Directed by: David Petrarca
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Game of Thrones,” “A Clash of Kings,” “A Storm of Swords,” “A Feast for Crows,” “A Dance With Dragons,” and the as-yet unpublished “The Winds of Winter” and “A Dream of Spring.”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.
50/100
“Garden of Bones” marks the second of four episodes in “Game of Thrones” written by a woman. Jane Espenson previously wrote season one’s “A Golden Crown,” and now Vanessa Taylor has become the second of two women to write for “Thrones.”
Unfortunately, this episode is bad. (My fellow women, we must do better!)
“Bad” not because it is poorly made—at this point, the show looks and sounds great almost all the time—but because it indulges in the worst tendencies of “Thrones,” tendencies that will only worsen as the show goes on. Specifically, there are four bad habits the show falls prey to in this episode.
Number one: the brutalization of women. This has been repeatedly indulged in during previous episodes, but reaches a new low when Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) sends some prostitutes to Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) in the hopes that it will… help his psychopathic tendencies…? I guess it’s time for him to become a real man now, and obviously the way to do that is through sex! Joffrey will graduate to proper masculinity once he has “had” a woman (emphasis on the possessiveness of that word), and maybe then he will stop such boyish pranks as pointing a crossbow at Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) or having his Kingsguard so-called knights beat her. That Tyrion even orders these women to attend to Joffrey boggles the mind, not because Tyrion is a champion and protector of women—though he is kind to Sansa in this episode—but because he hates his nephew and is smart enough to know exactly how Joffrey’s seven minutes in heaven will likely end.
To no one’s shock, except perhaps the suddenly idiotic Tyrion, the women are abused horribly. Ros (Esme Bianco) is made to beat another girl (Maisie Dee) from Littlefinger’s (Aidan Gillen) brothel as Joffrey trains his crossbow at the two of them, his requests becoming more and more sadistic as time goes on. Both, of course, are in various states of undress, with particular attention paid to their breasts. How novel. How daring. How revelatory.
What, exactly, is the point of this scene? What do we know now that we did not know before? Did we not know that Joffrey is a sadistic psychopath? Did we not know that women, especially non-noble women, are treated poorly in Westeros? Or does it exist only as yet another excuse to have women bare their bodies on screen and be humiliated for the predominantly male audience’s viewing pleasure? It’s “porn brain” translated to prestige television. Watch this woman be slapped by another woman while she makes screams that sound like moans. Watch them turn around so you get a full view of their hot asses, red from slapping. Don’t you think it’s sexy to see women degraded? Doesn’t that stroke your male ego? Had this given us any new information about Joffrey, Ros, or relationships between nobility and sex workers, I could have been more understanding, but there is nothing. Frankly, its existence should be insulting to all viewers, not just me with my “Thrones”-themed stick up the ass.
Tendency number two: taking away the agency of women. Specifically, the dumbing down of Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley). Oh, look at that—this, too, sounds familiar! This decision, at least, has some motivation behind it other than, “If we don’t show boobs, viewers will leave us in droves.” Littlefinger and Cat have not shared a scene since season one, and indeed, they would never do so again if the show faithfully followed the book’s timeline. Instead, however, Littlefinger arrives at Renly Baratheon’s (Gethin Anthony) camp at Storm’s End at nearly the same time that Cat does (in the books, he does not go to woo the Tyrells until after Renly’s death, by which point Cat is well on her way back to Riverrun).
In and of itself, this is not a terrible decision, especially given that Fairley and Gillen are among the most talented in the cast and it is a privilege to watch them act against each other. Littlefinger giving Cat her dead husband’s (Sean Bean) bones as an attempt to woo her is the sort of wonderfully creepy and inappropriate thing he would do, and is a more interesting character beat than Tyrion simply sending the bones to Riverrun, as he does in the books. Cat’s rebuff of Littlefinger, even after his “thoughtful” “gift,” is just more fuel to the fire of his incel grudge.
It’s the conversation about Arya (Maisie Williams) and Sansa that sours this interaction. Cat will, rather infamously, free Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) in an attempt to spring her girls from Lannister clutches after the apparent deaths of Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) and Rickon (Art Parkinson). It is a decision driven by grief and desperation, one that is heartbreaking but understandable to anyone who has lost a family member, and one that entirely belongs to Cat—or, at least, it should, except that here, it is Littlefinger who plants the idea in Cat’s head as he tells her that the Lannisters will trade Sansa and Arya (the latter of whom is notably not in King’s Landing) for Jaime. “Consider it, Cat,” he says. “It may be your last chance.”
Suddenly, instead of Cat, flaws and all, hatching her own plan to free Jaime, it is only because of Littlefinger that she takes action. And, since Littlefinger has emerged as a full-throated villain after his betrayal of Ned last season, the obvious conclusion is that freeing Jaime is a dunderheaded maneuver and that Cat is an idiot for falling for his manipulations. Her decision to free Jaime is far from her most clearheaded move, but it is her decision and should remain as such, just as it should have been her decision, fourteen episodes ago, to push Ned towards King’s Landing.
Tendency number three: adding drama for the sake of drama. This episode marks the introduction of battlefield nurse Talisa Maegyr (Oona Chaplin), who, despite becoming a prominent character and even marrying Robb Stark (Richard Madden), does not exist in the books. Instead, Robb weds Jeyne Westerling, daughter of a minor house sworn to the Lannisters. (The show loves to erase its Jeynes, doesn’t it?)
We are not privy to what happens between Robb and Jeyne. Robb, not being a point of view character in the books, spends much of “A Clash of Kings” off-page as Cat, our POV on the Stark cause, parlays with the Baratheons and handles the ever more intricate politics of Robb’s bannermen. Then, suddenly, her younger sons are presumed dead and her firstborn comes back with a wife in tow, ruining the Starks’ alliance with the Freys and plunging their campaign into even worse political turmoil:
“I took her castle and she took my heart. The Crag was weakly garrisoned, so we took it by storm one night. Black Walder [Frey] and the Smalljon [Umber] led scaling parties over the walls, while I broke the main gate with a ram. I took an arrow in the arm just before Ser Rolph [Spicer] yielded us the castle. It seemed nothing at first, but it festered. Jeyne had me taken to her own bed, and she nursed me until the fever passed. And she was with me when the Greatjon [Umber] brought me the news of… of Winterfell. Bran and Rickon. That night, she… she comforted me, Mother.”
Catelyn did not need to be told what sort of comfort Jeyne Westerling had offered her son. “And you wed her the next day.”
He looked her in the eyes, proud and miserable all at once. “It was the only honorable thing to do. She’s gentle and sweet, Mother, she will make me a good wife.” (Catelyn II, “ASOS”)
Robb is right: Jeyne is, by all accounts, gentle and sweet, though she has but few appearances. The impulse to make her more of a character than she is on page is a sound one, as is including Robb in more scenes this season. The audience has come to care about him as much as Catelyn does, and to deprive us of Robb (and Madden) would be cruel and lessen the gut punch of the Red Wedding. But Talisa is a harbinger of the original characters to come: She has little personality outside of “cheeky,” and her existence as a young, noble Volantene woman somehow able to wander the wartorn Riverlands and saw off legs beggars belief.
More importantly, when she and Robb marry purely for love and no other reason, romantic as it may be, Robb looks like the biggest idiot in Westeros. In the books, of course, the decision is still a politically deadly one, but their marriage is driven by Robb’s honor more than anything else—honor and fear of siring a bastard that will be treated the same way his brother Jon Snow (Kit Harington) was treated. Are these not compelling character beats to cover? Yet in “Thrones,” he does not break his vow to the Freys out of honor, he betrays them just… well, because he was horny.
Besides, there were certainly ways to make Jeyne herself interesting in the show without bringing in Miss “Not Like Other Girls” (the first of many, which will include instances of book characters being warped beyond all recognition). Hell, Jeyne meets Robb when tending to his wounds—what’s more romantic than that? The two still have affection for each other in the books, and the show could still play up the “forbidden romance” angle while not having Robb be an utter fool. The Westerlings, too, are ripe for adaptation; in fact, it is widely speculated that Jeyne’s mother, Sybell Spicer, was working with the Lannisters and may have drugged Robb to get him to sleep with Jeyne, thus breaking his pact with the Freys and turning them against him. She also drugged her own daughter to keep Jeyne, who was unaware of this whole plot, from getting pregnant. If the show still wanted to up the tragedy, then still they could have killed Jeyne during the Red Wedding as they will Talisa (Jeyne is currently alive and safely, if unhappily, at Riverrun in the books) while keeping Robb’s intellect intact.
But Talisa hits the bigger dramatic beats. It’s a big capital-L Love story, she’s more outspoken than Jeyne (and therefore must be more interesting), and she’s even foreign nobility. Star-crossed. If it’s not big and dramatic, viewers won’t care—from Joffrey abusing sex workers to Robb falling in love.
Tendency number four: the hero worship of undeserving men.
After Arya (Maisie Williams) and Gendry (Joe Dempsie) are captured by Amory Lorch (Fintan McKeown), they are taken to Harrenhal. Harrenhal features prominently in “House of the Dragon,” but this marks its first appearance in “Thrones.” The famously haunted castle was burned by Aegon the Conqueror after Harren the Black claimed no fire could melt stone; alas, Harren had never encountered dragonfire. The resulting vista is one of the show’s most striking visuals thus far, even though we barely get a glimpse.
Harrenhal is also crawling with Lannister soldiers, and soon, the man himself comes to join in on the fun: Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance). He stops the torture of the prisoners, because he is a Good and Rational Guy, and appoints Arya, whom he immediately clocks as a girl, to be his cupbearer. Arya does become a cupbearer in the books… but to Roose Bolton (Michael McElhatton), and only after Harrenhal is seized by Northern forces. While the Lannisters hold the castle, Arya is only a kitchen girl.
Condensing Arya’s stay at Harrenhal was a wise choice; too much detail on Weese and his dog or Chiswyck would have slowed the pacing of the show (indeed, Arya’s “ACOK” chapters in the book can be a bit repetitive). Her relationship with Roose is practically nonexistent—though it is fun when she walks in on him being leeched—and so not much is lost. That said, choosing to create a relationship, even a respect, between Tywin and Arya softens the former and, in doing so, whitewashes him. The show falls for the image that Tywin projects (that of a man who does “necessary evils” in the name of the bigger picture) instead of his actual character (a hypocrite so scared of being laughed at that he would rather kill entire families and ruin his children than be normal).
Taking “Garden of Bones” in a vacuum, only one of these impulses truly sinks it (take a wild guess as to which it is). All the other changes have not unsound impulses: at best, these alterations are clever ways to let talented actors bounce off each other or develop underutilized characters; at worst, though, they are self-indulgent, cruel, and show a remarkable lack of reading comprehension. (I suppose this should be expected from the man who once said, “Themes are for eighth-grade book reports.”) For now, the rest of the show is strong enough to cover up these blemishes, but it will not be long before everything else begins to falter and the scales fall from our eyes.
But there are bigger fish to fry in this episode, or perhaps I should say onions, given Ser Davos’s (Liam Cunningham) involvement. Stannis (Stephen Dillane) and Renly must parlay, which goes as disastrously as can be expected: Stannis grinds his teeth, and Renly pokes fun at Stannis’s new religion. “He’s the lord’s chosen, born amidst salt and smoke,” Melisandre (Carice van Houten) proclaims. In one of the cleverer show-only lines, Renly shoots back, “Born amidst salt and smoke? Is he a ham?”
This exchange occurs in a Catelyn chapter, where we are privy to her scathing opinions on the remaining Baratheon brothers. She begs both of them to focus on the larger Lannister threat, but Stannis stubbornly insists that he is the rightful heir (true but myopic) while Renly views the whole thing as a bit of a joke. Much of this also happens on screen, though Catelyn’s opinions are not quite as evident. The biggest change comes not from what the scene added, but what they removed—specifically, a peach.
In the book, Renly offers Stannis a peach. A harmless gesture, but a mocking one; he invites his older brother to taste the finer things in life, but Stannis refuses, and the two suddenly become much nastier to each other. Peace, already unlikely, becomes an impossibility, and that peach will haunt Stannis for the rest of his life. Removing the peach does not change much of the scene, which follows the same beats as the book, but it does rob us of one of Stannis’s most touching moments:
Renly offered me a peach. At our parley. Mocked me, defied me, threatened me, and offered me a peach. I thought he was drawing a blade and went for mine own. Was that his purpose, to make me show fear? Or was it one of his pointless jests? When he spoke of how sweet the peach was, did his words have some hidden meaning? Only Renly could vex me with a piece of fruit. He brought his doom on himself with his treason, but I did love him, Davos. I know that now. I swear, I will go to my grave thinking of my brother’s peach. (Davos II, “ACOK”)
But, peach or not, Stannis believes that Renly must die. That is where Davos and Melisandre come in.
Davos, former smuggler that he is, rows Melisandre to a secluded cove near Renly’s camp. She speaks of rotten onions, giving us a glimpse into her own black and white morality—perhaps somewhat in contrast to Stannis’s earlier proclamation that “a good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad the good,” but similarly rigid—and then disrobes.
For all my griping about how “Thrones” dances around the magical elements, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss do not dance around this. Melisandre is pregnant, but not with a human child; instead, her stomach contorts and bulges and out comes a twisted and distorted shadow devoid of any semblance of normal life.
The lack of magic thus far in “Thrones” makes Melisandre’s shadow birth that much more otherworldly, though I have no doubt that was only incidental and not a purposeful choice on Benioff and Weiss’s part. Still, it does mean that the sheer bizarreness of the situation is more extreme than if, say, Bran’s dreams had been as outlandish as they are in Martin’s work. Like Jory’s death halfway through season one, the birth of the shadow marks a turning point in this second season. If not for the glaring flaws in this episode, it might be one of the best so far, if only for what transpires between Stannis and Renly. And yet, as ever, it seems that “Thrones” must always succumb to its basest instincts, neglecting its truly interesting stories and relationships for the imaginary. I swear, I will go to my grave mourning what could have been.
Stray Observations:
- Book-Davos does not witness the shadow baby until its second deployment, this time against Ser Cortnay Penrose, the castellan of Storm’s End. Renly has died, but Penrose still holds the castle, which is nigh impenetrable. While it makes sense to excise Penrose and have Storm’s End fall with Renly’s death for the show, we do lose out on one of the best lines in the series. After Stannis proclaims, “I give you fair warning. If you force me to take my castle by storm, you may expect no mercy. I will hang you for traitors, every one of you,” Penrose has a comeback for the ages: “As the gods will it. Bring on your storm, my lord—and recall, if you do, the name of this castle” (Davos II, “ACOK”).
- It should be noted that Cat immediately sniffs out the Spicers and warns Robb away from them. She also warned him against sending Theon (Alfie Allen) to Pyke and told him to keep his direwolf, Grey Wind, close, which could have saved Robb from the Freys. Cat’s political instincts are just about right on everything here, making the inevitable march towards the Red Wedding that much more tragic.
- The opening scene gives us some humanization for the smallfolk Lannister soldiers before they all die, and despite me disliking this episode, it does a good job at showing how even the “right” side lays waste to the land and the smallfolk as they march on. The soldiers also say, “They’re horses. They get spooked by their own shadows,” which is very true. My old horse would get spooked when we changed direction and the shadows looked different.
- The Hound (Rory McCann) continues his sort-of-redemption arc here by giving Sansa his cloak after Joffrey sics Meryn Trant (Ian Beattie) on her.
- Worst dress of all time on Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer) this episode. Really awful work.
- The whole concept of the “Garden of Bones” outside Qarth is only in the show; Dany is received immediately in “ACOK.” I find the whole standoff in this episode very silly. What the hell is sumai?
- The show goes on to butcher Stannis but I do love this exchange with Davos in this episode: “Well, life’s been good since you hacked them [Davos’s fingers] off, Your Grace, and it’s four less fingernails to clean,” Davos tells his king. Stannis responds only with, “Fewer. Four fewer fingernails to clean.”
- Brotherhood Without Banners mention!
- Renly tells Littlefinger, “I don’t like you, Lord Baelish. I don’t like your face. I don’t like the words that come oozing out of your mouth.” This is once again furthering the show’s “Renly is a good guy” agenda, because Renly in the books cracks many a jape with Littlefinger and would have very few quibbles with his schemes.
Episode Ranking:
- “What Is Dead May Never Die”
- “The North Remembers”
- “The Night Lands”
- “Garden of Bones”
“Game of Thrones” Season Two Trailer
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