Directed by: Daniel Minahan
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Game of Thrones,” “A Clash of Kings,” “A Storm of Swords,” “A Feast for Crows,” “A Dance With Dragons,” and the as-yet unpublished “The Winds of Winter” and “A Dream of Spring.”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.
75/100
He dreamt an old dream, of three knights in white cloaks, and a tower long fallen, and Lyanna in her bed of blood.
In the dream his friends rode with him, as they had in life. Proud Martyn Cassel, Jory’s father; faithful Theo Wull; Ethan Glover, who had been Brandon’s squire; Ser Mark Ryswell, soft of speech and gentle of heart; the crannogman, Howland Reed; Lord Dustin on his great red stallion. Ned had known their faces as well as he knew his own once, but the years leech at a man’s memories, even those he has vowed never to forget. In the dream they were only shadows, grey wraiths on horses made of mist.
They were seven, facing three. In the dream as it had been in life. Yet these were no ordinary three. They waited before the round tower, the red mountains of Dorne at their backs, their white cloaks blowing in the wind. And these were no shadows; their faces burned clear, even now. Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, had a sad smile on his lips. The hilt of the greatsword Dawn poked up over his right shoulder. Ser Oswell Whent was on one knee, sharpening his blade with a whetstone. Across his white-enameled helm, the black bat of his House spread its wings. Between them stood fierce old Ser Gerold Hightower, the White Bull, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard.
“I looked for you on the Trident,” Ned said to them.
“We were not there,” Ser Gerold answered.
“Woe to the Usurper if we had been,” said Ser Oswell.
…
“I came down on Storm’s End to lift the siege,” Ned told them, “and the Lords Tyrell and Redwyne dipped their banners, and all their knights bent the knee to pledge us fealty. I was certain you would be among them.”
“Our knees do not bend easily,” said Ser Arthur Dayne.
…
“We swore a vow,” explained old Ser Gerold.
Ned’s wraiths moved up beside him, with shadow swords in hand. They were seven against three.
“And now it begins,” said Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning. He unsheathed Dawn and held it with both hands. The blade was pale as milkglass, alive with light.
“No,” Ned said with sadness in his voice. “Now it ends.” As they came together in a rush of steel and shadow, he could hear Lyanna screaming. “Eddard!” she called. A storm of rose petals blew across a blood-streaked sky, as blue as the eyes of death. (Eddard X, “AGOT”)
That is how Eddard X opens: an old dream and a bed of blood. Ned, ravaged by a fever from his leg wound, finds his mind wandering back to the fabled Tower of Joy, where his sister, Lyanna, died. George R. R. Martin pulls off a miraculous balancing act: he lets us glimpse the immense burden of guilt that Ned has been shouldering since Robert’s Rebellion, but he dances around Lyanna’s death skillfully enough that the reader doesn’t see through him. Of course, he gives us the clues to begin puzzling out Jon Snow’s true parentage if we look hard enough, but few do so, wrapped up as we are in Martin’s trancelike descriptions of Ned’s rememberings. The Kingsguard—the legendary Arthur Dayne, Oswell Whent, Gerold Hightower—are ghosts whose faces Ned recalls more clearly than those of his friends. Their names have already passed into legend, but their inclusion here should, to the keen-eyed reader, ring some alarm bells: why does Ned speak so highly of the Daynes (in the books only, as the Daynes are scarcely mentioned in the show) when he presumably killed their most famous family member here? Why were three Kingsguard dispatched to that “tower long fallen” while their king-to-be, Rhaegar Targaryen, was heading to the Trident to battle Robert Baratheon? And why were they guarding Lyanna, whom Rhaegar had allegedly abducted?
How does “A Golden Crown” begin, in contrast? Ned (Sean Bean) is abed and feverish, much as he is in the books, but there the similarities stop. There is no dream—there is no Howland Reed or Arthur Dayne or even Lyanna. Writers and showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, alongside fellow writer Jane Espenson (one of a whopping two, yes, two female writers the show will have throughout its run), cut straight to the chase as Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy) demands that Ned resume his post as Hand of the King with little-to-no preamble. All the mysticism, as with Bran’s (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) dreams of the three-eyed crow, has been snipped away.
We do, eventually, get a version of this in the show, but not until season seven, via one of Bran’s time traveling visions. There, it is dull and sanded-down, with none of the melancholy or poeticism that effuses Martin’s work in the first book. Ned’s dream here even mirrors a dream that Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) will have two books later—another dream full of lush imagery and layered with meaning that the show excises completely.
As I have said, in cutting these less realistic moments from the show, “Game of Thrones” shoots itself in the foot. Yes, you may not have alienated the average American that you are trying so desperately to court (not that a dream sequence is that bizarre for the average viewer!), but you have lost some of the beauty of the source material, robbed yourself of key foreshadowing and character work, and have made the introduction of the necessary mystical moments later in the show clumsy and out-of-place.
Other than the distressing loss of Ned’s fever dream, “A Golden Crown” follows the books faithfully and marks another good episode from early “Thrones,” smoothly bouncing between locations, giving us our first main character death of the season, and teeing up the explosive back half of episodes—even as the omission of the Tower of Joy dream sets off alarm bells about what the future may hold.
At this point in the season, the audience has grown used to the various castles and countries, and so cutting between the primary locations in the episode—King’s Landing, the Eyrie, and Vaes Dothrak—no longer feels as baffling as it might have a few episodes ago, though this is the last we will see of the Eyrie for a while. That will come as no small relief to viewers, given how insufferable Lysa Arryn (Katie Dickie) has proven to be, in contrast to her rational sister, Cat (Michelle Fairley). Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) has grown tired of Lysa’s insults and attempts to get him to confess to the murder of Jon Arryn—a murder, I will remind you, that Lysa herself committed, though we don’t learn that for a few seasons yet—and so demands a trial by combat. When Lysa forces the trial to take place immediately (instead of Tyrion summoning Jaime as he intended), a mercenary named Bronn (Jerome Flynn) steps up to stand as Tyrion’s champion.
Bronn will go on to become one of the more overexposed characters in “Thrones,” but it’s easy to see why: he’s dry and witty, good with a sword, and one of the few people who doesn’t treat Tyrion with outright contempt. While Cat may not treat him with disdain, she is still positioned as an antagonist to Tyrion; Bronn, on the other hand, is an ally. As Tyrion easily endears himself with the audience, anyone who treats him well will automatically endear himself to the audience as well. Of course, Bronn is no saint—he fights dirty in the trial by combat, but that ensures him the victory. Lysa and her doomed champion, Ser Vardis Egen (Brendan McCormack, far younger than Egen is described in the books), cloak themselves in the trappings of chivalry, with polished armor and a coat of arms, but the mercenary sees through that smokescreen.
With no other recourse now that Tyrion has won his trial by combat, Cat must let him go back to King’s Landing, and she to Winterfell. Yet even though Tyrion is now free, Cat’s arrest of him has already caused ripple effects throughout Westeros, as Ned soon discovers.
It turns out that, as revenge for the arrest of his son, Lannister patriarch Tywin (still unseen for now) has unleashed the monstrous Gregor Clegane (Conan Stevens), aka the Mountain, upon the Riverlands. Not upon a lord, which would declare outright war, but upon the unsuspecting smallfolk, who neither know nor care about Tyrion’s fate. It’s revenge, but far more petty than strategic, and so Ned—playing at king for a day as Robert goes boar hunting—summons Tywin to court. He also dispatches a knight named Beric Dondarrion (David Michael Scott, who has no lines in this episode and is later recast) to arrest Gregor, but don’t worry about him just yet—the important thing here is another Stark has now made a move against the Lannisters, and war inches (or rather sprints) closer.
And yet, despite the (wrong) perception of Ned as honorable but dumb, he makes the right call here, something the show itself does not understand. In summoning Tywin to court, Ned ties the hands of the Lannisters: either Tywin does not answer, pitting him against the crown and king’s men, or he does, and presumably throws Gregor under the bus to keep his own hands clean, thus stopping the pillaging and leaving the realm in relative peace. It is only Robert’s death in the next episode that leaves Ned in a bind; had Cersei’s harebrained scheme to kill Robert not succeeded, then Tywin would have been in open rebellion against the king if he had refused Ned’s summons. With Tywin’s daughter and grandchildren in King’s Landing, rebelling would have been out of the question, especially with Gregor as such an easy scapegoat.
Instead, Robert dies, the Lannisters kill Ned, and civil war begins. The war ravages Westeros, leading to riots against the Lannisters in King’s Landing and, much later, the High Sparrow’s election and thus Cersei’s walk of shame and what should have been the Lannister downfall—only the show began to portray the Lannisters as political masterminds whose cruelty was the reason they remained in power, when in the books, it’s why everything begins to spiral out of their control. The honor that Ned exhibits in this episode, the honor that the show will later come to deride, ensures that the Starks still have the loyalty of their vassals and will, in the end, emerge victorious as the Lannisters squabble and trample each other into the dust.
After Ned dispatches Beric to capture Gregor, he finally puzzles out that Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) is a product of incest between Cersei (Lena Headey) and twin Jaime and therefore illegitimate. Truly, if not for Robert’s happenstance death, everything would have come up Ned: the Lannisters subdued, an heir to the throne who isn’t a sociopath, and relative peace in the realm.
That is, unless the Targaryens across the Narrow Sea make their way over.
Viserys (Harry Lloyd), the presumptive Targaryen heir to the throne, and Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) have, by now, fully swapped places in the power hierarchy. Viserys is mocked and derided by his Dothraki “allies,” but Daenerys has become one of them, eating a horse heart to prove her strength and the strength of her unborn son. Drunk and incensed by the Dothraki’s treatment of him, Viserys draws his sword in Vaes Dothrak, something he has been told over and over not to do, and demands the golden crown that Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa) promised him.
He gets one—just not the one he wanted, and Khal Drogo pours a vat of molten gold onto the last (maybe!) male Targaryen’s head.
We had Jory Cassel’s (Jamie Sives) death last episode, but Viserys’s demise is something more. He was a main character—or at least nearly one—and the brother of one of our protagonists. His death by molten gold is a bigger spectacle than Jaime stabbing Jory in the eyeball; this moment only six episodes in will set a precedent, and soon enough the show will be tripping over itself trying to top the next spectacular death, most especially when it runs out of books. But even knowing the violence that comes later, Viserys’s death still stands out, and the thud that his head makes as it hits the ground has been seared into viewers’ brains.
Let us pour one out for Harry Lloyd, who, for my money, is one of the best Targaryen actors across both “Thrones” and “House of the Dragon.” He balanced Viserys’ cruelty and instability with charm and enough sadness to get us to pity him, and his loss will make Dany’s supporting cast that much more boring, even though Dany herself has become that much more interesting.
“He was no dragon,” she says of her brother. “Fire cannot kill a dragon.”
I guess a sword to the breast can, though. (Too soon?)
Stray Observations:
- Famous last words from Robert Baratheon to Ned Stark: “We’ll talk when I return from the hunt.”
- Tyrion makes sure to demand a trial by combat in front of the lords and ladies of the Vale and conveniently reminds them who he’s related to. This mirrors Cat’s plea in the Inn of the Crossroads where she reminds the knights there of their fealty to her father; here, Tyrion reminds the onlookers that he’s not just a dwarf to mock but a Lannister of Casterly Rock. Lysa, of course, is too far gone to see the political implications of this, and her lords and ladies are too isolated to do anything, but it was a smart move on Tyrion’s part.
- It’s a good thing Mark Addy is so charismatic, because his treatment of Cersei in this episode—and throughout their marriage—is appalling and unjustifiable, no matter how she goads him. “See what she does to me? My loving wife,” he seethes when he was the one who hit her!
- Mance Rayder (Ciarán Hinds) gets mentioned in the Winterfell section of this episode, which sees the introduction of the wildling Osha (Natalia Tena) and Theon (Alfie Allen) being Theon—that is, acting rashly to impress the male figures in his life. In this case, it’s Robb (Richard Madden) and, to an extent, Ned.
- It gets over-quoted, but Syrio Forel’s (Miltos Yerolemou) line of, “There is only one god, and His name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: not today,” is really a banger. And it’s only in the show! His mantra in the books is, “Fear cuts deeper than swords.” Also good.
- In the books, the Moon Door is just a door on the side of the Eyrie. Much cooler to have it in the middle of the floor, though it makes me question the stability of the building.
- Loras Tyrell (Finn Jones) volunteers to go after the Mountain in the books, and had Ned let him, it would have radically altered the story by pitting the Lannisters against the Tyrells (assuming that the Mountain would have killed Loras, which he most certainly would have).
- It’s so strange to see Jorah (Iain Glen) as a good guy here. He’s such a sleazebag in the books, but I don’t mind the changes.
Episode Ranking:
- “A Golden Crown”
- “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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