Directed by: Brian Kirk
Distributed by: HBO
Written by Anna Harrison
Overview
In these retrospectives, I will be looking back on “Game of Thrones” through my viewpoint as a fanatical fan of George R. R. Martin’s original book series, “A Song of Ice and Fire.” Mostly, I suspect this will be an exercise in venting my frustration about the adaptation of the books and pointing out where things went wrong in my mind—and I have a lot to work out.
For ease of reference, the show “Game of Thrones” can be abbreviated as “GOT” or “Thrones,” and the books in “A Song of Ice and Fire” can be abbreviated as “ASOIAF.”
The books in the series are “A Game of Thrones,” “A Clash of Kings,” “A Storm of Swords,” “A Feast for Crows,” “A Dance With Dragons,” and the as-yet unpublished “The Winds of Winter” and “A Dream of Spring.” These can be abbreviated as “AGOT,” “ACOK,” “ASOS,” “AFFC,” “ADWD,” “TWOW,” and “ADOS.”
Chapters within the book will be referred to by their point-of-view character and a Roman numeral indicating what chapter within the POV it is (ex., Catelyn I, Jaime II, Arya III, and so on), as Martin does not number his chapters nor name them besides indicating whose POV we are about to enter.
70/100
“Game of Thrones” has, in the years since its premiere, become notorious for its shocking violence—but in the first season, actual blood is few and far between. The first episode features some White Walkers decapitating men of the Night’s Watch, and episode four had a lance through the neck of an unsuspecting knight, but the moments were quick and the violence, while effective, was not out of the ordinary for an HBO show.
“The Wolf and the Lion” changes that.
Compared to later seasons, the episode is still fairly tame, but episode five—the halfway mark for season one—signals a large (if not quite seismic) shift for “Thrones.” This episode sees Gregor Clegane (Conan Stevens) chop off his horse’s head within the first ten minutes, and it only gets worse from there. Luckily the Mountain’s brother, Sandor (Rory McCann), steps in, showing his more knightly side for the first time, but the moment is among the most gruesome in the show so far; even Sandor’s killing of Arya’s friend Mycah (Rhodri Hosking) happened offscreen. It may be small fry compared to what will come later this episode, but sets the tone right off the bat: shit is about to get real.
In order for shit to get real, however, we need to set the stage, resulting in a couple of clunky, exposition-heavy scenes as the episode shoulders the burden of explaining Martin’s lore. This is largely exemplified by the sex scene between Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen) and show-only prostitute Ros (Esmé Bianco), whose breasts the camera loves to linger on and who, despite the medieval-inspired setting, has no pubic hair. Come (ha) for the tits, stay for the House Greyjoy lore dump. It’s a tactic the show has already used with Viserys (Harry Lloyd) last episode, who extolled on the virtues of House Targaryen’s dragons while getting it on with Daenerys’s (Emilia Clarke) handmaiden (slave) Doreah (Roxanne McKee), and will only grow more egregious throughout the seasons.
But it’s not just women that the show has problems with, it’s also gay people! Hooray. The Hand’s Tourney serves as our introduction to the Knight of Flowers, Loras Tyrell (Finn Jones), who is Renly Baratheon’s (Gethin Anthony) lover. As neither are POV characters in the books and no POV character ever walks in on them messing around, Loras and Renly’s relationship was never made explicit, though Martin all but states it. The show once again uses its non-POV structure to its advantage by dropping the viewer into a scene that never could have existed in the books, which would be a win for representation if the scene were not so bad. And lazy.
How do we know Loras and Renly are gay? Well, Loras likes Renly clean-shaven everywhere, because showing a man is effeminate is the shortest way to signal he’s gay—as if the kissing doesn’t give that away. While Loras takes a straight razor to Renly’s pit (singular), he plants the idea that Renly should be king, rather than the impetus coming from Renly himself, as it does in the books. Here, Renly comes off as a feeble-minded fop as he squirms at the sight of his own blood and dithers about kingship, and Loras… well, it’s probably not great queer representation to have this apparently effeminate gay man be evil and scheming as he drips poison into Renly’s ear.
This scene reduces these characters down to stereotypes and robs them of what makes them interesting. Renly has ambition for himself in “A Song of Ice and Fire,” even attempting to initiate a marriage between King Robert (Mark Addy) and Margaery Tyrell (played by Natalie Dormer next season), Loras’s sister, by claiming she looks as Lyanna Stark once did. This would push the Lannisters out of power and place the Tyrells at King’s Landing instead, who would now be beholden to Renly and, presumably, less inclined to commit war crimes willy-nilly than the Lannisters. Loras, for his part, is still not above scheming—as proven by the incident with the mare at the tourney—but is too impulsive and hotheaded to be a great political mind.
But who knows—since they were never POV characters, maybe Renly and Loras did have weird shaving foreplay. Still, considering what happens in later seasons with Loras and other gay characters in “Thrones,” this scene’s not-quite-homophobia feels a harbinger of what is to come rather than an outlier.
Let it be acknowledged, however, that Martin himself is not a perfect #ally, nor a perfect storyteller: our third “let’s get the plot going” scene involves Arya chasing cats around King’s Landing and just happening to overhear Varys’ (Conleth Hill) plan. It is incredibly contrived… and straight out of Martin’s original work. Oh, well. Sometimes you have to use your author privileges to force things to coalesce as you want them. Readers need to know that Varys and Illyrio (Roger Allam) are plotting together, but as neither are POV characters, someone else must overhear them; in the show, Illyrio (who kept Viserys (Harry Lloyd) and Daenerys safe in Pentos and organized the latter’s marriage to Jason Momoa’s Khal Drogo) has only appeared briefly, so it might seem odd to have a scene with just him and Varys. Keeping Arya there adds a sympathetic point of view and links Westeros to Essos by revealing Varys’s connection to Illyrio and the exiled Targaryens (which Targaryen they actually meant is a much longer conversation for season five or so).
Neither the show nor the books are immune to that “early installment weirdness,” as shown by the clunkiness of this scene and other things the variety of ways characters pronounce “Arya,” how green the landscape around King’s Landing is compared to later seasons, or book-Tyrion doing an acrobatic flip in an early chapter of “A Game of Thrones.” Luckily, the rest of the episode does not stick out like a sore thumb or insult women and gay people, and the dominoes start to fall.
It begins with Ned (Sean Bean) resigning from the Small Council. He resigns and vows to leave King’s Landing for the same reason he did all those years ago after Robert’s Rebellion: he will have no part in killing children, Targaryen or not. As Martin writes,
“Robert, I ask you, what did we rise against Aerys Targaryen for, if not to put an end to the murder of children?”
“To put an end to Targaryens!” the king growled. (Ned VIII, “AGOT”)
And later:
Ned had heard enough. “You send hired knives to kill a fourteen-year-old girl and still quibble about honor?” He pushed back his chair and stood. “Do it yourself, Robert. The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. Look her in the eyes before you kill her. See her tears, hear her last words. You owe her that much at least.” (Ned VIII, “AGOT”)
Of course, this talk of murdering children is slightly harder to swallow in the show, where Dany is several years older than her canonical fourteen, so the script skates around some of Ned’s more forthright assertions. But the gist of it remains the same, as does Ned’s moral backbone.
Unfortunately, the show saw fit to have Robert call Ned an “honorable fool.” I say “unfortunately” not because this tiny deviation from the books is bad—it seems like something Robert would say—but because many viewers have taken this assertion as gospel. Even the show itself, as time goes on, seems to equate honor with foolishness. But what could Ned have possibly gained that would make selling his soul worth it? His moral uprightness will reverberate more strongly and for much longer than the cold political schemes of a certain Lannister patriarch. That the show forgets this and goes on to discard the thematic weight of Ned’s honor shows a lack of reading comprehension, but for now, at least, this scene means something. If the king is willing to send assassins after children, what hope is there for peace?
Nowhere is the realm’s rot more apparent than at the Eyrie, where Catelyn (Michelle Fairley) has taken Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) to be tried for the attempted murder of Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright). Only… Cat’s younger sister and the Lady Regent of the Vale, Lysa (Kate Dickie)—wife of the late Jon Arryn, whose mysterious death spurred this whole thing—has absolutely lost her marbles. Lysa enjoys breastfeeding her six-year-old son, Robin (Lino Facioli), also known as Sweetrobin, also known as Azor Ahai reborn (joke). She refuses to grant a fair trial and instead throws Tyrion into the Eyrie’s famous sky cells, built into the side of the castle with one open wall promising a plummet to your death if you misstep; she claims with certainty that Tyrion murdered Jon Arryn, and shrieks so convincingly that we almost believe her (of course, it was Lysa herself who killed him). Where last episode, Cat’s faith in the feudal system worked perfectly as she appealed to her father’s bannermen to help her, here she sees the cracks start to form as Lysa, Lady of the Eyrie and the ultimate authority in the Vale, overrides Cat’s protestations at fair treatment and twists the means to suit her own end.
Any semblance of decorum finally shatters in the final moments of this episode. Ned, at Littlefinger’s urging, has begun to visit the brothels where Robert has sired bastard children. Then out pops Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who demands to fight Ned for Cat’s arrest of Tyrion. The actual battle is choreographed more clunkily than what will come after, once “Thrones” becomes known for being that Sword and Violence Show, but no less startling, especially when Jaime thrusts his dagger through the eye of loyal Jory Cassel (Jamie Sives), the captain of Ned’s guard. It’s the first character death with weight: we’ve seen Jory care for Ned and his children, and we even watched him bond with Jaime earlier in the season. But none of that kept him alive. Ned, too, does not get out unscathed, and gets skewered in the leg by a Lannister guardsman (much to Jaime’s chagrin, as the Kingslayer was looking forward to a decent fight).
While the entire story was kicked off by Jon Arryn’s murder, Jory’s death at the hands of Jaime is the first time we see a major character kill another prominent one. It’s not clandestine, it’s not done to silence someone from speaking out—it’s done only to hurt Ned and the Starks, in retaliation for Cat (peacefully, I might add) seizing Tyrion. It’s a primer for what will happen on the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor in episode nine, and, like any good story, ensures that your attention does not stray through the middle spate of episodes or chapters, whatever the case may be.
Also, it’s pretty riveting television.
Stray Observations:
- Robin is named Robert in the books, but I guess the show thought people would be too confused that he was called “Sweetrobin” if his name was not… Robin.
- Jory is a small character in the books as well as the show (the show at least gives him a scene on his own with Jaime), but damn if his death doesn’t hit hard:
When he opened his eyes again, Lord Eddard Stark was alone with his dead. His horse moved closer, caught the rank scent of blood, and galloped away. Ned began to drag himself through the mud, gritting his teeth at the agony in his leg. It seemed to take years. Faces watched from candlelit windows, and people began to emerge from alleys and doors, but no one moved to help.
Littlefinger and the City Watch found him there in the street, cradling Jory Cassel’s body in his arms.
Somewhere the gold cloaks found a litter, but the trip back to the castle was a blur of agony, and Ned lost consciousness more than once. He remembered seeing the Red Keep looming ahead of him in the first grey light of dawn. The rain had darkened the pale pink stone of the massive walls to the color of blood. (Ned IX, “AGOT”)
- Renly namedrops Stannis (Stephen Dillane) and Loras says that he “has the personality of a lobster.” Pretty funny (sorry, Stannis). Also, why would Loras shave one armpit and part of Renly’s chest but leave his other armpit and happy trail intact?
- Barristan Selmy (Ian McElhinney) tells Ned, “He was a fine man, your father. What the Mad King did to him was a terrible crime,” which prompts the question… what did you do to stop that terrible crime, Barristan? Huh? (The answer is jack shit.)
- This episode introduces Bronn (Jerome Flynn), who will go on to be a prominent character in the show and books, though his status as “fan favorite” means he outstays his welcome on the screen. Once Tyrion is over in Essos, Bronn serves no real purpose and so finds himself sent to Dorne on a whim and then is elected Master of Coin, a plot development so baffling that I still cannot wrap my head around it all these years later.
- Varys and Littlefinger (Aidan Gillen) share a scene in this episode that’s not nearly as good as the whole “chaos is a ladder” one, and is in fact a bit nonsensical if you think about it, but Gillen and Hill are so good that I don’t even mind that much.
- Another great show-only scene: Robert and Cersei (Lena Headey) discuss the state of their marriage and the specter of Lyanna Stark. “What harm could Lyanna Stark’s ghost do to either of us that we haven’t done to each other a hundred times over?” Cersei asks. Turns out, a lot.
Episode Ranking:
- “The Wolf and the Lion”
- “The Kingsroad”
- “Lord Snow”
- “Winter Is Coming”
- “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things”
“Game of Thrones” Season One Trailer
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