and says he’ll never sit on it. No, Varys agrees, but he says, “You
could help another climb those steps and take that seat. The Seven Kingdoms
need someone stronger than Tommen, but gentler than Stannis, a monarch who can
intimidate the high lords and inspire the people, a ruler loved by millions with
a powerful army and a right family name.” Tyrion scoffs again. “Good luck
finding him,” he sneers. Varys stands up straight and replies, “Who said
anything about him?” Daenerys has
everything it could take to be a good, strong leader of Westeros. What she
lacks is a proper advisor who is cunning and knows exactly how to maintain that
power. The thought of her joining forces with Tyrion — the first time
Daenerys’s character would ever actually share screen time with another
character from another family on the show — makes me giddy with excitement.
Now, if they could just get Brienne and Arya over there, it would be a perfect
union.
As for that other Stark, Sansa’s hair is
jet black and she has assumed a new air of confidence as she stands by
Baelish’s side. What do you make of how our little girl has grown up, Chris?
Christopher:
As I have said many, many times over the four years
we’ve been doing these posts, Sophie Turner has done a yeoman’s job in what is
easily the most thankless role in the GoT firmament. She started coming into
her own at the end of season one, and spent most of seasons two and three
undergoing the painful process of growing up in a hard, harsh world that is
effectively the antithesis of all her dreams of princesses and knights. And
then last season was yet another gauntlet, which she endured with poise and
imagination, having learned some crucial lessons from Littlefinger. And now she
seems to read the people around her well, and to carry herself with a
confidence born of hard lessons.
And it is here that we find another
divergence from the novels: Littlefinger’s plan to take her far away, not just
from potentially treacherous people in the Vale, but far enough away to elude
the long reach of the Lannisters, is new. In the novels, Sansa and Littlefinger
stay in the Vale and she remains disguised as his bastard daughter Alayne. So
where are they now going? Wherever, it will be news to me.
(And I’m curious to know what you think of
this other tease, as Sansa’s coach passes by where Brienne and Pod have stopped
at the roadside. Poor Brienne).
Which brings us back to Cersei, who is
drinking rather heavily at her father’s wake and enduring a painfully insincere
monologue from Loras Tyrell, telling her what a force he was. And we have our
first glimpse of a new religious order in the person of Cersei’s cousin and
erstwhile lover Lancel: he comes dressed in penitent’s robe, barefoot, and
seeks her out, alone, to offer her his apologies for having tempted her into
their “unnatural relations.” And we all snicker a little: as if Cersei was the
weak, tempted woman in that relationship. And she herself cannot contain a
laugh when Lancel promises to pray for Tywin’s soul. “The day Tywin Lannister’s
soul needs your help …” she trails off and sips her wine.
I’ll be very interested to see how the show
deals with the infestation of Sparrows. This is our first taste of the “bloody
fanatics” who begin to descend on King’s Landing. Like much else in Game of Thrones, this austere, rigid
religious order speaks to a larger sociohistorical truth: that fanaticism
breeds out of despair. We’ve seen stark images of a countryside ravaged by war,
people’s livelihoods ruined, families destroyed by violence, villainy, and
rapine as the armies of the warring factions sweep back and forth across the
continent. None of the great houses are innocent of barbarism, as Brienne’s
fight with rogue Stark soldiers showed in season three. And out of all this
death and despair rises a new order of people who attach themselves to whatever
can give them meaning. “Their world is at hand,” Lancel tells Cersei ominously,
referring to the Seven Gods, but we can also interpret that as meaning Lancel’s
fellow Sparrows.
Of course, Cersei Lannister is not one to
take a barefoot penitent seriously or for one moment imagine that a rag-tag
band of fanatics possesses any power.
Nikki: And Cersei also has an enemy in the form of her widowed
daughter-in-law, who’s about to marry Son #2. We see Loras in bed with Oliver,
discussing plans to move to Dorn, when Margaery just breezes into the room and
plops down on the side of the bed as if she has every right to be there. Just
as she doesn’t kowtow to social conventions when it comes to her brother and
his lover, she’s not going to bow before Cersei, and is clearly planning
something. Loras says he doesn’t have to marry Cersei now, but it’s in
Margaery’s best interests for him to do so because he’d take her away from
King’s Landing. Otherwise, she’ll stick around and make Margaery’s life
miserable. “Perhaps,” says the young queen, as she pops a fig into her mouth.
“Perhaps.” What does she have up her sleeve?
Lancel has played a relatively small role
in the series so far, and some of the non-reader fans might not recognize him
or remember him (I had to jog my husband’s memory when he wondered aloud who he
was). Viewers will remember him from the first season as the meek guy with the
long hair who was always at Robert Baratheon’s side, whom he constantly mocked.
He was his constant wine-pourer, and in one scene he is helping Robert put on
his armour, which doesn’t fit, and then makes the mistake of suggesting that
perhaps it’s too small. Just when it looks like Robert is going to have him
executed, Ned shows up and says the armour isn’t too small, it’s that Robert
has gotten too fat. Robert laughs and sends Lancel out to get his breastplate
stretcher, and Lancel rushes out of the room to do so, completely oblivious to
the fact there’s no such thing. Knowing that Lancel is Robert’s wine-pourer,
Cersei sets him up by having him give the poisoned wine to the king, killing
him on the hunt. When Jaime is taken away, she begins having a sexual fling
with Lancel, who always comes off as a dolt whenever he opens his mouth to
speak. Now, with his head shaven and his clothes gone, he looks and sounds
completely different. He’s been abused and treated badly by the Lannisters and
Robert Baratheon, and he’s changed his ways. We don’t know too much about the
Sparrows yet, but I’m assuming there will be more explanation for us
non-readers in the episodes to come.
As for Brienne and Podrick, their scene is
brief, but important for exactly the reason you mention. As Brienne is licking
her wounds from having lost Arya Stark, the one thing she thought still gave
her life purpose, a coach goes by that contains Sansa and Baelish. I definitely
squeed... now that Brienne has lost Arya (and is asking Pod to leave her
alone), what if she were to find Sansa? Will she discover that another Stark
girl is alive? Could this renew her sense of purpose? I’m VERY intrigued by the
fact that the scene of Sansa and Baelish heading away from the Eyrie diverges
from the books, as you have told us. I wonder how much it will stray from the
story you know?
Of course, one of the best moments of this
episode is the ending, which takes place in the Nawth, up at the Wall. Mance
Rayder has been captured by Stannis, who asks him to bow before him and pledge
fealty. But Rayder will do no such thing. I know how much you love Ciarán
Hinds, the actor who plays him, so I’ll leave this last section to you, my
friend.
Christopher:
I do love Ciarán Hinds. He’ll always be Julius
Caesar to me, but he has done an extraordinary job as Mance Rayder. And like
many great actors, he brings out the best in those he works with: Kit
Harrington’s best moments, to my mind, have been in the scenes between Jon and
Mance. And as good as those other scenes have been, this one might well be the
best.
It is an impossible situation, which Jon
doesn’t quite grasp as intuitively as Mance does. He wants to save his people,
but cannot do it by bending the knee. His one play had always been an
all-or-nothing gamble: taking the Wall and Castle Black on his terms and
letting his people escape the coming horrors of the north. His people won’t see
the nuances—they’ll see their erstwhile leader surrendering and doing that
which runs against their very identity of wildlings, and there vanishes
whatever authority and respect he’d possessed.
Hinds is brilliant in this scene. If you
want to see a subtle moment that communicates volumes silently, watch his face
when Jon tells him he is to be burned alive. Until now, he has been implacable;
here, a little twitch under the eye on hearing the news offers a brief but
telling indication of the powerful emotions roiling beneath. “Bad way to go,”
he says, laconically, but that brief moment tells us everything we need to know
about the terror he’s feeling. And it
makes the speech that follows that much more powerful: “I’ll be honest with
you—I don’t want to die, and burn to death. I don’t want people to remember me
like that. Scorched, and screaming. But it’s better than betraying everything I
believe.” Jon still does not understand, not entirely: “I think you’re making a
terrible mistake.” And Mance responds with what could very well serve as his
epitaph, and his people’s: “The freedom to make my own mistakes is all I’ve
ever wanted.”
The execution sequence is excruciating,
even before the fires are lit: Mance’s slow walk out of his cell, his point-of-view
shot as he sees the pyre, the ever so slight hitch in his step as he approaches
his death. But he possesses more dignity than any of the kings south of the
Wall we’ve met, as he responds to Stannis’ offer of mercy by simply saying “I
wish you good fortune in the wars to come.” It is a simple but powerful
statement, and serves to remind us that he truly bears the southerners no ill
will or malice, and understands better than anyone the dangers they face if
they remain divided in their petty power struggles.
We see then the fear in his face as the
guards lead him up on the pyre and tie him to the stake. This scene I found
difficult to watch, and not just because it is difficult not to imagine oneself
in Mance’s place. It was difficult because you see Mance’s struggle, as the
flames lick higher and he feels them scorching him, to not surrender to the
pain, to keep his implacable demeanour for the sake of his people present … and
for the sake of not being remembered that way. The reaction shots as he starts
to break down are telling: Melissandre’s smug satisfaction, Queen Selyse’s
almost erotic religious fervor, the anger and sorrow on the faces of his
people, especially Tormund.
And then … Jon Snow gives him the parting
gift of an arrow in the heart, so he will not suffer and his people won’t have
to see it.
All of this falls out more or less
precisely as it does in the novel. There is, however, one small detail I was
watching for that I did not see. Which means that there might be a somewhat
significant divergence from GRRM’s version. I can’t say for certain—we’ll just
have to wait and see.
Well! That ends the first installment of
the great Chris and Nikki Game of Thrones
co-blog for season five, and I have to say I think the show is off to a
promising start. We’ll see you next week for number two. In the meantime
everyone, stay warm, and keep that door barred against ice zombies!
