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Game of Thrones,” “A Clash of Kings,” “A Storm of Swords,” “A Feast for Crows,” “A Dance With Dragons,” and the as-yet unpublished “The Winds of Winter” and “A Dream of Spring.”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.
70/100
At some point in history, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss read Catelyn’s (Michelle Fairley) seventh chapter in “A Storm of Swords”—her seventh chapter being, of course, the infamous Red Wedding. They must have thought this was some pretty gripping literature (which it is) as it ended up being one of the reasons they pitched “Game of Thrones” in the first place, which probably says something about their priorities (me, personally, I would have cited Theon’s (Alfie Allen) chapters in “A Dance With Dragons” as a reason to make the show, though I suppose “A Dance With Dragons” wasn’t out when Benioff and Weiss pitched it, so what am I thinking, and besides, the Red Wedding is, all things considered, a pretty dramatically compelling event). Now that season two got “A Clash of Kings” out of the way, we can finally get a move on to “A Storm of Swords” and, just as the seeds for “Blackwater” were sown early on, we can watch the groundwork get laid for an episode that would shift the world.
Maybe that’s an overstatement. But it certainly shifted something and it remains an incredible feat, even if “Thrones” learned all the wrong lessons from it. It gives season three a sense of doom, or maybe that’s just because I know exactly what’s going to happen. But no—I don’t think it’s just me, because the episode opens with some pretty grim stuff: the Night’s Watch has been attacked and decimated by hordes of wights and white walkers, and Samwell Tarly (John Bradley) is having the worst day of his life, worse even than that time his father chained him to a wall for several days for the crime of wanting to study at the Citadel.
This scene plays out quite differently in the books: in both instances, Sam has fallen behind the Night’s Watch in their endless trek through icy purgatory, but in the books, he kills an Other with the dragonglass dagger he found at the Fist of the First Men. For reasons of… delayed gratification…? Or something? Show-Sam will not kill a white walker until episode eight. It’s not a bad change by any means as it gives Sam some growth to do over the course of the season; with “ASOS” as meaty as it is, Benioff and Weiss split the book across seasons three and four. While Sam has one clear arc across “ASOS,” it would not do to open the season with his slaying an Other and then waiting around until season four to do something of more substance, such as rigging elections, and thus he needs some sort of growth to do across these ten episodes.
It is jarring to see the show so clearly articulate the threat that the white walkers pose here when they will be handwaved away in the future, but I am trying to learn how to enjoy the moment even when I know it won’t last. For now, at least, the show acknowledges that the Night’s Watch has been fighting the wrong battles.
This, of course, does not make them stop fighting those battles. Might I suggest teaming up with the wildlings, or giving just a bit more thought as to why they are all marching south? Jeor Mormont (James Cosmo) would perish the thought, but not so Jon Snow—Westeros’s second most woke man (Stannis (Stephen Dillane) is first, obviously) is busy meeting with the King-Beyond-the-Wall, Mance Rayder (Ciarán Hinds).
As Stannis’s mentions in season one gave us an idea of the man before his first appearance in season two, allusions to Mance built him up long before he showed up on our screens: he was a turncloak, a man who betrayed his brothers, lawless, wild. Then we meet Mance and… well, he’s a pretty normal guy. Hinds gives Mance equal measures of warmth and danger, and it even brings out some personality in Jon as the latter goes toe to toe with the wildling leader. “If I’m a traitor, then you are too,” Jon reminds Mance, and soon enough Jon finds himself a bonafide wildling.
Unfortunately, the show does little to define what it means to be a wildling; they are simply a mass of fur-bound bodies who don’t have lords, and that is the only thing separating them from those south of the Wall. Unlike the Dothraki horde, which remains a poorly-defined, well, horde, the wildlings have a strong cast of characters and diverse culture: there are the Thenns, who have their own smiths and lords; the Hornfoots, who walk without shoes; the inhabitants of the Frozen Shore, with their dog sleds, and many more besides. North of the Wall is not simply one great sheet of snow and ice, as the show would have you believe; there is color, and life, and music, and each wildling faction differs from the next. Mance even tells Jon the reason for his defection is the color of his cloak:
“The black wool cloak of a Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch,” said the King-beyond-the-Wall. “One day on a ranging we brought down a fine big elk. We were skinning it when the smell of blood drew a shadow-cat out of its lair. I drove it off, but not before it shredded my cloak to ribbons. Do you see? Here, here, and here?” He chuckled. “It shredded my arm and back as well, and I bled worse than the elk. My brothers feared I might die before they got me back to Maester Mullin at the Shadow Tower, so they carried me to a wildling village where we knew an old wisewoman did some healing. She was dead, as it happened, but her daughter saw to me. Cleaned my wounds, sewed me up, and fed me porridge and potions until I was strong enough to ride again. And she sewed up the rents in my cloak as well, with some scarlet silk from Asshai that her grandmother had pulled from the wreck of a cog washed up on the Frozen Shore. It was the greatest treasure she had, and her gift to me.” He swept the cloak back over his shoulders. “But at the Shadow Tower, I was given a new wool cloak from stores, black and black, and trimmed with black, to go with my black breeches and black boots, my black doublet and black mail. The new cloak had no frays nor rips nor tears… and most of all, no red. The men of the Night’s Watch dressed in black, Ser Denys Mallister reminded me sternly, as if I had forgotten. My old cloak was fit for burning now, he said.
I left the next morning… for a place where a kiss was not a crime, and a man could wear any cloak he chose.”
Jon I, A Storm of Swords
The cloak was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back, but judging by Michele Clapton’s costume design here, you’d never know the wildlings know of the color red at all. Everyone is in shades of gray and brown—which makes their bullying Jon over his black cloak baffling—and there is no differentiation at all between most of the wildlings. Could the show not trust viewers to intuit that perhaps there are cultural differences amongst most wildlings and they are not a monolith? The Lannisters, Tyrells, and Starks all have unique fashion sensibilities—why not the wildlings? Jon’s arc amongst the wildlings is still by and large his most interesting, yet think of how much stronger their allure would have been to him if they had had some damn color.
It stings especially for Mance, but show-Mance is, in general, much more subdued than book-Mance, who loves to play his lute, sings of tasting the Dornishman’s wife, and lives far longer than the show’s version. Not all the changes in this scene are bad, however. Jon’s stated rationale for joining the wildlings shifted from resentment at his bastardy to resentment that the Night’s Watch let Craster (Robert Pugh) sacrifice his sons to the white walkers and did nothing about it or the threat the Others posed. The show too often ignores Jon’s very real resentment over his birth, but to have him so clearly call out the Night’s Watch’s hypocrisy to a man who left them for that very reason works quite well.
Jon is not the only one frustrated in the hypocrisy of his higher-ups. Martin’s favorite pastime is interrogating systems of power, from the hallowed institutions that guard the realms of men to the Hand of the King—not Tyrion (Peter Dinklage), but Tywin (Charles Dance). Though Tyrion will not get the meat of his “ASOS” arc until season four, the show must keep poking at his wounds until they fester enough that we cheer him on when he shoots his father with a crossbow bolt. Cersei (Lena Headey), too, isn’t quite sure what to make of their father; when she goes to visit Tyrion in his tiny room (with some very fun framing as they talk to each other between the bars of his window, rather like prison bars) and Tyrion tells her of his plans to pay a visit to Daddy Lannister, she wonders what Tyrion could possibly want from Tywin. “What do I want from him? He’s my father, do I need to want something?” Tyrion shoots back, and Cersei just stares at him. They have been raised to view everything as a competition, a way to get ahead, with no room left for things like love or human decency. Talking to their father simply to talk with their father is not an option.
The exchange that follows between Tyrion and Tywin is taken nearly line-for-line from the books, because the venom in that scene cannot be topped and can only be copied. Tyrion rightfully points out that he saved the city and got attacked and practically jailed as reward, and that Tywin has no viable heir to Casterly Rock except Tyrion; to this, Tywin calls his youngest son an “ill-made, spiteful little creature, full of envy, lust, and low cunning.” I would shoot him too.
After a season of softening the edges of Tywin Lannister, it’s a relief to see him acting like the bastard he is again—and, of course, his biggest act of bastardy is yet to come. But as awful as he is, Dance is imminently watchable, and the trio of him, Dinklage, and Headey is so wonderfully compelling that it almost makes me forget the stupid sex scene with Bronn (Jerome Flynn), who only exists in this episode to talk about how much he likes money. Does it get repetitive to say that these King’s Landing actors are great and the only thing that brings these scenes down is the abundance of breasts on display? Because I’ll say it again: these King’s Landing actors are great and the only thing that brings these scenes down are the abundance of breasts on display.
As with Blackwater, the hints for the Red Wedding must be hidden in plain sight—invisible to the first-time watcher or reader, but obvious for those who already know. Tywin regains his sharp edges, and an inordinate amount of time is spent watching him write and seal a letter to an unknown recipient that we can guess, with the benefit of hindsight, to be Roose Bolton (Michael McElhatton). Roose has taken Harrenhal, and for some reason the entirety of the Northern army, even Catelyn, has come with him to scope it out. This makes zero logistical sense—in fact, very little of the show’s tactics has made logistical sense after they omitted Riverrun entirely in season two—but gives us some spine-tingling foreshadowing.
As Robb (Richard Madden) and his men stumble upon what is left of Harrenhal’s denizens, Roose and Rickard Karstark (John Stahl) (whose sons were killed by Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who was in turn freed by Cat) stand to the side discussing vengeance. “The debt will be repaid, my friend, for them and for your sons,” Roose tells Karstark. Innocent enough. But then Karstark replies, “Will it? They rot in the ground while their killer runs free,” and the camera cuts to Cat and Robb.
Martin lays all kinds of groundwork for the Red Wedding in “ASOS,” but nothing he writes can achieve the simplicity of this cut and the blocking of this scene. He can do a great many things that a camera cannot, but the reverse is also true and exemplified beautifully here. Rickard will die before the Red Wedding, but even before his death, Robb’s army is beginning to fall apart. The Red Wedding’s shock comes from its sheer brutality (and a few misdirects right beforehand), but betrayal has been fomenting for quite some time.
If only Robb’s bannermen were as loyal as Davos (Liam Cunningham) is to Stannis.
Davos first appears in “ACOK,” where he gets a grand total of three chapters as a point of view character. He exists mostly as a lens through which the readers can see Stannis, whose innermost thoughts will forever remain a mystery; after reading of the Battle of Blackwater Bay, it would have been logical for readers to assume that Davos had perished along with so many of Stannis’s men. But no, Davos miraculously lives, and this time he gets double the chapters, growing far beyond his assigned role of “Stannis’s right-hand man.” (Perhaps this was a beneficial side effect of George R. R. Martin’s gardening approach to writing, though to my knowledge he has never claimed that he changed his mind on Davos’s role in the story.)
Having had access to “ASOS” by the time season two came out, Benioff and Weiss went ahead and elevated Davos ahead of time, helped by Cunningham. (Is there a single bad casting choice in this show other than Ed Sheeran?) Good thing they did this, because they truncate Davos’s first two chapters into just three scenes, bypassing his entire religious epiphany in Davos I just as they bypass the rest of the Faith of the Seven until it becomes a major plot point; they skip over the Florents and in fact anyone else that might still be hanging out with Stannis, save for the person who Davos came to kill: Melisandre (Carice van Houten).
Even with splitting “ASOS” in half, there is a hell of a lot to get to—I don’t blame the show for whittling down Davos’s chapters, though I mourn the loss of his deeply introspective first chapter (which probably would have been hell to adapt). It does, however, mean that, despite being told repeatedly by Salladhor Saan (Lucian Msamati, making the absolute most out of his limited screentime) that Stannis is not seeing any visitors, that he only talks to Melisandre, that he’s burning people alive, Davos waltzes right up to him at Dragonstone with very little trouble whatsoever. We see his half-baked plan to kill Melisandre in action and then he is whisked away to a dungeon, leaving us to worry about one of the few wholly decent men in Westeros.
In the book, he is arrested before he can see Stannis, who spends the first half of Davos’s “ASOS” chapters off-page and brooding. Frankly, I would have opted to omit Stannis from both this episode and the season two finale, not just because I find him strangling Melisandre distasteful and out of character, but because his absence creates more intrigue than his presence possibly could. We spent season two getting to know the kind of man he is—how would that man react to such a crushing defeat at Blackwater? Martin has the right of it: leave everything to the imagination, and the shock of the changes wrought in him will be ten times more effective.
Stannis wore a grey wool tunic, a dark red mantle, and a plain black leather belt from which his sword and dagger hung. A red-gold crown with flame-shaped points encircled his brows. The look of him was a shock. He seemed ten years older than the man that Davos had left at Storm’s End when he set sail for the Blackwater and the battle that would be their undoing. The king’s close-cropped beard was spiderwebbed with grey hairs, and he had dropped two stone or more of weight. He had never been a fleshy man, but now the bones moved beneath his skin like spears, fighting to cut free. Even his crown seemed too large for his head. His eyes were blue pits lost in deep hollows, and the shape of a skull could be seen beneath his face.
Yet when he saw Davos, a faint smile brushed his lips. “So the sea has returned me my knight of the fish and onions.”
Davos IV, A Storm of Swords
Terrible as it is to deprive viewers of Stephen Dillane, his appearances in both “Valar Morghulis” and “Valar Dohaeris” (by the way, not sure why they wasted that episode name here, when there are so many better opportunities for it down the line; it feels quite random here) are not significant enough to warrant their inclusion, when their exclusion would have been so much more powerful. But that is the problem with television—characters are played by actors, and actors have contracts. The audience must wait at least a week to see their favorite characters again; they cannot simply read until their eyes give out. And so we get Stannis in this episode.
Stannis’s cousin (yes, she’s his cousin), meanwhile, has finally, finally, finally broken free of the shackles of Qarth. Holy shit. I have never in my life been more excited to see a new city. Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) has gone with her khalasar—miraculously returned to healthy numbers after being ostensibly massacred by the warlocks of Qarth last season—to Astapor in the hopes of raising an army.
I don’t even want to do a postmortem on Qarth because it was so abysmal, but as a quick recap: no color, boring magic, dragons stolen for no reason, Daenerys does nothing except whine, more supporting characters killed, new supporting characters boring, lazy, lazy, lazy, awful, awful, awful. The show can (sometimes) elevate good storylines within the book, but it seems that, when handed even a middling plotline, such as Qarth, they shit the bed entirely.
Luckily, Dany’s “ASOS” arc works like gangbusters—and, thanks to the medium of television, the show might even be better for just one reason: language barriers.
The people of Astapor speak a bastardized High Valyrian, something that Dany cues readers in on very quickly; there is no way to hide that she does not understand their language. She keeps up the pretense of not understanding until the very end, but the readers already know she will pull the rug out from underneath the Astapor slavers. Show watchers, however, do not get access to her inner monologue—we see slave trader Kraznys mo Nakloz (Dan Hildebrand) spit and curse at Dany in subtitles, and we hear translator Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel) make the words more palatable. At no point does Dany give us even a hint that she might understand the insults that Kraznys hurls at her. Thus, the reveal that she has understood the whole time hits the audience just as it hits the slavers, and it lands with a stronger impact than in the book.
There is even a little bit of color in Astapor, thank goodness, and Dany’s thin supporting cast gets a well-needed infusion of new blood with the arrival of Barristan Selmy (Ian McElhinney), last seen throwing his sword down in defiance of Joffrey’s (Jack Gleeson) sadism. Ser Grandfather, as Dany calls him in “A Dance with Dragons,” is a breath of fresh air, as Dany’s plot was desperately in need of more interesting supporting characters (Missandei will eventually join the ranks as well).
That said, were I writing this show and scratching my head over ways to make Dany’s arc more interesting this season, I might have introduced Strong Belwas alongside Barristan. In the books, Barristan arrives in disguise as Arstan Whitebeard—something much harder to do in television, as viewers would have immediately cottoned on that that’s the same actor as Barristan Selmy—alongside a former Meereenese pit fighter named Strong Belwas. Strong Belwas is a bull of a man covered in scars who often refers to himself in the third person (“Never did I lose. I let each man cut me once, before I kill him. Count the cuts and you will know how many Strong Belwas has slain,” he says upon his introduction in Dany’s fifth chapter in “ACOK”). Is Strong Belwas particularly important to the plot? No, but Qarth exposed the gaping flaws in Daenerys’s supporting cast (or lack thereof), and I imagine he would have quickly become a fan favorite à la Tormund Giantsbane (Kristofer Hivju). But something is better than nothing, especially considering how much Qarth dragged down last season.
In short, things are looking up. As a premiere episode, it is better than the season two opener; it starts off much more strongly than with a boring and yellow birthday tourney for Joffrey. Is it the most compelling episode? Far from it, but it is clear that something has shifted. New characters, new locations, and even some course correction from what didn’t work in season two.
When you get source material like “A Storm of Swords,” it’s hard to screw it up that badly. “ACOK” presented challenges that the “Thrones” team could not overcome, such as Dany having a mere five chapters and Robb being off-page for most of it, but with “ASOS,” everything has been handed to them on a silver platter, and while it was maybe no great distance to rise to the occasion, “Thrones” will do just that this season.
Stray Observations:
- Astapor has been added to the opening credits and Winterfell now burns.
- Not enough sobbing and taking another step from Sam in this episode. If you know, you know.
- The show sadly omits Small Paul from the Night’s Watch scenes, which is understandable as he’s really only in one chapter and immediately dies, but I have a soft spot for him. He just wanted a raven!
- Introduced in the wildling camp is Tormund, who will be bastardized soon enough but is fun for now. Missing from the wildling camp are Dalla, Mance’s pregnant wife, and Val, Dalla’s sister and the object of Jon’s affections (kind of) down the line. The omission of Dalla and Mance’s child have much larger butterfly effects later on, but I’m saddest about Val, who is a fun and spiky minor character.
- Cersei tells Tyrion, “They said you’d lost your nose, but it’s not as gruesome as all that,” referencing the fact that Tyrion does lose his nose in the books.
- Maybe the reason Davos’s scenes were so truncated this episode is because the show never references his fingerbones he carries in a pouch around his neck—he loses his lucky bones in the Blackwater and spends much of his inner monologue lamenting. Without that, we can cut down at least a quarter of his chapters.
- Dany to noted slave trader Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen) about the Unsullied: “The greatest slave soldiers in the world. The distinction means a good deal to some people.” I laughed out loud.
- Missandei’s dress is some neat costume design, as its collar is both slightly fashionable and horrifying as it reminds you of her slave status.
- Jorah does not have a good episode as he also gets handed the line, “You’ll have a true khalasar when you prove yourself strong and not before,” which is insane for two reasons: 1) Daenerys’s khalasar was, I remind you, ostensibly slaughtered in Qarth, and 2) has she not proven herself strong already? Was that not the entirety of her season one arc?
- Qyburn (Anton Lesser) appears at Harrenhal for some reason. I guess this is what you get when you decide to cut the Bloody Mummers—you have to get really creative with how you handle some characters.
- Once again, I find it utterly confounding that Margaery (Natalie Dormer) and Loras (Finn Jones) are just going around and having intimate dinners with Cersei and Joffrey without anyone else from their house present, especially with Olenna (Diana Rigg) officially in King’s Landing this season.
- Tywin: “The next whore I catch in your bed I’ll hang.” You first, buddy…
- Shae (Sibel Kekilli) and Ros (Esmé Bianco) share a scene in this episode, which floored me. How nice to see two of the smallfolk interacting like this. It’s so rare in both the show and the books to have non-lords speak with each other for extended amounts of time, and it is lovely to see the kind of solidarity that they quickly form as two vulnerable sex workers who have climbed their way up in the world at no small cost to themselves. I also find it very sweet that they are looking out for Sansa (Sophie Turner), though, of course, that will make Shae’s betrayal next season much harder to swallow.
- That said… would it kill them to give Shae more than one costume? I mean, really.
- Everyone give a round of applause to Ghost, our favorite direwolf, who made a brief reappearance this episode.
“Game of Thrones” Season Three Trailer
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