(SPOILERS COMING AT YOU LIKE A GELATINOUS CUBE)
(SPOILERS ONLY APPLY TO THE TV SHOW. FOR THE BOOKS, WATCH OUT FOR TANTALIZING HINTS)
Sunday night’s episode, “The Night Lands,” felt like a very long set-up to…..something. I am coming to the realization that I do not know for certain what that something might be.
Before getting into the nuts & bolts of the episode, I feel a bit of a mea culpa coming on about the books. I’ve read the first four books, twice. I started reading the first book, A Game of Thrones, in the summer of 2007, and I finished my first reading of book 4, A Feast for Crows, in roughly December 2008. When discussing the TV show with others, I often feel a need to interject sentences beginning with “But in the book they…” When discussing the books, I tend to feel the need to point out that 2007 to 2008 time frame.
In short, I was into Game of Thrones before it was cool.
I just needed to get that off my chest.
Most of my thoughts on this week’s episode involve specific characters, and how they either met my expectations or made me stop and ponder.
Jaqen H’ghar: Remember the three guys locked in the cart in the group going to the Wall? Arya hit one of them with a stick after he demanded ale? Jaqen is the polite one who speaks entirely in the third person (“A girl has more courage than wits”). He did not look at all like how I pictured him, but his mannerisms are exactly what I imagined. I hope they do something cool with him.
Rakharo: So, I guess they’re not shipping Daenerys and Rakharo after all. Nice bait and switch. This one seriously threw me, because this does not happen in the books, and it actually throws off some of Daenerys’ story. The scuttlebutt is that the actor playing Rakharo got a movie role and had to leave the show, so they gave him a moment of tender screen time with his khaleesi.
Truth be told, Daenerys’ three bloodriders (Aggo, Jhogo, and Rakharo) aren’t exactly deeply-developed characters anyway. I was surprised last week that they went so far as to cast all three roles and make a point of teaching us their names, but now I think I know why. (They combined Drogo’s three bloodriders into one character last season.) Daenerys’ bloodriders are mostly just a sort of bad-ass Huey, Dewey, and Louie, so maybe the loss of one of them will lead to further development of the other two characters.
On an semi-related spoilery note, I really like the actress who plays Doreah.
Tyrion Lannister: Did anyone else notice that he moved up in the billing on the show? While Janos Slynt, captain of the City Watch, did not look at all like how I pictured him–he was described, as I recall, as being jowly, so I pictured someone like Maury Chaykin–the scene where Tyrion sends him to the Wall was still a thing of beauty. His interactions with Cersei and Varys were interesting to watch. The cat-and-mouse games depicted in the book must be hard to translate to a screenplay–I expect there to be more slapping, stomping, and slamming of doors in future episodes.
Salladhor Saan: This is the pirate recruited by Davos Seaworth to lead Stannis Baratheon’s ships in battle against Joffrey, et al. I always liked this character, and Lucian Msamati is excellent in the role. Salladhor Saan is a seriously creepy rapist, pirate, murderer, etc., and it gets complicated from there. The books have a dire problem with race, as does just about any work in the fantasy genre, in that it is almost always based around a European-modeled society with anyone non-white deemed an “other” of some sort (cf. Lord of the Rings, both the books and movies). The Dothraki are modeled rather overtly on the Mongols, obviously. As best I can recall, the only characters in the books described as having “dark” or “black” skin (aside from Chataya, Alayaya and a few others) are the Summer Islanders, who play little to no role in the first four books. This is not my complaint to make, but I just wanted to put it out there.
House Greyjoy: This is sort of a spoiler, but bear with me. Theon Greyjoy’s motivations were never entirely clear to me in the second book. People watching the show often had no idea who this guy was, but they had to feature him in the first season in order to accommodate the much larger role he will have in the second season. The fact that Alfie Allen comes off as a pompous douchebag who tries to fuck everything that moves fits quite well with his new role back at Pyke. They worked very hard to build a bromance between him and Robb Stark, though, so it will be interesting to see where this goes.
Then there was the whole sister thing. I’m not going there.
Side note: the girl cast as the captain’s daughter on the ship that took Theon back to the Iron Islands (the one who didn’t need any help from the wardrobe department, if you know what I mean) was perfectly cast.
Stannis and Melisandre: This here is the elephant in the room, of course. The book never says that Stannis and Melisandre bumped uglies, but then it never said that they didn’t either. Considering that I didn’t even pick up on the Renly Baratheon/Loras Tyrell tryst on my first reading of the books, it is entirely possible that I missed some covert (or overt) hints about one or more episodes of Stannis-on-Melisandre action. Also, readers of the books never directly see anything related to Stannis that Davos Seaworth doesn’t also see, thanks to the limited third-person omniscient writing style.
Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish: What the fuck was he about in this episode? He barely interacted with any other major character. Mostly, his voyeuristic supervision of his business activities gave the producers an excuse to show more titties, and then we got to see a cruel-yet-efficient side of him that I suspect we all knew was there, but was shrouded by Littlefinger’s legendary sense of subtlety. Carol Pinchefsy said it best at Forbes:
We were also given a startling look at the goings-on in Littlefinger’s brothel…and an even more startling look at Littlefinger, which marks the first time I’ve been disappointed with a character in this series.
In the book, Littlefinger is as subtle as he is surprising as he is self-interested. But a scene with the prostitute Ros—who came to King’s Landing from Winterfell—contradicts all of this.
Ros, who is crying over the death of a child (see the previous episode), is unable to service a customer. Littlefinger tells her that a woman he had purchased from Lys had also cried, and so to cut his losses, he sold her to a cruel man, implying Ros would share the same fate. The whole scene angered me. First, Littlefinger is too cunning to threaten outright; second, he didn’t purchase Ros. She came from Winterfell, looking for work. There were no losses to cut.
Littlefinger is far more interesting when you don’t know what he’s thinking or what his motives are. Read the book to see what I mean.
Besides that, this whole sequence took up at least five minutes of screen time, probably more. I’ll say it this way: I can see boobs any time I want to thanks to the internet, but every second of screen time spent in Littlefinger’s brothel is a second in which no one is slapping Joffrey. Or, even worse, someone is slapping Joffrey but the cameras are not there. Get on that, HBO!
Photo credits: All photos link to source. No claim is made to ownership of these images, and fair use is claimed.
