Elkins

ETA: Never mind. I just realized that I reversed the order of two events in my memory. Carry on!

Very much so, yes. I wonder if Martin hoped that this event would still be forefront in the reader's mind during the scene (which is coming up soon, IIRC) in which Ned actually has to remind Robert that nobody would be willing to give the king a fair fight in the melee. I'm not sure whether that scene mitigates his dickishness to Jaime or not. On the one hand, it could be seen as evidence that his behavior is more insensitive than malicious. On the other hand, one could also read it as implying that Robert has a pattern of using this exact form of "obliviousness" to get away with shit. Anyway, I've just been lurking this thread, since I tend to be down on Martin's writing and have no interest in becoming, y'know, that guy, but I just wanted to chime in briefly to thank Avaleigh for all the work she's putting into these chapter summaries. Summarizing complicated fiction chapters like these is hard; doing so with any degree of brevity is even harder. You're doing a really great job, Avaleigh. Thanks!

I am consistently blown away by the performances of the smaller roles on this show. The principals are great too, don't get me wrong, but in many ways, it is the smaller parts that really make the show for me. There are so many, but just off the top of my head: Joel Fry's Hizdahr. He (with a strong assist from the script) took a character about whom I could remember from the books nothing save his plot function and transformed him into the most intriguing character of the season for me. Now that he's gone, I find that my interest in the Meereen plotline has faded dramatically. Donald Sumpter's Maester Luwin. Another character who made little impression on me in the books, only to really stand out for me on the show. Sumpter invested his Luwin with so much genuine warmth. His feeling for the Stark children was palpable, yet he also always retained that underlying clinical edge that one would expect to see in a man who has dedicated his life to scholarship. He reminded me of some of the best teachers I have ever had. I may have had quite a large something in my eye at his death. Anton Lesser, as Luwin's dark mirror Qyburn. Another fantastic performance in a smaller role. I've written elsewhere about my non-reader friends who just know he has to be vivisecting peasants somewhere in the back of those chambers. Lesser manages to convey a great deal about his character through his performance alone, without much in the way of aid from the script and -- most impressively, to my mind -- without ever playing it broad. I suspect it would be all too easy to caricature the mad scientist of Westeros. Lesser underplays it instead, and by doing so makes his character utterly unsettling in just the right way. Tara Fitzgerald's ambivalent and emotionally disturbed Selyse. Her depiction of Selyse's gnawing sense of dread over the course of this season was just spectacular. That grim expression on her face when she told her daughter "You have no idea what people will do" will probably haunt me for years to come. Just generally speaking, I think the casting for this show has been truly extraordinary. There have been very few misfires.

Head canon gratefully accepted, Umbelina! Indeed, that is much more palatable than the "What an amazing coincidence that Joffrey should have ordered Trant to do just the sort of thing he happens to fetishize, wow!" thing that I was stumbling over. Somehow the most depressing thing about that article is the fact that the first handful of comments are all from people defensively listing every bit of male nudity they can ever remember seeing on the show. "But...but...but the wine seller! And Hodor's prosthetic wang!" Actually, maybe that's not so much depressing as hilarious. I haven't quite made up my mind yet. I was also very impressed by Dillane's hollow-eyed performance as everything collapsed around him. I think he's finished, myself, but every time someone argues otherwise, I find myself rather wishing for it to be true, just because I enjoyed his portrayal so much.

Yes, I suppose you're right. It was a brutal enough attack to give viewers pause, even with all of the over-the-top villainizing of Trant. I guess we'll have to see where Arya's story goes from here. Even leaving aside high falutin' concerns like moral simplicity, though, Show!Trant the sadopedobear also struck me as a deep step down from Book!Raff the pedobear, because ...uggghhhh, now I'm trying to think of how to explain my reasons for feeling that way. Hmmm. Okay. It reminds me a bit of the Star Wars universe (just stick with me for a little while on this one, okay? I promise it will be relevant). By 1987 or so, Star Wars fans had pretty much finished every last scrap of meat on the original trilogy, so they turned to sucking the marrow out of the bones. As a result, every last extra who had a line of dialogue--or even some notable body language--in the original movies now has a name, a biography, and at least one appearance in an authorized spin-off novel. But of course, their personalities and histories are always still deduced from their one film appearace. Because, you know, fans. The end result is that you wind up with "characters" like the completely unimportant Imperial Officer who says "What are you doing with that...thing?" in a scornful tone of voice while looking at Chewbacca in the first movie. You remember that guy? No? Well, someone must have, because he has a name by now. And a history. And a personality. And because the only thing anyone had to go on for him was that he seemed to be kinda racist (or speciesist, or whatever) against Wookies, that is now the entirety of his character in the expanded universe. His personality is that he's the racistist racist to ever be racist, especially against Wookies. His history? Well, he was a member of a human supremicist movement, see, and then after he joined the Imperial Navy he committed horrible war crimes against the Wookies. Wanna hear a story about him? Okay, it starts like this: "Because Extra #4 hated Wookies so much..." And so forth. I feel like the show did very much the same thing with Trant. What do we know about this guy? Well, he's a Kingsguard thug, and he killed Syrio and beat up Sansa. There's not much else to go on. So, huh, he beat up Sansa, did he? Okay, we can work with that! So...beating little girls must just be Ser Meryn's thing, right? He's all about the beating up of little girls. I'll bet he's got a fetish for it. Hey, in fact, I'll bet when he goes to a whorehouse, he doesn't even care about getting laid! All he wants to do is beat up little girls! Yeah, that's the ticket! I dunno. It just strikes me as exactly the same sort of goofy extrapolation of a single trait into an entire character that you see in the Star Wars universe with characters like Third Stormtrooper From the Left. And I'm sorry, but it's...well, it's just sort of ridiculous, you know? IMO, of course. All IMO.

Arya was drawn off-track before she knew of Trant's predilections, though. She passed on poisoning her assigned target in favor of following him through the city. Eventually she did follow him to the brothel, but by then she'd already made it clear that a name on her list took precedence over her assignment. I guess the question I'm asking is: in what way does it serve the narrative for Trant not to be exactly the same sort of thug as "pretty much every soldier or guard in the story?" What makes him special to Arya is that his particular brutal-order-following resulted in the death of someone she cared about. That's why he's on her list, and that's why she wants him dead. Anything else about him is extraneous. So what is the function of heaping extraneous vices on this particular character's head? The function is to simplify the emotional and moral landscape of the story. That's the purpose it serves. I don't see how Arya's story benefits from being made less complex in that way. In my opinion, it makes it a significantly less interesting and meaningful story. Huh? I...don't think you understood the nature of my complaint. My own fault, I'm sure - I must not have been writing as clearly as I would have liked. I'm not calling anyone out for depicting terrible characters doing terrible things. I'm calling them out for dodging moral complexity. It's all very convenient for certain characters to be wearing pitch black hats so we all know whom to boo and hiss, but it's also rather childish, and it belies this franchise's claim to be serving up high fantasy without the simplistic morality commonly associated with that genre.

More stuff, because the software keeps telling me that my posts are overly long and full of boxquotes. I think the Winterfell storyline definitely deserves to win the Golden Banana of Discord this season, as the plotline whose reception shows the highest standard deviation. It's been extremely polarizing, to be sure. I'm not sure if I think that it's necessarily an Unsullied vs Bookwalker schism, though. The Unsullied at the Spitball Wall on this very site seemed quite down on it, for example, while all of the book readers I know in my so-called "Real Life" loved it. As did I, although I would have liked it better had there been a lot more of it. While I enjoyed it, I also agree with Shanna Marie here: I too regret some of the lost potential of snowed-in Winterfell. I was expecting them to make a lot more hay out of the creepy, snowed-in cabin fever atmosphere. It started well, but I was hoping we'd eventually be seeing the Overlook Hotel of Westeros, and it never got there. It never really had the time to get there. But then, that's the case with nearly all of the plotlines. My biggest criticism not only of this season but of the show in general, is that with the exception of the very first season, there's rarely enough time for the storylines and the characters within them to develop in a way that feels organic. Nearly all of them would be so much better, IMO, if they had a bit more room to breathe and stretch out and find their own rhythm. As things stand, a lot of the show winds up feeling a bit like a Cliff's Notes version. The scenes that wind up packing the biggest emotional punches in this show are nearly always those from the storylines that haven't been rushed all to hell and back. Then, I think I'm at an extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to pacing preference. I appreciate a very leisurely pace (which is one of the reasons that I've come to prefer television drama to film, actually). Arya's plotline was one of the more effective ones for me this season, for the very reason that it didn't seem overly rushed like nearly all the others. It seems that what I consider proper pacing, however, is often viewed by many others as intolerably slow, so it's probably for the best that I'm not the one writing these scripts. I'd bore the audience half to death, I'm sure. Picking locks at Westeros's tech level isn't really all that difficult, so long as one has a narrow metal something (like the end of an augur) to use as a pick. There's no athletic ability required. What is required is fine motor coordination and a good deal of patience -- which also just happen to be the very skills required to excel at embroidery and other types of needlework. Fancy that. Well sure, Oscirus, but she didn't grow wings, now, did she? A character with agency would have grown wings. But I guess that would just be too EMPOWERED for misogynists like D&D, who have obviously always hated Sansa. I'll bet they wrote her without wings just to make sure that the audience wouldn't care if she died. Because that's totally something that a writer would want to do. Tennisgurl, I liked Arya's story as well, and I quite agree that Dorne was rather hopeless. I'm not even sure I understand what they were aiming for with Dorne, which is unusual for me with this show. Usually even with scenes that don't work all that well for me, I still feel as if I get what they were trying for. Dorne, though... Yeah, I've no idea. I can't even begin to imagine where it's going, either. I saw it as white with gold stripes. I have no idea what you blue dress people are on about. Yeah, that was surprising, wasn't it? Usually if there's on thing that's solid on this show, it's the visual continuity of the costuming and set design. I wonder what happened there. It wasn't the sourest note for me, though. The sourest note for me was the way they handled Meryn Fucking Trant. Ugh, yes. The worst part of the episode for me, no question. Did we really need Meryn Fucking Trant to turn out to be both a homophobe and some kind of sadistic pedophile? Was that really necessary? Isn't it enough that he's an unpleasant thug who follows brutal orders without hesitation and killed someone Arya loved? I mean, we're supposed to be finding Arya's passion for vengeful violence a bit disturbing at this point, correct? Everything else in this story is pulling out all the stops to indicate that we're supposed to feel saddened by and worried for her. So why bend so far over backwards to make us want to see Trant suffer? It's just...just so cheesy, you know? So banal. It's trite and played out and 'Hollywood' in all the worst senses of that term to pull that hoary old "now we will make you hate the villain so you will cheer when he gets killed" move. As a viewer, I actually felt insulted by it. Because seriously, that shit? There's just no humble way to say this: It's beneath me. I really enjoyed this interview with Ian Beattie, who played Meryn Fucking Trant (and who seems just lovely). I was particularly amused by this passage: Somehow that just totally cracks me up. "Yeah, I had to figure out why my guy was such a creep, so I came up with this entire backstory in my head about why he hates the Starks so much...and then I got this season's scripts and was like 'Oh. Sooo....he's just a pervert? Well. Alrighty, then!'" Eh, I'm not willing to put all the blame on George for this one. Benioff and Weiss have shown themselves perfectly willing to omit or repair Martin's more boneheaded authorial decisions in the past. Doing so is, in fact, an important part of their job. There's no reason they had to make Trant a sadopedobear just because Martin wrote Raff as one. Where I am willing to put some of the blame on George, though, is the overall unstructured nature of the narrative. That's just the nature of the beast, as far as I'm concerned. The source material has pretty much become a big sprawling sloppy structureless soap opera at this point, so I guess I just take it as read that the show will follow suit. It's somewhat baked into my expectations that nothing's ever going to be particularly narratively tight in ASOIAF land. Or, as Wulfsige put it: Hee! Not at all a bad description, that. Especially of the later volumes. Although for me, one of the really important bits comes from the fact that this particular toddler used to work in television, so the monologue must always end with: "And I'm sick of working in television, so everything will sprawl all over the place and be nothing like television. NOTHING AT ALL LIKE TELEVISION, YOU HEAR? Oh, well, apart from the stings, of course. I mean, who doesn't love stings? Everyone loves stings! I can't live without my stings! So every chapter shall end either with a fake-out character death, or a 'Dun-dun-DUN! CLOSE UP ON CHARACTER'S FACE. SMASH CUT TO COMMERCIAL BREAK' moment." Seriously, I found it really difficult when reading the books not to crack up at the end of each chapter, because they were all just so obviously written by a guy who worked in TV in the late '80s. I kept reaching for my VCR remote, to fast-forward through all the commercials and the coming attraction spot for the next episode of Alien Nation. Really, though, I think when it comes to this particular criticism of the story, I can do no better than to repeat this little gem: Two. Weeks. That...certainly does explain much. Much and more, even. Where do editors go?

I know, right? How is anyone supposed to stay interested when they kill off all the good characters? No Ned, no Robert, no Drogo... I mean, what's supposed to hold our interest here, the kids and the dwarf? </2011> I'm really surprised by the number of people who thought Drogon was possibly dying in that scene. It just didn't read that way to me at all. Don't you think if we were meant to understand Drogon to be that severely wounded, then Dany would be showing signs of concern, rather than pestering him to fly her home or catch them both some food? I mean, I know that she did lock her other two dragons away when she was afraid they might hurt people, but still. She loves Drogon. I really think that if he were that badly wounded, we would have seen her trying to help him somehow, trying to clean and bind his wounds maybe, or at the very least stroking and comforting him. Instead, she was nagging him to return to Meereen, trying to clamber back onto his back... I just can't see her acting that way if her baby were suffering from life-endangering injuries. I also interpreted all those charred skeletons to mean that Drogon had taken her back to the nest he'd made for himself since leaving Meereen. When he lay down there, it didn't look all that ominous to me; it just looked like him doing the dragon equivalent of lazing about on the couch in his bachelor pad. RE: Walk o' Shame: I hope they paid Lena's body double very well for that. And also that she was given her own trailer and awesome food to eat and expensive booze and free backrubs and assistants to order around for as long as she was on set, because holy hell, even for someone accustomed to professional nudity, that could not have been fun. Huh. I couldn't disagree more. I thought the scene had to be that long in order to work properly. If it had been short, it would have been far too easy for a viewer to just think, "Ha ha, Cersei! You got what was coming to you!" rather than being forced to confront the true ugliness and misogyny of what was going on. For it to work as well as it did, the viewer had to desperately want it to end. I also think that making it too short a scene would have run a very high risk of making it just kind of gross and exploitative, because it would have run the risk of making Cersei seem like the object of the scene, just yet another naked lady on Game of Thrones, rather than enforcing her position as subject. This was a sequence that was carefully designed to anchor the viewer in Cersei's point of view, and one of the particular techniques they used to do that was dependent on that length. The sequence begins and at first, just like Cersei, the viewer thinks: well, it can't be so difficult to just ignore everyone and keep your head up high long enough to reach the Red Keep, can it? They're only peasants, and they're not going to be allowed to physically attack her or anything; I mean, c'mon, it's not that long a walk, right? And then the scene drags on and on and on and ON, and the camera keeps panning up to the Red Keep, so that you and Cersei can both see that, yeah, maybe it's getting closer but not really all that much closer, not half closer enough...until finally you find yourself reaching the same revelation that Cersei is. Namely, that no. No, actually, it can be "so difficult," because 'short' and 'long' are highly subjective notions when it comes to time, because time is not a solid object, time can be even more elastic than ethics, time just makes no damned sense, time can even stretch out endlessly towards an infinitely receding horizon...and this walk is never going to be over, not really. It's going to be going on forfuckingever. To pull that off, the scene really did have to be almost unbearably long, IMO. That length was absolutely essential to the sequence's narrative construction. And I can't wait. I've been waiting for her to burn that city to the ground for years now. Come ON, Cersei! Surely there has to be some of that wildfire left somewhere? Speaking of Myrcella, while Nell Tiger Free did a fine job, I really do have to wonder what about Myrcella's role this season was considered so challenging that they felt the need to recast the part. It's hard to imagine that Aimee Richardson wouldn't have been able to handle that material. Yeah, I'm a little confused as to their intent there as well. Are they actually planning an all-out coup? Who is next in the line of succession after Trystane? The Sand Snakes are bastards, so I assume they can't inherit. Do they plan to flee the city? Are they just sort of hoping that Doran doesn't find out about it? Or is-- Ugh. You know, that Dorne plotline was just such a mess that I wonder if there's even any point to trying to make sense of it. I mean, is it going to continue next year as part of some actual continuity, or is it going to be like "Yara tries to rescue Theon," where we all just try to pretend it never happened at all? Hah! My husband said the same thing. "I thought they took all the-- oh, right, her horse. Yeah, I wouldn't have risked taking that one either." The nag was dark and full of terrors. Indeed. I can't say that I feel Arya is being terribly wronged here either. She apparently wants the Faceless Men to teach her all of their special skills -- as well as providing her with room and board in their high temple -- while she continues to ignore their teachings and disrespect their religious beliefs. I hate to use the word 'entitlement' here, but honestly now! I can't help but think that if she isn't sincere in wanting to serve (as all men must), then she shouldn't expect those guys to keep giving her free power-ups. Yeah, I'm not really feeling the Olly hate either. I get him. He's just another Arya, really: just another child twisted and warped by trauma and the desire for vengeance. He saw everyone he'd ever loved -- everyone he'd ever even known -- murdered by a bunch of cruel barbarians who were then rewarded by the LC with gifts of land. Possibly some of them are even going to be given the same land that his slaughtered family and village once farmed. Of course he's pissed! He's traumatized and angry, and who can blame him? I would be too, I suspect, and I'm a middle-aged adult. Olly's still just a kid, and kids by virtue of their very youth don't have all that much experience dealing with disappointment or sorrow, let alone rage. So I'm not fussed about Olly. It's Aliser Thorne I'm feeling extremely disappointed in. I know he's been an asshole antagonist from Day One, but all the same, I really didn't think that he would lead a mutiny. I thought he might very well stand back and allow mutineers to act unopposed, washing his hands of Jon in much the same way he did with Slynt, but I didn't expect him to be one of its leaders. I don't know, the characterization there just seems a bit off to me. I feel as if it should have taken considerably more provocation to make Thorne turn. I also think the mutineers were total dicks for involving a kid to the extent that they did. Anyone could have lured Jon out to the courtyard with that tale of Benjen's return; it didn't need to be Olly. They are grown men of the Night's Watch, and presumably they believed that they were doing what they had to in order to preserve the institution of the Watch itself. Regardless of whether we think they were right or not, their decision was an adult one, rooted in their sense of responsibility and of duty. It was not a decision for a child who hasn't even yet sworn himself to the Watch. I guess maybe they wanted to accept Olly into their fold because they think of him as a future brother-in-arms or something, which...okay. Fine, so keep him enough in the loop so that he knows what is coming and won't be surprised by it, then. But there was no need for a group of adults to give a child still too young to take a binding oath such a starring role in an assassination, and plenty of very good reasons not to. .

I thought they really missed a trick in not having Renly present for the altercation that led to poor Lady's death in episode 2. He certainly would have made an impression on viewers if he'd been struggling to keep from bursting out laughing at Joffrey, the way he was in the books. ("Lion's Tooth!") Leaving him in King's Landing, on the other hand, meant that he had to share his introduction with a whole bunch of other brand new characters, which I think made him far less memorable to unsullied viewers. He wound up coming across as a bit of "generic untrustworthy courtier #2." It wasn't until quite late in the season that a couple of my housemates were consistently able to remember precisely who he was, or to understand how he slotted into the story in terms of his relationship to the other characters. (His angry outburst on the boar hunt was what finally seemed to cement his identity in their minds.) It's too bad, too, because it became apparent in season 2 that Gethin Anthony was actually capable of projecting quite a lot of charisma, once the script started allowing him to do so.

You're not as alone as you might fear. Negative criticism is usually louder than appreciation, probably because -- let's be honest here -- kvetching is just plain fun. Nobody sits down with a collection of Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert and giddily anticipates the positive reviews, you know? Pans are always more fun to read than picks -- and usually they're a lot more fun to write as well. But I also thought this was a good season. It had its share of flaws, certainly, but not as deadly ones as Season 3 had, IMO. And yet, back when that season was airing, I don't remember seeing the same sort of... Well, Digital Count probably put it best: Yes, precisely. Co-signed. Lately I've been wondering if the rise of smartphones and tablets and the popularity of Twitter have resulted in people paying less attention when they watch TV. Specifically, it seems to me that it is those things which are only conveyed visually that are the things most often missed. It's hard for me not to wonder if it might not be because people are looking away from the screen more often to type out tweets or check their facebook or whatever. Case in point. That's a perfect example, actually, because it's an interpretation that I can easily imagine someone reaching if they were only listening to the show, or if they kept looking away from the screen at all the wrong moments. Carice van Houton's Melisandre doesn't show her doubts in her voice. She shows them in her face, and then only subtly. As she does here, the precise moment when she realizes that she's made a huge mistake: Given the Walk of Shame sequence, I guess that was never going to be the performance everyone would be talking about come Monday, but I thought it was just sublime. You can almost hear the car crash sound effect. I believe that all book readers should try to watch this show with at least one unsullied friend if they can possibly manage to swing it. It really can be eye-opening at times. Although actually, I guess after this season, there's no need as there's no longer going to be all that much difference. I find that so exciting! Anyway, my unsullied husband had no problem recognizing those guys as Dothraki. He was, however, convinced that Theon and Sansa had leapt to their deaths from those battlements. If the show-runners intended that scene to be read as Butch and Sundance, rather than as Thelma and Louise, then I think they needed to make it more clear. I don't even remember seeing any snow drifts, although it's possible that I just missed them. (As I, too, have been known to look away from the screen at just the wrong moment!) None of the non-readers I know were too concerned about Jon Snow's death though. They had all noticed Mel's ever-so-well-timed return to Castle Black, and they also remembered Beric's resurrections, so they concluded that she's just going to conjure him back to life ('like that Robin Hood guy Arya met'). I was, however, then witness to a debate over whether if they really had killed Jon Snow off for realzies no backsies, that would be a brilliant genre subversion, or an idiotic hamstringing of the narrative. (Me: "C'mon, guys. It can be more than one thing! Can't it be both?" Them: "You mean both brilliant and idiotic? No.") Yes! They nailed it, Lena and the director both. I've been stressing over that scene all year long, expecting the worst (because come on, it's a literal slut-shaming sequence in a show that hasn't had the best track record when it comes to handling such material with grace), but holy cow, they really knocked that one out of the park. Every detail of how it was filmed kept the viewer firmly anchored to Cersei's perspective. When she looked up at the Red Keep, the viewer was looking up at the Red Keep. Her thoughts were completely transparent. There was just never any question that Cersei was the subject of that scene, not its object. And there was also never any doubt that no matter what her crimes, what was happening there was totally gross -- something else I was afraid they might fail to land. Overall it succeeded in being an incredibly powerful sequence without ever once dipping into exploitation. And Lena Headey, holy shit. Give that woman an Emmy. (And give something nice to her body double, too, okay? Because those three days of filming could not have been fun.) Me either! I noticed not a thing. Someone here even said that it looked "uncanny valley" to them, which...yeah, wow, I must just have no eye for that sort of thing at all because I didn't notice anything even slightly amiss. I would never have guessed that there was any computer fakery going on there. I wonder if this could in part be a generational thing? I'm an old fogey too. :) Given that things in the Uncanny Valley tend to seriously freak me out, though, I think that I'm actually quite glad to be (apparently) blind to such effects. I am hopelessly in love with this gloss, Avaleigh. Seriously, totally in love with it. For a supposed act of atonement to actually serve as a kind of reverse baptism due to the scapegoat effect... That's just brilliant. And that steely-eyed look of pure hatred on Cersei's face at the end reminds us all of why after you pass your entire community's sins onto the scapegoat, you're then supposed to get rid of the goat. Good lord, and she hasn't even heard about Myrcella yet. She is going to burn that place to the ground, and I can't even pretend that I'm not gleefully looking forward to it. Qyburn really was rather terrifying in that scene, I thought. Anton Lesser is terrific. He hit that perfect note of tenderness and compassion with Cersei, yet without ever quite letting you forget that he's a mad scientist who does messed up things to people back at his lab. As with so many other smaller parts in this show, he's turning in a great performance. (Funny thing about Qyburn. So far, the show has only shown him messing about with rats and dead people. Well, and Gregorstein. We've seen no evidence of him doing anything horrific with living human victims in that lab. And yet, every last one of my non-reader friends has already gone there. They're convinced that he's the creepiest sadist ever to creep and that he must be vivisecting peasants right and left in those chambers somewhere. It's as if the show doesn't even need to take any time to allude to such activities, because they're already fully implied by the performance. Very cool.)

Coffee? Did somebody say coffee?! You have deduced my weakness, candall! I read all of her pip-pipping as a desperate (and ultimately futile) attempt to convince herself that what they were doing was good and right and necessary. She kind of got more and more desperate as she went on, until she was almost babbling. I thought that she was addressing her statements to Stannis because she was absolutely desperate to hear some agreement from him, some reassurance that indeed, they were doing the right thing. But, you know. Stannis. Reassuring others isn't exactly his bailiwick. I agree with you, though, that they didn't quite succeed in making it work. What I suspect they were trying for was a situation where the viewer would first be surprised by her behaviour, and then remember all of her scenes over the course of the season ("You have no idea what people will do," terrified glances at Mel, etc.) to come to the abrupt realization that all that time she was actually dreading this very thing coming to pass. In other words, I think they did try to mislead the viewer with a lot of her earlier character beats, but in the hopes of later achieving a sudden surprising "scales fall from our eyes" moment. Alas, however, it was quite obviously unsuccessful. I haven't seen a single "Oh, of course! THAT's why she was acting so weird around Shireen all season!" response to this episode. Instead, I've seen a ton of "Well, THAT came out of nowhere, huh?" responses. So yeah, while I think I see what they were going for, it didn't quite work. The clues they were dropping weren't obvious enough, even in retrospect, to overcome viewer conceptions of Selyse as a crazed fanatic harbouring a pure and uncomplicated hatred of her daughter. (BTW, am I the only one who finds herself frequently changing her American spelling to British spelling on this site, just to appease the built-in spell-checker? I had no idea I'd been so well socialized to feel shame when confronted with red underlining!) --------- About the significance of the harpy, I was imagining it very much the same way that Hecate was, although now that I think about it, there's no real evidence one way or the other. It does bother me a lot, though, that we've never seen any evidence of Dany so much as inquiring as to the symbolic significance of the Harpy to the people she has conquered. No one erects a golden statue of that size on the top of the highest building in their city-state just, y'know, because. Then, that ties into my ambivalence about the Meereen plotline in general. I'm never quite sure whether we're meant to recognize Dany as a clueless (if superficially well-meaning, as after all, slavery is indeed a Bad Thing) foreigner exerting hegemonic force on a conquered people to suppress their native culture, or whether we're supposed to read her liberationist crusade in a far less cynical light. The ambivalent reading is the one that comes most naturally to me, but there have often been times -- and indeed, it does seem to be the Essos plotlines where this usually happens -- where Martin suddenly starts playing it straight with some incredibly dubious and antiquated pulp genre tropes. Those are generally the times when I badly misread him, so I have learned to be wary.

For which I'm sure she is grateful, as it must be awfully difficult for any living actress to deliver an accurate portrayal of an inconsistently written Freudian cartoon. Show!Cersei has an entire two dimensions, giving her performer quite a bit more to work with, and she even seems to be more or less the same character from one season to the next!

This just reminds me so very much of all of the statements everyone involved with Battlestar Galactica gave to the press after they'd "killed off for realz" Starbuck. She was never coming back to the show, you guys. Really!

Aw, that's really too bad, Cletus. I love the clockwork map of the opening credits. In fact, I think this is the only show I've ever followed where I don't start fast-forwarding through the opening credits after a while. I still watch them each and every time. As a kid, I desperately wanted an electric train set; I suspect the little clockwork model appeals to the same part of my brain. Anyway, the model of Meereen in the credits still features the giant golden harpy perched on the top of the main pyramid -- even though we saw them tear it down, in that "this sequence draws on no contemporary iconography at all, nope, it doesn't, not at all, we promise, really" scene in the first episode this season. When Winterfell got sacked, its little model started smoking to reflect that fact, and then it changed once again after the Boltons had moved in and repaired the damage. But that harpy's still perched up there on the top of Meereen's pyramid. It's probably just a budgeting issue, but it's hard for me not to read it as significant even so. It's like a constant reminder that there are still a whole lot of hearts and minds that have not been won in that city.

One thing you have to give the White Walkers: they deal relatively quick death to their enemies. They've also been known to spare the supplicating defeated (Will, Sam). Also, they adopt abandoned infants! Sadly, I suspect they'll just turn out to be the usual boring old existential threat personified (yawn), but I would very much like it if Umbellina's favored reading were in fact borne out by the text.

I think you could make a case that it's not so much that he assassinated Renly as how he did it. It seems to be implied that making those shadow babies literally drains a part of the father's spirit, or even his soul. I'm not sure how well I think the concept of spiritual corruption really fits with Martin's view of the world, or even how well the idea of morality being rooted in the soul does -- both concepts seem a little jarring to me as part of the ASOIAF universe, although I'm not sure I can articulate my feelings why -- but it seems to me that if anything in his world has that kind of corrupting power, that sort of blood magic does.

Thanks for reminding me about Book Hizdahr's characterization! Honestly, he made so little impression on me that I barely even remembered what he was like. I only remembered Dany's extreme disdain for him (he of the 'tepid kisses') and feeling that he was probably a red herring when it came to the whole Harpy mystery -- although I can't now remember what it was that made me think that way. I seem to remember feeling deeply suspicious of one of her other advisors, maybe the hard-line guy? Ugh, it wasn't even so long ago that I read that novel, and already I can't remember the details of those chapters. I liked them conceptually (which puts me in a minority, I know), but they really were ploddingly written IMO. Anyway, in the show, he struck me as more of a liberal trust fund kid sorely in need of some privilege checks than as a leader of a resistance. An appeaser, not an infiltrator. I mean, I guess next week we could find out that he was up to his eyeballs in it; I'm just really not expecting it. I don't think the show has made the same sort of mystery out of who leads the Harpies than the book did -- nor, for that matter, even encouraged the viewer to believe that they have a single leader -- so to my mind there's nothing there that even requires further resolution. I sort of feel as if this is a book-only mystery that simply doesn't fit if overlaid on top of the show.

Avaleigh, I wish you'd been right about the show not going there. :( I agree with everyone who said it might have been better for the Daznak's Pit sequence to come before Shireen's sacrifice. I understand that maybe they thought it would be better to end with something "uplifting," but I think that even some of Dany's more enthusiastic fans probably still found it difficult to engage with her high fantasy business--far less feel 'uplifted' by it--after watching Kerry Ingram's astonishingly harrowing performance and hearing her pleas give way to screams of agony. That was awful. Seriously, I'm trying to think of anything else I've seen on television that has even come close to being that horrible, and I'm drawing a blank. Now I'm hoping that grayscale is highly contagious once atomized, and that every last one of those assholes who stood there and watched that little girl burn got a good lungful of it. It would explain why the wildlings refuse to believe in dormant grayscale, right? Because they burn their dead. Yeah, I say it's time to get this plague on the road. Release the First Horseman on his white horse! Northern Vector: Go! Yeah, well. You get what you pay for. Maybe the ease with which they butchered the unarmed civilians of Astapor left them just a tad complacent. (Sorry. I thought that "and now she robs the weapon shop with its own guns!!1!" business in ASOS was one of the most ridiculous things I'd ever read, and it appears that even now, so many years later, I'm still bitter over it.) Yeah, they really needed to crank up the wind machine for that scene. The motionlessness of her hair and clothes was a major part of what made the CGI look "fake," IMO. I know they can't afford the best special effects, but I thought they really could have done more in that scene to help sell the special effects that they did have. In contrast, just look how well they've done with some of the CGI-enhanced location work this season! Both Braavos and the Volantis Long Bridge felt utterly convincing as places, and what made them work so well wasn't just the expensive CGI, but also everything that was then done to enhance that illusion with fastidiously selected props, costumed extras, creative camera work, etc. There are plenty of low-cost, low-tech things you can do to help prop up your special effects. It really seems odd to me that they didn't even try plugging in a fan for Dany's flight sequence. RE: Hizdahr and the Harpies: I'm finding it hard to understand the insistence that Hizdahr must have been in league with them. Is it just because the book (unlike the show) made a bit of a Whodunnit out of the question, and in the show he's the only named Meereenese character we've got? Because the way I see it, from the Harpies' point of view, Show!Hizdahr would have been a collaborator. The son of a known liberal (seconding the love for Digital Count for 'Hizdad' here. Hee!), he served at the foreign conqueror's pleasure as the supplanted ruling class's representative on her sham of a "council." In that position, he tirelessly argued for compromises that would help pacify the city and thus strengthen her rule. He even undertook diplomatic missions for her -- missions designed to keep Meereen's once-allied city-states firmly under her yoke! Why would they ever consider someone like that an ally? Just because he occasionally defended one or two of the region's cultural traditions -- and not even the most important one: slavery -- to its foreign invader? That's supposed to be enough to put him in the good graces of an insurgency? Sorry, I'm just not seeing it. If Hizdahr was really trying to support the insurgency by doing all that, then he has got to have been the Worst. Fifth. Columnist. Ever. No, I think he was genuinely a moderate, and thus, from the Harpies' point of view, a filthy traitor. All things considered, he was probably lucky that all they did was stab him to death. Wartime collaborators have been known to come to far stickier ends when they're unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the resistance.

Good God. That was horrible to watch, and I'm not even a parent. I imagine that many parents of young daughters found themselves leaving the room, or at the very least diving for the mute button. I thought it was suggested onscreen that Selyse was both aware of and terrified by the possibility that Shireen would wind up sacrificed. I even posted about it on the speculation thread, a while back. Sylese was consistently shown to be extremely anxious about the safety of her daughter. It was written on her face, all season long. Every time Melisandre would mention Shireen having a "destiny," Selyse would look absolutely terrified. She was the one who didn't want to bring her daughter up north. She was the one who told Shireen: "You have no idea what people will do. All your books, and you still don't know." I thought it was very nicely foreshadowed that even though she was the nutty fanatical one, she was also the one who was not, in her heart of hearts, at all okay with filicide -- and who was, in fact, already terrified that things were heading in just that direction. Cool story, Frost bro, but personally, I hold with those who favor ice. I'm not a terribly passionate person, really -- desire, to my mind, is often overrated -- and I've always loved the cold. Give me numbness over pain, any old day. At least the White Walkers don't seem interested in torturing people to death, unlike some ostensible protagonists we could mention. Jorah had taken a number of hits already, hadn't he? Probably Fighter #2 thought it was better strategy. Also, though, I thought he was playing to the crowd. That fighter seemed to be a big crowd favorite, so I'm guessing that he was accustomed to fighting with an eye on the stands. "Triumphant Warrior Stabbed in the Back Right Before Completing a Coup de Grace" is a lot more exciting, from a spectator's point of view, than "Guy Towering Over Fallen Fighter Kills Him. Because of Course He Does. Duh." Were you not entertained? You and random wolf-whisting guys on the streets of Braavos! Speaking of which, I really liked Maisie's performance there. It's such a weird fucked-up rite of passage, the first time some rando on the street wolf-whistles or makes a perverted comment at you. It's the "Girl, You Are A Woman Now" moment that nobody ever wants to talk about, because there's really no way to spin it as something inspirational or positive, rather than something that just sorta sucks. That combination of surprised and grossed-out on Arya's face is exactly how I remember feeling at that age. Fuck puberty, man. What a miserable couple of years that was. Of course, it was primarily there in the script to lead both Arya and the audience to the realization that she's now just old enough to have what it takes to appeal to scum like Meryn Trant, but it was still a cool little character moment. Shades of Stoppard, right? "The bad end unhappily, the good end unluckily. That is what tragedy means."

Is Euron=Daario really a serious theory? I always assumed that it was a cracktheory in much the same vein as Varys, King of the Merlings. ETA: Thanks, Oscirus! Now off to Google wild theory before the new casting info causes people to start taking things down.

Panic is an immediate response. It doesn't last for days on end. It actually physically can't -- the human body cannot sustain that state for very long. Eventually, no matter how panicked you may be, it doesn't matter, you will crash. We're not talking about panic here. Sustained exposure to life-threatening horror can cause PTSD, which is maybe what you mean? But that's a different thing. I really do think that the immediate cut from "monsters in the woods" to "guy is now running from soldiers close to Winterfell" wound up giving the wrong impression. It made it look like the young man fled the monsters and then was still running in the same panic when he got caught near Winterfell. That isn't how it could possibly have gone. There are days of travel in between, and obstacles like the Wall that would have required deliberate planning to negotiate.

I didn't get a chance to see this episode until rather late in the week. Well, that was quite some action scene, wasn't it? I'm not ordinarily into action sequences at all, actually. I have a hard time maintaining interest in them, to be honest, and I truly do suck at "reading" them. It's embarrassing to admit but often, I don't even fully understand what happened in action scenes until it is explained to me afterwards. I have an extremely poor spatial sense -- like, learning disability level poor -- and that in combination with my tendency to lose interest makes following big action sequences genuinely difficult for me. So when I heard that there was going to be some enormous battle hoo-ha taking up the back half of this episode, I settled in to watch it with a rather glum expression on my face. But even I liked that one. I could actually follow what was happening, for once, and bits of it were genuinely creepy. It seemed to me in places to be hewing much closer to the visual "grammar" of a horror movie than to the usual grammar of an action movie, which may have been why I enjoyed it: horror sequences are rarely difficult for me to follow the way that action sequences are, for some weird reason. RE: Dissatisfaction with Arya's plotline A lot of people seem to be finding Arya's current plotline uninteresting. I think that her story may be suffering this season from not fitting in with the others thematically. This season seems to me to be very much about "sleeping with the enemy" -- sometimes even literally! -- and about the necessity of doing that sometimes in order to achieve your goals. Sometimes getting in bed with your old enemies can even transform them into powerful allies, sometimes it merely allows you to survive long enough or position yourself well enough to plan your next move, but nearly every storyline this season touches somehow on this concept. Those who show themselves willing to play ball -- Dany, Jon, Tyrion, Sansa, Tormund, possibly Jaime and Doran (depending on where their story goes) -- are the heroes of the season. Those who refuse to do so -- Cersei, Ellaria, the Sand Snakes, Mance, Marge -- get mown down by the season's inexorable thematic momentum. And then there's Arya. Back there in Braavos, doing her own thing. Personally, I like Arya's story this season. I enjoy her scenes very much; I think they're all sorts of creepy and atmospheric and cool. But I can see how it just doesn't fit in all that well with the other stuff that's going on. I think that the writers did try to tie it in by linking Arya's story to Theon's in exactly the same way that the books did -- through motifs of identity and identity loss -- but as it turns out, that's not what has emerged as the strongest thematic thrust this season at all, and as a result her story winds up feeling as if it's wandering lost somewhere out in left field. RE: cousin marriage In regard to the discussion on cousin marriage, I think that some of my fellow USians might be showing just a bit of...provincialism, maybe, here? The US is actually quite unusual for its excessive aversion to marriage between first cousins. There are plenty of places where it isn't frowned upon at all. In fact, in many parts of the Middle East, first cousins are considered the ideal partners. It's primarily Westerners -- well, Westerners, the Chinese, and the Koreans -- who consider cousin marriage problematic, and it's nonetheless still fairly commonplace in Europe. The US is one of the only places in the world that has actually gone so far as to make it a criminal offense (and even then, it is so only in some US states), and even the existence of laws making it illegal often comes as quite a shock to people from other countries. When it comes to toleration of cousin marriage, we're not at all in the middle of the road; we're very much at one far end of that particular spectrum. (Aaaand, checking out the US map there, I see that I'm actually currently living in a state where it's illegal! How weird. I didn't grow up in a part of the country where it was, nor was I married in one. Huh. Guess it's a good thing I didn't marry a cousin then.) RE: Cersei and her popularity or lack thereof I think that Cersei is popular with a lot of show-only viewers, but very much in the same way that viewers loved Lucille in Arrested Development. Or, for that matter, in the same way that the queen bitch characters on the classic daytime soap operas were adored (but let us hope that Lena Headey has more luck with the Emmy awards than Susan Lucci did!). Her nastiness can be vicariously thrilling, and she's camp as all hell. She amuses through audacity. That's not at all the same sort of popularity, though, that characters who are viewed as truly likeable enjoy. It's a completely different form of audience pleasure. Oh, I often find myself reacting positively to Cersei. Primarily I do so when she is expressing her rage, because while she's a terrible human being, her rage is nonetheless just so hideously and painfully and intimately familiar to me that I can't help but respond positively to it. I loved the frustrated edge rising in her voice when she said about being raised alongside Jaime, "I could never figure out why they treated us so differently." I loved it when she threw the fact of her incest right in her father's face. I loved it when she responded to Sansa's cry of "But you were Robert's QUEEN" with "As you will be Joffrey's. Enjoy!" And God, how I loved the drunken over-enunciation she gave to her plosives in "in for a bit of rape!" In those moments, the fact that she's a spiteful and sadistic creature who cares for nothing but herself just doesn't seem nearly as relevant to me as my sense of identification with her anger and her frustration. I guess you could say that in those moments I "like" her, but it's really not the right word, and it rather misses the point besides. Who cares about "liking" anyway? When it comes to fiction, liking doesn't really enter into the equation for me; it's identification that matters far more. Not affection, but empathy. And to tell you the secret and terrible truth, I sort of do want her to wind up burning the whole damned city down. It's funny: I hate it when Dany yells about burning shit down, because she always has to get her super-ego all up in there, so it comes out all self-righteous. But I love it each and every time Cersei breaks something or shrieks about wanting to destroy something or burn something down, because when she does it, there's no moral dimension to it at all. No, when Cersei does it, it is pure untrammeled selfish raging id, and I love that. Tyrion is so wrong: the best part of Cersei isn't her c***, nor is it her cheekbones, nor her supposed love for her children. Her anger is the best part of her, the purest and the most true thing, and how I want to see her give it rein! Burn it down, Cersei! Burn the whole damned city down!

Are you suggesting that Jon and the wildlings are now going to take those boats all the way south to Dorne, leaving the people at the Wall to their fates and giving no one else any warning of what they saw? Because that would be the equivalent of what the deserter did. The deserter wasn't killed because he ran in fear from the monsters in the woods. He was killed because instead of running back to the Wall and reporting on what he'd seen, he decided that everyone else in the world could go hang. He didn't even have the courtesy of warning anyone of what might be coming for them until he got caught. On the contrary, he went out of his way not to warn anyone! In order to get south of the Wall, he had to make a deliberate decision to find some passage south -- either by taking a boat or by sneaking through one of the deserted castles -- that avoided contact with anyone else from the Watch, thus also avoiding giving any of them fair warning of what might be coming for them. All the people he'd been living with and eating with and sleeping with for who knows how long at the Wall? Screw 'em. Then, in order to reach Winterfell, he had to have continued to avoid contact with people for more days on end. He wasn't passing through villages on his way south like some sort of Westerosi Paul Revere, ringing a bell and warning people that the monsters are coming, the monsters are coming. By the time he reached Winterfell, many days south of the wall, how many villages full of old people and women and children must he have passed? Screw all of them, too. He was effectively throwing all of those people off of the sled to slow down the wolves. I empathize with cowardice myself, and I'm not keen on capital punishment. But it's silly to claim that the deserter was killed just because he was scared. His behavior went well beyond "runs in panic from monsters" and edged right into the realms of "that guy in the zombie movie who deliberately hides evidence of the impending apocalypse from others in order to up his personal chances of survival." (To be honest, I often do find myself in an uncomfortable sympathy with that guy in the apocalypse movie. But I still recognize that he's doing something unconscionably selfish.) Sorry to go on at such great length. This has just become a bit of a pet peeve of mine.

Drogo first rapes her in the very first episode, actually. Then he does so some more in a later episode in the first season. And the scenes of the Dothraki raping women after conquering their village that you're remembering happened in the first season as well. From the very start, the show has been grotesquely saturated with rape. It was widely criticized for that very reason when the first season originally aired. Not, mind you, that this means that anyone shouldn't get fed up with it and decide that enough is enough already. Just saying, the show has always been really terrible on that count. I don't think that the first season was any better than the second. In fact, given that the first season featured a young woman falling in love with her rapist, I think you could make a case for it being even worse.

You know, it wasn't until I read this that I remembered that those two captive Lannister kids that Karstark slaughtered were Lancel's younger brothers. Killed in the succession crisis caused (in part) by Robert's death. No wonder Lancel broke so hard that he turned to religious extremism. Can you imagine how guilty he must have felt?