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Game of Thrones,” “A Clash of Kings,” “A Storm of Swords,” “A Feast for Crows,” “A Dance With Dragons,” and the as-yet unpublished “The Winds of Winter” and “A Dream of Spring.”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.
80/100
Most television shows never have an episode as good as “Blackwater,” and so I am inclined to forgive “Valar Morghulis” for many of its sins. Now comes the climax for those neglected in “Blackwater,” and after such a focused episode, the show by necessity finds itself spread thin across both Westeros and Essos as it wraps up its sophomore outing. Thus we are once more at the mercy of location, as we have been for so much of this season.
But first, we must attend to the falling action in King’s Landing—almost literally for Tyrion (Peter Dinklage), who finds himself fallen in status with the arrival of Tywin (Charles Dance) and with a new and nasty scar across his face. (In the books, Tyrion loses his entire nose, which does not help his reputation as a conniving “demon-monkey,” but that would have been an expensive endeavor for the show’s makeup and visual effects team and likely unpleasant for Dinklage.) The first shot of this episode is Tyrion opening his eyes, where first we see the fire on the Blackwater reflected and hear the screams of men and horses before the reflection resolves into Grand Maester Pycelle (Julian Glober). It’s one of several moments of artistry in this episode, helmed by show veteran Alan Taylor; while this episode may not reach the artistic highs of its predecessor, it’s no slouch, either.
Despite his wildfire plan single-handedly saving King’s Landing, Tyrion spent his tenure as Hand more concerned with battling Cersei than cultivating staunch allies who might stick up for him; still, his demotion is just as frustrating for the viewer as it is for Tyrion, as we know exactly what all he did to protect his thankless family. Plus, no one wants to stand up for Tywin Lannister, even if his horse shits before it enters the throne room (surely no symbolism there), but Tyrion cannot find it within himself to break free. “I can’t. I do belong here. These bad people are what I’m good at,” he later tells Shae (Sibel Kekilli). This will be the start of a long and agonizing descent into villainy for Tyrion, except… it won’t be, sorry, I forgot—he just drinks and knows things. Right.
For Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), things are looking up. Relatively. She is at last free from her engagement to Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) as the Tyrells quickly move to secure a new alliance. This is done directly by Loras (Finn Jones) and Margaery (Natalie Dormer, once again wearing a dress that is an affront to anyone with eyeballs), presumably because Mace and Olenna had not been cast yet, but it is downright bizarre to see these two negotiating on behalf of the entire house without the presence of anyone with real seniority. While the two Tyrell children save Sansa from the most immediate Lannister threat, fear not, there is still misery in store for her as Littlefinger (Aidan Gillen) begins to make passes at a child.
With King’s Landing in order for now, we can return to the other factions. I may as well get Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Brienne (Gwendoline Christie) out of the way now, not because I want to get their scenes over with, but because I would otherwise devote far too much time to what is ultimately an unimportant part of this episode. But it’s important to me.
I previously mentioned that Brienne, in the books, does not kill anyone until “A Feast for Crows,” when she dispatches several members of the Bloody Mummers. The Bloody Mummers don’t appear in the show and get replaced by Locke (Noah Taylor), but it’s the Mummers who nearly rape Brienne and lop off Jaime’s hand, plus who knows how many other atrocities in the Riverlands. She does the realm a service, but it is a traumatizing experience:
She knocked aside his [Shagwell’s] arm and punched the steel into his bowels. “Laugh,” she snarled at him. He moaned instead. “Laugh,” she repeated, grabbing his throat with one hand and stabbing at his belly with the other. “Laugh!” She kept saying it, over and over, until her hand was red up to the wrist and the stink of the fool’s dying was like to choke her. But Shagwell never laughed. The sobs that Brienne heard were all her own. When she realized that, she threw down her knife and shuddered.
Brienne IV, A Feast for Crows
In this episode, however, Brienne seems to relish killing. She and Jaime come across a group of northmen who killed a group of women because “they lay with lions,” and soon enough the men realize Jaime’s identity and a fight breaks out. On the one hand, it is good to show the Stark cause as fallible and to showcase the damage that war does to the common people; on the other, Brienne very purposely kills a man in agonizingly slow fashion as revenge for what he did to those women. This man’s death is no great loss as he was a rapist and murderer, but Brienne is perhaps the most compassionate character in the entire series; apparently, “Game of Thrones” does not know how to handle this kind of thing, and opt for the easy way out and a surface-level “badass” moment that misrepresents much of Brienne’s ethos. The one upside to this scene is that Jaime immediately begins making heart-eyes at Brienne after she kills those guys, and Coster-Waldau and Christie’s chemistry is never less than stellar, but it—not to beat a dead horse over here—once again highlights the inability of “Thrones” to handle some of its more contradictory characters, especially women.
And, it seems, Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane). He, too, gets given uncharacteristic violent tendencies in this episode. Having apparently teleported back to Dragonstone, he is so unhappy with his performance at Blackwater that he decides to choke Melisandre (Carice van Houten). Stannis is a bit of a misogynist, this is true, but he does not—as of yet—inflict violence upon the unarmed unless they are cannibals or rapists. After spending a season carefully building up Stannis as righteous yet flawed, the show now begins to veer into “power-hungry maniac” territory, especially as Melisandre begins to whisper in his ear. “You are the song of fire. You are the warrior of light,” she tells him, somehow neglecting to mention the words “Azor Ahai” or “the prince that was promised.” Still, it is an otherwise good scene, benefitting from Ramin Djwadi’s strong score and again featuring more artistry than the middle chunk of episodes. Melisandre takes Stannis to the fire and bids him look in, which he does; we can see the flames reflecting in both Melisandre and Stannis’s eyes as they did Tyrion’s earlier in this episode. We do not see what Stannis does, but Dillane, the cinematography, and the eerie music convey more than enough—when the show has the guts to lean into the mysticism, as it does here, it can work beautifully.
As the flames in Stannis’s eyes mirror Tyrion’s gaze from earlier, they also serve as a transition to Winterfell, where Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen) continues to dig his own grave. Allen continues to do stellar work this season as he vacillates between funny, sympathetic, repugnant, and pathetic all within the same sentence; when Maester Luwin (Donald Sumpter, equally stellar) suggests Theon join the Night’s Watch, you can see the exact moment where Theon considers the offer, rejects it, and then begins to ponder it again, all without any lines. “I’ve known you many years, Theon Greyjoy. You’re not the man you’re pretending to be. Not yet,” Luwin tells him. To which Theon replies, “You may be right. But I’ve gone too far to pretend to be anything else.” Every so often, the show drops some really incredible stuff, and this scene is one of those times.
Soon after this, Theon’s own men knock him unconscious, stab Maester Luwin, and leave for greener pastures. This is a far cry from the sack of Winterfell in the books, where events follow thusly: Ser Rodrik Cassel (Ron Donachie) leaves Winterfell to fight against Ramsay Snow (Iwan Rheon), whose forced marriage and subsequent imprisonment of Donella Hornwood caused a mild succession crisis. By impersonating a servant, Ramsay manages to escape, though finds himself in Winterfell’s dungeons; Rodrik believes the real Ramsay to be dead. When Dagmer Cleftjaw (Ralph Ineson) begins to lay siege to Torrhen’s Square, Rodrik once again rides off, leaving Winterfell ripe for Theon’s taking. This Theon does, and he releases the prisoner from the dungeon, who calls himself Reek and quickly ingratiates himself with Theon. Rodrik returns and begins to lay siege to Winterfell, but soon enough Bolton forces arrive, ostensibly to reinforce the Starks but in reality to double-cross them because Ramsay is a murderous sociopath. Ramsay kills Rodrik, blames it on the ironborn, and seizes Winterfell from the inside. This is the last we hear of Theon for two books:
“Ramsay.” There was a smile on his plump lips, but none in those pale pale eyes. “Snow, my wife called me before she ate her fingers, but I say Bolton.” His smile curdled. “So you’d offer me a kennel girl for my good service, is that the way of it?”
There was a tone in his voice Theon did not like, no more than he liked the insolent way the Dreadfort men were looking at him. “She was what was promised.”
“She smells of dogshit. I’ve had enough of bad smells, as it happens. I think I’ll have your bedwarmer instead. What do you call her? Kyra?”
“Are you mad?” Theon said angrily. “I’ll have you—” The Bastard’s backhand caught him square, and his cheekbone shattered with a sickening crunch beneath the lobstered steel. The world vanished in a red roar of pain.
Sometime later, Theon found himself on the ground. He rolled onto his stomach and swallowed a mouthful of blood. Close the gates! he tried to shout, but it was too late. The Dreadfort men had cut down Red Rolfe and Kenned, and more were pouring through, a river of mail and sharp swords. There was a ringing in his ears, and horror all around him. Black Lorren had his sword out, but there were already four of them pressing in on him. He saw Ulf go down with a crossbow bolt through the belly as he ran for the Great Hall. Maester Luwin was trying to reach him when a knight on a warhorse planted a spear between his shoulders, then swung back to ride over him. Another man whipped a torch round and round his head and then lofted it toward the thatched roof of the stables. “Save me the Freys,” the Bastard was shouting as the flames roared upward, “and burn the rest. Burn it, burn it all.”
The last thing Theon Greyjoy saw was Smiler, kicking free of the burning stables with his mane ablaze, screaming, rearing…
Theon VI, A Clash of Kings
As Ramsay does not get introduced in the show until next season, the sack of Winterfell looks quite different in the show. Ramsay’s presence in “A Clash of Kings” is quite convoluted—I nearly confused myself typing it all out—and I don’t mind how it plays out here. There is nothing thematically or dramatically necessary we miss, and the characters still hit their big beats.
In fact, omitting the actual sack itself proves to be the more effective choice, as seeing Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright), Rickon (Art Parkinson), Osha (Natalia Tena), and Hodor (Kristian Nairn) moving through the smoldering ruins is more heart-wrenching than any actual battle would be. Most heartbreaking of all is the death of Maester Luwin by the godswood. Donald Sumpter never had showy scenes and hardly ever had more than one scene per episode, and it was often espousing exposition, but the amount of emotion that he managed in each line was astonishing. “They burned everything,” Bran says. “Not everything. Not you,” Maester Luwin tells him. Amongst the slew of older British thespians in “Thrones,” Sumpter often gets overlooked, but he nearly brought me (jaded, full of hatred) to tears here.
This is where “A Clash of Kings” ends—with Bran and his merry gang fleeing Winterfell:
At the edge of the wolfswood, Bran turned in his basket for one last glimpse of the castle that had been his life. Wisps of smoke still rose into the grey sky, but no more than might have risen from Winterfell’s chimneys on a cold autumn afternoon. Soot stains marked some of the arrow loops, and here and there a crack or a missing merlon could be seen in the curtain wall, but it seemed little enough from this distance. Beyond, the tops of the keeps and towers still stood as they had for hundreds of years, and it was hard to tell that the castle had been sacked and burned at all. The stone is strong, Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I’m not dead either.
Bran VII, A Clash of Kings
Amongst them are Jojen (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and Meera (Ellie Kendrick) Reed, whose exclusion this season will make for a much more puzzling introduction in the next than, say, Ramsay. But the show captures perfectly the emotion felt at the end of the book as Bran looks out on his burning home and the Stark musical theme swells around him. There is love and hope and melancholia all wrapped in one.
Sadly, “Valar Morghulis” does not end on this poignant note. Unfortunately, there is still Qarth. Qarth has returned to undo all the good work so far in this episode, and there is only so much that Alan Taylor can do when given such an uninspiring script. In a very offensive bit of editing, we move directly from that moving scene with Bran to the House of the Undying, where Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) has gone to retrieve her stolen dragons.
The House of the Undying—more than Ned’s fever dream, more than Bran’s prophetic visions—is the most enraging victim (so far) of the show’s dedication to making its magic boring and simple. The whole Qarth plotline has been visually bland with a bland story and a bland cast at its center, but some of this may be excused as its source material is not the most inspiring part of “A Clash of Kings.” But Dany’s chapters in “ACOK” are all worth it for this final moment, where she ventures through the color-soaked House of the Undying and Drogon burns it all to the ground. There is none of this bullshit about Xaro Xhoan Daxos’ (Nonso Anonzie) Valyrian steel vault, nor does Doreah (Roxanne McKee) get locked in said vault with Daxos in a supremely psychopathic move from Dany. Instead, there is this:
In one room, a beautiful woman sprawled naked on the floor while four little men crawled over her. They had rattish pointed faces and tiny pink hands, like the servitor who had brought her the glass of shade. One was pumping between her thigh. Another savaged her breasts, worrying at the nipples with his wet red mouth, tearing and chewing.
Farther on she came upon a feast of corpses. Savagely slaughtered, the feasters lay strewn across overturned chairs and hacked trestle tables, asprawl in pools of congealing blood. Some had lost limbs, even heads. Severed hands clutched bloody cups, wooden spoons, roast fowl, heels of bread. In a throne above them sat a dead man with the head of a wolf. He wore an iron crown and held a leg of lamb in one hand as a king might hold a scepter, and his eyes followed Dany with mute appeal.
Daenerys IV, A Clash of Kings
She sees visions of her childhood in Braavos, exiled but happy, and the Mad King ranting and raving about fire. And this:
Viserys, was her first thought the next time she paused, but a second glance told her otherwise. The man had her brother’s hair, but he was taller, and his eyes were a dark indigo rather than lilac. “Aegon,” he said to a woman nursing a newborn babe in a great wooden bed. “What better name for a king?”
“Will you make a song for him?” the woman asked.
“He has a song,” the man replied. “He is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of ice and fire.” He looked up when he said it and his eyes met Dany’s, and it seemed as if he saw her standing there beyond the door. “There must be one more,” he said, though whether he was speaking to her or the woman in bed she could not say. “The dragon has three heads.” He went to the window seat, picked up a harp, and ran his fingers lightly over its silvery strings. Sweet sadness filled the room as man and wife and babe faded like the morning mist, only the music lingering behind to speed her on her way.
Daenerys IV, A Clash of Kings
She sees even more: Rhaegar’s death, the forgotten future of her dead son, Stannis, a blue flower growing “from a chink in a wall of ice” (representing Jon (Kit Harington), of course), a mummer’s dragon (Young Griff/Aegon), slaves calling her “mother” (Daenerys IV, “ACOK”). There is, at one point, a blue human heart floating above a table; it is this heart that keeps the Undying Ones, leaders of the warlocks of Qarth, alive.
The show ignores all of this, and once again we find David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, the writers of this episode, at the scene of the crime.
Some of this I can forgive—perhaps the rape of Westeros by its five claimant kings made literal would be hard to swallow, maybe the floating blue heart would have been too expensive after the visual effects-heavy “Blackwater.” But why cut the Red Wedding foreshadowing? Why cut Rhaegar discussing the prince that was promised? Why cut the hint to Jon’s parentage (the blue flower in the ice)? Why strip any sort of depth from the House of the Undying and replace it with something so painfully generic?
Dany sees the Iron Throne (anyone claiming that its destruction is foreshadowing of season eight is wrong, there is no way that was even a thought in anyone’s heads at the time), briefly visits the Wall, and has an admittedly touching reunion with Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa). But none of this tells us anything we did not know. None of this hints at what is to come, none of this helps us put the puzzle pieces together, none of this has any semblance of the rigorous creativity that Martin employs in his House of the Undying. Instead, we get a retread of Dany’s season one arc: she is forced to adjust to a different culture, struggles with being powerless, and then gets a cool badass moment at the end. Does she grow? Does she learn? Does she experience anything meaningfully new or impactful? Does she, for instance, learn about her family? Does the audience learn something about her childhood? Are there new mysteries for us to parse? No, no, no, no, no, and no. It is as if this moment was carved out purely to give her the requisite “awesome” scene that audiences now expect after season one—for she spent the rest of the season leading up to this bleating and sitting on her hands—and no one actually read the source material. This moves nothing—character, plot, setting—forward. Nothing. It only reminds us how empty Dany’s supporting cast is now that Jason Momoa can no longer lend the show his charisma.
Thank goodness, then, that the episode doesn’t end with that. It ends, instead, with the prologue from “A Storm of Swords.” At least in this the show does not shy away from its mysticism, perhaps because zombies are more palatable to an audience used to “The Walking Dead,” but I’ll take it. We hear at long last the dread three horn blasts from the Fist of the First Men, the three blasts that mean white walkers. Poor Samwell Tarly (John Bradley) is first to witness the wights as they begin to swarm the Fist, and we see our first Other properly. (The show actually only calls them white walkers, never the Others). He is a far cry from the sidhe-like race described in Martin’s books; his armor does not shift in the light, his sword does not appear as if made from moonlight. He just looks like a zombie on steroids. It’s not a bad design, per se, and how Martin describes the white walkers is difficult to put to screen—as far as zombie-ish designs go, it’s more memorable than most. It is, undeniably, fantastical… so why couldn’t they have committed to designing the House of the Undying with the same unrealism?
It is the same problem that has dogged season two almost from the start. A scene between Robb (Richard Madden) and Talisa (Oona Chaplin) might have you rolling your eyes; the next, Theon will have you rapt as he sprints towards his own doom. On the one hand, more and more magic via Melisandre’s introduction and Bran’s burgeoning dreams; on the other, the complete refusal to engage with the House of the Undying. The show has grown in confidence and ability, but so too has it grown in its own missteps.
At the time, “Thrones” was still fresh, and episodes like “Blackwater” did much to smooth things like Qarth over—by and large, things were running very smoothly, with excellent performers, competently-shot battles, and political intrigue to spare. Only the most diehards had their quibbles, as evidenced by the difference in episode discussions between r/asoiaf and r/got, but even for the Martinheads, things trended positive; besides, “ACOK” also varied in quality between Tyrion’s perfect chapters in King’s Landing and Arya’s seemingly endless travelogues in the Riverlands, so it stood to reason that “Thrones” would too.
It would be easier if I could point to a single change or deviation that derailed everything—but whilst many of season two’s struggles arise from changing the book (Qarth, Talisa, Jon), it excels in just as many areas (Theon, Arya, King’s Landing). There is not one producer or writer whose departure or arrival suddenly threw Westeros off its axis, nor is there a single moment that divides the good seasons from the bad; in fact, many of the issues from this season will be rectified in the next. Is it because “A Storm of Swords” is widely considered the best book in “A Song of Ice and Fire,” and there is less room to err? Dany has more chapters again, Robb is back after spending much of “ACOK” off-page, Jaime is introduced as a new POV. By and large, it seems the show can elevate strong material but often struggles with Martin’s “lesser” arcs, and yet there are many instances where the show’s original scenes show a nuanced understanding of the source material (though there are just as many that do not).
The descent into mediocrity and eventually idiocy is not sharp; it is not even consistent. Season three is an improvement on two, and four is not quite an improvement on three but certainly better than Qarth. This makes it all the more painful—if there were one person, one moment at whose feet I could lay the blame, I might feel better about this whole thing. Instead, there is a slow, unsteady march into agony. At least next season is better.
Stray Observations:
- Xaro Xhoan Daxos is still alive in the books. He even shows up in “A Dance with Dragons,” warning Daenerys that she has made an enemy of Qarth.
- In the books, Theon immediately begins imagining how he will rise to become Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch and bed beautiful wildling women. Immediately after this, everything gets set on fire and Ramsay (Iwan Rheon) knocks him out. Good times. He does not, however, have the great one-liner he gets in this episode: “Thank you, wise bald man.”
- An ironborn named Wex gets mentioned. I assume this is a reference to Wex Pyke, Theon’s mute squire, but this Wex is nothing like book-Wex. I love book-Wex and I think it’s a damn shame they cut him.
- Dracarys was “drakharys” in HBO’s subtitles. Not sure what’s going on there.
- This marks the last episode for Tom Wlaschiha as Jaqen H’ghar (for now) as he helps Arya (Maisie Williams) and Gendry (Joe Dempsie) finally escape Harrenhal and reveals what it truly means to be a Faceless Man.
- A fun fact I never got the chance to mention this season is that Arya, in the books, runs into a boy named Elmar Frey who is crying because he can’t marry his princess anymore as her family dishonored his—the princess, of course, being Arya herself, only she doesn’t know that.
- Another semi-surprising moment of artistry: Ros (Esme Bianco) finds a strange sort of comfort with Varys (Conleth Hill) in a brothel room absolutely drenched in red. It’s a very well-lit and well-shot scene, which are rarities with Ros—usually whatever shows off her breasts the most will do.
- Jaime attempting a terrible Northern accent is really funny. I love him so much.
- I couldn’t bring myself to talk too much about Robb and Talisa in this review after I’ve spent the rest of the season complaining about them, but all of Robb’s problems would be solved if he just listened to his mother! Listen to Cat (Michelle Fairley)! “Love didn’t just happen to us. We built it slowly, over the years, stone by stone,” she says of her marriage with Ned (Sean Bean). My heart. “Treat your oaths recklessly and your people shall do the same.” Listen to her!
- Okay, one more comment on Robb. Why in the world is he swearing his wedding vows to the Seven? Hello? Should he not be swearing them to the old gods like his father did?
- Can we please get a new dress for Shae. I don’t think she was ever out of this one the entire season. She’s lady’s maid to Sansa, surely they have some sort of uniform or dress code?
- I complained a lot about the House of the Undying but I’d be lying if Drogo saying, “And if this is a dream, I will kill the man who tries to wake me” didn’t get to me a bit. Dany just wants a home…
- Jon is also in this episode, I guess. He kills Qhorin (Simon Armstrong). Great. How did they manage to make his plot so boring in this season?
Episode Ranking:
- “Blackwater”
- “What Is Dead May Never Die”
- “Valar Morghulis”
- “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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