it's all narrative

Welcome once again to the Great Chris & Nikki Game of Thrones Co-Blog™, wherein we take the most recent episode and spread it out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table. This week: it’s All The Wall All The Time, as the long-expected attack by Julius Caesar Mance Rayder descends on the Band of Buggered known as the Night’s Watch. It was an episode that featured some pretty impressive visuals, some awesome fist-pumping moments, and the writers snuck in some equally impressive writing. Those scamps.

But without further ado—want to lead us off, Nikki?

Nikki: You know, I never thought I’d see anything more impressive than Legolas sliding down the side of a tower while shooting arrows at the enemies at Helm’s Deep, but seeing the Night’s Watch guys suddenly pull a gigantic scythe that had been long hidden in the side of the Wall and pummel the hell out of the wildlings scaling the side of it? Holy hell. Turns out the reason we haven’t seen much of the dragons this season (I mean, seriously, where DOES Daenerys keep those beasts? Do they just fly around randomly through Meereen scaring the hell out of the local children?) is because they poured 92% of their CGI budget into this one episode. And what an incredible sequence it was.

I don’t recall another episode of Game of Thrones that focused entirely on one area, one battle; they always touch on other things and then come back to the battle at the end of the episode. I could be wrong, but I think this is the first time we get to focus on one story and one story only, Chris, and it was a nail-biter.

With the death of Oberyn looming over us from last week, I kept wondering who was going to die in this one. Samwell Tarly? Jon Snow? Ygritte? Gilly? Someone had to die, after all. After we discussed last week how GRRM has upended our expectations over and over again, does his flipping of convention actually become the new expectation? Do we now go into every scene thinking, “Um… yeah. Jon Snow ain’t walking away from this one…” and then GRRM manages to flip THAT expectation? I just don’t know how to handle any of it anymore, but in creating this “will he or won’t he” atmosphere around his writing, GRRM has effectively managed to make his episodes seem very realistic. Just as in real life, you never know who’s going to return from battle and who won’t. He will take out the main character just as easily as the guy playing “Sentry #13.”

Aside from the awesome effects in this episode (the giant had a bow that shot spears like they were arrows WHAT THE HELL) I think my favourite scene may have been the one between Maester Aemon and Sam. This is when Sam still thinks Gilly is dead from the attack on Mole’s Town, and Aemon tells him how difficult it is to see straight when you are in love. “Love is the death of duty,” he tells him, and he’s pointing specifically to Jon Snow falling in love with Ygritte, or Sam falling in love with Gilly. He tells Sam that he was in love with, and in this gorgeous moment he looks off in the distance and says that he can still see her in front of him, “she’s more real than you are.” Aemon is legally blind, from what I can tell (I believe he can still see shadows and such) and because he can no longer see the world around him in the present, he instead looks upon the beauty of his past. And in the midst of this moment of calm before the storm, he says to Sam, “Nothing makes the past a sweeter place to visit than the prospect of imminent death.”

This one scene then has a huge impact upon our expectations of the rest of the episode. Will Jon see Ygritte and fail to do his duty? Will Sam shirk his duty for Gilly? And whose death will be imminent?

And yet, not surprisingly, love is not the death of duty for Sam. He loves Gilly and hides her and the baby away in a locked room, but refuses to stay with her. He has made a vow, and he intends to stick by it, even as a man lay dying in his lap with blood gushing from his mouth. He knows he also has a duty to Gilly, but his vow as a man of the Night’s Watch comes first, and he never runs off to hide, unlike Janos Slynt, who goes into shock and rushes into the room. (And to be honest, I felt like if he’d jumped into the fray the Night’s Watch might have accidentally mistaken his bald pate for a Thenn, so… he was probably better off cowering in that room.)

And similarly, we saw Jon Snow abandon Ygritte despite his feelings for her, because he had to get back to the Night’s Watch and tell them what he’d seen. Love wasn’t the death of duty for him, either, although we do see in this episode that when he should have laid waste to the wildling girl, he hesitates.

The flip side of Aemon’s speech is Tormund talking about sex rather brutally, and Ygritte staying focused on her one and only task at hand: killing Jon Snow. As Tormund talks about “Sheila” and Sam asks Jon, “So… what’s it like?” in a very Monty Pythonesque way (nudge nudge wink wink) we realize that when it’s time to go into battle, the mind turns to that from which it derives pleasure: namely sex and love. Do those things make us weaker in the face of battle, or stronger?

What did you think of this episode, Chris? Did it play out in a similar fashion in the book?

 

Christopher: Well, to start with, you’re forgetting season two’s spectacular episode “Blackwater,” which focused exclusively on Stannis’ attack on King’s Landing and Tyrion’s brilliant defense of the city. So we do have precedent for Game of Thrones ignoring all storylines but one in order to depict a massive battle. And I think you’re right about the dearth of dragons this season: this episode outdid “Blackwater” by a mile, and treated us to the kind of eye-poppingly sophisticated CGI one rarely sees on television, but that doesn’t come cheaply.

As for its consonance with the book, it changes a few key details. For one, Toramund’s assault on Castle Black is not coordinated with the assault on the Wall. In the books, there is no stockade on the south side of the Wall, and so Jon Snow and the Watch defend themselves from the tops of scattered towers, and from a makeshift barricade at the base of switchback stairs built into the Wall (in the novels, the “elevator” is not the only means of getting to the top). Ygritte dies in the fight, but we don’t see it happen. Jon finds her afterward just as she dies—with just enough time to remember the cave and say one last “you know nothing, Jon Snow”—and wonders whether it was his arrow that killed her.

Also, his friends Pyp and Grenn don’t die in the book: that one took me by surprise, and saddened me somewhat. Neither of them plays a large part in the series, and if you haven’t read the books you could be forgiven for not noticing them as distinct from any of the other watchmen. But as with so much of the casting on this show, the actors playing them were perfect for the parts, and I will miss them. (And it raises a question we’ve asked before about whether choices in the series are spoilers for the unwritten books—does this mean that Grenn and Pyp play no significant roles in the end? Or perhaps GRRM planned for them to, but will now incorporate their deaths into his writing? I’m pretty certain we’re in unprecedented territory here. It’s pretty fascinating, really).

The other significant difference is that in the novels the battle takes place over several days, with Jon Snow proving his mettle as a battle commander. When there is a lull in the fighting and Mance Rayder settles in for a protracted siege, that is when Janos Slynt arrives from King’s Landing with Alliser Thorne, who had been at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, one of the Night’s Watch’s other fortresses, and takes arrogant and preemptory command. On Thorne’s urging, he has Jon Snow thrown in chains for having betrayed his oaths with the wildlings; and it is Slynt (again, on Thorne’s urging) who sends Jon to parley with Mance Rayder with the suicidal mission of killing him—in order, he smugly says, to prove Jon’s loyalty.

So the series has compressed the action somewhat, which is not a bad thing, and in having Janos Slynt arriving at the Wall MUCH earlier, they turn him into a quivering, cowardly lump. Ser Alliser, by contrast, is made somewhat more sympathetic: I quite like what they did with him in this episode, having him admit to Jon Snow his error in not heeding his advice to block the tunnel, and then delivering a short speech on the nature of leadership that, in the absence of Maester Aemon’s speech, would have been the best bit of writing in the episode:

Do you know what leadership means, Lord Snow? It means that the person in charge gets second-guessed by every clever little twat with a mouth. But if he starts second-guessing himself, that’s the end—for himself, for the clever little twats, for everyone. This is not the end. Not for us. Not if you lot do your duty for however long it takes to beat them back. And then you get to go on hating me, and I get to go on wishing your wildling whore had finished the job.

I loved this—there’s no love lost between Thorne and Jon Snow, and if they survive the battle there will be no sudden bonds of affection and friendship between them. But Thorne, unlike his ally Janos Slynt, is a true soldier, and will put aside his petty hatreds in the name of duty. It is actually the flip side of the coin of Maester Aemon’s speech to Sam: love is the death of duty, but then so are other passions. Say what you will about Alliser Thorne, but he understands that hatred will sabotage his ability to do his duty as much as Sam’s love of Gilly, or Jon’s of Ygritte.

And then he goes on to show that he’s a guy you totally want having your back in a fight.

Like “Blackwater,” this was an episode that balanced some fine writing against some pretty spectacular action sequences. There were a number of fist-pumping moments for me, most notably when the burning oil lights the giants up like a torch, and when Jon Snow mashes the Thenn’s head in with a hammer. What got you cheering in this episode, Nikki?

Nikki: As I was typing the words “I don’t recall another episode of Game of Thrones that focused entirely on one area…” I thought to myself, “Did Blackwater just focus on that battle?” If I’d looked up our review of it that week, I would have seen that yes, indeed, it did. My mistake.

The enormous scythe probably got the biggest gasp from me, as did that spear the giant shot (that sent a man sailing through the air, off the side of the Wall, down several hundred feet, and impaled onto the ground on the other side… WOW). The two moments you mention were certainly spectacular and brilliantly handled on the show. I loved the archers leaning out and standing horizontally against the Wall, appearing to defy gravity as they shot their arrows straight down at the wildlings scaling the side of it (and when the oil exploded and broke the one man’s rope I will admit a scream emitted from my mouth). The sheer numbers of the wildlings as they appeared in front of the Wall, complete with their “fairy-tale” allies, made me think this was going to be a very quick battle, and I was thrilled that the Night’s Watch managed to stand their ground, even if it’s for one night only, as Jon Snow proclaims.

I agree entirely with your assessment of Ser Alliser. For everything I was saying a few weeks back on what a prick he is and what a dumbass he is for not listening to Jon Snow when Jon told him to seal the tunnels, he not only admits to his mistakes here, but fights like a true warrior when he hits the ground.

Probably the biggest fist-pumping scene for both my husband and me is when Sam unleashed Ghost. YES. The direwolves are always exciting to watch and have been since back in season 1, and the doggie-cam style of showing him working his way through the action and then choosing one guy to take down was brilliant.

I also wanted to mention that I thought the music was phenomenal in this episode: they reused that long scary blast music that first played as the Thenn came marching through the valley toward the wildlings, and it was overlaid with bits of the Game of Thrones theme music, the wildling music, and the music often used for the Night’s Watch. Just utterly brilliant music here.

I will admit there were times when we were a tad confused by the layout of everything (so… Mole’s Town must be north of the Wall because the wildlings were already there and massacred it, which means Castle Black is also north of the Wall? So from the south all you can see is the Wall itself, but the Castle is located on the northern side, is that correct?) but it didn’t stop the action one bit.

So, with the Night’s Watch’s numbers depleted but Castle Black still standing, Tormund in captivity, Ygritte and the Thenn leader dead, Slynt in severe shock, Ser Alliser wounded but still alive, Gilly safe in Castle Black for now, Sam having had his first kiss (awwww), and the giants dead after the men of the Night’s Watch held the gate, as Jon Snow had asked them to do… Jon is going to head off into the wilds north of the Wall and find Mance Rayder and end all of this, he says. Earlier in the episode, Gilly made Sam promise to come back, and he made that promise… and kept it. Now Sam watches Jon go — sans sword — and says to him, “Jon? Come back.” Part of me is terrified Jon won’t. But I’m assuming with so much focus on the Wall and what’s north of it in this episode, this might be the last we see of Jon Snow until season 5, and next week we’ll conclude the rest of the action in Westeros.

Of course, this final back-and-forth between Sam and Jon had me asking one very big question: where the hell was Mance Rayder? I remember when Ciaran Hinds was introduced as Mance last season and you were giddy, Chris (not least because he’s Julius Caesar to us) and then… nothing. He’s never there, he’s utterly absent from the battle, and he’s just disappeared from the action all this season. I haven’t read this book, so perhaps there some explanation there I’m missing, but it just felt like he should have been there in some capacity. If he was the one who brought them all together, after all, why isn’t he there fighting with them?

Any final thoughts, Chris?

Christopher: Mance is there, just not leading from the front. I assume that was, in part, just an issue of scheduling and pay … there wouldn’t have been much Mance this season anyway, so why pay an actor for a few-minute cameo in the penultimate episode? I say that, of course, knowing that we might see him in the finale, but I’m going to guess that you’re correct—we won’t see the Wall again until next season, as there is simply too much to tie up in the rest of our storylines.

I think you’re confused about the geography because you’ve momentarily forgotten that Tormund, Ygritte, et al are in fact south of the Wall. They climbed over the Wall last season with Jon Snow (as he reminds us in this episode) and have ranged pretty far south in the raiding as they wait for Mance’s signal. Castle Black is south of the Wall; Tormund’s group comes up on them from the south.

I too was thrilled by Sam releasing Ghost. We haven’t seen much of him this season, but he’s had two really great moments—taking out Rast at Craster’s Keep, and then again in this episode. Having a direwolf on your side goes a long way to evening the odds.

One thing I quite liked about this episode is Sam’s evolution as a character. John Bradley has never played him precisely like the Samwell Tarly of the novels—he’s always been more gregarious, less timid, and far less cowardly. Though I like the Sam of the novels, his incessant cringing and whining makes him difficult to take at times … and while on one hand it’s a welcome change from uniformly dour and courageous male heroes, one does start to lose patience with him. But Bradley’s Sam has evolved—starting out cringy and whiny, but slowly coming into his own as he endures hardships and dangers that would reduce most of us to jelly. They’re precisely the same hardships and dangers he endures in the novels, but Sam as written never quite toughens up. His speech to Pyp as they wait at the gates for the wildlings to attack is another lovely moment of writing, imbued with Sam’s self-awareness of how he’s changed. In the moment he killed the White Walker, he was “nothing”—and that is when fear disappears. So why was he afraid now? “I’m not nothing anymore,” he replies, and those words speak both to Sam coming into his own as a character, but also his realization that he loves Gilly. In other words, he has something now to live for.

In many ways, this was a very deftly written episode for one that was basically a massive battle. The themes of love, leadership, and duty run through it, and far from being three separate concepts they are shown to be inextricably entwined. Jon Snow’s fumbling attempt to explain how sex and love feels at the start is inadvertently quite eloquent: “It’s this whole other person … you’re wrapped up in them, they’re wrapped up in you … for a little while you’re more than just you … Oh, I don’t know, I’m not a bleeding poet!” Oh, Jon—you were almost there. You almost had it. Jon’s description is the opposite of Sam’s when he tells Pyp about becoming nobody. It makes me think of the final line of Philip Larkin’s poem “An Arundel Tomb,” in which the otherwise cynical and bleak poet concludes that “What will survive of us is love.” Maester Aemon might characterize love as the death of duty, but he acknowledges its power … and we see that on Jon Snow’s face when he’s confronted by Ygritte pointing an arrow at his chest. The smile the crosses his face is enigmatic—at once chagrined but, as you observe Nikki, also delighted. It’s as if he’s thinking “Of course you’re the one who’s going to kill me,” but at the same time acknowledging that if he’s going to die, he’s happy she’s the one to do it.

Would she have shot him if Olly hadn’t beaten her to it? I had halfway expected her to put an arrow into Alabaster Seal while Jon was fighting him, at once saving his life but also following through on her earlier threat. We’re never given the answer of whether she’d actually have killed Jon this time … but then, perhaps, some questions should not be answered.

 

Well, that’s it for this week, folks! Thanks for reading, and always remember to uncage your direwolf before the battle. Tune in next week as Nikki and I put our fourth season of Game of Thrones to bed. And I promise you this much: once again, the internet’s gonna get broke.

 Well, my fellow Westerosi, we’re almost all the way through now … two more episodes to go, and as always we wonder just how much more killin’ GRRM has in store for us. So once again, here we are again–that is to say, me, and my dear friend whose house sigil is the crossed stakes under a mysterious island, the one and only Nikki Stafford–to murder and dissect another installment of Game of Thrones. And in Nikki’s case, have a small tantrum.

So, without further ado …

Christopher: This episode gave us some really lovely moments, albeit moments bookended with blood and brutality. The attack on Moletown unfolded with predictable violence and gore, with Ygritte being as ruthless as any of her fellow wildlings … until she sees Gilly hiding with Little Sam, at which point she chooses to spare the mother and her child. Would she have been so merciful without the presence of the infant? My guess is no, but it is also likely that she alone among her company would have acted in this way. One can only be relieved the infant was not discovered by one of the Thenns. ::::shudder::::

Ygritte’s moment of mercy is important on two fronts: first, it reminds us that however determined she is to revenge herself on Jon Snow, she is a basically decent person and not, unlike some of her comrades, an outright psychopath. But secondly, it also reminds us of how interconnected all these characters are. Nothing in Westeros happens in a vacuum, and everything ultimately touches everyone in some way or another—and, as we see later with Ser Jorah, past sins can still burn you. Ygritte’s act of mercy is done in ignorance of whom Gilly is, but in this moment we see the woman in love with Jon Snow saving the life of the woman Jon Snow’s best friend saved (and, let’s be fair, is in love with), along with the life of the child who bears Sam’s name. Again, would she have been so merciful had she known? Or would Gilly have found herself taken as a bargaining ship? Fortunately, we don’t have to find out.

It is a moment that does not occur in the novel. This episode’s departures have been very interesting, for reasons I’ll get to as we go. In this case, it is just a little deviation, one presumably designed to keep Ygritte sympathetic (not that hard, personally speaking—she’d have to become a lot more evil for me not to like her). But when we cut to the black brothers morosely sitting around a mess table berating themselves for their helplessness and reminding themselves that they can’t ride out to meet the wildlings, it does make you wonder: what was Sam thinking? It’s not like he didn’t know there were wildlings south of the Wall when he sent Gilly to Moletown, and it’s not as if the attack WASN’T COMPLETELY INEVITABLE. I understand his fear that Gilly was in danger from assault from the less honourable members of the Night’s Watch, but Moletown wasn’t much better—and as we saw in the first few minutes of this episode, it doesn’t appear that the women of Moletown were inclined to be kind and protect her. Considering Sam’s obvious ambivalence about sending her away, it makes no sense to have done it—except that it gives Ygritte her moment of humanity. A nice moment, to be certain, but in the end an unusually clumsy stumble on the part of the writers.

They do however redeem themselves. An unlikely romance seems to be developing among Daenerys’ people (the West Wing watcher in me wants to call them her “senior staff”). In a weirdly crocodilian moment, Grey Worm peers over the surface of the water at Missandei as she bathes. After a moment, she becomes aware that she is observed. You know how there are so many moments when this show employs gratuitous nudity? This, I would argue, is a good example of thoughtful, thematically significant nudity, and it all rests in Nathalie Emmanuel’s wonderful face acting, as she moves from innocent surprise to confident display to the sudden thought that perhaps she should be more modest. I can only speak for myself, but I found this scene far more touching than it was titillating. And the later scene in the throne room when Grey Worm apologizes in broken English (or, I suppose, broken Westrosi) is superb. It could have easily gone the other way—it could have easily been cheesy or twee or just hamfisted, but the writers got it right, and the actors played it with such dignity and subtle emotion that it made for one of the most heartwarming scenes in the series so far.

Because why shouldn’t it be? The obvious question, as tacitly assumed by Daenerys, is “how can a eunuch love a woman? how can a woman love him back?” Coming on the heels of Varys’ blithe assertion of his antipathy to desire (and Oberyn’s bafflement at such an assertion), Grey Worm and Missandei’s obvious feelings for each other continue to complicate assumptions about love, sex, and what is “necessary” to both. Why shouldn’t Grey Worm and Missandei fall in love? Both are products of an institution that systematically dehumanizes people, treats them like beasts and property, and is in and of itself fundamentally unnatural.

What did you think of that scene, Nikki?

Nikki: It’s only reading your take on it that I suddenly realized there was nudity in this episode. How remarkable is that? I watched that scene, but like you didn’t think it was the usual “woman-being-taken-from-behind-as-Baelish-speaks-in-the-foreground” sort of gratuitousness that Game of Thrones is known for. It serves the plot, and isn’t there for our benefit (despite the fact that she is, without a doubt, stunning) but suddenly shows the Unsullied as having a little more depth than we’d been led to believe. I did love Daenery’s comment, though, wondering aloud if when they castrate the Unsullied, do they take the pillar as well as the stones? Ha!

The scene where Grey Worm comes to speak to Missandei to apologize to her for looking at her was lovely. She tells him that she’s sorry he was cut, but he doesn’t see it that way: if being cut was central to him being one of the Unsullied, and therefore someone who could become Daenerys’s soldier, and therefore someone who could free the people of Meereen from their masters, and therefore someone who is at Daenerys’s side, and therefore is close enough to Missandei to see her in all her beauty… then he’s happy he was cut. Missandei seems torn. She likes Grey Worm, and he shows her respect, and you can tell she’s attracted to him, pillar and stones or no. And so she says, “I am glad you saw me,” and he replies, without any hesitation, “So am I.” Just a perfect little scene in the midst of all this war and treachery.

And… on the flip side of loveliness and light we have Ramsay and Reek. What a scene that was. Good Christ. There was actually a moment in there when I thought maybe — just maybe — Theon is actually playing Ramsay, just a tad. As in, he’s crazy, but not looney-bin batshit crazy.

I was wrong.

After Ramsay pats down his armour and reminds him “Remember what you are and what you’re not,” he tells him to bring him Lord Kenning, who is holding down the place. Theon strides into the castle grounds and it was in that instant I thought, “Reek couldn’t possibly pull this off; he’s still Theon.” And then Kenning questions that this sniveling creature before him could possibly be the son of Balon Greyjoy . . . and the veil drops and we see he really was acting. His eyes dart all over the place, he can’t look Kenning in the eye, he hands over the piece of paper without looking at him, he talks about Balon Greyjoy like he’s someone else. And at one point, if you listen closely, Kenning tells him to go back to his people and tell them he won’t deal with him, “whoever you really are” and you can hear Theon sputter and mutter “Reek” … just as Kenning’s man embeds an axe in the back of his head and takes the deal.

You know I’m not a fan of Theon, and never have been, and much of that has been simply not really liking the actor who plays him very much. (I don’t like him in the books, either… he’s a bit of a twat as a character.) At the beginning of this season you said to me that I MUST find sympathy for him now that he’s been reduced to such a deplorable state, and while I thought it was horrible that this was being done to him, I never felt my heart go out to him. Even when Yara tried to save him and realized her brother was dead, and what was left was this pathetic shell, I just shook my head at what had been done to him but that’s about it.

It was that one word that changed everything for me. The way he just said, “Reek” in that tiny little voice when Kenning asked him who he really was… he couldn’t even keep up the ruse, and almost got himself killed by making them think he really wasn’t Theon. And Alfie Allen delivers the line brilliantly, underneath the conversation, at the very moment the axe comes down, and then he jumps as if he’s been jolted out of this moment of clarity. It was the single best Theon scene in the show so far for me. Allen is brilliant (I said it!), and when he returns to Ramsay, it’s like a dog returning to his master, happy to be going home.

Ramsay, on the other hand, is victorious in this scene due to the actions of his misshapen creature, and his father does the unthinkable and makes him a Bolton. No longer a Snow, Pinocchio just became a real boy: Ramsay Bolton, son of Roose Bolton, warden of the North. This scene is significant not just because Bolton dares to do what Ned Stark never did with Jon Snow, but because Roose actually outlines just how gigantic the North really is, and that if you rule the North, you have the largest area in Westeros. Not population, mind you (he only mentions territory) but still, that’s why “King of the North” was such an important title for Robb Stark.

While it turns out Reek wasn’t acting at all, and really has become this pathetic, sniveling creature, Sansa, on the other hand, has shown herself to be a remarkable actor, much to Baelish’s delight. Just as Alfie Allen finally convinced me that he can be brilliant in this role, Sophie Turner — in a single episode — stops being one of Ned Stark’s little girls and becomes an adult, a Lady Macbeth character if ever there was one. You must have loved that scene with her and Littlefinger up against the judges.

Christopher: It was my favourite scene in this episode, and probably ranks as one of my favourite scenes in the entire series now. This is one of those moments when I should clarify the difference between how the death of Lysa played out in the novel versus how they’ve done it in the show. In the novels, there was a young musician named Marillion who had insinuated himself into Lysa’s service, and who immediately started sniffing around Sansa the moment he saw her. Thinking she was a bastard child of Littlefinger (her cover story in the book), and hence lowborn, he was bold in the advances he made on her, just shy of actually sexually assaulting her. He was present when Littlefinger shoved Lysa through the Moon Door, and he was the one on whom Littlefinger pins the murder—and in the interim between Lysa’s death and the arrival of the Lords of the Vale, has him tortured within an inch of his life until he is so broken that he willingly confesses.

Hence I was curious to see how Littlefinger dealt with Lysa’s death, what story he would come up with. And … I have to say, I found it odd that he went with so lame a story as suicide. One would imagine he would have been more shrewd. So when Sansa launches into her story, telling the Vale Lords the (almost) truth, I totally assumed this was Littlefinger’s play. Certainly, it was masterful: it gave Sansa’s account more gravitas, it depicted Littlefinger as a much-abused hero and saviour, and it left the interrogators with no leg to stand on politically, unless they wanted to ally themselves with the Lannisters.

Beautiful. Masterfully done. Which is why I was utterly gobsmacked when we discover that this wasn’t Littlefinger’s play, but Sansa’s. And in learning that, we realize just how much she has grown and how much she has learned. She reads the Vale Lords perfectly—she knows how to protect herself and how to protect Baelish, and how to, basically, make them an offer they cannot refuse. Perhaps what is most brilliant about her story was how she cleverly exploits the lords’ misgivings about Lysa. She never crosses the line into slander, but just speaks suggestively: “You knew her well, my lords, my lady,” she says. “You knew she was a troubled woman.” And then she proceeds to tell the story pretty much exactly as it happened (except for Littlefinger’s kiss, which was more than just a peck), until the very end. And breaks down in tears.

Applause for Sophie Turner—Sansa has been one of the more thankless roles on this show, but she has played it well so far. And now we see what both Sansa and Sophie have to offer. This speech was pitch-perfect, as was the cryptic look she gives Littlefinger over the old woman’s shoulder. We immediately see how well it all worked in the following scene, as the Vale Lords lose their antagonism to Littlefinger and start slagging Lysa’s memory. “You could see it in the way she raised that boy,” says Lord Royce, suddenly all pompous and authoritative on the topic, “feeding him from her own teats when he was ten years old.” Littlefinger doesn’t miss a trick: he sees his advantage and presses it, reminding them that, once upon a time, the Vale was a force to be reckoned with. Jon Arryn rode to war with Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon. “Since then,” he needles, “all the great houses of the Vale watched from the corner like a timid boy at a tavern brawl.” When Lord Royce bristles, he is quick to defuse the insult, pinning the blame on Lysa’s paranoia and fear—but the suggestion has been planted, and the lords’ honour has been pricked. “Who would you have us back?” he is asked, and he replies “Robin Arryn,” reminding them that sickly boys can grow to be powerful men (and if there is any doubt about the truth of that, look who’s talking). He says what the lords have been longing to hear for years: that it is time Robin was taken with a firm hand and taught to be a man. Whether Littlefinger will succeed is uncertain; what is certain is that he has just made himself the de facto Lord of the Vale, setting himself up as Robin’s regent.

And then! And then we discover that Sansa’s speech had been her idea, and makes possible all of Littlefinger’s subsequent maneuvering. Lady Macbeth, indeed … “Do you know me?” Littlefinger asks her. “I know what you want,” she replies, and the episode leaves what that might be somewhat ambiguous. Does Littlefinger want Sansa? Well, obviously he does—but does he mean to take her as his own, or will they plot together to secure the Vale? When she appears later as Littlefinger tutors Robin, looking more beautiful than she yet has, it is unclear whether she is dressing for Littlefinger’s benefit or Robin’s. Or possibly both—she knows what Littlefinger wants, but will she also be working her charms on Robin? Will she be playing Margaery to his Tommen?

Meanwhile, across the Narrow Sea, Tywin Lannister has thrown a monkey wrench into Daenerys’ inner circle, sending Jorah’s royal pardon to Ser Barristan. The anguish on Jorah’s face as he reads the scroll is heartbreaking. “Let me speak with her privately,” he begs. “You’ll never be alone with her again,” Barristan replies, and so it is to be. What did you think of Jorah’s banishment, Nikki?

Nikki: When I watched the Sansa speech, for some reason I believed all along it was her doing. Perhaps it was the look on Baelish’s face. He looked genuinely shaken when she looked at him, apologized, and said she had to tell the truth. And then at the end as she was being embraced, and she looked up at him and he couldn’t even hide the “Wow, you are MUCH more than I thought you were!” look on his face, I just knew it was her doing. How strange that it never even crossed my mind it could have been Littlefinger’s plot the whole time. It makes more sense that viewers would have been led to believe that this was just one more of Littlefinger’s devious plots, or that we’re so used to Sansa being controlled by others that she would continue to be controlled by Baelish, and yet somehow I just immediately assumed this was her stepping up, taking the reins, and realizing after SO long being held captive by the Lannisters that it’s her turn to make the rules. I loved the scene of her walking down the stairs in that dress: it put her in charge, regardless of whom she was doing it for. She’s recognized that she and Littlefinger are the same: alone in the world, and using their cunning to survive.

As for Ser Jorah’s banishment, I found it frustrating as hell (not from a writing standpoint, but one of those yelling at the characters to stop what they’re doing moments). Once again Tywin is wielding power from afar by sitting at a desk and writing his horrible letters. The last bunch of letters he sent (that we saw, at least) landed at The Twins, in Walder Frey’s lap, and led to the massacre at the Red Wedding. Recently we saw the Small Council talking about Daenerys’s position and that she had two advisors: Ser Barristan and Ser Jorah. So clearly this is his way of unseating one of them, and leaving her in a vulnerable position. And she takes the bait.

“Why did The Usurper pardon you?!” she demands, and more importantly, “Did you tell them I was carrying Khal Drogo’s child?” Even though she doesn’t say it, you can tell her mind begins working overtime, wondering if the baby and Khal perhaps died because of something Jorah had leaked to her enemies.

Poor Ser Jorah. We’ve known for some time that he’d been spying (or, at least, some of us gleaned that because my husband, on the other hand, seemed utterly shocked) but that he had also changed by developing feelings and respect for Daenerys, and was now firmly on her side, in her camp. That doesn’t reverse the damage that he’s already done, but he’s far more useful to her as an ally than as an outcast. While she doesn’t always follow his advice, she certainly takes it to heart. In my notes I simply wrote, “Tywin wins again.” For all the mastery she has shown politically and on the battlefield, she’s still a child who can get caught up in emotions. She’s so hurt by his betrayal she doesn’t call for his execution or imprisonment, but banishes him from her sight. I wished she had kept him there in chains and discovered he really was trying to work for her, not against her. When she tells him not to call her Khaleesi, it hurt my heart. I loved those two together, him pining for the thing he can’t have but still loving her and protecting her every step of the way, and she resisting his advice but keeping him close because she always feels safer with him by her side. Jorah’s gone, and Barristan is getting older. Who will be her advisor once they are both gone? Argh, Daenerys. You had this. You had this. You let Tywin take it away. Argh.

Back over to the Eyrie, just as a (now bottle-fed?) bleary-eyed Robin is being led away from the nest, the Hound and Arya are making their way up to see Lysa. It’s just a short scene, but still a standout for Arya’s reaction to the ludicrous events happening around her.

Christopher: Arya’s hysterical laughter was brilliant. It was also cryptic: whether she’s laughing at the absurdity of the situation, at the Hound for failing to capitalize on his captive, or just at the series of unfortunate events her life has become. The scene is a little odd, however, given that the implicit suggestion is that they’ve been turned away and the Arya-Hound road show will continue … when in reality, having announced her identity as a surviving Stark, wouldn’t she be taken up to the Eyrie no matter what had happened to Lysa? Even the dullest dullard on sentry duty at the Bloody Gate should know that you don’t just let a scion of the North wander off. Perhaps I’m wrong and we’ll see them taken captive by the numerous guards surrounding them, but I don’t see how that happens without a massive deviation from the novels. In the books, the Hound is in fact taking Arya to the Eyrie, but they never get as close as they do in the series.

It was a brief interlude with Arya and the Hound, but we always get quality for our money with them. Their banter is both hilarious and chilling, with Arya lamenting the fact that she wasn’t present to witness Joffrey’s death. “I wanted to see the look in his eyes when he knew it was over,” she said. “Aye,” the Hound agrees, “nothing in the world beats that look.” What an adorable moment of bonding for these two as they agree on the sweetest aspect of killing. Indeed, it seems that killing has become Arya’s main form of satisfaction, enough that she cannot take pleasure in Joffrey’s death at a distance:

ARYA: I thought it would make me happy. But it doesn’t, really.
HOUND: Nothing makes you happy.
ARYA: Lots of things make me happy.
HOUND: Like what?
ARYA: Killing Polliver. Killing Rorge.

The Stark girls would make a good team now: Sansa with the plotting, Arya as the muscle. What is chilling is how she has obviously been devoting a lot of thought to the business of killing: she goes on to call out the Hound’s pride when he declares “Poison’s a woman’s weapon … men kill with steel.” Perhaps she has taken the lesson she learned a few episodes ago to heart: however skilled she becomes with a blade, she cannot overcome armour and brute force with steel. “That’s why you’ll never be a great killer,” she says disdainfully. She has learned a certain brutal pragmatism: use whatever means you have at your disposal.

Speaking of the failure of speed and skill in the face of brute force, we have come at last to this episode’s climactic scene. But before we get to the titular fight between the Mountain and the Viper, we’re treated to a fairly lengthy discussion between Jaime and Tyrion, in which Tyrion remembers his simple beetle-smashing cousin and arrives at a fairly bleak existential conclusion of life and death. The first time I watched this episode, all I could think about was the fight I knew had to happen at the end, and got impatient with Tyrion’s Jean-Paul Sartre schtick. I felt like Milhouse in the Poochie episode of The Simpsons: “When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory!?” But on re-watching, I was impressed with the writing, and with the depth of Peter Dinklage’s soliloquizing. What did you make of this scene, Nikki?

Nikki: See, because I didn’t know what was going to happen next in that battle scene, I adored this scene between Jaime and Tyrion (but if I’d known what was coming, I would have been exactly like you and Milhouse!). The whole story of his cousin Orson smashing beetles was a brilliant little side story, where we really see the camaraderie between Tyrion and Jaime as they remember their youth. It’s quite the opposite sort of memory than the one we got in the previous episode, where Oberyn talked about how Cersei had tortured Tyrion as an infant. “Laughing at another person’s misery was the only thing that made me feel like everyone else,” he says, and it’s yet another look into Tyrion’s past… one that, if I thought GRRM were actually some sort of sadistic prick, I would think was a clear indicator that Tyrion’s about to get it. But GRRM would never do that to us, right? Ahem.

The story is just left hanging, even as it adds some humour to an otherwise very dark episode. “Far too much has been written on great men,” Tyrion says, commenting on the very centralized theme of Game of Thrones: that it’s about men and women vying for power. “And not nearly enough on morons,” he adds, much to our delight. But just because his cousin was clearly brain-damaged didn’t mean that there wasn’t some purpose to his daily beetle-smashing, at least as far as young Tyrion was concerned. Tyrion had become obsessed by Orson’s actions. “I was the smartest person I knew, certainly I had the wherewithal to unravel the mysteries that lay at the heart of a moron.” He studied him daily, sitting nearby, watching the beetle carcasses just pile up and wondering, why? Why does his cousin do what he does?

And then… the scene just ends. No doubt everyone has their own theory for what Tyrion’s scene meant. Even my husband looked at me and said, “What were we supposed to take from that?!”

But no time for that now, the big fight’s starting! There’s Prince Oberyn, the Viper of Dorne, spitting in the face of the gods and saying that maybe they think it’s his time to die, to which he responds, “Not today.” There’s The Mountain, looming over the action, terrifying Ellaria, who cannot believe someone that massive is actually human. Tyrion is shaking, Oberyn is filled with confidence, the Mountain is focused on murder, and Ellaria begs him not to leave her alone in this world. He ain’t scared: he’s hellbent on revenge.

Yes, yes, yes, I know I should have learned my lesson by now. Take the convention, flip it on its head, and you can pretty much predict where GRRM is going to take the scene. Ned Stark will NOT be saved at the last minute. Main character? Bah. GRRM farts in the general direction of main characters. Arya Stark will NOT be reunited with her family at the Frey wedding. Butbutbut we’ve watched her try to be with them for so long; even if he massacres them, couldn’t she just, you know, say hello? You son of a silly person, GRRM says, your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries. Be off with you.

But I get tricked Every. Damn. Time. And this time, I knew how it was supposed to play out. Prince Oberyn has been waiting for this moment. He’s been roaming the countryside, training, with only one thing in mind: killing The Six-Fingered Man The Mountain. And when he finally gets his chance, he’s supposed to dance around him (check), he’s supposed to shock everyone that he might actually win this one (check). He’s supposed to repeat the same mantra over and over again: “My name is Prince Oberyn, Viper of Dorne. You killed my sister. Prepare to die.” (check… with paraphrasing) He’s supposed to knock him on his back (check) and he’s supposed to kill him.

…

I said… HE’S SUPPOSED TO KILL HIM. I’m sorry, is this thing on? He. Is. Supposed. To. Kill. Him.

See us? The viewers sitting out here in the audience? In my case, it’s my husband and I, literally on the edge of the couch, cackling and laughing and cheering on Prince Oberyn, knowing he’s the most charismatic and amazing character they’ve introduced since Brienne. We cheer as he knocks him on his back. We chuckle knowingly as Tyrion relaxes for the first time in weeks, as Jaime sits forward and smiles, realizing with shock and awe that David will indeed take down Goliath.

Until Goliath reaches out and reminds Oberyn that he’s nothing more than a beetle. That The Mountain has no mercy. And he will take David’s slingshot and smash it under his baby toe. He will take Inigo Montoya’s sword and break it in half. And then he will take his own thumbs and push them so far into Prince Oberyn’s face that he not only creates what is possibly THE most painful death I’ve seen on the show so far, but then he smashes his head like a fucking melon.

And suddenly the levity of the episode — the scenes with Arya/Hound and Tyrion/Jaime — have new meaning. Arya says that she wishes she could have seen Joffrey die, and is upset that she’s missed it. For her, his death wasn’t enough: she wanted to watch him suffer. But it’s that kind of emotional attachment that makes you lose. Oberyn needed to hear the Mountain fess up, and if he hadn’t pushed the issue and just killed him when he had the chance, he still would have been victorious, and Tyrion would be off the hook (that is, unless the Mountain was playing him the whole time, which is possible but unlikely, since that big hunk of muscle seems to just want to win quickly). Is this some sort of foreshadowing that Arya’s not as safe as I hope she is? And to return to Tyrion and Jaime: Why did Orson smash the beetle? Because he could. The Mountain holds no grudge against Tyrion or Oberyn, and held no grudge against Oberyn’s sister or children. He did what he did because he could, with no more thought in his brain than “Kuhn, Kuhn” just like Orson did.

I forgave you Ned Stark, Mr. Martin. I forgave you the Red Wedding. You made up for it with Joffrey and Lysa, after all. Those were funny deaths. But this. This.

As I said when I sent my first pass to you, Chris, I fucking hate George RR Martin today. It will pass, for it is he who has created this glorious world and I can’t wait to see what happens next, but The Mountain just crushed all hope from the show.

I can’t see how Tyrion could possibly die. Before this episode aired, my husband and I made a (very short) list of people who are the key players, and realized everyone else is just a catalyst, including everyone who has died so far. Our list was Tywin, Stannis, Daenerys, Arya, Bran, and Tyrion. But after this week, who knows. Yes, I’ll still be shocked if Tyrion really is executed after this — he’s the best character on the show — but I probably shouldn’t be.

I know this is usually the final pass on our back and forth, but I wanted to throw it back to you one last time if you had any final thoughts on this, Chris, since this was a key moment in the series.

Christopher: Well, just to lead off, let me say: I don’t know how much of that fight was done by Pedro Pascal and how much by a fight double, but wow—the Viper has some moves.

In an episode that has some notable deviations from the novels, the trial by combat unfolded almost precisely as GRRM wrote it, right down to the Mountain’s correcting the sequence of his crimes as he crushes the life out of Oberyn. And I reflected, on watching the fight, the same thing I did when I first read it in the novel: that the very lust for revenge that made Oberyn stand for Tyrion is also what causes his downfall. As you say, he can’t let it go—can’t just finish him off and be done with it, but must elicit a confession. Well … he gets the confession, and an entire audience of King’s Landing’s elite hears him say it. But it comes at the price of his life and (we assume) Tyrion’s.

The overtones of Inigo Montoya are so strong in this scene that it seems unlikely GRRM wasn’t being deliberate. Which, when you consider how it ultimately plays out, is very clever … ruthlessly, cruelly, pitilessly clever. In The Princess Bride, Inigo is gravely wounded by the Six-Fingered Man and looks about to lose, but brings himself together in what is one of the great fist-pumping moments in film. Oberyn, by contrast, is never really perturbed—there are one or two moments when the Mountain gets the upper hand, but things never look dire for him until the very end.

As I mentioned above, GRRM has a pretty clear-eyed view of what brute force can do. There was no miraculous escape for Syrio Forel, Arya might as well have been a mosquito when she stabs the Hound, and though Oberyn comes close to defeating the Mountain, all it took was a moment’s inattention. Gregor Clegane is a terrifying manifestation of brutal, unthinking violence. “Do you know who I am?” Oberyn demands. “Some dead man,” he grunts in reply, in an echo of his conversation with Cersei: “Who am I fighting?” “Does it matter?” To which he simply shakes his head. No, it does not matter. The Mountain’s role in the series has been (until now) somewhat more understated than in the novels. It is clearer in the novels that Gregor and his men are one of the weapons in Tywin Lannister’s arsenal. When he wishes to be subtle, he sends letters and wreaks havoc half a world away. When he needs to terrorize his enemies, he sends the Mountain. “Unleash Gregor Clegane and his reavers,” he says at one point in the novels, knowing full well that they will kill, rape, burn, and plunder until the countryside lives in abject terror.

What was cousin Orson doing? He was mindlessly killing, and presumably taking some perverse pleasure in the impunity with which he could do so. I don’t think the point of that story was so much Orson playing the Mountain with beetles, so much as Tyrion’s abject failure to comprehend it. Hopefully Oberyn’s spear proves to be the proverbial mule-kick that ends the Mountain’s mindless smashing.

Any last thoughts, Nikki?

Nikki: When my husband first asked me what Tyrion’s scene meant, I said I think it meant that sometimes, things just happen. Orson is pushing at beetles because, well, he’s pushing at beetles. Just as Tywin ended up in King’s Landing while Ygritte is a wildling. We want to attribute meaning to things, we want to say the gods wanted this to happen, but things just happen. Why does one person die of cancer while another one overcomes it? Why do some people feel driven by ambition while others are content with whatever will be, will be? Because they are. Sometimes you have to stop trying to find meaning in things, and know that the gods aren’t playing with us; shit happens. Oberyn could have won that fight, and The Mountain did. Orson doesn’t ask why he smashes the beetles, he just does. The real question that comes out of that scene is, why was Tyrion so obsessed with understanding why?

Maybe he can ask his gods. Because we’re being led to believe, at this point, that he’ll be meeting them soon.

But no matter how many times GRRM Joss Whedons me into sadness, I will still believe relentlessly that Tyrion’s gonna get himself out of this one. He just has to.

I think my academic title for this episode would be “Mockingbird: Lysa Arryn and the Effects of Rapid Deceleration Syndrome.” And let me be the first to say, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer gal.

Yup, it’s that time again kids, in which Nikki Stafford and myself throw the most recent episode of Game of Thrones into the mass spectrometer that is our shared brain and emerge with a scientific breakdown of the contents. For real, this is Science™.

Want to lead us off, Nikki?

Nikki: This week opens with the Kingslayer and He Who Is Accused of Being a Kingslayer. Poor Tyrion is still reeling from his treatment at the hands of Shae, and doesn’t seem to be clear enough yet to realize that she did what she did out of heartbreak. “Yes, I fell in love with a whore,” he tells Jaime, “and I was stupid enough to think she’d fallen in love with me.” She really did give her heart to Tyrion, despite what he thinks, and he doesn’t realize that he took that heart and shattered it into a million pieces, because if he’d held onto it the way he’d wanted to, she’d be dead. But SHE doesn’t know that he was sacrificing himself to save her, and so she committed her act of pure revenge.

Tyrion had declared at the end of last week’s episode that he wants a trial by combat, and he wants a champion, and that becomes the theme of this week’s episode. Jaime was the one he wanted, and Jaime turns him down. He’s scared, and through his lessons he knows he’s no match for anyone anymore. He was cocky and self-assured at the beginning of the season, knowing he could fight with his other hand better than most people fight with their regular hand, but his lessons have taught him differently. And the Mountain, as we saw in that one grotesque scene, is quite the formidable foe. Poor Tyrion is lost, and tries one last feeble joke on his brother, telling him he’s the golden child, and wouldn’t it be funny to see their father’s face as the family name is snuffed out with one blow. Jaime actually considers it for a moment, but realizes he values his own life, and were he to step into the ring, both he and Tyrion would be dead.

And so Tyrion tries Bronn, the man who was his champion the last time. But Bronn isn’t the sellsword that he once was, willing to step up and fight for Tyrion for a few pieces of silver. Now he’s dressed in fancy clothes and betrothed a woman who will ensure him a castle (as long as he gets rid of the older pesky heir, of course) and has no need for Tyrion and his shekels. “I like you . . . I just like myself more,” he tells Tyrion, reminding him that despite theirs being a friendship that is actually important to him, Tyrion has never risked his life for Bronn. Tyrion resignedly accepts Bronn’s refusal. It’s easy to hate Bronn in this scene — after all, he was nothing but a sellsword wandering the lands before he took Tyrion’s challenge and saved his life at the Eyrie, and made a lot of money doing so. Since then he’s been at Tyrion’s side, receiving favours and being given higher positions of power at King’s Landing due to Tyrion’s continued favours, and along the way has mocked Tyrion’s every move and talked about what a ridiculous family the Lannisters are. And . . . actually, yeah, it is easy to hate Bronn in this scene. And for a moment, I thought they were going to actually attempt a David and Goliath thing when Tyrion joked that he could go up against the Mountain himself. “Wouldn’t that make for a great song?” he says.

Until the real champion enters the room. We talked about Oberyn last week, Chris, and what a fantastic character he is, both funny and casual, yet cunning and as full of political maneuvering as the next guy. But there’s a deeper purpose behind Oberyn’s actions: he knows what the Lannisters did to him, and specifically what horrors the Mountain enacted upon his sister, a sister he loved very much. The scene where he tells Tyrion about seeing him for the first time as a baby, a tiny misshapen thing that young Cersei had told him was a monster, is heartbreaking. We all talked about Dinklage’s incredible performance last week, but the one he gives during this scene might have topped it: he doesn’t say a word as Oberyn tells the story, but instead sits there, eyes welling with tears, jaw moving in fixed, clenched hatred of a sister who seemed to have despised him from the beginning, a little girl who would come in and pinch his pink cock, as Oberyn put it, until he thought she’d squeeze it right off and Jaime would have to stop her. Tyrion knows that Cersei has hated him for as long as he can remember, but it’s during this story he realizes she’s hated him even longer. At the trial he told Tywin he was on trial for being a dwarf. Now he realizes that as far as Cersei is concerned, he’s on trial for murdering her mother as well as her son.

“It’s rare to meet a Lannister who shares my enthusiasm for dead Lannisters,” Oberyn says of Cersei. But he’s not on her side. She’s a true Lannister, and one who backs the Mountain as her champion. And if the man who killed his niece and nephew before brutally raping his sister Elia (before slicing her in half with his giant sword) is going to be the Lannister’s champion, he will be the one to fight him.

What a song that will make. I hope they’re singing it for centuries afterwards.

If he does win, I wish he could head north to the Wall and take out Ser Alliser while he’s at it. That guy drives me nuts. What did you think of the non-celebration upon Jon Snow’s return, Chris?

Christopher: GRRM’s talent for writing hateful characters is nowhere more evident than with Ser Alliser Thorne (well, and Joffrey). His sustained animosity toward Jon Snow is as consistent as it is vaguely baffling … especially when it flies in the face of common sense, as with Jon’s suggestion that they block the tunnels through the Wall. Tunnels can be re-built, but a massive wildling army south of the Wall would do more damage than Thorne seems to want to admit, to say nothing of leaving the Wall breached for the inevitable invasion of ice zombies.

The scenes at the Wall, however infuriating Ser Alliser is, felt a little like a placeholder—we’re in a holding pattern at the Wall, waiting for the arrival of Mance’s army. But then the rest of this episode felt like a placeholder. It was all quite good, don’t get me wrong, unlike the previous two episodes, not much actually happened (until the very end—but we’ll get to that). We do however get a new installment in the saga of Arya Stark’s unsentimental education, and another example of the common folk suffering in the aftermath of the war. “Who were they?” Arya asks the wounded farmer. “I stopped asking a while ago,” he replies, and his calm resignation in the last minutes of his life speaks less to stoicism than to exhaustion. Who were they? It matters not at all whether Lannister or Stark, Ironborn or Northmen is burning your home and plundering your coin. As we learned a few episodes ago, if the farmer had not already been attacked, the Hound would not have been adverse to relieving him of whatever meager wealth he possessed. The war might be over for the nobility, but the common folk still suffer.

The Hound performs what he considers an act of kindness, putting the man out of his misery … only to be attacked by the men who (presumably) are responsible for sacking the farm, one of whom shared a cage with Jaqen H’ghar—a particularly nasty piece of work named Rorge. I was wondering if we were going to see him again, considering that he actually plays a somewhat more substantial role in the novels than he has so far in the series. I was wondering to myself, as he stood facing off against the Hound, “How is he going to escape this now so he can … Oh. OK, Arya killed him.” Apparently she took the Hound’s anatomy lesson to heart (get it? to “heart”? Oh, I kill me), and I think I was even more surprised than Rorge at Arya’s quick little thrust to his chest. I guess they’ll have to introduce another psychopathic killer to play the role Rorge plays later in the story …

What did you think of the ongoing Hound and Arya story, Nikki?

Nikki: Ooh, I’m intrigued by the fact there’s another psychopath later in the books, whether he be Rorge or not. As you say, with the exception of the conclusion a lot of the episode felt like exposition to get us to whatever’s going to happen next, but what I did like about the scenes with the Hound and Arya is that it moved their relationship a little further. As we discussed a few episodes ago, they can’t make the Hound completely sympathetic or he’ll lose the danger he’s supposed to pose to Arya at every turn. However, they can certainly give us some insight into his character and allow us to see things from his perspective. Yes, he could turn on Arya or anyone who does him wrong at any moment, but at least as an audience we’ll understand why.

In season one, at the jousting tournament for Robert Baratheon, Baelish sat with Sansa and told her the story of the Mountain and the Hound. He said it like he was telling a ghost story around a campfire, turning the Monster into a true monster, and it wasn’t clear if he was just telling a story to scare the shit out of Sansa or if it was actually true. (I believe in the books it’s simply stated by the narrator, so you know it to be true, but in the show it wasn’t as clear.) Now we have it stated by the Hound himself: his own brother stuck his face in the fire because Sandor was playing with Gregor’s toy. And much like with Tyrion hearing the story about himself as a baby, here we are reminded that the Hound was a mere child once, being horribly abused by his own brother, and we’re also reminded that he’s human, and that he can be hurt emotionally. As he tells Arya, the pain was bearable, the smell was worse, but it was the fact that his own brother did it — and that his own father covered it up by telling everyone that his bedding had caught on fire, thus letting Gregor off the hook — that showed him where his place was in the world. He has always been alone.

For me one of the best parts of the episode was when Podrick, of all people, figured out where the Hound might actually be headed after he and Brienne discover that Arya is really and truly alive. I was thrilled when Brienne complimented the cook on his kidney pie and then the camera turned to reveal Hot Pie standing there! We see he’s doing well and thriving as a cook in this pub, and has been able to hone his craft (the bread direwolf that he sends with Brienne is much better than the one he’d made for Arya before). Where before Brienne and Podrick were presented as a comic duo, now we see just how well they work together. Brienne tells Hot Pie the truth about their quest, and where Podrick correctly thinks they should hold their cards closer to their chest, Brienne is the one who’d correctly asserted that Hot Pie was not their enemy and could be trusted. We’ve seen that Podrick is incredibly loyal, worthy in battle when he defended Tyrion and saved his life, and apparently very good with the ladies, but now we see just how brilliant he is when he deduces that if the Hound has Arya he must be taking her to the Eyrie because that’s the only place where he’d get a ransom.

Of course, now all I can think of is that if it’s like any other scene where Starks are about to come together (see Red Wedding and Bran and Jon a couple of episodes ago), either the Hound isn’t going to make it up the hill to the Eyrie or Sansa will have disappeared before he gets there, and Brienne and Podrick will be captured. Oh GRRM, how you frustrate us so!!

Speaking of frustrated, poor Selyse walks in upon Melisandre in her bath and not only has to continue to show her unwavering devotion, but must do so while gazing on the gorgeous body of the woman who has been with her husband. What did you make of that discussion?

Christopher: Well, first and foremost I was impressed with just how much Tara Fitzgerald has allowed herself to be so dowdied up. Carice van Houten is an extremely beautiful women, to be certain, but so is Fitzgerald—when I first heard she was cast as the unattractive Selyse—who is described as plain, dowdy, and chinless—I wondered why they were departing from the novels in casting someone with Fitzgerald’s striking looks. But they’ve chosen to make Selyse severe and angular, turning her into an ascetic as well as a fanatic. We haven’t seen much of Selyse so far in the series; this encounter went a long way to explicating the power dynamic between the priestess and the would-be queen.

My initial reaction to this scene was to roll my eyes a little, as it first appears to be yet more classic Game of Thrones sexposition (without the actual sex), an excuse to let the camera linger on Melissandre’s naked form while she and Selyse talk. But I think you put your finger on it (that’s what she said) in observing that it works as a goad to poor Selyse, whom we assume to have taken to Melissandre’s religion with such passion to compensate for the fact that there is utterly no passion in her marriage to dutiful, cold Stannis. As I’ve noted previously, in the novels there is no sex between the priestess and Stannis, and I was dubious when, in a moment of rather hamfisted symbolism, she did him on the giant map of Westeros. Then I had about the same thought I had in this scene: that they were introducing this plot point as an excuse to get Carice van Houten naked (as with her seduction of Gendry). To be certain, it does seem that the writers have a bit of a crush on van Houten, as she has replaced Esme Bianco (Ros) as Character Most Likely To Get Naked. But upon reflection, I think that the series has made the relationships on Dragonstone somewhat more complex, and made Melissandre at once more human and more inscrutable. In the books, she is painfully beautiful but also aloof, operating (from what we gather) entirely according to whatever religious impetus brought her to Stannis to start with. The series’ Melissandre appears as slightly more self-interested. Sleeping with Stannis, we begin to suspect, wasn’t merely a religious rite; she has insinuated herself into the life of the man she wishes to place on the Iron Throne, and her conversation with Selyse delineates exactly how the power dynamic now works. Yes, it was a typical bit of Game of Thrones gratuitous nudity; but while van Houten’s nudity means to titillate the audience, Melissandre’s means to intimidate Selyse. As I’ve said before, there are many moments when this show uses female nudity as an assertion of power, such as the scene between Brienne and Jaime in the baths, or when Daenerys defiantly stands and stares down Daario Naharis 1.0. It is significant that part of Melissandre’s monologue deals with the trickery a priestess like her has to engage in: what powders and potions will put on a show for the credulous, but also which ones actually have power. The larger meaning here isn’t exactly subtle: Melissandre knows how to dazzle, how to impress, how to seduce … some tasks require magical assistance, some do not.

Melissandre: A drop of this in any man’s wine will drive him wild with lust.
Selyse: Did you use it with Stannis?
Melissandre: No.

I confess to a sharp intake of breath at this exchange, in spite of the fact that you can see Melissandre’s answer a mile off. Here she asserts her power over Selyse, which is the simple fact that she has power over Stannis, that she inspires in him the lust and desire that Selyse never has. And she goes on to exercise that power, more or less ordering her to bring Shireen with them when they sail. Why? Why does Melissandre want Stannis and Selyse’s unfortunate child with them?

Actually, I’m really asking … because this exchange (to the best of my memory) never happens in the novels.

But from one cauldron of sexual politics to another: it seems that Daenerys has allowed herself to succumb to Daario’s charms. And that’s quite the outfit she’s wearing in the scene: I have written in my notes that I can’t wait to see what Gay of Thrones has to say about it.

 

Nikki: HAHAHAHA!!! OMG, I have in my notes, “Well, there’s one more outfit I’ll never be able to cosplay.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen Daenerys in an outfit as revealing as that one, save her birthday suit. And also, no offense to Liam from Nashville, but I just felt like this scene might have made more sense with Daario 1.0. The new guy seems a little too hamfisted to be a Lothario. (That said, when he dropped trou I immediately said to my husband, “So THAT’S what Rayna James has been gettin’.”) Like Melisandre, Daenerys telling Daario to undress comes across as an order — one with which he is all too willing to comply — showing that even the most powerful woman has needs. She will not allow him to control her any more than Stannis controls Melisandre, but she will enjoy her time with him and then send him on his way, which, in the case of Daario, is pretty much all he was looking for anyway. Poor Ser Jorah then sees him leaving the room, and when we talk about sexual frustrations on Game of Thrones, Ser Jorah’s picture really needs to be sitting beside it. It’s clear he’s been in love with his Khaleesi from the get-go, which is why he stays at her side and why he dislikes Daario and anyone else who gets too close to her.

In this case, at first Daenerys seems to have learned nothing from Loraq’s visit in the last episode, telling her about how ill-gotten her attempt was to free the slaves of Meereen, and that she’d hurt his father, who was a master but a fair one who tried to get others to treat their slaves fairly. (To which Dany never asked, “But did your father pay his slaves?” If only to have the guy look around and say, “Uhhhhh… oh look over there!” and then run away.) She tells Jorah that she’s sending the Second Sons to Yunkai to slaughter all the masters and free the slaves again. Jorah argues for moderation, she says she wants an end to slavery and will do whatever it takes to get it. However, she tells him, she’s going to send Loraq as an ambassador so he can tell them that “they can live in my new world or they can die in their old one.”

Can this work? We’ve seen what Daenerys has done in Yunkai, Astapor, and Meereen, and word travels quickly in Westeros. Her name will be known far and wide if it isn’t already, and it’s one thing to free the slaves in Yunkai, leave, and have the masters try to restore order even worse than it was before, but it’s quite another to go back to Yunkai, remind everyone who’s boss, slaughter all the masters, and once again free the slaves by showing them someone is looking out for her. Jorah tries to advise her on moderation, and on the one hand he’s absolutely right: the world is not black and white, and there are even slaves who are terrible people, and masters who are good and righteous, but Daenerys isn’t looking to deal with individual will here. As far as she’s concerned there is a world with slavery, and a world without it. Sacrifices have to be made, and if a few good men die along the way to eradicating slavery, so be it: the greater good will endure.

And last but certainly not least we come to the Eyrie, a place of sexual frustration if ever there was one. First we have the exchange between Sansa and her super-creepy cousin, who asks her what kind of a place Winterfell could possibly have been if it didn’t have a moondoor that made people fly, and then Littlefinger reveals the intentions he has on Sansa that we kind of saw coming, and then there’s that spectacular ending.

I will leave the final discussion on this to you, my friend, and will just say that A) I thought the scene between Sansa and Robin was a dream at first because who the hell can pack snow that perfectly (???!!!), B) Sansa’s hair is an even more remarkably red than I thought it was, and C) what I love most about this season is that we’re not having to suffer through a lot of good people dying, but instead we’re getting some true karma here. Although, for as weird and effed-up a child as Robin is, part of me feels sorry for how he’s going to take this news. After all, he still appears to be breastfeeding. :::shudder:::

 

Christopher: You’re quite right to observe that the lion’s share of the deaths this season have been people we won’t miss—but they’ve still been quite shocking, most of them, none more so than Lysa. And we’ve still got three episodes left, so expect that butcher’s bill to be added to.

This episode is titled for Littlefinger’s affected sigil: he wears a mockingbird, an eminently appropriate symbol for him, as they mimic the songs of other birds. Littlefinger has proven to be a master of dissembling, of being different things to different people and giving people the songs they want to hear. We see however in this episode that he is also playing the part of the cuckoo, insinuating himself into the Eyrie with Sansa as his ward and, after marrying Lysa—and thus giving himself title to the Eyrie—he disposes of her. We know from hard experience that Littlefinger is playing the long game, and for the most part he plays it utterly unsentimentally (recall his speech, re: chaos, ladder). What’s remarkable about his resurfacing this season is that he seems to be betraying genuine, deep feelings … When Sansa asks him why he really killed Joffrey, he replies “I loved your mother more than you could ever know. Given the opportunity, what do we do to those who’ve hurt the ones we love?” Sansa’s response is to smile: a moment ago when she asked the question, we could see her steeling herself, obviously ill at ease with Littlefinger, on guard. But when he characterizes his murder of Joffrey as vengeance, she allows herself a bit of complicitous satisfaction. She is still guarded, but there is a sense here that Littlefinger has said precisely the right thing. “In a better world,” he continues, “one where love can overcome strength and duty, you might have been my child.”

I have previously voiced my ambivalence about the way in which the series has been portraying Littlefinger as an utterly unsentimental, utterly calculating player for whom all those around him are disposable. He has that dimension in the novels, to be certain, but there was always visible a minute chink in that armour where Catelyn was concerned, as well as his past humiliations. That has largely been absent until now, and the Littlefinger we see in this episode proves to be far more complex than he has let on.

None of which is to suggest he isn’t being supremely creepy here. I’m not sure what’s more disturbing—the prospect that everything he has done has been all one big long con of almost algorithmic precision, or that it all proceeds from a perverse psychodrama in which Littlefinger has decided to resolve his past hurts by replacing Catelyn with Sansa. “But we don’t live in that world,” he tells Sansa. “You’re more beautiful than she ever was.” And he kisses her while audiences the world around squirm uncomfortably in their seats … and Lysa witnesses it.

What I like about Littlefinger in this episode is that he manages to be at once sympathetic and creepy, heartfelt and cruel. He doesn’t just shove Lysa out the Moon Door, he makes certain she knows she’s been terribly deceived. “I have only loved one woman,” he assures her, “only one, my entire life,” and for a brief moment she looks mollified. But of course he then stabs her metaphorically through the heart before literally killing her, giving her a terrible last thought to run through her head on the long, long way down.

On the bright side, we’ll never again have to watch her breastfeed her son.

Well, that brings us to the end of another episode. Three more to go! As always happens, this season is flying by. So on behalf of Nikki Stafford and myself, have a wonderful week of anticipation.

Well, if Peter Dinklage’s rant at the end of this episode wasn’t Emmy bait, I don’t know what is …

Hello and welcome once again to the Great Chris and Nikki Game of Thrones co-blog! I am your host, Christopher Lockett (Lord of the Pulled Pork, Keeper of the Sacred Clarence, Pretender to the Heisenberg Goatee), and I am yet again joined by Her Ladyship Nikki Stafford (Queen of the Buffy Rewatch, Most Prolific High Priestess of TV Posting, Scourge of Sparkly Vampires Everywhere).

But what I am prattling on about? To the episode!

 

Christopher: Judging from a lot of the discussions I’ve been reading, the writers are making fans of the books increasingly nervous with this season’s deviations … and this episode will likely only serve to ratchet up that anxiety, given that essentially its first half comprises storylines that do not appear in the novels. I remain fairly sanguine, as I simply cannot imagine that the series will change the overarching story in any substantial ways. These narrative doglegs are interesting, however, for the simple question of how the writers will get us back on track. Certain things have to happen, and some of these departures make me wonder just how the writers will unknot the threads down the line.

Sorry to be cryptic, but that’s about as spoilery as I’m comfortable getting.

Let’s talk first about Stannis’ visit to the Iron Bank of Braavos, but before I say anything about that I need a little moment to geek out about seeing Braavos appear in the opening credits. This city is one of GRRM’s most intriguing inventions, modeled on late medieval Venice, and about as close to an egalitarian society as one is able to find in that world. Like Venice was in its heyday, Braavos is a hub of commerce, a city run not by hereditary nobility but by its moneymen and merchantmen. And we meet the most powerful of the former. Stannis and Davos cool their heels in an impressively austere room while Stannis paces and complains about being made to wait. Davos is more patient, observing that this is the Braavos way, and starts to relate a story of his smuggling past … and stops, presumably thinking that it might not be the time to remind his king that he used to be a criminal. And then the doors open and in walks … MYCROFT HOLMES! My, but that fellow does get around in the corridors of power. (If only Tyrion could have hired his brother later in this episode).

As mentioned, this entire sequence does not appear in the novels. Stannis does ultimately have dealings with the Iron Bank, but that comes much later, under rather different circumstances. I find it interesting that the series is choosing to make the Iron Bank more prominent: not just because they’re having a major plot point pivot on whether or not Stannis will get bankrolled and hence have the resources to renew his war with the Lannisters, but because they’re emphasizing that crucial aspect of GRRM’s writing I mentioned last week: the pragmatic logistical component. Stannis is a man of unwavering principle, but his legal claim on the Iron Throne holds absolutely no water for the bankers (something Stannis should have understood in the first place when Mycroft bluntly dismissed the title of “lord,” and then further repeated all of Stannis’ titles back to him in a bored voice). He points out the fact that patrilineal right has counted for little in Westeros’ history, that its history books are littered with such words as “usurper,” and that the question of who is the rightful king is always open to interpretation. “Here our books are full of numbers,” he tells Stannis. “Much less open to interpretation.” And again, the question of logistics: he makes Davos list all of Stannis’ forces and resources, which amounts to a whole lot of not very much. “You can see why these numbers don’t add up to a happy ending.”

I like that it was Davos who convinced them—Davos, the pragmatic man, who points out in no uncertain terms why the Bank’s current arrangement with King’s Landing is a losing bet: Tywin is rock-steady and reliable, yes, but he is also old (sixty-seven, apparently), and he is the only stable presence there: Tommen is just a boy, Cersei is crazy, Tyrion’s on trial for killing Joffrey, and Jaime is a king-killer.

I love this bit, even if it does feel a little disingenuous—one has to assume that Mycroft has already worked all this out for himself. Then again, it may be that he’s just taking the measure of this would-be king. A bird in the hand, after all … Tywin might be a thin thread to hang the bank’s investment on, but until Davos’ impassioned speech, he has no reason to think Stannis is anything more than just another usurper. And Davos speaks Mycroft’s language in terms of payment and debt, showing him his mutilated hand, his punishment for years of smuggling as the price for entering Stannis’ service. A Lannister may always pay his debts, but as we gleaned from Jaime’s discussion with his father, Lannisters are as dwindling a resource as their gold.

After Davos re-hires Salador Saan, we cut to Yara’s raiding party, as she reads Ramsay’s letter to her crew and riles them up. This raid on the Dreadfort is odd on two fronts: one, it’s geographically problematic; and two, it is a complete deviation from the books. What did you make of Yara’s abortive attempt to rescues Theon?

Nikki: I too loved it when the doors opened and freakin’ Mark Gatiss strode in. I’m sure there was a huge audience of cult TV that squeed in that particular moment. He played it so straight, never wavering from that pasted-on smile until Davos began challenging him, and then we saw that confidence begin to waver. I, too, was thrilled with that scene (Stannis never would have been the one to say anything to convince him; that guy seems to be trapped in an arrested development where he requires everyone around him to do and say everything on his behalf) but it was brilliant.

And yes also on Braavos making it into the opening credits model. Just as my husband moaned, “Does this 28-minute opening sequence ever CHANGE?!” they showed it and I sat right up and exclaimed, “Ooh!! New city!! Ooh!! Back it up!! Big statue!!” Fantastic.

The Theon “rescue” sequence was heartbreaking. As Yara climbs back into the boat after failing to capture Theon, she bluntly says, “My brother’s dead,” and we know that’s the story she’ll take back to the Iron Islands and her father.

And the sad thing is, she’s absolutely right. Theon is dead. Now we have Reek, a quivering, shivering, shadow of his former self, who thought his sister was nothing more than another trick by Ramsay to make him think he was about to be rescued, rather than his actual rescue party. Yara’s departure means there’s no more rescue coming for him, and Reek’s complacency and actions in that moment solidified that he was 100% Ramsay’s puppet. As viewers, we internally beg Reek to go with Yara, to just be Theon again and run away rather than hinder the rescue mission. And yet… the writers oh so cleverly pull us in on the whole ruse in the following scene, when Ramsay tells him he’s drawn a hot bath for him and wants him to get in. Now we’re right there with Reek, shouting no, no, don’t get in there, he will drown you. And just as Ramsay has brainwashed Reek, he’s brainwashed all of us. He doesn’t do anything at all to Reek when he climbs into the tub; he simply begins washing him. Notice how Reek grabs the edges of the tub, almost to brace himself for the expectation that Ramsay will try to dunk his head under the water. Notice also the sadistic smile that creeps over Ramsay’s face when Reek drops his britches and one can only imagine the scarred, mutilated absence between Reek’s legs that Ramsay stares at. Now that Ramsay has his total loyalty, he tells him it’s time for Reek to pretend to be someone he’s not: Theon Greyjoy.

I thought the cutaway here to the Daenerys story was utterly brilliant. As I’ve been saying on here for a few weeks now, Daenerys (my girl, always my girl, please don’t take any offense to what I’m about to say oh First of Your Name, Mother of Dragons) has been “freeing” the slaves and punishing the slavemasters, but that opens up a whole new host of problems. Last week Ser Jorah told her that in Astapor and Yunkai she’s left more of a mess behind than perhaps was there to begin with AND she took the city’s armies from them, so now they’re utterly defenseless. She pulls the slaves on side and makes them love her, but it’s only so they’ll follow her into battle where most of them will be slaughtered. She expects their love and loyalty, but she’s freed them from one master only to control them herself. Cutting away from Theon’s story — where Theon has been beaten into submission, to the point where he now loves Ramsay, who seems to be freeing him from the life of torture he’d received from . . . Ramsay — reminds us that Daenerys frees them from one hell only to plunge many of them into another.

In this episode we see that the dragons are roaming the countrysides and fields, looking for herds of goats that they first barbecue and then eat. The goatherder approaches Daenerys on her throne and tells her what they’ve done, and she promises him three times what the goats are worth, and he backs away happily, grateful for his queen. (Did anyone else think that was his son’s bones in that blanket? When he first opened it I was horrified until I realized he was saying that was one of the goats. Apparently I didn’t notice the giant HORNS when I watched it the first time.) Daenerys looks thrilled that she’s made someone happy, and excitedly calls in the next supplicant. And… yeah, it’s not as happy as the first one. This guy is the son of one of the masters whom she had crucified (against Ser Barristan and Ser Jorah’s advice) and now she realizes the world isn’t black and white, with slaveowners being bad and slaves all being good: sometimes the slaveowners are good people, who fought against cruelty to the slaves, who treated the slaves well. In attacking the city and doing what she did, she looks like a despot who is forcing the people to trade one cruel monarchy for another. We know Daenerys wants the best for people, wants to be loved, and cares about her people, which sets her apart from other rulers, but this job ain’t as easy as she thought it was going to be.

What did you think of the Daenerys scene, Chris?

Christopher: I thought it was very well done, and unlike much of this episode, more or less hewed to the novel (more or less—there were a few deviations, but it got the gist of things). Dany has placed herself in a difficult spot, insofar as that she wants to be a liberator, but in order to do so, she has to be a conqueror too. And she faces a quandary we see through much of history: in liberating one segment of a population, it is necessary to overturn the customs and structures of another, and however much the revolution might be guided by moral imperatives, chaos and injustice are inevitable. In the case of something like slavery, there are no neat solutions, as the institution of slavery itself deforms a society in myriad pernicious ways.

One of the things that is admirable about A Song of Ice and Fire is that GRRM doesn’t shy from this basic fact, but places it front and center. There is a lot in the depiction of Daenerys’ “liberation” of the slave cities that is cringeworthy—first and foremost being the image of an extremely white person playing magnanimous saviour to pitiable people of colour (the final shot from last year’s season finale exemplifies this)—but on the level of storytelling, the degree to which the entire process is shown to be fraught is well done. Hizdahr zo Loraq’s entreaty reminds us of the grey areas, that not everyone is as deserving of punishment as others. On the other hand, I wanted Daenerys to remind him that, whatever his father’s opposition to the crucifixions, he was still complicit in the institution of slavery. The defense “well, I didn’t want to go as far as the others did” isn’t really a viable one when it comes to war crimes.

The fates of Astapor and Yunkai are also poignant for us because they resonate with so much of what has happened in the past hundred years in terms of the legacies of colonialism and wars of choice like Iraq. Daenerys’ blithe assumption that those cities would become peaceable simply because she ousted their tyrants and liberated the oppressed reminds me of nothing more than the neocons’ naïve belief that all you have to do is overthrow a dictator and say “you’re a democracy now,” and suddenly there will be a Starbucks on every corner (yes, I’m oversimplifying). But to her credit, Dany at least recognizes her mistakes and attempts to come to grips with them. Will she succeed? I actually can’t say, because GRRM hasn’t gotten that far in the novels. But I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that things get much, much worse in Mereen before they gat better.

The cut-aways in this episode are quite good: from Ramsay to Daenerys, and from Daenerys’ struggles ruling to a meeting of the Small Council, with Oberyn taking up his new position there. His presence, as Tywin intended, is symbolic of the Seven Kingdoms finally resuming something resembling equilibrium … but for how long? The obvious antipathy between Mace Tyrell and Oberyn reminds us of long-standing feuds, and Oberyn’s own vendetta against the Mountain sneaks in with the mention of the Mountain’s brother. And of course we hear tell of a new threat—Daenerys and her army and dragons. There is a palpable anxiety in the room when she is mentioned, in spite of Tywin’s attempt to dismiss her with the oddly (for him) naïve comment that dragons have not been a factor in war for three hundred years. Really, Tywin? What, do you think she’ll arrive on the shores of Westeros and the people will collectively say, “Oh, dragons are SO three centuries ago”? It’s tempting to think of that line as a stumble, but I’m more inclined to think of it as a betrayal of Tywin’s actual nervousness. After all, if “that Targaryen girl” does in fact return, Tywin Lannister becomes public enemy number one. He’s trying to reassure his people … but he’s also trying to reassure himself. And am I alone in sensing a little bit of goading glee in Oberyn when he tells everyone just how formidable the Unsullied are?

Oberyn is more and more becoming an intriguing character. Obviously Tyrion’s trial is the most spectacular part of this episode, but I loved the little exchange between Oberyn and Varys. It was very reminiscent, deliberately so, of Varys’ verbal fencing with Littlefinger. But where Baelish and Varys were politely implacable enemies, we don’t entirely know Oberyn’s intentions … and he doesn’t know Varys’, as we see in his somewhat clumsy attempt to feel him out. It is made very clear just why Varys is such a formidable player: like Littlefinger, Oberyn is ruled by desire. Where Littlefinger’s is focused, Oberyn’s are more diffuse and hedonistic; but in both cases, neither person can quite understand Varys, who is not ruled by his passions.

Oberyn: Everyone is interested in something.
Varys: Not me. When I see what desire does to people, what it’s done to this country, I am very glad to have no part in it. Besides, the absence of desire leaves one free to pursue other things.
Oberyn: Such as?
Varys: [looks significantly at the Iron Throne]

This exchange is wonderfully cryptic. He is after the throne itself? Isn’t that a direct contradiction of what he has just said? Or is there another, subtler meaning in that look?

What do you think, Nikki?

Nikki: One thing I love about doing these back and forth discussions with you is that almost every week, we write down exactly the same dialogue exchanges to be used later. The Varys/Oberyn (I can’t help but think of them as Dr. Evil and Mr. Sofia Vergara now… thank you Gay of Thrones) one I have written down word for word in my notes, just as you did. I, too, am intrigued by Oberyn and think he’s the best addition to the cast this year. He’s someone with his own ideas, who, like Tyrion at the beginning of season one, chases his passions and often gives the finger to political behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing that everyone else takes so seriously. For Oberyn, life is about joy and passion; he’ll sit on the Small Council and seems happy to do so, but only for him to get an inside view of the goings-on, and then toss out a bon mot or three (my favourite in this episode being when he comments that the Unsullied are powerful on the battlefield, not so much in the bedroom, ha!).

The scene between the two of them sizzles because every time we learn the tiniest little tidbit of Varys’s past life, it feels significant. Here he keeps his hands hidden inside his sleeves as always, and occasionally gives a little nod or quiet word to either affirm or deny Oberyn’s leading questions. But that nod to the throne at the end… wow. It certainly looked like he was admitting he was the dark horse who’d lately thrown his hat in the ring, but we know he’s been playing it all along. But does he actually want to sit on the throne, or be the trusted advisor to the one sitting on the throne? The line “the absence of desire leaves one free to pursue other things” is such a loaded one. Could he be referring to Tyrion: with Shae out of the way and stuck in a loveless marriage, there’s no passion or desire in his way. Or Jaime Lannister, who, post–rape scene, seems to have lost all desire for Cersei? Or does he mean himself? While everyone else is giving in to the very passion that Oberyn deems significant — including Lord Baelish, who despite his cunning, is still ruled by his unrequited love for Catelyn — Varys just slowly and quietly keeps his eye on the prize. The question is, what prize, exactly? And for whom?

He’s not the only one with his eye on the prize, however. Tywin holds many keys in this episode, and while he certainly shows his vulnerability in the Small Council scene when he waves off the dragons like they’re not important, as you pointed out, he’s back in charge when Jaime comes to him to plead for Tyrion’s life. In that scene Jaime comes storming in and thinks he’s trying to strong-arm his dad into a bargain: you let Tyrion go, I’ll step down from the Kingsguard, marry, and have children that will carry on the Lannister name. He thought that was his initial offer and that a negotiation would ensue, until Tywin triumphantly pronounces, “DONE!” and stops Jaime in his tracks. Jaime stepping down from the Kingsguard, Tyrion being banished to the Wall never to be seen again, and the Lannister name being carried on through the most viable genetic line Tywin had? Exactly what Tywin’s wanted all along. How much of this entire trial was simply a means for Tywin to get what he wanted?

The trial (hilariously sent up as The People’s Court in this week’s Gay of Thrones) is definitely the highlight of the episode, for sure, and one of the highlights of the entire series thus far, but it’s split up: we have the initial scene of Jaime walking Tyrion to the “courtroom” in handcuffs as per Tywin’s orders, with Tyrion announcing loudly, “Well . . . we mustn’t disappoint Father!” Note how when they’re walking down the aisle, someone defiantly shouts, “Kingslayer!” from the crowd. We assume the disdain in that person’s voice means the insult was being thrown at Tyrion, but notice the irony that it used to be the compliment they paid to Jaime Lannister. I guess whether Kingslayer is a good or bad word depends entirely on which king it was that you slayed.

In this scene, we get a parade of untrustworthy people lying through their teeth about Tyrion’s guilt, which is brilliantly played out as Tyrion sits small in the prisoner’s dock, the top of his head barely showing above the rail, listening to these people while not being able to defend himself. What did you think of Tywin’s control over the trial and Jaime in that scene I mentioned? Or the group of people who come out in the trial and what they said? How much of what they said do you think was directed by Tywin, or are they all speaking of their own volition?

Christopher: A little from column A, and a little from column B … As I mentioned before, though much of this episode departs from the novels, the trial unfolds practically word for word. And I should correct you on a specific point: the only person who actually lies outright is Shae. Everyone else more or less tells the truth, but tells it in such a way that puts Tyrion in the worst light possible. One interesting deviation from the novels is Pycelle producing Sansa’s necklace and declaring that the missing stone had left “traces” of the poison used to kill Joffrey (in my notes I’ve written “C.S.I.: King’s Landing”). I remember thinking, back when Littlefinger drops the necklace onto Dontos’ corpse, “Aren’t you worried that it will be found when the boat drifts ashore?” (in the novel, they burn Dontos and his boat to destroy the evidence). But on reflection I thought of course Littlefinger wants that damning evidence to make its way back to King’s Landing—so much the better for him to strengthen his hold over Sansa, to make her appear more unequivocally guilty (not that Cersei et al really need more evidence).

The most heartbreaking witness (besides Shae, of course) is Varys, who relates precisely Tyrion’s words to Joffrey after news of Robb Stark’s death, but then also colours his testimony with a little speculation, musing that perhaps Tyrion’s marriage to Sansa had made him sympathetic to the North. That, for me, is always such a painful moment (in the novel as well), specifically because of what Tyrion reminds Varys of—that Varys had been Tyrion’s friend and had thanked him for saving the city. But Varys is in no position to aid Tyrion, as he’s already warned him … whatever power he wields is tenuous, and in spite of his seemingly omniscient capacity to obtain intelligence, he cannot openly thwart powerful people. And so he will have to play Tywin’s game. None of which makes his testimony less damning or less painful for Tyrion, which prompts his question and Varys’ response—neither of which, I should note, are in the books. “Have you forgotten?” he demands. Varys’ answer is as hauntingly cryptic as his earlier discussion with Oberyn: “Sadly, my lord, I never forget a thing.”

How amazing is Conleth Hill in this role? As I’ve observed before, he’s nothing like the Varys of the novels except for his baldness. Oberyn could be excused for making assumptions about the sexual preferences of the novels’ Varys, who plays the part of a simpering, mincing, effeminate castrato. Conleth Hill’s Varys possesses a quiet dignity. I don’t know which version is better: the powdered, fluting Varys, it becomes apparent in the novels, is merely a performance, one mask worn by a master of disguise. We have not yet seen any chameleon-esque tendencies in Hill’s Varys, but that implacable equilibrium he radiates makes him such a compelling character—especially when displayed in contrast to the histrionics of those around him.

And then we cut to Tywin and Jaime, and it is a scene that, as you say Nikki, makes one wonder just how subtle Tywin is. Even given how much he hates Tyrion and is shamed by his very existence, it seems unlikely that Tywin would be so eager to see his flesh and blood executed for treason. And yet, that is precisely how the trial appears to be weighted: the deck has been stacked very neatly against him, and every avenue Tyrion might take in his own defense blocked. There seems no chance whatsoever of a not guilty verdict. And so Jaime pleads with his father for a way out, a chance for Tyrion to take the black. As you say, Nikki, Jaime presents his offer of leaving the Kingsguard and returning to Casterly Rock as the opening move in negotiations and is caught flat-footed by Tywin’s immediate acceptance. How much of the trial has been orchestrated by Tywin to arrive at this very resolution? It’s win-win-win for Tywin: the troublesome Joffrey replaced by the malleable Tommen, his despised son humiliated but not dead, exiled to the Wall, and his beloved son brought back into the fold to make a new generation of golden-haired Lannisters. Is he really that clever?

Perhaps not. Perhaps he then overplays his hand. Shae’s testimony is the most damning and the most mendacious, and that which most hurts Tyrion, provoking him to reject the whispered deal about taking the black and demanding trial by combat. There is little doubt that, even without Shae’s “evidence,” Tyrion is doomed. Shae is there to put the final nail in the coffin. Which makes me wonder: at whose behest is she betraying her erstwhile lover? Who brought her back? Did she return of her own accord to revenge herself on Tyrion’s final words? Was she captured, and gives this false testimony in exchange for her life? If so, who put those words in her mouth? Tywin? Is Tyrion’s father doing this to make a perverse point about his whoring? Or is it Cersei’s doing, making absolutely certain that her hated brother dies?

What do you think, Nikki?

Nikki: When the doors opened and Shae walked in, my husband gasped loudly and my hands flew to my mouth, and I moaned, “Nooooo… not Shae!” It was an absolutely devastating moment, and the look on Tyrion’s face speaks volumes. Until then he’d become resigned to whom he was, what was happening to him, and just hoped that Jaime would come through for him. And then… Shae walked in.

You are absolutely correct that the people who come before Shae aren’t outwardly lying; when I said they were all lying about his guilt, I meant exactly that: they’ve taken his words out of context and suggested they were precursors to a murder he didn’t commit. They weren’t lying, but they were providing a misdirection by way of context. Tyrion took the poisons that Pycelle accuses him of, but that was to save the city during the Battle of Blackwater. Cersei quotes him out of context, as does Varys, and the soldier at the very beginning. All of their witness statements add up to a murderer proclaiming what he’s about to do . . . except the context in which each of those statements was uttered, of course.

But Shae . . . ugh. That was just so heartbreaking and painful, and I asked all the same questions you did. The day before the wedding, Shae is serving everyone at the dinner where Joffrey is given the sword, and Tyrion overhears Cersei telling Tywin that Shae is the whore she’d told him about. It’s in that very moment he decides he must save her life and send her away, but to do so he destroys her soul, making her despise him by calling her a whore and telling her she didn’t mean anything to him. I still think Dinklage’s performance in that scene is extraordinary: it’s one of the only times we ever see Tyrion outright lie about something, and every word that comes out of his mouth pierces his own heart even deeper than it pierces Shae’s. His voice cracks and is almost a growl by the end of the scene, and his face is screwed up with sorrow, which she takes to be disgust.

And now, days (weeks?) later, we see that he succeeded: she hates him. Varys whisked her away to another life, and now she’s back to exact her revenge. She never believed him when he told her exactly what they’d do to her if they found out she was his lover, yet she clearly believed every verbal dagger that spewed forth from his mouth in that terrible scene. To me, Varys is clearly at the bottom of this: he’s the only one who knew where Shae had gone to. And when he steps down from delivering his testimony and Tyrion asks him to recall that they were friends, he drops his head and says, “Sadly, my lord, I never forget a thing.” And clearly, he’s remembered Shae, where she went, and that by turning her over to Tywin and Cersei, he makes sure he gets more brownie points than ever before.

Was Tywin behind it? Cersei? They could have been in collusion to get her back, but I don’t think Tywin colludes with anyone, and I think Cersei’s been too drunk and in mourning to have actually gotten her act together to have created this conspiracy. I think it was Tywin, working with Varys to get her back.

Regardless of who did it (it was totally Tywin), the impact it has on Tyrion is immediate and horrifying. As her web of lies becomes more and more complicated, and eventually devolves into sordid lies about their sexual acts (which is where Oberyn sits up and starts becoming interested), Tyrion is not only feared and hated, but mocked. He becomes the laughing stock of the courtroom, and if he wasn’t already tiny inside that prisoner’s dock, he shrinks further in this moment. “Shae . . .” he finally says. “Please, don’t.” It’s the only time he begs, the only time he asks for someone to stop torturing him. He stood silent and in shock as Cersei pointed at him at the Purple Wedding and was walked away. He told Jaime and anyone who would visit him that he was innocent, but he never rattled his jail cell bars or screamed his innocence to passersby. He strode into the courtroom, silent, and never yelled, “THIS IS NOT TRUE” when people took the witness stand. But now, quietly, he begs her to stop lying, to stop breaking his heart.

But she’s only doing what he’d done to her. Lying to break his heart, to make him hate her the way he made her hate him. The difference is, he was trying to save his life, and Shae is trying to have him killed. “I am a whore, remember?” she fires back at him. And that’s when he realizes that despite Shae’s betrayal, despite his father’s machinations to get him into this very spot, despite his sister’s coldness and failure to see the truth, despite his innocence… he was the master of his own downfall. For he really DID say the things Cersei said he did. He DID take the poisons out of Pycelle’s store, even if it wasn’t for this and was ages ago. He DID call Shae a whore and turned her against him. He DID regularly use prostitutes and drink himself senseless and was everything his father ever accused him of being.

And it’s in that moment that he suddenly rises up. At first quietly, then in a booming voice, he says that he wishes to confess. “I am guilty,” he pronounces. “I’m guilty of being a dwarf. I’ve been on trial for it my entire life.” Jaime looks shattered, Shae looks like she has second thoughts about what she just did, Cersei remains stone-faced, and Tywin simply looks satisfied. As you said, Chris, he can’t have his son executed for treason, because while he wouldn’t care about losing the son, he wouldn’t want the blot on the family name. Instead he can send him to his certain death on the Wall. But… might Tyrion think he’d somehow won if he didn’t execute him? Hm… can’t have that. So… let’s destroy him from the inside. Tyrion’s outburst at the end of this episode is exactly what Tywin wanted: proof that he has triumphed over the son who was always too smart for his own good.

As Tyrion digs his hole deeper, turning to the disparaging and naïve citizens of King’s Landing, he tells them that he wishes he’d had the guts to kill King Joffrey, that he wishes he’d had enough poison to take out the whole lot of them. Amongst the gasps and oohs and aahs and chatter that rises up from the courtroom, you just see the look of quiet glee on Tywin’s face. And finally, to everyone’s surprise, he turns back to his father and tells him that he’s done with this, and demands a trial by combat. Cut to Jaime and that, “Oh… right” look on his face. Remember when you told Tyrion just a few episodes ago that if you’d been at the Eyrie you would have been his champion? Looks like you’re about to get called out on that.

I am positively giddy about the next episode. The ending of this was SO spectacular, so upsetting when it cut to credits (my “NOOOOOOO!!!” was heard throughout the neighbourhood) I just can’t wait until next week.

Near the beginning of the first book in the series, we are introduced to Tyrion Lannister when he has a conversation with Jon Snow about who has it worse: the dwarf or the bastard. And this is what GRRM writes:

[Tyrion] favored Jon with a rueful grin. “Remember this, boy. All dwarfs may be bastards, yet not all bastards need be dwarfs.” And with that he turned and sauntered back into the feast, whistling a tune. When he opened the door, the light from within threw his shadow clear across the yard, and for just a moment Tyrion Lannister stood tall as a king.

In this scene Tyrion once again stands tall, but makes himself the most hated man in King’s Landing. I mean, things can only get better from here, right? 😉

Hello again, everyone, and welcome once again to the great Chris & Nikki co-blog, wherein we gab about the most recent episode of Game of Thrones. This week’s was pretty impressive—I’d place it among the best episodes of the show so far. So much to love: Tommen is crowned, Cersei arrives at an apparent détente with Margaery, Arya learns a harsh lesson about swordcraft, Daenerys enters the queen-in-training program (Mereen campus), Sansa has some thoughts about frying pans and fires, and the Brienne-and-Jaime buddy comedy gets a spinoff.

And of course, one or two things happen north of the Wall.

But I’m getting ahead of ourselves. What shall we start with, Nikki?

 

Nikki: So let’s start in the Eyrie, that place with the creepy Lysa and her much creepier son, Robin. We haven’t seen these people since season 1, when Robin urged his mother to send Tyrion flying through the moon door. Baelish told Sansa they were heading there, and I watched their entrance with one eye closed because I thought, oh my god, if she’s still breastfeeding that kid I’m switching over to Mad Men. She wasn’t . . . but he wasn’t far from her breast. And he’s even loopier than he was when he was younger: when he wasn’t dancing around Sansa and asking her if it was true that her family was slaughtered, he was taking Baelish’s precious gift of a glass bird (transported all the way from Westeros and up the mountains of the Eyrie without breaking it) and just flings it through the moon door to show them, you know, what he means when he refers to the moon door. (Note to Robin: next time, JUST POINT.)

But we can’t really blame the kid for being more than a little off; look at his mother, after all. She tells Sansa about how Catelyn used to eat so many sweets she was making herself fat (as she’s pushing the same sweets into Sansa’s mouth), then hints at the story of Catelyn being so drawn to Brandon Stark that he forced Baelish into a duel that almost killed Littlefinger (a story from Book 1), then pushes down on Sansa’s rings, seriously hurting the girl’s hands and scaring her by suggesting she’s a whore who’s trying to seduce Lord Baelish before taking her to her breast and whispering “there, there,” reassuring poor Sansa that soon Tyrion will be executed and she will be free to marry Robin and become Lady of the Vale. The “DA FUH?!” look on Sansa’s face when she catches that last part is priceless.

Oh, and then there’s the snogging with Littlefinger, which I could do with never, ever seeing again, where she promises him that she will scream across the Vale when he makes love to her that night . . . a promise that she keeps, much to Sansa’s dismay. The union between Littlefinger and Lysa didn’t seem to make a lot of sense at first; of course, he’s connected to her through his love of Catelyn (if you can’t have one sister, you might as well have the other… then again, switching from Catelyn to Lysa doesn’t quite seem like switching from Brandon to Ned). And Lysa is a powerful woman still, so the marriage could be worth something. But now we discover that they’ve been connected for years, ever since Baelish convinced her to poison her husband Jon Arryn, which then orchestrated the whole Robert Baratheon goes to Winterfell/Ned becomes the Hand of the King/Ned sniffs out the bastardy issue/Robert dies/Ned dies/all hell breaks loose thing. So there’s that.

Wait… WHAT?! Baelish was behind everything?! The entire game of thrones that began with the death of Jon Arryn wasn’t, in fact, executed by Pycelles or Cersei, but Baelish? Ooh… THIS just got more interesting.

What did you think of this episode, Chris?

 

Christopher: In many ways, this has been my favourite episode so far this season. So much happened—there are an awful lot of exclamation points in my notes. One thing I think worth mentioning is that this episode flipped back and forth between storylines a lot more frequently than we’ve tended to see. The trend for a while has been spending a good chunk of time on one thread, and then moving on … but we had a lot of backing and forthing, which gave this episode somewhat more of a dynamic feel to it.

That being said, we had only one sojourn with Daenerys this go-around, and the final sequence was a long stay with Jon Snow, Bran, and Locke (though to be fair, it did switch quite frequently between their perspectives). I’ll start with Daenerys, who is now considering her options. What to do? She has proved her worth in conquering three mighty cities, amassing in the process an army large enough to challenge King’s Landing. But as Jorah reminds her, King’s Landing is one thing—the entirety of Westeros is another. And she hears disturbing news from Astapor and Yunkai: those cities she has “liberated” have reverted to old practices, old despotisms, with unseemly haste. It makes you remember Tywin’s advice to Tommen last episode: King Robert was mighty in battle, but made the mortal error of mistaking prowess in war for competence in ruling. So much of this show is about the nature of power. Daenerys has shown just how formidable she is, but at the same time just how transient her influence is. Without her actual presence, these cities have no compunction to play by her rules.

But unlike other tyrants we’ve seen—unlike King Robert, or Joffrey, or Viserys—she recognizes as much and rejects her advisors’ urgings to sail for King’s Landing. “How can I rule the Seven Kingdoms,” she asks, “when I can’t rule one city?” How indeed … and so she opts to stay in Mereen—and prove her worth as a ruler.

The nature of kingship (and queenship) is much on display and in debate in this episode. We begin with Tommen’s coronation—and can I say just how Christian and British that sequence is? The prevailing seven-pointed church of Westeros is an obvious analogy to Christianity, but I don’t think it’s been quite so explicit prior to this bit. But that parallel is quite significant, as it reminds us of the principle of divine right of kings. Hence, the conversation between Margaery and Cersei is, to put it mildly, somewhat loaded. Before I get into the substance of it, let me praise Natalie Dormer and Lena Headey for some extraordinarily understated acting. Anyone who had not seen the series to that point could be forgiven for thinking, “Oh, nice … they’re helping each other through their grief, and they’ll work in concert to aid Tommen.” HA! What a lovely depiction of honeyed barbs, especially on the heels of Margaery’s secret shared smiles with the new king, and Cersei’s rather pointed intrusion into her line of sight,

All of which helps to highlight the series’ troubling of the very notion of divine right. Margaery, looking at the diminutive Tommen on the Iron Throne, offers the saccharine platitude that “he sits the throne like he was born to it.” What I loved about this sequence was how blunt Cersei is: “But he wasn’t,” she asks, “was he?” What followed floored me: Cersei admitting, to her dead son’s bride, that her dead son was a monster. Though she doesn’t use those precise words, the meaning is plain. What an incredible moment of incommensurable conflict: the acknowledgement that Joffrey was a monster, alongside the mother’s fierce love for her first son. It’s obvious here that, though she obviously loves Tommen—who is, by all indications, a far superior human being to Joffrey—she cares far less for him than she did (does) for the wee prick.

But her admission is staggering, as is her suggestion that Tommen might be the first king in centuries who is actually good. “Who was the last decent king, I wonder?” she muses. A question to our readers: how many of you had the hair on the back of your neck stand up at that moment?

Of course, all of Cersei’s seeming commiseration with Margaery (not that we believed it) was belied by her conversation with her father. What did you think of that scene, Nikki?

 

Nikki: This was definitely Cersei’s episode. So much so, in fact, that near the end I began to worry she was about to be killed off. (“Let’s give Lena some great scenes and then… off with her head!”) I think this season has gone a long way to making Cersei a more sympathetic character. That wine goblet is ever present, as much a constant accessory for Cersei as her rings and braided hair, showing how much she needs liquid courage just to get through her day. The conversation with Margaery was exactly what you said it was: staggering. In fact, I was so enthralled by what was happening that my note-taking ceased, and I scrambled to catch up after and had to rewatch that scene. Those two actresses are marvelous together, and as you pointed out, the moment of Cersei stepping between Tommen and Margaery as Margaery flirted from above and Tommen giggled on his throne was so powerfully symbolic.

And yet, for the first time, we got a real admission from her. Yes, as you say, the sincerity was undercut by the later discussion with Tywin, but for her to respond to Margaery’s loyalty to Joffrey with the curt, “He would have been your nightmare” was shocking. She’s gleaned what Margaery’s been up to, and so Cersei decides to take the reins rather than let Margaery get away with it: she encourages her to marry Tommen, forcing Margaery to act coy and say she’d have to ask her father, and then Cersei admits she’ll have to do the same. Of course they do: for all the power they wield, they are nothing.

And then we cut to the Tywin conversation where he confirms that the Tyrells are their “only true rivals” when it comes to resources, and they need to get them on side. The Lannisters had the gold, but it’s dried up completely and has yielded a total amount of zero gold (no ounces, pounds, or tons). Tywin admits that Robert Baratheon had created a tremendous debt now owed to the Iron Bank of Braavos (I couldn’t help but picture Gringotts). We knew this already because Tyrion pointed it out when he became Master of Coin, and it was in fact Littlefinger who did the drawing on the bank to cover up Baratheon’s massive spending and hide the mess he was making. He explains to Cersei that the weddings are necessary: despite her disgust, she must marry Renly to tie them to the Tyrells, just as Tommen must be with Margaery.

And here, once again, that theme of kingship in this episode comes to the fore: Baratheon was a terrible king who spent so much money that he’s left the kingdom in terrible debt to a bank that sounds like quite the formidable foe (“It is a temple, and we live in its shadow,” says Tywin), and now all sorts of alliances must be made with other houses that have nothing to do with military power, and everything to do with paying off old debts.

But for all of Cersei’s campaigning in this episode — first talking to Margaery, then to Tywin, and finally to Oberyn, and to each one repeating that her brother Tyrion killed Joffrey and he must pay for his actions — little does she know that the real killer is in the very House with whom she’s making these alliances.

The scene between Cersei and Oberyn further heightened my sympathies to her. I know she’s conniving, but just as she explained her love of Joffrey to Margaery — “You never love anything in the world the way you love your first child, no matter what they do” — her love for her other children is deep, too. She was devastated when they shipped Myrcella off to Dorne, and she goes to Oberyn to ask if he’s seen her. He tells of her laughing and playing in the water with his daughters and loving life, which, given the hellhole that Westeros has become, is like a dreamworld in comparison. (Is it possible he’s lying, or can we hold on to the hope that he’s telling the truth?) She asks him, “What good is power when you cannot save the ones you love?” When we first met Cersei, she was trapped in a loveless marriage but finding solace with Jaime; she had her children around her, Tyrion was in his place, Jaime was by her side, Robert was off fondling other women and barely noticing her existence, and her son was going to take over as king. Even then, she was an unhappy woman because of the alliance made to Robert, who made her life a constant misery. But now her father barely tolerates her, Jaime hates her and he disgusts her, her beloved first child is dead, and her daughter has been shipped elsewhere. As I said in last week’s recap, the women on Game of Thrones often have the look of power, but very little of it is actually theirs to wield, which is not the show necessarily being sexist, but providing an example of the sad reality around us every day. I literally gasped at the beauty and harshness of the next line Cersei uttered:

Oberyn: They don’t hurt little girls in Dorne.
Cersei: Everywhere in the world, they hurt little girls.

Cersei might be cold, calculating, and lack empathy, but in this episode we are reminded of how she was turned into that person: she has been used as a pawn her entire life, and everything she’s ever loved has been taken from her.

And similarly, everyone that Arya has ever loved has been seemingly taken from her. In this episode, we see her recite her list once again before sleep, and the final name (which I knew was coming all along) adds an extra punch. Everywhere in the world, they indeed hurt little girls. But not all little girls know how to wield a sword.

 

Christopher: Not all little girls wield a sword, it is true, but Arya’s showdown with the Hound reminds her (and us) of the great chasm between theory and practice. Arya is like a kid who thinks he can fight because he’s got his brown belt in karate, and proceeds to get his ass handed to him when he provokes someone who actually has experience fighting. The Hound’s amusement in this scene is brilliant.

Arya: No one’s going to kill me.
Hound: They will if you nance around like that.

Also brilliant is the utter contempt in his voice when Arya tells him Syrio was killed by Meryn Trant. We of course saw what happened, and we know that a fake sword is no match for actual steel and plate armour—no matter how brilliant the swordsman—and we further know that Syrio sacrificed himself to spare Arya … none of which really stands up to the Hound’s derision and his brutal confidence in his own abilities. I think, perhaps, we can safely say that our sympathy for the Hound is ebbing? Certainly the contemptuous backhand he deals Arya reminds us just how unsentimental this man is. And he cares nothing for Arya’s hate, sleeping soundly by her even though he has made her list of death. It doesn’t do to underestimate Arya, but neither should we overestimate her: Needle’s failure to so much as poke a hole in the Hound’s armour would have been hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic. Never has Arya’s beloved sword looked more like a toy.

That’s one of the things I love about this series and the novels on which it is based: GRRM doesn’t merely not shy away from the brutal calculus of life and death in this world, he makes it a central theme. In some ways, Arya is practically archetypal: the young hero with a unique talent, who through determination and spunk bests seasoned warriors. Except that when you think about it, she hasn’t: everyone she has so far killed, she has killed by accident (the boy in the stable back in King’s Landing) or by trickery or stealth. All of which is entirely appropriate for a slip of a girl with a toothpick sword, but like the fact that even a brilliant swordsman like Syrio cannot defeat a mediocre one like Meryn Trant when the latter is encased in steel, so too the Hound’s size, strength, and utter willingness to kill will always trump Arya’s skill.

Arya’s feeble confrontation with the Hound reflects a broader reality as well, one acknowledged by Tywin: stuff matters. Having just spent a semester teaching a class on The Lord of the Rings, GRRM’s emphasis on the material necessities for war and governance is particularly striking. Tolkien’s novel is a masterpiece, but has little concern for questions of logistics. How does Gondor feed its armies? How does it pay them? From where do they procure the raw materials for weapons? And so forth … these questions are never raised by Tolkien, much less answered. Game of Thrones, by contrast, functions on the basic principle that armies must be fed, paid, provisioned, and that the money for that has to come from somewhere. Littlefinger’s ostensible mismanagement of the Iron Throne’s finances takes on a rather more sinister character, doesn’t it? As you point out, the revelation that Jon Arryn—whose assassination essentially put this story in motion—was killed by his wife at Littlefinger’s behest is one of the more shocking revelations in a series that raises shocking twists to the level of art. I remember nearly dropping the book when I read that. Littlefinger does seem to be behind everything, and has been working toward all of this for a very long time. But rest assured when I tell you his is only one of the conspiracies shaping the destinies of our favourite characters.

Speaking of our favourite characters (how’s that for a segue?) it looks as though we’re getting a new buddy comedy starring Brienne and Pod … though this one looks like it will feature much less sharp banter and a lot more slapstick. What did you think of the way Brienne’s new storyline is proceeding?

 

Nikki: As you know, my love of Brienne runs deep. And I think much of that love stems from the fact that her story is a perfect blend of comedy, tragedy, pathos, sadness, and triumph — moreso than possibly any other character on the show (save, perhaps, Tyrion), her story runs the gamut of emotions. This week there’s a lot of comedy — Pod unable to keep his horse straight, Brienne trying to convince him to just go away but he’s unwilling because it would make him a bad squire, Pod catching a rabbit on fire because he didn’t realize he needed to skin it first — but within that comedy we get a very big revelation for Brienne: that one of the Kingsguard tried to kill Tyrion during the Battle of Blackwater. This seemingly unimportant piece of information that Pod tosses off in the midst of explaining to her that he killed a man once to save Tyrion’s life could end up being a very valuable piece of information later. It’s possible Brienne could be killed (noooo!) before she’s able to actually use this piece of information — after all, GRRM often brings us to the brink of something happening and then shatters it — but here’s hoping that it becomes useful to her. What definitely happens in that scene is that Brienne develops sympathy for Pod, and realizes that what he might lack in skills he makes up for in loyalty. It’s a lovely moment when she allows him to remove her armour for her. But you can see from the look on her face that she’s rather shocked by what he just told her.

And, as you said above, that’s the thing I really enjoy about Game of Thrones and the books upon which it is based: that so often what would be a “dun-dun-DAAAAHHH!” moment on any other show — quickly given, used, and resolved — just becomes a puzzle piece on this show that might be used, or might be a dangling red herring. As you so rightfully point out, Arya could be a coming of age story of a girl who proves that a person is a person, no matter how small… or, in the world of GRRM, she can be a girl who longs to prove that, but will still end up dead in a ditch because her sword is about as useful as a twig my son would pick up in the woods and pretend to swordfight with. (In fact, I didn’t actually recognize Needle at first and wondered why she was parrying with a twig rather than Needle, and then realized… “Oh.”)

But the same goes for Daenerys. As much as I adore her (I repeat: my fealty lies in the House of Targaryen), I’ve always thought it rather convenient that she frees the slaves and has some of them follow her and… then what? What about the people left behind? Are the people really better off? What about the ones who don’t follow her? Aren’t they vulnerable right now? She just took all of the Unsullied out of Yunkai, isn’t that their only defense?

So in this episode, when her advisors explain that actually, things turned to shit in Astapor and Yunkai after she “liberated” them (definitely a commentary on recent world events), I was rather delighted. It’s not all sunshine and light, and GRRM shows the downside to military victory: his novels might be in the fantasy genre, but he shows the very real trials and tribulations attached to these circumstances; the military occupation and triumph might be done with the best of intentions, but sometimes with disastrous results. I was also very happy to hear her talking about Westeros — she’s always been so removed from the goings-on in the rest of the Seven Kingdoms, with her own story being entirely separate from the others (excepting the occasional references to her whereabouts that are mentioned in small councils) that hearing the two of them come together was rather wonderful. Unlike the men who reign over these other areas, she will stop, strengthen, and rule, getting to know her people and her kingdom before moving forward. “I will do what queens do: I will rule.”

Daenerys — her power and intelligence — is the perfect antidote to the sad lot of the other women in the story. And with that… we move to Craster’s Keep. Whoa. Talk about a crazy suspenseful sequence, where both my husband and I started to worry that Jon Snow might die next (NO! Not Jon Snow!) simply because Bran was this close to reuniting with him, and we remember what happened to the other Stark brother when Arya got that close to him. Eep! But first there’s Jojen’s revelation that they’re all just accompanying Bran to the weirwood; then the threatened rape of Jojen’s sister; then Bran turns Hodor into a killer, which resonates so deeply as Hodor stares at the blood on his hands in confusion and heartbreak; then the return of Ghost (YES!); then the horrifying death of Tanner… I literally had my knees pulled right up to my chin and was holding my hands out going, “Geeeeyaaaaahhh noooooo!” as Jon Snow s-l-o-w-l-y pulled that sword back out of his head GOOD GOD. Seriously, between that and the horse episode of Hannibal, which I just saw this week, I think I’m giving up eating popcorn while watching television. But what an insanely amazing end to the episode. You had revealed to us that Locke was a construct of the show, so I figured he wouldn’t last long on the show, but I really thought this entire sequence was rather spectacular nonetheless. What did you think, Chris?

 

Christopher: I completely agree—it instantly became one of my favourite sequences on the show thus far, and is remarkable on two fronts: first, it was not in the books (I’m hard pressed to think of any of my other favourite bits that weren’t), and second, it had Bran in it! The last time Bran was in an awesome sequence, he was in a coma as his direwolf killed his would-be assassin.

It also renewed my faith in the writers. I should have known better than to worry about the appearance of Locke at the Wall and the apparent collision course between Jon and Bran. They sidestepped a potential rupture in GRRM’s overall story with a certain narrative elegance and a lot of brutal violence (as is their wont). And in the process they emphasized both Bran’s importance to the story and the cost of their mission—both in terms of what his protectors are willing to endure, as well as the actual human cost of blood spilled. But it was the Hodor moments that made this sequence as brilliant as it was. Poor Hodor … it’s quite an accomplishment to inspire that thrill and triumph of Hodor’s sudden badassery, while simultaneously cringing because we know just how much of a violation it is to make the gentle giant a killer. As you say, Nikki, the aftermath as he’s looking at his hands in hurt bewilderment is heartbreaking.

As is the necessity of Bran slipping away without having a reunion with Jon Snow. We recall from season one that they’d had a warm relationship, with Jon gently encouraging during his archery lesson, and the genuine hurt on his face when he sits next to comatose Bran’s bed to say farewell. Bran must desert one of his few remaining family members; and Jon will not know that the brother he thought dead by Theon’s hand is very much alive.

In other words, this final sequence is exemplary of what Game of Thrones can do when it’s on its game: exciting, suspenseful, and deeply satisfying on a visceral level, but also riddled with pathos and regret (but also love and warmth—if Cersei’s grief and Arya’s hate are the emotional low points of the episode, Jon’s reunion with Ghost is certainly the high one). For all the blood that’s spilled at Craster’s Keep and the deep satisfaction of seeing Tanner and Locke get their comeuppance, there’s a powerful ambivalence, best embodied by Craster’s wives … effectively imprisoned and enslaved by Craster, then imprisoned again by Karl Tanner and his mutineers and repeatedly raped, they nevertheless refuse Jon Snow’s offer of asylum. But neither can they return to the only home they’ve known, with its memories of Craster. “Burn it,” says the leader, in spite of the fact that that will leave them with no shelter as winter encroaches. Their wounds run deeper than winter’s chill.

Do you realize we’re now at the mid-point of this season? As with all good things, this goes too quickly. So thanks once again, Nikki! And thanks to all of you following the show with us. In the meantime, be good and work hard, and remember that if you suddenly wake up to find yourself choking a Night’s Watch impostor, don’t panic. Just go with it. He was probably an asshole anyway.

Hello again and welcome to the great Game of Thrones co-blog, starring yours truly and my brilliant partner in thronegab, Nikki Stafford. Take it away, Nikki!

Nikki: Let’s start at the very beginning (cue Julie Andrews… on second thought, let’s not cue Julie Andrews…) with my girl Daenerys. As we discussed last week, she has raised a massive army based on loyalty and love and gratitude for freeing slaves. But there’s a new dark side that’s been cast with this week’s outing.

We begin with Grey Worm taking lessons from Missandei on reading or learning English (it wasn’t exactly clear to me what she was teaching) and they begin discussing who they were before Dany freed them. Grey Worm said he was always Unsullied, never anything before that, and Missandei doesn’t accept that, and tells him he needs to remember back to when he was a human being, before that was taken away from him. She remembers her village being burned, reminding me of the child from last week’s episode who watches his village being burned and massacred by the Thenns and wildlings; was she like him? Will he grow up to be a slave?

Grey Worm won’t remember this, because his brain has been washed clean of anything he ever was before the Unsullied, and despite what Missandei says, he doesn’t ever see himself returning to the Summer Isles. “Kill the Masters…” he mutters to himself. And, in an uncomfortable return to his roots, he dresses up as a slave along with other former Unsullieds and they sneak into the tunnels where the slaves of Meereen are discussing whether or not to rise up against their masters, falling heavily on the side of “not.” This scene is made even more intriguing because of the “disguises” that Grey Worm and his fellow soldiers are wearing — they aren’t posing as slaves, but showing the other slaves that they were once just like them, and now, with the weapons they have brought to them, they too can free themselves of the masters. The powerful become so because they convince the weak they are, well, weak, and the vulnerable people never actually look at their numbers and realize hey, there are more of us than there are of them! (Think of high school classroom politics: there are usually about 10 “popular” kids in each grade, and 50 “unpopular” kids… but no one ever actually runs those numbers to realize how preposterous it all is.)

But here’s where it gets interesting. The slaves do rise up and quash the masters while declaring fealty and love to their new Mhysa, Daenerys calls for an eye for an eye, wanting the masters crucified at the same mile markers as they’d crucified their slaves. Ser Barristan Selmy tries to advise her against it, telling her that she should answer injustice with mercy. She defiantly tells him she will answer injustice with justice, and the men are hammered into the posts, with their left hands nailed to the horizontal slab of wood, while their left hands are nailed to their ribcages, just as they’d done to their slaves. Now, instead of 163 slaves, you have countless masters pointing the way to Meereen with their grisly bodies, and Daenerys shows them absolutely no mercy as she stands at the top of the tower of Meereen, just as she showed no mercy to Doreah, her handmaiden, and Xaxos, whom she locked in the vault for eternity back in Qarth. As the sigil of the House of Targaryen waves behind her, we hear the screams of the fallen masters below, echoing up to the Khaleesi like a national anthem.

Now, while I’m focusing here on the opening of the episode, I saw Twitter explode at 10pm over some major deviations from the book. Am I right in assuming (from what I could gather over there) that the end of the episode, with the white walkers, is actually from future books and not from the third book, Chris?

Christopher: There were rather a large number of deviations from the novels in this episode. The one thing the Mereen sequence hewed to was the way in which Daenerys’ people entered the city through the sewers. They did that in the novel, too … except there it was Jorah and Barristan leading an actual attack. And they were in the vanguard for reasons I cannot share here for fear of spoilers. Suffice to say, we’re rapidly arriving at a point where the series is making irrevocable changes: the nature of the subjugation of Mereen, the presence of Locke (not a GRRM character) at the Wall, the scenes at Craster’s, Bran’s capture, Margaery’s secret midnight rendezvous with Tommen, and of course the final scene with … a White Walker? It was a Walker who took Craster’s boy to the mini-Stonehenge, but it looked like an entirely different race/species of ice demon who touched the infant and transformed him.

The thing is: unlike other televisual adaptations of novels (Dexter, for example), Game of Thrones has worked in pretty close concert with the writer, from having him on board to write an episode every season, to demanding his notes as a condition of the contract (in case he dies before finishing the series), to generally using him as an invaluable resource. All of which tells me that nothing happens without GRRM signing off on it (officially or otherwise). Which raises an interesting question: is that scene in the mini-Stonehenge at the end of this episode a spoiler? Does it reveal something that we’re going to learn about in The Winds of Winter? Are Weiss and Benioff giving us a glimpse of what we can expect from future novels? Or are they merely inventing something that GRRM leaves implicit?

But to get to the substance of the episode … we must be approaching the mid-point of the season, because tonight’s episode was one of those in which a huge amount of stuff happened, but there was no particular note that resonated—nothing that will have the proverbial water coolers abuzz with discussion (excepting those water coolers populated by people who have read the novels, apparently). Which is not to say this wasn’t a good episode, just that it was one of those bridges we tend to see mid-season that moves the story along without offering any truly OMG moments. I suppose the one thing approaching that in this episode is the sort-of reveal of who actually killed Joffrey. But we’ll come to that later.

After the Mereen sequence, we’re back in King’s Landing … and oh, my, but Jaime has been getting much better fighting with his left hand. Until Bronn again teaches him an abrupt lesson and smacks him across the face with Jaime’s right hand. This was a nicely-crafted scene for a variety of reasons—some of which I cannot mention, because spoilers. But if I can drop hints, their discussion about how Tyrion evaded Lysa’s grasp by demanding the right of trial by combat is something to keep in mind. Bronn reminds Jaime that Bronn only ended up standing for Tyrion because Lysa (or as I suppose we now have to call her, the future Mrs. Littlefinger) asserted that the combat must happen immediately … negating the possibility of waiting for Tyrion’s first choice of champion, his brother. Bronn tells Jaime that Tyrion knew he would have ridden day and night to defend his brother. But now?

Now Jaime is caught between love of his brother and love of his sister. And Tyrion is more than a little embittered by that fact, responding badly to Jaime’s attempts at banter, just as Cersei is more than a little paranoid about the fact that Jaime visited Tyrion. And at no point in that meeting between Jaime and his sister is there a hint, a sense, a reverberation of the fact that he raped her the last time we saw them together. What did you make of that, Nikki?

 

Nikki: I think, like everyone else watching last night, the moment Jaime entered the room I waited for there to be some comment about the rape. After all, the internet went crazy with the discussion over it last week. Yes, they have a history together, and yes, knowing these two I would presume their sexual relationship is a rather sado-masochistic one, and within the parameters of what they are used to, perhaps, maybe part of their foreplay is for her to say no and him to say yes. But… he did it beside their son’s corpse. The very setting of the rape defines it as rape, whether she was hesitantly welcoming or not. She is at the lowest moment of her life emotionally, her father just reminded her that she will never have power and as long as he can manipulate Tommen the power will be his, she knows that Margaery will have her talons in Tommen in no time (and we all know what Cersei thinks of Margaery), and she believes her younger brother is her son’s murderer.

But maybe the writers want us to see it as just another day in Westeros. After all, we’re not screaming about the injustices being done to the Craster daughters right now at Craster’s Keep. And we didn’t even mention what was happening to the innkeeper’s daughter when the Hound and Arya showed up to kill Polliver and his crew. Or how about Sansa just being betrothed to whomever suits Tywin’s fancy? Or Margaery being used as a pawn for the Tyrell family, being married off to unsuitable men just to further their power? Or, you know, Viserys telling his little sister to strip and clean herself in boiling hot water right after he tweaks her nipple and slaps her ass? We swoon over the relationship between Khal Drogo and Daenerys, and overlook the fact that he rapes her on their wedding night (she’s 13 in the books, and on the show is sobbing openly as he has sex with her) and she must take charge of their sexual relationship in order for him to respect her.

There have been many words written about the complicated portrayal of women in GRRM’s novels and on the show. It’s the most positive portrayal of women on TV right now. It’s an incredibly negative and nasty portrayal of women on TV right now. It shows women rising up and being powerful. It shows women as helpless and powerless in the face of a masculine universe.

I think it’s all those things, which is why I could turn this into a giant paper on feminist responses to Game of Thrones and why they are correct and why they are terribly wrong. But I won’t. Because our posts are already too long as it is. 🙂

Suffice to say, I wasn’t exactly surprised when Jaime walked in and there was no mention of it, because I think Cersei has resigned herself to being a pawn in the masculine Lannister family: aside from whatshername who was stuck on a boat and sent to Dorne, I can’t name another female Lannister. (Come to think of it, I guess technically I can’t even name THAT Lannister. Starts with an M. I’ll think of it.) Cersei is alone in this family, and has always been alone in this family. Her mother died giving birth to Tyrion, and the only comfort and acceptance she’s gotten has been in the incestuous arms of her twin brother. Tyrion loathes her, her father dismisses her, she was married off to a boor of a man… being raped beside her son’s corpse probably feels like a Tuesday to Cersei, not a monumental event that will shatter her psychologically. She lives in a different world than we do. Does that make it right? No. Does it make my love of Jaime and his character more complicated now? Absolutely. Am I happy that Brienne went off and left Jaime behind so we can love Brienne while having to work out our difficult feelings about Jaime separately? YES.

(Myrcella. Her name was Myrcella. Whew.)

I adore Brienne, and have from the beginning. As I said to my husband last night, I’m still in awe over the perfect casting of this woman. “Find me a woman who’s 6-foot-3, very plain-looking, almost unattractive and man-like, and yet very feminine, beautiful in the right light, who can play tough and vulnerable at the same time.” I can only imagine how much the casting director must loathe GRRM at times… and yet, they found the perfect woman. Brienne is tough, but very vulnerable and lost at times; plan and masculine-looking (Pod calling her “Sir” is hilarious) and yet gorgeous — none of us shall forget what she looked like in that hot tub — very tall, and yet one who can be made to look small just by the look on her face. We almost never see her smile, which I’m sure is one of the actress’s tricks; if she did smile, she would probably be beautiful, so she keeps her face very shocked and angry-looking all the time, and it works. As she rode off on her horse with Podrick at her side (what a GREAT duo, I never would have thought of it but can’t wait to see what they do with it), my husband said, “I really hope they have a great storyline for her, because she’s one of the best characters on the show.” Yes she is. Let’s put her in the “GRRM writes amazing female characters” category.

In the scene that you mentioned with Tyrion and Jaime, Tyrion is very quick to defend his wife’s honour, telling Jaime that she couldn’t have killed the king. “Sansa’s not a killer . . . not yet, anyway,” he says. I immediately wondered if that was foreshadowing. We cut to Sansa being over on the ship with Baelish and saying the same thing about her husband, that there’s simply no way he could have done it. I love that the writers on the show have included scenes of Sansa and Littlefinger in every season, as if building up to them ending up on this ship together in the fourth season. What did you think of their conversation, Chris?

 

Christopher: I loved it. There have been some wonderfully crafted character arcs on this show; one of the best things about the revolution in television these past ten years or so has been its ability to employ its long-form storytelling in the service of developing layered, complex characters who evolve as they suffer life’s indelicacies. And the best shows take their time, so that the Ellis Carver we see in the final episode of The Wire or the Jesse Pinkman at the end of Breaking Bad are utterly different people than they were at the start. We see this most strikingly in Game of Thrones, I’d argue, with Arya; but Sansa’s evolution has been far more subtle and in some ways far more profound. She did not have much to do last season as she languished in King’s Landing, but we see from her conversation with Littlefinger that she has been paying attention.

And you’re absolutely right, Nikki, to observe that we’ve been privy to a handful of strategically placed scenes between Sansa and Littlefinger that, taken individually, don’t amount to much—but by the time Sansa clambers over that ship’s rail, the two of them have established a connection. Or rather, Littlefinger has established a connection with Sansa, who was certainly unaware that anything was happening. Their conversation thus is as much of a reveal as when we first saw Littlefinger again—as Sansa slowly starts to piece things together, we see she’s pretty damn far from the obnoxious child she was in season one.

If this season is teaching us anything about politics in Westeros, it’s that it doesn’t pay to be a capricious or unpredictable king. We see Tywin’s satisfaction at the malleable and decent Tommen, Tyrion wonders if his father is responsible for Joffrey’s death for the sake of stability, and here Littlefinger confesses to orchestrating Joffrey’s death because “he was not a reliable ally.” And … cut to the other half of the conspiracy, in which we see Olenna and Margaery spinning their own plot … though not until Olenna shares a scandalous little secret, namely that she seduced her late husband away from her sister and basically ensnared him by being so spectacular in bed that he was helpless before her (and speaking as someone who first discovered The Avengers and the knee-trembling spectacle of Diana Rigg in a catsuit when I was about Tommen’s age, her claim to have been “very good” rings absolutely true). Keep in mind, of course, that she hasn’t yet spoken of her late husband with anything other than contempt until this moment: her nostalgia for literally fucking him into submission betrays no pleasure at the memory, just pleasure in remembering how good she was. There is no affection here, just satisfaction at having played the game well … and reminds us that Olenna, like Tywin and Littlefinger, has absolutely no sentimentality for anyone but her inner circle, seeing people as objects to be used as means to an end.

Reflecting back on your earlier comments, Nikki, I’d add that in addition to depicting a neomedieval world in which cruelty and pain are inescapable facts of life, Game of Thrones does something that Rome also did wonderfully—namely, to counterpoise masculine and feminine power. The scheming of Atia and the feud she engages in with Servillia have a lot in common with the behind-the-scenes maneuvering done by Olenna, as well as the nascent conflict with Cersei.

With Joffrey out of the way, they now need to consolidate power by taking control of Tommen—which Olenna knows will be difficult, as Cersei will guard him like Cerberus. Did you catch Margaery stroking her necklace? A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind man, and that read rather loudly as an assertion that Margaery and Olenna are pretty much willing to do whatever the hells they need to get what they want.

Which for the moment, fortunately for Cersei, involves sneaking into Tommen’s bedchamber. Margaery mercifully does not employ her grandmother’s tactic and go all statutory-rapey on Tommen, but proceeds with a little more subtlety. What did you make of that scene, Nikki?

 

Nikki: Nudge nudge… say no more. First of all, I do have to say I didn’t see Tommen coming. The kid’s been in a handful of scenes and has barely uttered more than a grunt, and I never even noticed him standing there. I was going to say last week that the casting directors were once more brilliant in casting this kid way back in season one before he actually had to do anything spectacular… until I checked this week and discovered that no, he’s actually being played by a new actor this season. That makes a little more sense. But, at the risk of being totally cougary myself, I do have to say they’ve cast a really good-looking guy to play him. I don’t know yet if he has any charisma in the books, but so far the actor is playing him as cautious and smart, yet wide-eyed and quiet. And when Margaery comes into the room to see him and Mr. Pounce joins them on the bed, let’s just say when she leans forward to talk to Tommen, I don’t think Mr. Pounce was the only thing jumping up in that scene. She’s as brilliant as her grandmother when it comes to subtlety and tactics, and just like Grandma Peel (yes, when Olenna made the comment about being really fantastic back in the day, my mind immediately went to Emma Peel in a catsuit, too!), Margaery knows how to use her feminine wiles to get what she wants. I love that she’s able to control Tommen far more than she ever could Joffrey, which not only makes me intrigued for the little “secrets” they’re going to keep from Cersei, but also hopeful that for once, maybe one of her kingly husbands might actually survive the marriage.

Speaking of getting things up, let’s move northward, shall we? (In case you’re wondering, I’m in a self-imposed contest to come up with the worst segue ever. I’m thinking that one might be a major contender.)

Over at Craster’s Keep, Karl Tanner is holding court, using dialogue from the Al Swearengen School of Emoting. I recently stayed with a couple of friends in the UK and they showed me several episodes of The Thick of It, starring Peter Capaldi as a foul-mouthed governmental director of communications, but in these scenes in this week’s Game of Thrones, Owen from Torchwood makes Capaldi’s character look like a Sunday school teacher. As he drinks wine from Mormont’s skull, he lords over everyone else, encouraging them to fuck the girls to death (subtle, dude) and take what’s theirs. In the background you can see Craster’s daughters in various stages of undress, beatings, and being brutally raped. It’s a horrific scene, made worse when the old woman comes in carrying yet another male heir of Craster. The mother in me cringed at the newborn baby playing the role of the newborn baby, and I remember thinking note to all expecting mothers: do NOT agree to let your newborn baby appear in an episode of Game of Thrones. It never turns out well for the wee bairn.

But THEN… Bran moves into the mind of Summer and sees Ghost (a reunion of direwolves!!) and then the whole lot of them gets caught. And THEN… they beat on Hodor and stab him. I had no idea how much I loved the big lunk until that happened, and then I was furious and frightened that this might be the end of the character. I literally sat up straight on the couch and yelled, “DON’T YOU DARE HURT HODOR!!” When Tanner smacks Bran and jokes that where he came from in Gin Alley, if he’d struck a highborn he would have lost his right hand, I couldn’t help but think please please please let this be foreshadowing. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Game of Thrones so far, the pricks seem to get theirs in the end. I’m gleeful about what could possibly be awaiting Tanner.

I was shocked when you said that Locke wasn’t in the books, Chris; you did actually say that back when he was lopping off Jaime’s hand, but of course I’d entirely forgotten that you did until you just mentioned it again. So if it’s not in the book, I wonder if we should fear Locke at all, since one would assume Bran’s story wouldn’t be messed with in a big way (i.e. you wouldn’t kill off Bran on the show if he survives in the book)… or would it? With all the divergences from the book that you mention above, it made me think that maybe the Game of Thrones guys are either doing what you said — they know the ending to the books and are now turning things more quickly to that end, knowing they can’t keep the show going for another eight years — or they’re following The Walking Dead’s lead on moving so far away from the books that the readers can no longer predict what’s coming next … to the extent that when something major DID happen this past season that was exactly from the books, it caught everyone — including the readers — off-guard.

My guess is the first, because what has really set GoT apart from so many other adaptations is its fealty to the books, and I would hate for that to be destroyed. But now I also see why the readers would be up in arms: you all choose to read the books because you want to read it from GRRM first, and don’t want the show to spoil it for you, whereas those of us who started on the show watch it first and read later. But if they’re going to jump ahead and include information from future books that haven’t yet been released, they’re taking the choice out of the hands of the reader/viewer and surprising them with spoilers.

Any final words about Locke and those white walkers at the end, Chris?

Christopher: Locke’s current role is puzzling. I understood why they created him initially; in the novels, Jaime’s hand is cut off by a psychotic group of mercenaries called the Bloody Mummers, who had originally worked for the Lannisters, but then switched sides to Roose Bolton. So the series was consistent insofar as Jaime loses his hand to Bolton’s men. But the whole infiltration of the Watch and the capture of Bran are huge deviations from the novels. Assuming they mean for Bran to escape and carry on north, then this is just a little diversion from his main storyline—probably created because Bran’s storyline is otherwise JUST SO DAMN BORING. But Locke seems to be developing into a fairly significant character. I have a few thoughts about how this might play out so that the main storyline is preserved, but I think I’ll keep them to myself for the moment.

Though it is worth pointing out that, to go on this mission, Locke must take the oath. And while he presumably plans to desert and return to Roose Bolton, the penalty for desertion is death. Full stop, no appeal. However much the Night Watch is mocked in the southern regions of Westeros, that law is about as absolute as they come. Would Roose shelter him? If I was Locke, I’d be leery of trusting Roose Bolton with my life …

As for the White Walkers … I suppose it’s possible that we’re getting a glimpse into the books’ mythology, something that won’t necessarily be made explicit in them. Why do the White Walkers demand this horrifying sacrifice? What happens to the babies? Well, now we know—they’re made into more White Walkers (not such a great galloping shock, that).

But I’m not overly concerned with the series deviating in any fundamental way from the books, and not just because the outcry from the fans would be enormous. It makes a certain amount of sense for series like Dexter or The Walking Dead to go off in their own directions: the Dexter novels are discrete, stand-alone stories, and (from what I can glean) the Walking Dead graphic novels could potentially go on forever, as there is no cohesive, overarching story. But A Song of Ice and Fire is building to a specific conclusion (dragons, meet White Walkers; White Walkers, these are Daenerys’ dragons), and the showrunners have in their possession GRRM’s notes and plot outline. I have to assume that the changes they make, however baffling, won’t paint them into a corner. It’s sort of like when J.K. Rowling read the screenplay for The Order of the Phoenix, and asked “What happened to Kreacher?” The writers said they left him out. “Noooo …” said Rowling. “He’s actually kind of important.” So we have a brief little glimpse of the sour house-elf.

Well, that wraps things up for another week! Once again, Nikki, a pleasure. We’ll see everyone here next Monday. In the meantime, as my favourite CBC personality used to say, be cool, stay warm, and be good to the people you love. And strongly encourage your cousin to switch her wedding venue from Westeros to Narnia. Even if she loses the deposit.

Hello again and welcome to the great Game of Thrones co-blog, featuring Nikki Stafford and myself, who gets to ride along in her TARDIS of televisual commentary (sorry, I was watching season five of Doctor Who earlier and watched an episode in which Ser Jorah Mormont appears. Iain Glen does get around).

Tonight episode picked up pretty much precisely where last week’s left off—which is just a great way for me to remind everyone that Joffrey is dead. Do not pass GO, do not collect your two hundred gold dragons. Dead. And his former betrothed Sansa has been liberated from the scene, which brings us to …

Nikki: And the episode begins with Sansa racing off across the waters, escaping the accusations of the Lannisters for the death of the Little Shit (one week later, STILL GLORIOUS) and her connection to Tyrion, and is placed safely in the hands of…

Goddammit!!

From one psychopath to another. Now, as we discussed back in our book discussion, Lord Baelish is more sympathetic in the books (we see how Catelyn mocked him and how much he yearned for her love but was physically helpless to fight in any battles to win her hand) but on the show, he’s a scheming bastard who in season 3 arranges for the torture and death of Ros, the prostitute who’d been working for him and who he assumed betrayed him. The last we see of him is having a verbal sparring match with Varys, telling him that he believes chaos is necessary to move ahead. He has already asked Sansa once to join him on his ship, and she refused, and so, we assume, he leaves for the Vale of Arryn…

…when in fact it looks like he just threw down an anchor and tried to come up with a new plan to get Sansa on that ship. And if this means that he is behind Joffrey’s death somehow… woo, that plan was a doozy. In the previous episode, Ser Dontos approaches Sansa with a necklace that he says belonged to his mother and is the only thing of value that he owns. He’s thanking her for saving his life back at the beginning of season 2, when she talked Joffrey out of beheading Dontos and making him the king’s fool instead. But it turns out the necklace was a ruse to get Sansa on-side. Dontos clearly didn’t think he was betraying Sansa or putting her in harm’s way, and was instead saving her from certain death at the hand of the Lannisters (which is probably true). Because of Baelish’s unrequited love for Catelyn, one assumes he’ll keep Sansa safe, not only because she’s the daughter of his great love, but because she looks like Catelyn, and he appears to be partly in love with Sansa, too. But when it comes to Baelish, one should never assume anything. Just like the lovely Ser Dontos never should have assumed he could have done a job for Baelish and gotten out of this alive.

And man, that ship must have been anchored waaaay out in the waters, since it was mid-day when Sansa got into the dinghy, and it appears to be midnight when she gets to the boat.

Were you happy to see Littlefinger again, Chris?

 

Christopher: I keep thinking to myself, there’s something to be written about the fairly singular pleasure those of us who have read the books have in anticipating key moments as they occur in the series: both in terms of wondering how they will be rendered, whether they’ll be done well or not (and so far, to my mind, there haven’t been any missteps); and in terms of anticipating how you lot who haven’t read the books will respond. When the shadowy man who has helped Sansa onto the ship steps back and we see Littlefinger, I came close to punching the air and saying “Yes!” Not because I didn’t know it would be him, but because the reveal was crafted so beautifully. Knowing that you, Nikki, and thousands of other people who haven’t read the books were having a frisson of shock and surprise was almost as good as experiencing it myself. Or perhaps even better. I’m sure the Germans could come up with a word for the experience.

All of which is by way of saying: yes, I am delighted to see Littlefinger again. Though I did wonder (out loud, in fact) “what that hell’s going on with his voice?” It’s like Littlefinger suddenly remembered he was Irish. And don’t get me wrong—I love hearing Aiden Gillen speak with his natural accent, but it was a bit surprising after hearing him speak in a neutral, clipped mid-Atlantic accent these past three seasons. Also, his voice was hoarser than normal … which I suppose is partly because he was whispering, but it was something of an odd effect. He sounded like Irish Batman.

One of the things I liked about this episode is the way, in the first three scenes, we get a contiguous set of schemes: first Littlefinger, then the Tyrell women, then Tywin staking immediate claim to the mentorship of the new king. Let’s talk about Margaery and Olenna first: this scene is understated but deeply significant, at once touching in the obvious affection Olenna has for her granddaughter but also a wonderful display of the Queen of Thorns’ ruthless pragmatism. A shame, she observes, that Joffrey did not have the courtesy of consummating the marriage before dying. Margaery perhaps can be forgiven for having a moment of despairing cynicism, wondering if she is cursed—but what is interesting is that she seems more concerned (however glibly) that she might herself be somehow deficient, rather than railing in totally justifiable anger at her role as a pawn in the game of thrones. Of course she doesn’t: she has shown herself to be precisely as pragmatic as her grandmother in the matter-of-fact way she dealt with Renly’s sexual preferences, and again in the shrewd way she worked with Joffrey, learning to seduce him not through sex but feigned interest in his enthusiasms. Her momentary despair comes from the fear that Joffrey’s untimely death has upset her family’s ambitions … but Olenna sets her straight, observing that “Your circumstances have improved remarkably.” After all, she points out, the Lannisters need this alliance—they cannot hold the throne without the power of Highgarden, and so will wed Margaery to the new king … who is younger, more malleable, and above all, not a psychopath. “You did wonderful work on Joffrey,” Olenna compliments her, and adds “The next one should be easier.”

Cut to: the next one! Prince Tommen, standing beside his mother, gazing down at his elder brother’s corpse, complete with those flat stones with creepy eyes painted on them. Poor kid doesn’t look like he knows what to think … I mean, I can only imagine what it would have been like to be Joffrey’s little brother! (We get a somewhat better sense in the novels—for instance, Tommen had a pet fawn, which Joffrey killed and skinned and had made into a vest). On one hand he’s aware of the enormity of the situation, but on the other, he can’t be excessively sorry that the little shit is dead.

Enter Tywin, who proceeds to engage his grandson in a Socratic dialogue about what it takes to be king. What did you think of that scene, Nikki?

Nikki: Irish Batman, hahahahaha!!! I was wondering the same thing about that accent? “Where the hell has Baelish been sailing?!”

You wrote, “Tommen had a pet fawn, which Joffrey killed and skinned and had made into a vest.” Good Christ, he was even worse than I thought. Like many of the fans this week, I’ve been thinking how I would have liked to see Joffrey tormented the same way Theon has been before Joffrey finally kicked the bucket; he was let off too easily. Ugh.

Anyway, Tommen has been such a minor character thus far that I barely remembered he existed, but for the first time we see him step up and be questioned by Tywin, who is calm, pragmatic, and as you say, leads the conversation but requires Tommen to come up with the answers. Throughout this utterly brilliant bit of dialogue, I kept imagining Joffrey answering the same questions:

Tywin: Your brother is dead, do you know what that means?
Joffrey: It means the best man has won, and I AM KING! Bow down before me, grandfather.
Tywin: What kind of king do you think you’ll be?
Joffrey: The ONLY king, grandfather, does it matter what kind?! (swagger, looks to the left for confirmation from a guard, smirks, puts his hand on his sword) Now bow down before me.
Tywin: What makes a good king?
Joffrey: I’ll show you what makes a powerful king if you don’t bow down before me RIGHT NOW, Grandfather. How much do you like your head?

Instead, Tommen answers with humility and deep thought. He suggests “holiness” is an important quality. Tywin tells him about a man who was holy, but made a terrible mistake and died. Perhaps “justice.” Definitely important, says Tywin, but the most just king he can recall was killed by an unjust brother. “What about strength?” Tommen asks. For that one, Tywin pulls out Tommen’s own “father,” Robert Baratheon, and tells him how strength didn’t do him much good in the end. What do they all lack? “Wisdom,” Tommen answers wisely, and at home we think, oh my goodness, the Lannisters might actually have a shot under the rule of this kid. For the past three seasons, the Lannisters have been the bad guys, despite the fact both Jaime and Tyrion are two of the most sympathetic characters, and Tywin, despite having evil moments, is a genius. With Cersei and Joffrey in power, the Lannisters were loathsome, the house we were fighting against. And now, with Tommen, that might shift.

As Tywin and Tommen walk out, Tywin puts his hand on Tommen’s shoulder, a gesture I never saw him make with Joffrey, and one Joffrey never would have welcomed or even allowed. Tommen is wise, and he will listen to his even wiser grandfather.

Jaime enters the room to see Cersei, staring down at Joffrey (and I second your creeped-out feeling on those hand-painted stones for eyes, geeeyaaaah). I must mention that I thought Lena Headey was pretty fantastic in this episode and in the previous. There’s so much love for this little monster because at her heart, she’s a mother who loves her son no matter what. During the Tywin/Tommen scene she just continues to stare at her son’s corpse, with anguish on her face, at one point quietly suggesting this isn’t the time or place for this conversation. And now that Jaime enters the room, he rapes her beside their son’s corpse, an intensely uncomfortable scene. Was that in the books the same way, Chris?

Christopher: No, in the books Cersei was still reluctant, but Jaime didn’t force her. An important difference here between the books and the series is that Jaime doesn’t return in the novel until after Joffrey is killed. In fact, it is in the presence of Joffrey’s corpse that Cersei sees him again for the first time, and that simple difference makes the hasty, uncomfortable sex somewhat more understandable (if still awkward and creepy. Also, in the novel, Cersei is having her period, which makes the scene more than just figuratively messy). I wondered to myself whether this rape scene—because, really, there’s no other way to describe it—was written for the express purpose of denuding our growing sympathy for Jaime. He has gone from being a smug and hateful villain to someone far more sympathetic and thoughtful. Did the writers think he needed to be taken down a notch? Or perhaps Cersei raised a little in our sympathies?

One way or another, I think the scene was a catastrophic misstep, made all the worse by the fact that the bit leading up to it was amazing. I agree with you entirely: Lena Headey was phenomenal here, her grief palpable and no less powerful for the fact that we’re all sitting there shouting at her that her son was a monster (or maybe that was just me). Jaime’s confusion was also poignant, as was his shock when Cersei implores him to kill Tyrion.

I think part of my problem with this scene is rooted in my problem with Lena Headey as Cersei. As you know, she has long been the one bit of casting that hasn’t worked for me, which is no reflection on Headey’s acting—I think she’s done a superb job. But she plays Cersei as cold and aloof. There is very little sensuality there, very little sense of the pungent sexuality that addles the minds of the men about her. Which wouldn’t be a problem if I had any sense of chemistry between her and Jaime when they’re alone—all of their scenes together, alone, have tended to be him being flirtatious or ardent and her being standoffish. The one time before this we see them having sex—the scene that ends with Bran being thrown from the tower—I did not get the sense that she was into it at all.

By contrast, in this scene, that first moment when they kiss was the first bit of real chemistry I’ve seen between them. For a moment Cersei loses herself—but quickly recalls her grief. Jaime’s anger at being rebuffed, and the expression on his face as he stares at her, is a great little bit of face-acting. You can see the tumult in his mind: his desire for the woman he loves, his jealousy that she is more interested in grieving her son than being with him (which is consonant with the novels: Jaime’s POV chapters make it clear that he’s more or less indifferent to the children he fathered on Cersei—all he wants is her), and his helpless anger at being caught between his love for his sister and his love for his brother. That, I think, is where the “You’re a hateful woman” line comes from, her outsized loathing of Tyrion, but it is also perhaps the realization of a painful truth long suppressed.

But the rape? Frankly, it makes no sense, not unless you’re truly invested in keeping Jaime firmly on the villain side of the equation. I think it would have been a more powerful scene if he had just stalked out after the “hateful” line, with Cersei’s pleas following him.

I have a sneaking suspicion this scene will be fodder for a lot of arguments.

One last word on Tywin’s Socratic lesson with Tommen: I think you’re being somewhat optimistic there, Nikki … yes, Tommen is far more thoughtful and kind than Joffrey, and yes, I think we can look forward to a more equitable kingship under Tommen (always assuming, of course, that the principals here escape GRRM’s capricious death pen); but I saw this scene as Tywin cementing his power. Joffrey was unpredictable; we know his petulance and childishness sat poorly with his grandfather (of the various theories about who the poisoner is circulating on the web, this scene gives weight to those saying it was Tywin, who didn’t like being hand to a sociopathic king). What is the ultimate and more crucial lesson for Tommen? Wisdom is the most important quality for a king. “But what is wisdom?” Tywin asks. “A wise king knows what he knows and what he doesn’t.” Which is to say: listen to your advisers. Which is to say: listen to me. “Your brother was not a wise king,” he tells Tommen. “Your brother was not a good king. Perhaps if he was, he’d still be alive.” This last sentence spoken with a glance over his shoulder at the grieving Cersei as he leads Tommen away. This for me was the crux of the scene: visibly separating Tommen from his mother as he continues to murmur advice in his ear, Tywin silently rebukes his daughter for having been so catastrophically indulgent with Joffrey.

The next scene brings us back to Arya and the Hound, whom we had left at the end of episode one having vanquished a handful of Arya’s foes. Then, we were all delighted by their newfound camaraderie … but in this episode? It strikes me that this episode is, in part, about disillusionment. What did you think of the Hound’s cynical treatment of their host, Nikki?

Nikki: Just as the scene with Jaime and Cersei reverses our sympathies on both of them, so does this scene with the host turn my sympathies against the Hound. And yet, at the same time, cements his place as a guy you don’t mess with. On the one hand, I thought it was a dastardly thing to do, so awful and thoughtless, basically ensuring that they’ll starve even faster than what the Hound assumed was already inevitable. But on the other, I wouldn’t want the Hound to turn into a puppy, and we were on the road to that happening. They need to keep showing his teeth to remind us that he’s dangerous, and I like that about the character a lot. I still love his sarcasm most (when Arya says she wants a map and he growls, “Just point out the next map shop you see and I’ll buy you one” he is utterly brilliant), but I like this sense of danger about him so we never get too comfortable around him. Just as a Hound should be.

Arya is constant in her sense of justice for the weak, and therefore turns on the Hound with furious vengeance, but he instantly puts her in her place, cutting her deep by aligning her with the weak hosts he’d just robbed by telling her the weak end up dead, and adding, “How many Starks do they have to behead before you figure that out?”

Harsh. But important for her to see and understand. By ensuring she never gets too comfortable with things, he also prevents her from ever letting her guard down, which could be the thing that saves her in the end.

Meanwhile, in the North… Sam is worried that Gilly is surrounded by too many men of the Night’s Watch, and therefore relocates her to Molestown, a horrible dump of a town nearby filled with frightening people who loathe anyone or anything that comes from north of the Wall. Yeah… Gilly will be totally safe there. Yikes. As she was trying to settle the baby and turned her back on Sam, my heart broke for him, but I also was terrified. Will she even make it through the night there? Is Sam doing the right thing at all?

And then there’s Tyrion, my favourite. Imprisoned, blamed for the death of his little shit nephew, he meets with Podrick, who tells him Sansa is gone and there’s no one left to vouch for him. Even at his lowest, he still manages to crack a joke, saying that Cersei is the only one he believes is innocent, “which makes this unique as King’s Landing murders go.” Ha!! But even more importantly, he begs Podrick to testify against him if that’s what they’ve asked him to do, because while he wants to be exonerated, and we know he didn’t do it, it would kill him for Pod to be somehow sacrificed in the name of Cersei wanting Tyrion condemned above all others. There’s never a sense of defeat about Tyrion, even as he looks worried about it, as if he knows somehow he’ll get out of this pickle despite his sister wanting his head on a spike. He knows Cersei’s weaknesses, and maybe he’s already putting together a plan of how he can use them. Or, perhaps, he has a better relationship with Tommen than we know at this point, and if, as you say (clearly having a better sense of Tommen/Tywin and their future from the books than we do from the show at this point), Tywin is the one who’s really in charge at King’s Landing, would he really let Cersei kill Tyrion?

Speaking of knowing what’s coming up while reading the books, last season you mentioned that Stannis using the leeches was going to become very important, and in this episode he takes credit for Joffrey’s death and relates it back to that scene. What did you think of all the Stannis/Davos material this week? (And also, did you catch the Monty Python reference when Shireen tells him you can’t pronounce “knight” like “kuh-niggit”? Ha!!)

 

Christopher: I laughed almost as hard as when the Hound said, in the first episode, “Man’s gotta have a code.” I kind of love that the writers aren’t above tipping their hats to their audience. I also love the fact that, once upon a time, knight was pronounced “kuh-niggit” (or more like “kuh-nict,” actually), and that the Python boys all knew that (Terry Jones is actually a medieval scholar).

The Stannis/Davos scenes were much as their previous scenes have been this season—they feel a little like placeholders, reminding us that they’re there without doing much to advance that story. There was an acknowledgement of that in Stannis’ concern: that if he doesn’t press his suit, he’ll be forgotten. Certainly for the moment he’s doing little besides brooding on his rock while his wife descends further into religious fanaticism. That being said, there seemed to be the suggestion that Davos is about to change the game. The scene with Shireen was interesting, as it unfolded similarly in the novel—except that his epiphany was dramatically different, so I’m not sure what’s happening now, aside from that he seems to be about to take out a loan from the Iron Bank of Braavos … or possibly not. Recall from when Tyrion was Master of Coin last season, and he lamented the sorry state of the throne’s finances to his father? The Iron Throne was in a lot of debt to, among others, the Iron Bank. Perhaps Davos sees an opportunity …

But if I can return for a moment to the Hound and Arya scenes … the Hound is such a great character, in both the series and the novels—and Rory McCann has done a spectacular job in portraying his odd blend of pathos, cruelty, and personal ethics, all sedimented over top of profound, roiling anger. GRRM does a disturbingly good job of depicting out-and-out sociopaths like Joffrey, Viserys, or the Hound’s brother Gregor, but it’s the characters like Sandor Clegane that set these novels apart and add a degree of complexity you don’t find in fantasy that imitates the Tolkien model. He is a distinctly Darwinian character: adaptable but merciless in the face of weakness. He is not wantonly cruel—he leaves the farmer and his daughter alive and unmolested—but unsentimental. He made a cold calculation: sooner or later other bandits would be along to kill the man and his daughter for their silver. If they’re about to lose it anyway, it might as well go in his purse.

Arya’s fury at this seeming betrayal is something of a relief, too. There has been a sense since the two of them paired up that they’re both changing each other, with the Hound becoming more sympathetic and Arya becoming colder and more ruthless. Watching her kill Polliver in the first episode was deeply satisfying, but also disturbing: we’ve watched Arya go from playing at violence with Syrio to becoming a practiced and unflinching killer. It’s good to see that her basic understanding of right and wrong hasn’t changed, though one wonders how much longer it will endure.

Tyrion’s scene was heartbreaking, and it offers a cynical commentary on life in King’s Landing. He knows all too well that he dooms himself in ordering Pod to accept the bribe—but also that his loyal squire would be dead if he did not. In ordering him to save his own life, Tyrion shows more capacity for human compassion than any display of grief on his sister’s part could. He has been an adept player of the game of thrones, but at a certain point he cannot do what his father, sister, Littlefinger, et al do, which is see other people merely as pieces on the board. At a certain point, he is unwilling to sacrifice others for his own sake. Whereas his father capitalizes on events to cement his power, offering Oberyn revenge on the Mountain in exchange for his cooperation and thus solidifying Dorne’s loyalty. “Give it to my father,” says Tyrion, “He never fails to take advantage of a family tragedy.”

Meanwhile, in the North, Tormund’s wildling band, augmented by the terrifying Thenns, descend on a village, killing all but a child they send to Castle Black . Speaking of characters we’ve grown to love behaving viciously, we see Ygritte killing helpless people as efficiently as Alabaster Seal does. What did you think of this spot of pillaging, Nikki?

 

Nikki: The Thenns are terrifying in a way the wildlings never were. The wildlings were feared, but the Thenns are merciless, and when they kill, they eat the corpses. Now that the wildlings are working with them, they become an unstoppable army, made all the more real when we move to Castle Black and realize that they have 100… against 100,000 of Mance Rayder’s people. AND… they still have rangers up at Craster’s whom they know will tell Rayder that. If Rayder finds out just how unmanned that Wall really is, the south doesn’t stand a chance.

And then there’s Daenerys over at Meereen. Back in episode 1, neither of us was too sure of this new casting of Busted Josh Groban for Daario, but he sort of won me over in this scene, where he goes up against Meereen’s champion in a literal pissing contest. Daenerys once again goes for numbers over seeming power when she targets the slaves, telling them that they could be free to follow her if they just throw off their collars. And then she hurls all the collars at the city — the ones they’d been taking off the mile-marker corpses that they’ve been burying for the past 163 miles. It’s a glorious scene, especially when you see the looks on the faces of the slaves, followed by the realization on the faces of the slave-owners. Ruh-roh. I’ve pledged my allegiance to House Targaryen since season 1, and my loyalty remains unchanged.

We haven’t yet discussed Tywin jockeying for the support of the Dornish by offering Oberyn a seat on the judge’s council at Tyrion’s trial, where he reminds the viewer that he’s trying to unite the seven kingdoms against my girl Dany. I’ll leave the final word on this to you, Chris.

 

Christopher: If Tywin could have witnessed the final scene of this episode and seen Daenerys in action, he’d be a whole lot more anxious about things, I think. Daenerys will be a formidable enemy not because she gains the people’s respect (though she does) or inspires fear, but because she has earned their love. However masterful a strategist Tywin is, he will never be loved—though he’ll do his best to make certain Tommen is.

We haven’t developed a solid sense of Dorne as a place yet—in the novels we learn it is sort of the outlier of the Seven Kingdoms, and has always had a fairly elevated sense of itself (which is why Oberyn’s brother calls himself a “prince” rather than just the Lord of Dorne). Meeting Oberyn and Ellaria certainly evokes the sense of its exoticism. This episode kind of bludgeoned us with the stark contrast by having Tywin walk in on what was essentially a mini-orgy—and reminded us that Tywin is a cool customer, keeping his face utterly impassive while Oberyn flaunts his hedonism. I of course know what will come of this putative alliance, so I’ll just say that for all of Tywin’s shrewd plotting, one wonders if he underestimates the passions of other.

And that is all for this week! Tune in next week, for the further adventures of Chris and Nikki watching television and yakking about it!