Directed by: Alan Taylor
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Game of Thrones,” “A Clash of Kings,” “A Storm of Swords,” “A Feast for Crows,” “A Dance With Dragons,” and the as-yet unpublished “The Winds of Winter” and “A Dream of Spring.”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.
65/100
This episode marks the beginning of the most romantic relationship in all of “Game of Thrones.” No, I am not talking about Robb Stark (Richard Madden) and Talisa Maegyr (Oona Chaplin) acting like horny teenagers. No. I am talking instead about Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie).
The actual consummation of this relationship in season eight is one of the most abysmal pieces of writing I have ever seen, but there is no arguing that their relationship in the source material is, at the very least, capital-R Romantic, and I personally find it hard to argue that it isn’t lowercase-r romantic as well, unless you find thinking of someone while in the bath or picturing them naked all the time not romantic. There is a reason the writers shoehorned in that terrible, terrible moment in season eight, and it starts here.
Jaime and Brienne do not spend significant time in the books together until “A Storm of Swords,” but season two of “Game of Thrones” moves up their timeline a bit. It’s not a terribly egregious change, though perhaps I am simply so smitten with their characters that it is egregious and I’m too blind to see it. It gives Jaime more to do this season, as otherwise Coster-Waldau would just be sitting around in a prison cell the entire time, though it does rob Brienne of some of her sweeter moments with Catelyn (Michelle Fairley). Specifically, I am thinking of the scene between the two of them after Cat learns of Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) and Rickon’s (Art Parkinson) supposed deaths whilst at Riverrun, and Brienne—very awkwardly—attempts to comfort her:
“Brienne’s face was a watery blur. She reached across the table, but her fingers stopped short of Catelyn’s, as if the touch might be unwelcome.”
Catelyn VII, A Clash of Kings
Of course, in the show, Catelyn has yet to learn of Bran and Rickon, for Theon (Alfie Allen) only just strung up the miller’s boys last episode. The reasoning behind this change still eludes me, as not only does it make Cat a less interesting character, it also gives her less time to form a relationship with Brienne. (I guess that’s not that important if you cut Lady Stoneheart!) But Jaime’s chapters in “A Storm of Swords” are eclipsed in my mind only by Theon’s in “A Dance With Dragons,” and even though the show plays with specifics, the bones are still solid enough—and the show is still faithful enough—that the material lands.
Jaime and Brienne only have one scene in this episode, but it’s much more pleasant to focus on them than the utter nonsense between Robb and Talisa. Talisa, as a concept, continues to baffle me. She is a Volantene noble and yet speaks with the same British accent as the rest of Westeros. She, in this episode, quite literally says she is “not like other girls,” which is so on the nose that I wrote “let’s all kill ourselves” in my notes: “I decided not to waste my years planning dances and masquerades with the other noble ladies,” she says, because the only way to be a worthy love interest is to eschew feminine roles in a society where dances and masquerades form the social backbone of the nobility. At one point, she walks into Robb’s tent during a meeting with one of his most important bannermen and loiters in the background for a minute or so before dumping backstory to make her seem progressive. There is no given reason that she walked into Robb’s tent, it is simply because the writers (I’ll let you guess what dunderheads wrote this episode) needed her there because the story decreed she and Robb were to have sex this episode.
But let us not harp on only the women! Robb, too, is unbearable. After Talisa explains why slavery is bad, Robb swiftly rids himself of all clothing and the two get to boning. He is not, as in the books, wounded, drugged, and half-mad with grief for Bran and Rickon. He is not, as in the books, a lonely teenager. He is not, as in the books, frightened to bring a bastard into the world after seeing the treatment of Jon Snow (Kit Harington). He is, instead, a fully grown man in full control of his mental faculties who boldly doesn’t give one fig about societal stigma. “I don’t want to marry the Frey girl,” he says, and decides to throw his mother’s hard-won alliance with Walder Frey (David Bradley) out the window because… he’s horny?
It’s a shame for many, many reasons, perhaps chief among that Chaplin and Madden share good chemistry. There was a way to keep the chemistry, expand on Jeyne/Talisa as a character, keep Robb’s intellect intact, and create a compelling romance. Follow him at the Crag, show him wounded and grief-stricken, show Jeyne/Talisa caring for him, the two can fall in love and have sex and then Robb can be crippled with guilt about a possible bastard, bring in Sybell Spicer’s scheming to add intrigue, and done. Drama! Romance! Characters not being absolute idiots! To add insult to injury, the sex scene between Robb and Talisa here is one of the more effective sex scenes in “Thrones” (a low bar, to be sure) as it aims more for romance and not titillation.
Thank god, then, for Winterfell. Alfie Allen, despite being relegated to only a handful of lines in season one, has very quickly established himself as a standout in season two, somehow managing to keep the audience sympathetic and repulsed at the same time. Of course, the colors are still drab, but the performances are riveting enough (Donald Sumpter as Maester Luwin does so, so much with very little) that I only really thought about it upon rewatch, and I am admittedly rewatching with hatred in my heart and looking to exploit every flaw this show ever had. These flaws also include a very obvious stunt double for Yara (Gemma Whelan) as she rides into Winterfell to save her brother from himself. Both have realized the hopelessness of the situation—“Don’t die so far from the sea,” Yara says—and yet Theon’s pride prevents him from doing anything but digging his own grave even deeper.
King’s Landing, too, continues to prove worth watching. Tyrion (Peter Dinklage), Bronn (Jerome Flynn), and Varys (Conleth Hill) are an adept comedic trio, and the seeds for Blackwater are crawling their way up to the sun. Cersei (Lena Headey) and Tyrion’s feud escalates as Cersei tells Tyrion she “has your little whore,” leading both Tyrion and viewer to believe she has abducted Shae (Sibel Kekilli); however, it is poor Ros (Esmé Bianco) who faces Cersei’s wrath.
This occurs in the books as well, only it is not Ros—a show-only creation—who is captured by Cersei, it is a sex worker named Alayaya. Alayaya works at her mother Chataya’s brothel, which caters to upscale clientele; both Alayaya and Chataya are Summer Islanders, where there is no shame in sex or prostitution. Their exclusion is no great loss (though it does rob the show of two black women… but considering how terribly “Thrones” abuses its prostitutes, maybe that is for the best; plus, as I’ve said before, Martin is not a bastion of representation himself and I’m sure having two of the few black women in the books show up as prostitutes is… not ideal…) as the characters are only superficially interesting, while the audience has grown to care about Ros.
The Kettleblack brothers, likewise, find themselves absent from this scene in the show and, indeed, “Thrones” as a whole. Osney, Osfryd, and Osmund all serve Cersei and are all varying levels of thuggish; one is appointed to the Kingsguard, one or two sleep with Cersei (frankly, they are hard to tell apart), one kills the High Sparrow, and all three are most certainly dead come “The Winds of Winter.” But their father, Oswell, belongs to Petyr Baelish (Aidan Gillen), as is revealed at the end of “A Storm of Swords,” and that means that his sons also ultimately report up to Littlefinger. Each is a small enough part in Martin’s chessboard that their removal leans more towards pragmatic streamlining than disastrous omission—very different from the removal of say, Tysha, who gets obliquely referenced this episode (Cersei asks Tyrion, “Tell me, have you married this one [prostitute] yet?”) despite the show never following that thread.
Elsewhere, things progress in typical fashion for season two. Davos (Liam Cunningham) continues to provide some much-needed humanity to Stannis (Stephen Dillane), who sheds some light on Davos’s “Onion Knight” moniker. “Every man on Storm’s End wanted to kiss you that night” when Davos smuggled onions to keep those at the siege of Storm’s End from starving, Stannis remembers. “I was relieved they did not,” Davos says, and then there is a pause just long enough to make a girl wonder, What are we? Stannis remembers all the insults he bore from his more popular brothers (and there are many, both imagined and real) in a speech that bears distinct resemblance to Cat’s internal monologues from the book: “Robert told me to hold Storm’s End, so I held it. Then he told me he was giving it to Renly, so I gave it up. Insult or no, I gave it up because Robert was my older brother and he was the king, and I’ve always done my duty. But now I’m the rightful king by every law of Westeros. And when I sit the Iron Throne, you’ll be my Hand.”
This makes Stannis the most progressive guy in Westeros at the moment. A former peasant now Hand of the King! Stannis is basically Bernie Sanders. In fact, show-Stannis is more progressive than book-Stannis in this regard, as Davos does not become Hand until “A Storm of Swords.” Alester Florent, Stannis’s uncle-in-law, serves as Hand until he is burned for treason. (Yay!)
Crucially, this moment humanizes Stannis, which will make the audience torn during the Battle of the Blackwater. Do we want him to win, placing a—possibly—more just ruler on the Iron Throne (shadow baby aside), but putting two of the most watchable characters in the show (Cersei and Tyrion) in danger? Do we want him to lose, damning Westeros to Lannister rule but ensuring Dinklage and Headey stay on our screens? What of poor Sansa’s (Sophie Turner) fate, should the iron-fisted Stannis successfully take King’s Landing?
As has been the case with most of season two, the strength of these scenes—Winterfell, King’s Landing, Dragonstone—makes the weaknesses of everything else that much more apparent. Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) does nothing this episode except bleat about how she wants her dragons back. Jon (Kit Harington) kills Qhorin Halfhand (Simon Armstrong) at the latter’s request in order to better infiltrate the wildlings, which should be an interesting scene but… Jon spends most of it with pouty lips and nary a facial expression save “bemused.”
The fact that Qhorin was even captured by wildlings in the first place like this is somewhat insulting; in the books, Qhorin and his merry band (Jon, Squire Dalbridge, Ebben, and Stonesnake) scale the Skirling Pass, and though the wildlings do find them eventually (through a skinchanger Jon killed earlier who now inhabits his eagle companion’s body), they are not so easily taken. Dalbridge sacrifices himself to hold off an entire band of wildlings, Ebben dies bravely on his way back to the Wall, and Stonesnake manages to slip away entirely, his whereabouts still unknown. Qhorin tells Jon to surrender to the wildlings and do whatever they ask of him—including killing Qhorin, which Jon does.
“He knew, he [Jon] thought numbly. He knew what they would ask of me. He thought of Samwell Tarly then, of Grenn and Dolorous Edd, of Pyp and Toad back at Castle Black. Had he lost them all, as he had lost Bran and Rickon and Robb? Who was he now? What was he?”
Jon VIII, A Clash of Kings
And, of course, there is the lack of the mystical. Jon, like his siblings, can warg into his direwolf, and yet Ghost is nowhere to be found. Gone too are Jon’s magical dreams:
When he closed his eyes, he dreamed of direwolves.
There were five of them when there should have been six, and they were scattered, each apart from the others…
Jon?
The call came from behind him, softer than a whisper, but strong too. Can a shout be silent? He turned his head, searching for his brother, for a glimpse of a lean grey shape moving beneath the trees, but there was nothing, only…
A weirwood.
It seemed to sprout from solid rock, its pale roots twisting up from a myriad of fissures and hairline cracks. The tree was slender compared to other weirwoods he had seen, no more than a sapling, yet it was growing as he watched, its limbs thickening as they reached for the sky. Wary, he circled the smooth white trunk until he came to the face. Red eyes looked at him. Fierce eyes they were, yet glad to see him. The weirwood had his brother’s face. Had his brother always had three eyes?
Not always, came the silent shout. Not before the crow.
He sniffed at the bark, smelled wolf and tree and boy, but behind that there were other scents, the rich brown smell of warm earth and the hard grey smell of stone and something else, something terrible. Death, he knew. He was smelling death. He cringed back, his hair bristling, and bared his fangs.
Don’t be afraid, I like it in the dark. No one can see you, but you can see them. But first you have to open your eyes. See? Like this. And the tree reached down and touched him.
And suddenly he was back in the mountains, his paws sunk deep in a drift of snow as he stood upon the edge of a great precipice. Before him the Skirling Pass opened up into airy emptiness, and a long vee-shaped valley lay spread beneath him like a quilt, awash in all the colors of an autumn afternoon.
Jon VII, A Clash of Kings
I, for one, am glad that this moment of connection between Jon and Bran gets cut so we can watch Robb steadily lose all of his brain cells. It’s not like the show needs to set up Bran’s magical abilities so his importance in the last season doesn’t come out of nowhere.
Stray Observations:
- Asha/Yara seems to imply that her mother is dead when she tells Theon, “We both loved our mother. We both endured our father.” Alannys Harlaw is alive in the books, though a shell of her former self after losing two of her sons in the Greyjoy Rebellion and having Theon shipped off to Winterfell.
- “I don’t want your grief. I want my vengeance” is a great line from Rickard Karstark (John Stahl).
- Another great line, this time from Brienne: “All my life men like you have sneered at me. And all my life I’ve been knocking men like you into the dust.”
- While it makes sense to cut Cleos Frey from the show—he does not last that long in the books—it does mean we are robbed of some excellent quips from Jaime, including, “Ser Cleos looked like a weasel, fought like a goose, and had the courage of an especially brave ewe” (Jaime I, “ASOS”)
- The show more directly addresses why Arya (Maisie Williams) does not name Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance) as a target to Jaqen H’gar (Tom Wlaschiha). The book does not, which is a semi-frequent complaint from people who can’t read between the lines. Guys, she is nine.
- In the books, the legendary Horn of Joramun is said to be able to wake the giants and bring down the Wall. Mance Rayder (Ciarán Hinds) uses one horn as an empty threat against the Watch, but that is revealed to be a fake; the real one is likely the one found in the cache Sam (David Bradley) unearths this episode. (This is Ghost erasure, as it’s Ghost who finds the horn in the books.) Sam still has it in Oldtown as of “A Feast for Crows.” Of course… the show doesn’t really touch on the horn at all, instead focusing on the dragonglass weapons. Great.
- The Winterfell/Stark theme playing as the camera reveals Bran is still alive… I was moved, I admit.
Episode Ranking:
- “What Is Dead May Never Die”
- “The North Remembers”
- “The Ghost of Harrenhal”
- “The Night Lands”
- “The Old Gods and the New”
- “The Prince of Winterfell”
- “A Man Without Honor”
- “Garden of Bones”
“Game of Thrones” Season Two Trailer
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