“The Bear and the Maiden Fair”

May 12th, 2013

“How do the men holding the banners fight?”

I’m always interested by what online conversation refers to as “Filler” episodes. By all accounts, “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” fits the bill as far as I understand it: no major events take place, a lot of storylines are merely ways of reminding us of what’s about to happen and the stakes for those involved, and there’s not that big triumphant moment that takes the story in a new direction.

As a result, “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” never evolves into a particularly exciting hour of television, content mostly to sketch out the boundaries of the season’s storylines in preparation for the oncoming climax. In the hands of A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin, the hour functions not unlike the dominant narratives of his books: a lot of people talking about doing something or going somewhere or being someone. At times cheeky in its references to future book material, the episode mostly settles for a sort of muddled clarity, a promise that there is a future even while acknowledging it to be a dark and complicated one.

It’s the equivalent of Arya running out into the dark on her own. She wants to leave the Brotherhood behind because they betrayed Gendry by sending him off with Melisandre, and mean to betray her by straying from their course to Riverrun (where her family isn’t even at, of course), but she’s running out into a night that is dark and full of Cleganes. Arya wants control over her future, and so she abandons the muddled uncertainty of the Brotherhood’s hunt for gold and glory in favor of her own muddled certainty of running off on her own. It’s a large part of her independent streak, an unwillingness to accept the position that has been afforded her and a desire to prove herself capable in other ways. Those other ways are no less complicated than becoming a lady and marrying a prince; in many ways, they are even more dangerous should she have gotten her wish and fought on the battlefield with her Needle. However, they are also much more certain, her fate within her own hands as opposed to those of others.

That’s the one thread that’s really holding this hour together, and the point that Martin’s script seeks to make: in the Game of Thrones, your fate is only your own if you’re in a position to claim it. Power is not just about status or title, but rather about psychology and circumstance. Sansa has status and title, but that is actually what strips her of her power as her circumstance makes her an easy target for the Lannisters in their quest to solidify their claim to Westeros. Robb Stark has named himself King of the North, but he’s also in the process of marching to bow at the feet of a man who has the troops necessary to win his war. Jon Snow has status and title, but he’s given it up to join the Night’s Watch, and given that up to become a Wildling where such status means nothing. There, it’s just about the trust you have in another human being, a trust that Ygritte doesn’t find in the gods or the realm but rather in Jon Snow and, more importantly, herself.

“The Bear and the Maiden Fair” almost makes the argument that if you want to survive this game, you need to be willing to abandon the established social order in circumstances where it will no longer serve your interest. Jon Snow is perhaps right that the Wildlings are too unregimented to successfully claim Westeros as their own, but at the same time they’ve learned not to put their trust in anything but one another. It’s a lesson that Jaime took to heart as he returns to Harrenhal once he realizes that trusting Locke and the system of hostage negotiations to bring her safely home to Tarth would prove unwise. At first he believes he was responsible for her death, his attempt to save her from being raped convincing Locke that there was a greater bounty to be had than the gold dragons offered, but when he arrives he discovers that it wasn’t about money: it was about pride. Locke simply wanted the pleasure of seeing a bear maul her to death, something Jaime protects by putting his own life—more valuable than Brienne’s—at risk. It’s a selfless act, and gives the episode its most explicitly heroic sequence as Jaime asserts his own social power to protect someone who lacks it.

It’s also a sequence where Brienne is handicapped by her circumstance. That’s the situation Theon Greyjoy has been in all season, even before he realized it, and tonight’s bit of mind games from his captors served as a critique of his power. On the one hand, the sequence explored what power Theon has over his own impulses, his abject fear eventually overcome by his sexual desire; however, on the other hand, the sexual foreplay simultaneously reinforced that what Theon once used as a source of power with women is also able to be taken away from him. Not content to simply confine Theon through circumstance—you don’t have much power when you’re tied up like that—his captors instead want to take away that which gives him power in the real world. The choice to dramatize Theon’s castration creates symmetry with the loss of Jaime’s hand, in the process laying out a fairly strong critique of Theon’s person if his penis was his more treasured body part.

It’s also a sequence, though, that raises questions about the degree to which Game of Thrones can actually critique other forms of social power within Westeros. I saw at least a few tweets that referred to its objectification, and I certainly cringed at the same kind of blunt sexual dialogue that often plagued the books (this is not only the show’s problem). The two female characters position themselves as objects, assert their agency only in the name of their male superior, and are pushed to the background once the guards come in to perform their castration duties. They may be asserting their power over Theon, but only because they have been ordered to do so. Much like the infamous scene that launched a now infamous term, where Littlefinger helped train two of his girls how to hold power over their clients through submissive performance, does this give the women agency or simply circumscribe their agency within the power of the men who own them? And how do we understand this critique operating when the show, although presenting this as a larger point about social power and sexuality, is lingering on their naked bodies in a way that does little to undermine such hierarchies?

My view on the issue is that their sexual performance was not incidental to the sequence, but rather central to its psychosexual assault on Theon. We could have a larger discussion about why the psychosexual assault was necessary, and indeed one could discuss whether it has been “necessary” for Theon’s torture to become such a consistent throughline of the season at all. However, I do think it helps illustrate that despite being the only character who is actually being tortured and slowly cut down, other characters are in similar positions. Sansa and Margaery’s conversation in this episode is all about what they can do from within positions of subjugation, while Shae might try to figure out her place in Tyrion’s life now that his duty has been forced to outweigh his desire. While it is unfortunate that the show never gave us a true glimpse into the specificity of prostitutes within the series, and that their one attempt to do so—Ros—ended in such a violent, horrific way so as to strip the thread of any nuance (if consistent with the social hierarchies of the novels and their setting), at the same time they offer a thematic window into the ways in which no single character stands outside of those hierarchies, or rather how no single character can stand outside of those hierarchies for very long.

One could argue there are two exceptions at the moment. The first is Tywin Lannister, who is undoubtedly in control of Westeros if anyone is at this stage. His scene with Joffrey stands out in the episode because of the fluidity of the power dynamics, Tywin beginning the scene in service of his king and ending the scene in control of his grandson. It’s a simple bit of staging (Tywin moving from the bottom of the stairs to the top), but it’s also a tremendous piece of acting by both Charles Dance and Jack Gleeson, and a sequence that demonstrates the degree to which Joffrey’s title means little compared to Tywin’s larger sense of control. It’s also a reaffirmation of patriarchal control, the same kind of control that Margaery can only imagine stamping out by trying to do her best to influence her son in a way Cersei has failed to influence her own.

However, Daernerys is another story. She also holds control of her own destiny, an army who is devoted to her and who will follow her to the end of the earth. But despite a level of autonomy and freedom, and despite being offered the tools necessary to cross the sea to Westeros, Dany isn’t capable of overlooking the social inequality right in front of her. Her efforts to free the Unsullied may have given her an army with which she could take Westeros, but those efforts were never about Westeros. They were about fighting a slaver’s hubris and chauvinism, and about waging a war against cruelty and injustice. None of the people who want to lay claim to the throne of Westeros are doing so for the sake of social justice: part of this is because there is no longer outright slavery in Westeros, but part of it is also because their claims to power are dependent on the social order and the security it offers. Dany’s power may derive in part from her dragons and her title, but they are not what drive her to make the decisions she makes. Of the show’s characters, she is the one who has stood up most consistently against cultures of rape and slavery in which she feels complicit; however, she’s also one of the few characters who has the luxury of independence and isolation.

What an episode like “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” helps with is keeping that position from being isolated and independent. Although this is an episode that bounces across nearly every storyline, leaving out only a few characters (Cersei most prominent among them), it was also an episode that did a nice job of building a world in which these characters co-exist as opposed to a collection of worlds that happen to be connected. Tywin’s long walk down the empty hall of the throne room represents the hollowness of Joffrey’s power just as the long procession of Unsullied that the Yunkai leader is forced to ride past is representative of the solidity of Dany’s. Even the romantic pairings, never the show’s strong suit, felt stronger when we got to see moments of intimacy from both Robb/Talisa and Jon/Ygritte in which their differences and similarities rose to the surface. While technically not the most eventful episode, these series of isolated sequences nonetheless put a mirror up to the show, creating a series of potential connections that I found more interesting the more I started writing about them, a good sign for the culmination of those connections in the weeks to come.

Cultural Observations

• Orell’s sudden interest in Ygritte didn’t make a whole lot of sense until he suggested that Ygritte won’t like Jon so much when she knows what he really is. I’m interested to see where they go with that, something that they’ve been building into this season but actually haven’t explore to the degree they could.
• “You waste time trying to get people to love you, you’ll end up the most popular dead guy in town.” Bronn isn’t wrong, but I’m wondering how we contrast this with Margaery’s strategy for taking over control of the kingdom, even with Sansa and Lora both married to Lannisters. Does this statement apply equally to men and women?
• “What would I do there? Juggle?” No comment on this one, GRRM.
• I’m not sure if Melisandre laying out Gendry’s paternity was all that subtle a sequence, but I really loved the visual of the wreckage-strewn Blackwater with the Red Keep in the background. CGI-dependent, certainly, but striking.
• My favorite punchline in the episode was easily Osha complaining about Bran’s closeness with Jojen, and then her attempt to look to Hodor for affirmation. Brilliance.

“The Climb”

May 5th, 2013

“If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.”

“The Climb” begins with three groups of characters who share a common goal: reaching The Wall. While Jon and Ygritte are with the wildlings as they prepare to scale it, Bran and Sam are moving toward the Wall from opposite directions.

For viewers, The Wall has been a prominent object for the series, one of the first images we saw to introduce a sense of the scale of Westeros. It’s a prominent part of the credits, sure, but it was also key to the series’ prologue. When Jon Snow saw the Wall for the first time, it was a formative moment for the character, just as it’s foretold as a prominent moment for Gilly, who can’t even imagine the stories Sam tells her about the structure. It’s something so large that it persists even for those who have never laid eyes on it, something that holds power even when the vast majority of its expanse lies unguarded. The Night’s Watch may be in charge of protecting the Wall, but the Wall does most of the protecting itself, a single crack in the ice capable of nearly killing the entirety of the Wildling party.

The “Game of Thrones” would be difficult enough if its only threat were static obstacles like The Wall (or the threat of the White Walkers beyond it, which is ostensibly still the most prominent threat to the entirety of Westeros). But “The Climb” isn’t a solitary activity, something that you can survive on your own: there’s always someone there to cut your rope, or stand in your way, or give your life new—often less—meaning at the drop of a hat. With its central metaphor, “The Climb” reminds us that no climb is without the threat of not simply missing a foothold but someone doing everything in their power to make sure that no foothold even exists, a dark and often foreboding episode that despite closing on a hopeful moment offers little evidence of hopefulness overall.

Theon’s torture was always going to be a dark turn, one that Iwan Rheon managed to make both engaging and yet also excruciating through his performance. But “The Climb” isn’t content with the image of Theon’s finger getting cut open, doubling down on torture with Littlefinger literally giving Ros to Joffrey as a target for his crossbow practice. The camera doesn’t linger on Ros’ prone body as it does on Theon’s screams of pain, but the image is even more striking, a case of collateral damage where her betrayal to Varys not only cost her her life but also any sense of humanity she had left. It’s a sickening sequence, one which emphasizes Littlefinger’s fundamental lack of human decency and which reinforces a parallel between Rheon’s character and Joffrey that reminds us that there is evil in this world that does not exist beyond the Wall.

And yet these characters are far from the only ones who are part of this larger suffering. Locke isn’t pure evil for cutting off Jaime’s hand, for instance, but rather someone whose own suffering at the hands of Lannisters and their ilk gave him reason to want vengeance (and despite whatever sympathy we might have for him, Jaime himself is not innocent in such affairs). Similarly, the Brotherhood without Banners may sell Gendry off to Melisandre, but it is not as simple as cruelty: while they acknowledge they are doing it in part because of their faith, they also admit the gold is central, for it is the gold that will allow them to continue forward in their mission. The end result, to Arya, is an immense cruelty: Gendry wanted to be a part of them, wanted to be connected to a group of people in a way he never was as a bastard, and yet in the end the only connection that matters is that he carries the Baratheon blood Melisandre needs for her sacrifice.

Are we supposed to see this as an abject cruelty? Obviously, the idea of a character we like being sacrificed by one who the show has often treated as a villain is far from ideal, but Melisandre doesn’t consider herself evil. The choice to bring Melisandre into this part of the story calls attention to the shared religion with Thoros, and by making this explicit we’re asked to confront the truth of the matter: do we celebrate Beric’s continued life while simultaneously vilifying Melisandre’s motives? Can we comfortably fit Beric into one category or another? Can Melisandre be classified by this point in the story? Or are all of these characters those figures who do not simply act out of malice but who rather share a belief system distinct enough from a more basic sense of morality and honor that we have come to understand as the default through characters like Ned and his children?

We’re horrified by what Littlefinger did to Ros, but does this make Varys a hero by comparison if he tortured his own tormenter—someone who betrayed him—earlier this season? As Meera and Osha are fighting over their rabbit skinning techniques, Bran makes a fair observation: while Osha is right that their first meeting involved Meera’s knife on her throat, that was how Bran and Osha met as well. Jon was about to kill Ygritte when they first met, and yet it is ultimately Jon who saves Ygritte’s life as they’re able to fall to their deaths on the Wall. Is Orell evil for being willing to kill them, or practical for privileging his life over theirs?

What can you do to protect yourself in this environment? What can you do when human agency is your greatest threat to your existence? Tyrion was in the midst of a battle where he could be killed at any moment, but it was Joffrey’s order—or what Cersei suggests is Joffrey’s order—that came the closest to ending his life. And while Theon and Ros were tied up, unable to protect themselves against horrifying torture, Sansa Stark is more or less imprisoned in King’s Landing, a victim as two powerful families wage war over her future. Tyrion at one point asks who is getting the worst bargain in the marriage plot Tywin is perpetrating: we discover the answer is Ros for her role in Varys and Littlefinger’s battle—which the older Lannisters don’t even seem aware of—but Sansa is the person who was never prepared for this, and who isn’t surrounded by a family to protect her (not unlike Gendry, who is equally powerless and a victim of his blood rather than his actions).

How does one survive this struggle? Ygritte, acknowledging that she does not believe Jon to have truly cast off his affiliation with the Night’s Watch, puts it simply: “It’s you and me who matters to me and you.” But that’s something Wildlings are able to argue because they often don’t have families to protect, or laws and customs to follow. Robb has to ask Edmure to help pay for his hubris in marrying Talisa, just as Robb has to pay for the Karstarks’ murder of the Lannister boys, just as Robb has to pay for Catelyn’s decision to let Jaime and Brienne free, just as Brienne has to pay for her affiliation with Jaime after being captured. These people are not just victims of abjectly cruel people like Ros and Theon’s torturers, but they are nonetheless victims of a system that Littlefinger suggests is chaos but could just as rightfully be understood as order.

“The Climb” is liberal in its adjustments to the book, but in the process it heightens the stakes at a point in the season where the stakes needed to be solidified. It’s an interesting case study in that no storyline really reaches its resolution: the additional Lannister/Tyrell marriages are confirmed but not completed, Gendry is taken away by Melisandre without actually being sacrificed, Jaime and Brienne’s future is discussed without being seen, and Robb and Edmure make a deal with the Freys without having to actually follow through on it. And yet the foreboding nature of all of those decisions is nonetheless very clear: although the episode ends on the skies parting and the sun shining on the North, the episode as a whole suggests such calm skies are both fleeting and, in this case, a misleading moment of calm amidst the chaos of order (and vice versa).

Cultural Observations

• I know that it wasn’t actually something that they shoehorned in as a result of fan complaints, but Sam’s “Hey look at this dagger I found on the Fist of the First Men” moment nonetheless reads as an on-the-nose response to fans angry he didn’t discover the dagger earlier.
• “A sword swallower, through and through” – we had to know our first Olenna/Tywin scene would be a delight, but those are two characters who play off each other well, and who make determining the fates of entire families both harrowing and hilarious. Any time someone tries to tell me something about myself, I’m breaking out “As an authority on myself, I must disagree.”
• As noted, for non-book readers, the show is now in uncharted territory with Melisandre and Gendry, which caught me off guard in an interesting way: the logic of Melisandre’s plan filled in for me immediately, but I’m not sure if this is because I knew very clearly that Melisandre’s plan involved sacrifice or whether the show actually did a strong enough job of foreshadowing this in the dialogue before she left Dragonstone. Curious how non-book readers responded to “You have something he needs.”
• I hope everyone else wrote their weekly reviews while cranking Miley Cyrus. And if I’m not linked to a Jon/Ygritte fan video set to that song in the next week, I’m going to be very disappointed in you, Internet.

“Kissed By Fire”

April 28th, 2013

“You swore some vows. I want you to break them.”

As Ygritte seduces Jon Snow in a conveniently located hot springs, I found myself at odds with the story unfolding onscreen. Although I have long known—unlike Jon Snow, of course, who knows nothing—this scene would take place, there was something oddly romantic about the moment that struck me as off. In the books, I always remembered the scene as more complicated, a sort of alternate passage into manhood as contrasted with the vows Jon swore in front of the heart tree. It was still effectively Jon and Ygritte having sex in a cave, mind you, but I always found the moment less romantic and more adolescent.

This is, of course, because it was more adolescent given that Jon was only a teenager. The same goes for Robb Stark, whose decision to chop off the head of Richard Karstark was less an act of determination and more an act of formation, a moment when he stopped being a boy and became a leader. The show’s decision to age up the younger characters made sense, and it has resulted in a number of positive story developments, but Robb and Jon are two characters whose stories have been transformed by nature of their relative maturity.

In the case of Jon’s encounter with Ygritte, there’s no adolescent fumbling to be found here: instead, he’s a masterful lover, his desire to kiss her “there” proving quite well received. And yet whereas I once saw that scene as this brief moment of solitude, of innocence—and the removal of that innocence—in the midst of a coming war, here it just felt like Jon and Ygritte getting it on, following by some pillow talk without the pillows. It all felt too romantic, which is not to say that romance has no place in this show but rather to say that the storyline came at a point in Jon’s storyline where I did not feel it earned that romance, at least not in the way I had understood it previously.

As “Kissed by Fire” unfolded, however, it became clear that Jon and Ygritte’s encounter had been somewhat shifted in meaning. It wasn’t about breaking up Jon and Ygritte’s journey so much as it was giving us a fleeting moment of romance before destroying every other idealistic notion you could imagine. Their encounter gives the episode a brief moment of solitude, but it’s not for the characters so much as it’s for the audience. It is a moment of lust and freedom in a world where lust is punished, freedom is overwritten by family, and “romance” exists only as the enemy of common sense and good strategy.

The episode ends with the simplest statement of this fact: Tywin may be fighting a battle with Robb Stark, but the real war is with the Tyrells, and Jaime’s retelling of Aerys’ death at his hands paints a portrait of Tywin as someone who is always thinking two steps ahead. Unable to openly wage war against someone on whom he depends to feed his people and win the battle at hand, Tywin uses his children to settle the score instead. Tyrion is to marry Sansa Stark so that Loras cannot, and Cersei is to marry Loras to further embed Lannister power within Highgarden. It’s a genius plan, impossible for the Tyrells to openly reject without betraying their own plot to marry Loras to Sansa and claim the North as their own. It’s also a plot that treats family as currency, as something that can be bought, exchanged, and traded in times of need.

Game of Thrones has always been a show about families, primarily the Starks and the Lannisters, but the definition of family is expanding. “Kissed by Fire” gives us our first look at Stannis’ family rather than his priestess, which includes his ailing daughter, his devoted wife, and their three dead fetuses jarred up as monuments to her struggles to provide an heir. We know from Melisandre’s earlier appearance this season that their blood is required for Stannis’ sacrifice, and yet we hear no talk of that here. Instead, we see simply Stannis returning to his role as husband and father, exploring what that relationship was before he can consider destroying it. It’s also a chance for the show to use Shireen to bring Davos back into the story, and it also creates a larger scale to the world of Dragonstone for the first time in the series.

That sense of scale has been what has complicated notions of family. When you could divide up the show based on family, the Starks and the Lannisters as two central houses, there was simplicity to the show’s views on the issue. But then the Starks were divided, and then the Lannister children’s conflict with their patriarch was made evident, and since then “family” has been no simple vow. Catelyn betrayed her son; Theon betrayed his adopted family in favor of a family that may never truly have been his own; Jon left the family he was never allowed to lay claim to with a name for a family he was forced to give up for the sake of the realm. Family is not just a thing you have in Westeros, but rather something you can lay claim to. It’s what makes the death of the young Lannister cousins that much more tragic: they were killed not for “being” Lannisters but for rather being born Lannisters, two rather different crimes that the Karstarks—in the name of vengeance for the death of their own kin—were not willing to distinguish between.

“Kissed by Fire” largely positions family as a marker of identity, rather than an innate sense of being. We could tie it perhaps to Loras’ homosexuality, a part of himself that he is forced to repress—except when tempted by one of Littlefinger’s spies—because his duty to his family and to society is a more powerful force operating against him. But we could also tie it to the slavery of the Unsullied, and on Grey Worm’s decision to maintain his slave identity for it is his slave identity who was made free, and his former identity who was made a slave. Neither of these situations are easy to explain, simple claims to a name or a title. Rather, they are complicated intersections of society, politics, and personhood, ones that cannot be comfortably fit into a family tree or any other such hierarchy. As much as we use family to organize these characters, we cannot come to understand them solely based on their roles within those households and the society surrounding them; however, at the same time, one cannot pretend that these forces are not ultimately determining their fates.

There is perhaps no better example of this than Sansa Stark, who has become the key to the North. The tragedy, of course, is that this is what both the Tyrells and the Lannisters think of her. The difference is that while the Tyrells wine and dine her, offering her friendship and visions of a luscious future with Loras, the Lannisters plot behind closed doors to marry her to Tyrion. And yet we cannot separate the two acts as it relates to Sansa’s best wishes: while the Tyrells may mean her less harm and cruelty through their actions, they are just as willing to lay claim to her not as a person but as a title. She is as much a chess piece to them than she is to the Lannisters, even if they’re better at making her feel like she is beloved and welcome within their family.

And yet while Sansa has gotten used to this role, given that she’s been playing it ever since her father died for one house or another (and thus she doesn’t complain at replacing the Lannisters or Littlefinger with the benevolent Tyrells), Arya can’t feel the same way. As devoted as she is to her family, and as much as she wants to be reunited with them, she resents being a bargaining chip for the Brotherhood Without Banners (itself, of course, a makeshift family). It strips her of the agency that, as much as her life has been in danger, she has been able to retain while on the run with Gendry. But when Arya pushes Gendry to come with her to Riverrun, he refuses for much the same reason, an orphan who never had a real family but would rather be able to choose to join the Brotherhood than be beholden to Robb at Riverrun.

I was struck by Arya and Gendry’s argument, as it certainly contains a romantic overtone. When Arya tries to suggest that she could be his family, he responds that this would make her his lady, and that’s certainly implying marriage. But Arya never thought of it that way, perhaps because her notion of family isn’t quite so rigid. Indeed, one of the character’s best attributes is that she’s resisted those gender norms.* In fact, while family has guided her, one could argue that she hasn’t had one since she was rushed away from her father’s execution and given a new name by Yoren. In that moment, Arya didn’t cease to be a Stark but she nonetheless took on a new identity, one which gained a new relationship with family, and one that she will test as she moves back toward her family as a pawn for the Brotherhood to pawn off.

*EDIT: A few people have raised the point that “milady” is likely just referring to Arya’s class status as opposed to marital status. That’s probably a more logical read on the scene—blame the years of pondering over the shipping of the two characters—but I think the larger point still stands in regards to Arya’s identity regardless of how far we read into the term in question.

This review is remaining largely on the side of thematic developments—and I haven’t even discussed the title’s ties to identity being bestowed on you at birth—as opposed to qualitative judgments, but I consider that itself to be qualitative in nature. There was a lot happening in the episode, but I felt a lot of it served a central purpose (or rather served the central purpose of complicating any single purpose). The nudity—spread across both genders for a change—was serving many different functions, none of it as simply as titillation. The politics moved quickly, so quickly that various characters were unable to pull themselves out of harm’s way in time. “Kissed by Fire” delivers that brief moment of solitude for Jon and Ygritte before reminding us that no such solitude waits for them or anyone else in the future, for the night is dark and full of titles, ones which are either laid claim to or hoisted upon others in these trying times.

No one knows this better than Jaime Lannister. The episode’s most powerful moment is when Jaime seeks to reclaim his identity, retelling the story of his murder of Aerys the Mad King as an act of family loyalty and human decency. However, as much as he resents and resists the title of Kingslayer that was bestowed upon him, he also played it. He played it because it was the label Ned Stark placed on him, and it was the position that had been determined for him and thus the one that he would take (much as Cersei and Tyrion are expected to play their parts dutifully). Jaime’s scene with Brienne in the bath was masterful from Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, a reclamation of self that was perhaps only possible once a part of himself—his hand—was taken from him. It’s also a reclamation that he doesn’t ultimately control, instead left to the hands of those like his father who would seek to define his identity for their own purposes.

Cultural Observations

• I suppose it’s only fitting given that Martin’s awkward sexual dialogue was itself a sort of awakening for my teenage self, but I cringed during Jon’s explanation of oral sex. I just didn’t think it worked.
• That they went three-quarters of the episode before explaining that Beric can be brought back from the dead was kind of strange to me. They didn’t really show Beric “healing” in the midst of the opening battle, so I’d be curious how any non-readers responded to his sudden consciousness and the episode’s long delay before explaining things.
• It was strange seeing Ned and Robert in a “Previously On” sequence, but it was necessary for the episode’s subtle callbacks to Jorah’s treason against Dany to register as he fishes to see whether Selmy was at all aware of it.
• We only got a brief glimpse of it, but the slightly less barren view of Iceland we got tonight was stunning, as per usual.
• A very effective edit from Shireen reading the book about Aegon to Davos to our one and only scene with Dany.
• Perhaps fitting given that it was written by the show’s most devoted book reader, story editor Bryan Cogman, but this definitely felt like a major connective tissue, introducing a large number of characters and setting up both some convergences and divergences from book material. I know I had at least one moment where my anticipation was raised to its strongest levels yet this season.

“And Now His Watch Is Ended”

April 21st, 2013

“Influence is largely a matter of patience.”

As Olenna Tyrell sits in her garden at King’s Landing, she schools one of her young charges on the silliness of the House Tyrell words. “Growing strong,” she argues, lacks any of the strength associated with “Winter is coming” or “We do not sow”; the golden rose, meanwhile, certainly doesn’t strike fear in the way the direwolf or the kraken might.

And while Olenna is willfully eliding the thorns of which she is queen, and the way we could see Margaery’s growing power in King’s Landing as evidence of the sigil’s representativeness, I also think there’s something about Game of Thrones’ approach to storytelling here. This is a show where stories don’t always progress like direwolves or krakens, often growing incrementally on a week-by-week basis. Watching the show, you sort of have to take the Tyrell words as your motto: if you give stories time to grow, you may well be rewarded.

“And Now His Watch Is Ended” concludes on one of the series’ best sequences, Daenerys’ overthrow of the slavers of Astapor and her triumphant freeing of the Unsullied. It’s incredibly satisfying, perhaps impressively so given that it is told through a grand total of four scenes over the first three episodes. It’s a unique story structure for the series, as it really lacks any relationship to other ongoing storylines: while Joffrey’s talk of Targaryens certainly reminds us of Dany’s claim to Westeros, her actual storyline has to serve as its own engine. This isn’t a new phenomenon for Dany, but this is the most effectively her storyline has been managed, in part because the four scenes we get are paced extraordinarily well.

It’s a model the show would do well to follow, and one the show will have to navigate at least once more this season.

I don’t quite have time to write an exhaustive review, so I’m going to focus on Dany’s storyline as it has unfolded this season. I went back and rewatched the scenes to this point, and wasn’t shocked to discover they are small in number:

Episode One:

Scene 1: Dany and Dragons at Sea [1:49]

Scene 2: Viewing the Unsullied, Barristan’s arrival [7:16]

Episode Three:

Scene 3: Walk of Punishment, Bartering a Dragon [6:49]

Episode Four:

Scene 4: A Dragon is Not a Slave [6:20]

Outside of the introduction sequence, these are long scenes for the show, sustained glimpses of Dany’s storyline that nonetheless function as part of a larger whole. They’re also scenes that are nicely transformed by the reveal at the end, something that I’m guessing worked particularly well for non-readers. The fact that Dany speaks Valyrian isn’t something that only readers could figure out: while the show has never explicitly discussed her language abilities, it’s part of her heritage, and I can imagine some people wondered given the protracted interest in translation whether Dany could understand what was being said. Knowing doesn’t make it any less satisfying when she first speaks Valyrian to the Unsullied, as it’s still a triumphant moment for a character who spend too much of the second season scrambling instead of acting.

However, once you realize that she’s understood everything Kraznys has said, going back and watching that first scene takes on a whole new meaning. You can see the exact moment when she decides she’s going to purchase them in order to save them, in order to set them free. It’s a great performance from Emilia Clarke, in that her confidence is such that it can be read as both ignorant hubris and calculated strategy depending on your level of knowledge. The clues are all there if you’re paying attention, and revisiting only heightened the satisfaction of seeing Dany put Kraznys to the flame, and called attention to how the direction by Alex Graves and the great music by Ramin Djawadi played a huge role in making the sequence in tonight’s episode so successful.

It’s a tightly constructed narrative, necessary because it’s not able to connect with any other storylines. In the second season, it seemed like they didn’t know how to handle this, and struggled to get the Qarth story moving quickly enough to keep Dany a vital part of the series. Here, they’re managed to do a lot with a little, increasing not the amount of scenes featuring Dany but the length of those scenes, and the clarity of the storytelling. The use of the audience’s ignorance to Dany understanding the subtitles—at least among those who didn’t piece it together—also gives this episode a sense of revelation, something else they struggled with last season. As more characters are dispersed in this way, treating those narratives as isolated structures with their own story beats—rather than necessarily part of larger narratives—may well be a necessary step for the show.

It helps that they’re inheriting a more interesting Dany storyline, but it’s also something they want to work with in Theon’s storyline as well. It’s following the same principle, with brief sequences building to a reveal in tonight’s episode. While there are still questions left unanswered—like, for example, who Iwan Rheon’s character is—it avoids a more linear form of storytelling driven by plot. Instead, there’s that sense of revelation, of little mysteries being solved while larger mysteries remain. Knowing now that Rheon’s character is not Theon’s friend, the information he shared with him just before that revelation takes on a new meaning, depending on who Rheon is aligned with.

It functions as a way to activate meaning in a storyline that could lack meaning for non-readers. While the storyline might remain vague, and its connection to other narratives may yet be unclear to those who don’t know where this is heading, this initial reveal can at least push viewers to reconsider what they’ve seen in a different light. In writing my pre-air thoughts, I wondered how the fragmented narrative could cause issues for those who haven’t read the books, but rewatching the episodes week-to-week I was struck by how Dany’s reveal pushed me to want to revisit those previous episodes, something that I don’t think has to do with me being a reader. And the more viewers who want to revisit something, who want to explore the show’s seriality on a deeper level, the more those viewers will begin to emulate the kind of viewer engagement that enables the show to overcome its fragmentation and maintain viewer interest.

These storylines are part of a larger episode that doesn’t reveal anything new, mostly following the threads from the previous episodes in predictably linear—but effective—ways. None of those storylines feature a game-changing moment, nor do they explicitly push us to rewatch earlier sequences. However, the more the show seeks to redefined the rules of its storylines, the most scenes like Tywin promising Cersei he’s doing everything he can to save Jaime could take on deeper meaning when we learn what exactly his plan entails. Tywin has now had two similar scenes with Tyrion and Cersei where he’s been writing and then sealing letters: who are the letters for, and what do they say? It could just be a stage direction, but it could also be something that becomes rewritten later on, something that was hidden in plain sight.

As a result, while Dany and Theon’s storylines might currently be standing on their own, the way the storylines work to engage the viewer in rethinking what they’ve seen so far can have the added impact of reading new meaning—or at least the potential for additional meaning—into scenes that otherwise might seem procedural, helping the show overcome a lack of explicit “action” in some storylines as it moves further into the third season.

Cultural Observations

• Varys’ story with the sorcerer is an episode highlight, but it also serves to emphasize the presence of magic in an episode which also features both Melisandre and Beric Dondarrion discussing the Lord of Light and the sacrifices we make to him. We might not be seeing a lot of magic, but its presence is being amplified, and that’s something the episode drew out nicely here.
• Lena Headey did some really nice work in Cersei’s confrontation with Tywin, nicely building on how the Queen of Thorns’ talk of male stupidity put her in the frame of mind necessary to confront her father on the subject. That he chided her for allowing Joffrey to make so many mistakes only further twists the knife as Margaery proves more adept at influencing him than she ever was. The political side of King’s Landing has been complex and compelling this season, with a range of different characters making strong impressions.
• I know Olenna said to leave it to the philosophers, but “What happens when a non-existent bumps against the decrepit?” is too good not to raise again here.
• Not much all that shocking in the Night’s Watch storyline, but I did like Mormont’s pause during the funeral, having not known where the dead man had come from. It was a nice final beat for the character before his death, a sign of his humanity as well as his sense of honor (as he still spoke of a man he barely knew as though the Watch would never see another like him).
• There was some discussion in last week’s comments that perhaps Pod’s sexual prowess was some kind of trick on Tyrion’s part to give him a sense of self-worth, and the way Ros talks about the event to Varys offers no clear answer on that response. Is the scene meant to make us skeptical (since the prostitutes aren’t talking about details)? Or is it just meant to remind us of something light and funny?
• Alfie Allen did some really great acting in his scene confessing his sins—and his sense that Ned was his true father—to Rheon’s character, which only made Rheon’s sadistic smile upon throwing Theon back into his torture chamber more effective.
• Relevant to my day job: the University of Wiscons-Madison Carillon Tower played the Game of Thrones theme recently, which is quite a feat of tower bell playing.

“Walk of Punishment”

April 14th, 2013

“A person could almost be forgiven for forgetting we’re at war.”

“Walk of Punishment” opens with something of a comedy routine. Edmure Tully is attempting to send his father off to the afterlife with a flaming arrow, but the arrow misses. And then misses again. And then misses again. It’s only then that his uncle, the Blackfish, steps in to fire the arrow necessary. Edmure is made to look the fool, the Blackfish is made to look like a man who suffers no such characters, and our first glimpse of Riverrun has served its function, in part, through comedy.

Of course, it’s also a funeral, which makes its comedy somewhat dark. It helps that we don’t actually know much about Hoster Tully, a character in the books and more of a symbol in the series. It also helps that the scene works the joke perfectly: I resisted laughter on the first miss, found it on the second, and felt the tragedy sneak back in on the third. The scene never feels at odds with the moment or the episode around it except when it’s supposed to feel like it’s at odds with the moment because, well, it is. A world of war and tragedy is not a world without comedy, but rather a world where comedy is rarely allowed to continue unabated for very long.

Catelyn’s quote above, spoken to the Blackfish, captures Benioff and Weiss’ approach to lightening the mood in Westeros. At any given point, there are characters in situations where they could forget about the gravity at hand, where the inherent humor of human interaction overwhelms the threat of widespread conflict. Sometimes it’s Talisa tending to two young captives, wanting to keep them from thinking about the world around them; sometimes its Tyrion wanting to give Podrick a gift for his loyal service. And in a previous time it was Jaime and Brienne, alone on the road, bantering their way toward King’s Landing.

But banter, like all men, must die.

“Walk of Punishment” ends with a punishment, but it also begins with a realization that the punishment is coming. Jaime and Brienne, tied up on a horse being escorted along by Bolton’s men, are bantering like they did before. There’s a brief moment where it looks like this could still be a charming captivity for the two characters, but then Jaime drops a dose of reality: when they stop, Brienne is going to be raped. He makes a crack about Renly that would have been a joke in last week’s episode, but it’s a foreboding statement here. The storyline only grows darker for Jaime, although he finds a moment of selflessness as he saves Brienne from being assaulted. One could even argue the episode implies Jaime would have avoided having his hand chopped off if he had simply allowed Brienne to be dishonored and kept his mouth shut.* The moment is darkly comic in its own way, if you’re of the mind that Jaime is someone who deserves to have his hand chopped off, but the series definitely works to complicate such a reading with his choice to protect Brienne from a terrible fate.

* I expect that non-readers will spend more time dissecting the loss of Jaime’s hand than readers, although the scene was bloody effective either way; just not quite as novel when you know it’s coming.

There’s a moment where any story must shed its comic skin, in a way. Hot Pie being left behind at the Inn could be seen as simply the end of the character’s journey, but it also takes away the most blatant “comic relief” character in Arya’s storyline as though to signal a heightened sense of dramatic weight ahead. Similarly, Samwell Tarly stopped being a comic character when he stopped being a sidekick, his story now the tragic viewpoint into the Night’s Watch’s march back to the Wall (and the birth of Gilly’s doomed son). Arya no longer has the luxury of a Hot Pie, nor does Sam have the luxury of being a lovable buffoon: Craster’s “Ser Piggy”-esque crack could have been a playful jab from one of his fellow crows back in the first season, but it’s taken on a new tone in light of recent events.

As a whole, “Walk of Punishment” spends a lot of time on the edge of comedy and tragedy, with Benioff’s directorial debut pushing the boundaries of how funny something can become within such difficult circumstances. This is perhaps no clearer than in Daenerys’ time in Astapor, and the continued game of translation going on between Kraznys and Missandei. There’s nothing funny about his sexism, mind you, but watching Missandei struggle to turn his disrespect into something more cordial has a light-hearted feel to it, one which stands in obvious contrast to the plight of the slaves in Astapor. I’d almost describe it as a dark-hearted comedy, one that briefly distracts from but ultimately reinforces the harrowing circumstances the characters are facing.

Perhaps this offers a way to interpret the show’s comedy more broadly, in that its sense of distraction rarely lingers for particularly long. Podrick’s gift from Tyrion is the episode’s most explicitly comic storyline, and extends the episode’s argument that the Lannisters have the privilege of light-hearted tomfoolery. Cersei and Tyrion’s musical chairs might have undertones of the sibling rivalry that nearly led to the latter being killed on the battlefield, but the stakes of the Small Council meeting in question are about entitlements and paying for a royal wedding, not survival. Similarly, while Podrick is being rewarded for his actions in the midst of a heated battle, he’s being rewarded in a period of relative calm, at least in King’s Landing, and within a space—Littlefinger’s brothel—that has often been seen as a sanctuary from the trials of war (except, as Tyrion points out, if you’re a King’s bastard).

The scenes with Pod stuck in my mind in the weeks after watching them, both because I found them extremely funny and because they felt at odds with the show around them. It’s a charming turn of events, one that gives Bronn and Tyrion a chance to banter, Podrick a chance to bashfully admit to his sexual prowess, and a sense of mirth and merriment that the show has rarely been able to achieve as the show has progressed. And yet as refreshing as that was, it’s tough to reconcile it with the show around it when you’re also following Brienne and Theon almost being raped, or the suffering of the slaves of Astapor. Of course, this implies that we’re supposed to reconcile it. Perhaps, not unlike the individual moments of “dark-hearted comedy” in the episode, we’re meant to almost feel guilt about the comedy of it all, our knowledge of the stakes outside of King’s Landing in stark contrast to the capacity for those inside the capitol to remain ignorant.

It’s possible for Game of Thrones to be a funny show, and “Walk of Punishment” offers perhaps the largest number of examples of this in a single episode. It also does so later in the series: while Tyrion’s time at the Eyrie with Mord the jailer were certainly quite comical, that was a time before Ned Stark was beheaded, and before the Battle of Blackwater Bay. However, there’s evidence to suggest the tonal clash is purposeful, a test of comedy’s ability to sustain itself in Westeros this far into the series. The Hold Steady’s version of “The Bear And The Maiden Fair” is upbeat and poppy, far from the funeral dirge of The National’s “The Rains of Castamere,” but perhaps that’s the point. After a moment designed to shock the non-reader audience, it’s only fitting that the song is itself a shock, confusing in tone not because the show itself is confused but because it wants the viewer to have to confront that confusion.

While the Blackfish implies that there are places in Westeros where people are simply living in peace while the war wages on elsewhere, we don’t have the luxury of isolation. Game of Thrones is going to take us to the places of war immediately after we get a brief moment of comic relief, the contrast here becoming a key function of the episode as the show delves further into its third season.

Cultural Observations

• While we get the haunting visual of the dead horses art installation at the Fist of the First Men—a callback to the series’ prologue—the scene mostly serves to move Jon Snow along: he’s now officially headed South to the Wall with Tormund.
• Small Council scenes are a really convenient form of exposition: Varys’ explanation of Robb’s movement is a nice way to remind viewers what Robb is doing at Riverrun without having to laden the opening sequences with dialogue.
• Speaking of Hoster, the character’s lack of any actual dialogue really does streamline things, framing Catelyn’s grief for her father into her grief as a mother. It isn’t quite the complicated portrait of her childhood that the books worked to render, but her scene overlooking the river was a strong one for Michelle Fairley.
• No closer to any real answers in Theon’s storyline, but I appreciated the energy of the horseback sequence: the show can’t really do large-scale action in each episode, but I think they saw Theon’s blank slate from the books as a chance to inject something a bit livelier into the story at this stage.
• Readers Corner: There’s a line in this episode that, if you were a book reader watching with a non-book reader, you probably made some kind of noise that raised eyebrows. Hopefully you brushed it off successful.

“Dark Wings, Dark Words”

April 6th, 2013

“I try to know as many people as I can. You never know which one you’ll need.”

When HBO’s decision to order Game of Thrones to pilot was first announced, I went back and began rereading the books in preparation. At the time, I wrote a piece thinking about how the structure of the books—specifically the chapters told from specific characters’ points-of-view—would prove a challenge, but how there remained thematic through-lines that could be capitalized upon.

More recently, Benioff and Weiss have said that they aren’t structuring the show around themes, suggesting they’re for grade school book reports. It’s a silly comment, and I will continue to remark upon clear themes that run through both the series and the novels on which that series is based, but I do think that they’re right on one point: this is not, primarily, structured as a thematic story. And yet, given the fact that the narrative has become dispersed from a clearly outlined conflict—the War of the Five Kings—into a scattered collection of individual narratives, a question is raised: how exactly is the show being structured?

To suggest that Game of Thrones is a character-driven show is not exactly groundbreaking, but I was struck during “Dark Wings, Dark Words” how the show is actually organized by character. In thinking about some of my pre-air thoughts regarding how audiences might respond to some characters better than others, I watched the episode thinking through one primary question: who is this scene about? While the fragmentation of the narrative means that no single episode will be about one single person, the focus of a given scene nonetheless often falls to a single character, and not always the character we might presume it to be. And while there is a collection of new characters introduced in this week’s episode, none of them feel like their scenes were about them so much as the existing characters they were meeting. At the same time, meanwhile, some characters whose existence was once defined by their support of other characters have become subjects of their own storylines, even if their role within the larger narrative hasn’t necessarily changed.

There is inevitably a question of adaptation functioning in this question: readers are more likely to know which characters become more important later in the story and which ones don’t. However, I don’t think you need to have read the books to realize that Game of Thrones is not Lady Olenna’s story. Mind you, Diana Rigg all but steals her scenes with a wry and commanding performance, but her scene with Margaery and Sansa never feels like it’s about her. As much as we learn key pieces of information about the Queen of Thorns, the scene ends with a shot of Sansa in the garden, both Olenna and Margaery cut out of the frame. It foregrounds the fact that Sansa has finally spoken out loud, in plain terms, of the horrors Joffrey put her through and how they affected her.

We see a similar characterization with Jojen Reed, who with his sister Meera joins Bran, Rickon, Osha and Hodor on their journey north to The Wall. When the character is introduced, it’s within one of Bran’s vivid dreams of a three-eyed raven; when he eventually meets up with Bran, we learn that his only stated purpose is to help guide Bran on his journey. At no point is Jojen given any motivation other than helping Bran, a supporting character from the very moment he is introduced. As much as the burden of another new character might create another name to remember, Jojen doesn’t actually create any greater burden in terms of engagement. He is rather a way for the writers to provide Bran context for his dreams, and for his ability to move into Summer’s body—while it is Jon Snow’s wildling companions who explain to the audience what being a Warg means, it’s Jojen who tells Bran he is one, while telling us comparatively little about himself (other than that, like Bran, he needs a bit of help from his friends).

In these instances, the introduction of new characters does not change the fact that Sansa and Bran remain more prominent narrative threads: Lady Olenna becomes another figure in King’s Landing’s ever-shifting political landscape, while Jojen joins Bran’s increasingly sizable caravan with his sister. One could make a similar claim of Arya’s run-in with the Brotherhood Without Banners: more new characters, but there’s no point at which one expects we’ll be featuring a whole new story thread with Thoros of Myr. The show has to this point been pretty clear about signifying when a new character will become of greater prominence, whether it’s Stannis’ home on Dragonstone entering the opening credits or Davos’ rescue and return to Dragonstone being told as his story rather than Stannis’ as this season began. If someone is going to be part of a whole new narrative thread, the show hasn’t necessarily sought to hide this fact.

However, I’m more interested in scenes where the focus seems inverted from where it might have been a season ago. The last time we were in King Joffrey’s bedroom observing his romantic relations, it was when he was torturing two prostitutes, a scene very much focused on telling us something about Joffrey (and, as I noted at the time, not as interested in telling us about the two women involved as it could have been). However, in his scene with Margaery, I was struck by how we really aren’t learning anything else about Joffrey. We know he’s a masochist, and we know he’s a hateful person, but watching Margaery work over him was about her ability to play the political game more than it was about his growing affection for her. When Joffrey suggests making Renly’s “perversion” punishable by death, there’s this great moment where Natalie Dormer flinches to indicate Margaery acknowledging Joffrey is suggesting her own brother be put to death. But moments later Margaery is suggestively stroking Joffrey’s crossbow, putting aside her personal feelings—this is after Sansa has confirmed the rumors of his monstrousness—to do the job she has committed to. While the show’s expansion of Margaery’s character was clear from her introduction last season, this season it definitely feels like scenes shared between her and Joffrey are more about her than they are him.

In other cases, the separation of characters has transformed once supporting players into leading ones, at least on a smaller scale. When Sam falls on his march back to Castle Black, Mormont explains to him in no uncertain terms that he cannot die, and this is now truer than it was before. Whereas he was expendable as Jon’s second hand in his time within the Night’s Watch, Sam is now our most prominent link to the ongoing affairs of the crows north of The Wall. It’s not necessarily that Sam is given a terribly large amount to do in this episode so much as he has become the anchor for one of the various collections of characters moving from one place to another. It mirrors how Sam was elevated to a “Point of View” character in the third book, not so much dramatically changing the character as changing our perspective on that character for the remainder of the season.

By comparison, Shae has no literary precedent for her elevation from a supporting role, although I’m not sure I would categorize her role as a leading one. That being said, Shae has more agency here than she has in the past, to the point where her brief scene with Tyrion is more about her—and her concerns about Sansa—than it is about Tyrion himself. The episode delivers an earlier scene with Shae and Sansa in which her concerns from last week regarding Littlefinger are reactivated, which allows her reunion with Tyrion at the end of the episode to be both a continuation of her narrative—including last week’s scene with Ros—as well as a postscript to Tyrion’s discussion with Tywin in which Shae’s life was put at risk. Tyrion is still the primary character in that relationship, and perhaps the primary character in the show along with Daenerys, but I would argue the episode constructed the Shae and Tyrion scene from the former’s perspective, even if subtly.

This effort to elevate certain characters is not always successful: one could argue that Shae’s characterization remains too thin to elevate her, similar to the show’s efforts to bring Talisa into a more prominent role. Talisa is surrounded by two Starks, which means that when she’s talking with Robb the scene feels like it’s about him, and when she goes to speak with Catelyn it’s mostly so Catelyn has someone to tell a story to. That story was the focus of much controversy after Jace Lacob referred to it as “character assassination,” which I’ll speak to in the observations below, but at the end of the day it was decidedly about Catelyn’s character. We still know precious little about Talisa, a decision that feels purposeful but also ensures that the character for now remains someone for more prominent characters to converse with.

In most of the above examples, characters are within larger groups, often supported by a range of different characters. Jon Snow might be the focus with his group of Wildlings, but he has Mance Rayder, Ygritte, and more—there is a whole ecosystem of characters he interacts with. Similarly, King’s Landing is consistently growing in scale as the series moves forward, while Robb and Catelyn’s journey to Riverrun will expand their ecosystem as well. Bran’s journey north now includes two more characters, while Daenerys’ time across the Narrow Sea—while not featured in this week’s episode—has added Barristan Selmy to her party of sorts (to use an RPG term). Even when we have no idea where Theon is, we still meet both a torturer and a potential savior who will support—and, you know, torture—the character going forward.

However, the strongest storyline in “Dark Wings, Dark Words” is the one that lacks an ecosystem at all. Jaime and Brienne’s buddy comedy was a highlight when it was introduced last season, but it has blossomed this season precisely because it doesn’t feel it is about one character or the other. More than any other storyline, they feel like equals: although we haven’t spent as much time with Brienne as we have with Jaime, their banter never feels like it’s servicing one character more than the other. Jaime’s teasing about her being in love with Renly certainly works to build Brienne’s backstory—while also reminding viewers in case they forget how precisely she came into Catelyn’s employ—but it also allows Jaime to reflect on the fact one cannot choose who one loves. Their battle on the bridge is partly about Jaime discovering what kind of fight he has left in him, but it’s also about Brienne proving she has skills he hasn’t respected; it’s the most satisfying one-on-one combat the show has delivered in a long time, precisely because I care about both characters involved. Even knowing that it wasn’t going to necessarily end on their terms—interrupted by Bolton’s men—it still feels like a moment not for one of them but for both of them. While their story will no longer be told in isolation, what with them having been captured and all, it will nonetheless be their story rather than two separate stories of different values tied together. The show as a whole might belong to no single character, but there are nonetheless characters that can emerge to “own” an episode, as I would argue Jaime and Brienne did here, and as other characters will do early this season.

Cultural Observations

• I’m not sure I’d view Catelyn’s admission about Jon Snow as character assassination. It certainly doesn’t portray her in a positive light, but there’s something about her pridefulness that has been evident throughout her characterization to me. It’s a pride tied up in love, certainly, but refusing to accept Jon fits with her commitment not to a general principle of family but to her family, a fitting precursor to her arrival at her father’s funeral and her reunion with both her brother and her uncle. And, without spoiling anything, it also fits with where the character is heading in the future, in my view.
• Speaking of character elevation, the show literally plucked Iwan Rheon’s “Boy”—that’s his actual character name as scripted—from the background, where he had been sweeping like a regular extra. It’s an interesting choice, and I’m curious to know if anyone who didn’t know he had been cast recognized him before he revealed himself to Theon.
• Speaking of Theon, meanwhile, I was interesting that he asked “Where am I?” before he asked “Who are you?” Both are important questions, but I’m always interested in how space functions in the show due to the credits: note that Theon isn’t “on the map” yet, despite (we presume) being in a new location.
• As much as the show’s fragmentation can be frustrating, I do love a good “Mention character than immediately jump to character” edit—we got three here: cutting to Theon after Robb tells Catelyn about the bad news from Winterfell, cutting to Jon Snow after Catelyn’s admission, and cutting to the Night’s Watch after Orell—the warg—spots “dead crows.”
• Enjoyed, if only for a brief moment, seeing Robb and Jon with Bran again. It did call attention to how much taller Isaac Hempstead-Wright has gotten—it’s unavoidable, really—but even hearing Sean Bean’s voice did a nice job of contextualizing what he’s been through.

“Valar Dohaeris”

March 31^st, 2013

“You’ve got to invent a story about where the ship is going and why.”

As Sansa and Shae look out on Blackwater Bay imagining where the ships are going, it’s hard not to think about the last time we as an audience watched the ships on Blackwater Bay. “Blackwater” brought a striking amount of clarity to the show, its tight focus clearly defining where the ships were going: Stannis Baratheon intended to take King’s Landing, because he believes himself to be the one true king of Westeros.

As Game of Thrones returns for its third season, such clarity seems long gone. As Robb notes, his men haven’t had a real battle in weeks, their “war” more of a glacial march in search of Lannister men more likely to “raze and run” than fight in the open battlefield. Stannis has retreated to Dragonstone to burn men alive in sacrifice to Melisandre’s lord of light, in hopes they will provide a path forward. Westeros is still at war, that much is certain, but the terms of that warfare are as muddled as they’ve ever been: much as the Narrow Sea separates Daenerys from her place on the Iron Throne, the other would-be Kings are equally unable to directly and openly lay claim to the title.

And yet they keep moving. Indeed, outside of those who remain at King’s Landing, nearly every character or group of characters are on the move, although it’s not always clear where they’re moving to precisely. “Valar Dohaeris” might reintroduce us to a collection of the show’s characters, but it’s an introduction that mostly finds characters exactly where they were before. The result is a premiere that lacks excitement not because things don’t happen, but rather because there’s little new information to hint toward what will happen next, relying on more general anticipation—often, to Sansa’s game above, of the viewer’s invention—as the narrative moves at its own pace.

When the first season ended, it ended on Dany and her dragons. They were the promise of her future, the promise of the strength she would need to lead a khalasar, and the promise of the power she would need to retake the Iron Throne. And yet when the second season returned we were reminded that the dragons weren’t big enough to serve any of these roles, still needing time to grow.

The dismantling of last season’s white walker invasion cliffhanger functions similarly, although without the same logic behind it. In both cases, the marginalization of the major events has as much to do with narrative purpose and budgetary restrictions; we couldn’t open on an extended battle between the White Walkers and the Night’s Watch because there isn’t the money for such a battle to be put to film. Although the use of the snow to build suspense on a smaller scale is effective, and Sam’s battle with the Wight provides a nice glimpse of Ghost, the fact remains that the cliffhanger promised a war and what we get is a single altercation followed by a promise of a journey from one place to another to follow in the episodes to come.

In both cases, the cliffhanger is transformed from a game-changing event to a new idea designed to build anticipation. We know there are dragons, and so we get excited when we cut back to Dany for the first time this season and discover Drogon flying out over the ocean, fiercer than we last saw him. Similarly, we know there are white walkers, so any scene north of the wall becomes more likely to be threatened by a sudden invasion. It’s the idea that something is out there, that at some point in the future the White Walkers that attacked the Fist of the First Men could move South and take over the entirety of Westeros. And because Sam doesn’t do his one job and send word using the ravens, for the time being we’re the only ones who know the extent of the threat other than the Night’s Watch themselves, who are about to start the long walk back to the Wall.

The length of the walk is where Game of Thrones runs into problems; heck, technically the conclusion to season two was just a reminder of what they foreshadowed back in the prologue, our first glimpse of the horrors beyond the Wall. The show will continue to parcel out these moments, if the books are any indication, but the toughest part of this strategy is bundling the parcel back up immediately afterward. It’s as though the viewer snuck into a closet in November and found their Christmas presents unwrapped, but then had to wait weeks before they were allowed to open them, only to discover that some of what they saw were actually birthday gifts for three months—or seasons—later.

Writing this as someone who has read the books takes on a different inflection, of course: I know what are in most of the parcels already, so my anticipation becomes both less suspenseful (I know what’s going to happen) and more impatient (because I often really want to see what I know happens next). It’s why I often find that, even without the sense of confusion that non-viewers might feel about certain storylines, I still feel like I get too little of many storylines to really latch onto within a given episode. Rewatching “Valar Dohaeris,” I was struck by how many events from subsequent episodes I had presumed had taken place in the premiere did not; I had remembered remarking upon Arya’s absence from the first hour given it forced me to watch the second immediately to see how her storyline evolves, but I had forgotten that Jaime and Brienne’s road trip or Bran and Theon’s diverging paths from Winterfell were equally unrepresented.

Where “Valar Dohaeris” finds its most satisfying material is in the one space where movement has ceased, at least temporarily. While restarting various journeys serves a procedural purpose, returning to King’s Landing shows a more traditional network of characters whose interactions offer a dynamic range of scene pairings. Whereas Robb’s fractured relationship with Catelyn is left to fester as he finds her a new prison in each new location without confronting the root of their conflict, Tyrion can’t avoid Cersei despite the fact she likely tried to have him killed, just as he can’t ignore that Tywin is now Hand of the King and the sole hero of the Blackwater. While the larger narrative arc of Game of Thrones is of a fantasy epic, King’s Landing has settled into a hotbed of soap operatic intrigue, one that I’m enjoying a lot. It’s the one space where storylines get to evolve in the span of the premiere: we get to see Tyrion’s conversations with both Cersei and his father (the latter of which was particularly great), fleshing out their respective relationships (which the show will continue to explore as they co-exist in the city in weeks to come). Margaery’s trip to the orphanage is reinforced by her time at the dinner table, offering a glimpse of the new “family” dynamic of the Lannisters and Tyrells that the season will be putting to the test and reinforcing that Natalie Dormer is worth expanding the novel’s characterization. It was the space where I felt I was getting more than just a reminder of who people were and what was going on, and the space where the show felt like it was moving forward instead of just moving around.

Sansa is perhaps the one King’s Landing character who has reason to want to flee the city, a goal shared by Littlefinger (who is always moving in his quest for title and purpose to prove his worth to Catelyn). And yet the interesting detail in this dynamic was less their plans to escape the city and more the conversation between their most trusted advisors. Despite my reservations with how Ros’ character has been handled in the series to this point, her scene with Shae discussing their shared fortune in finding a legitimate place for themselves in King’s Landing is an interesting one. It makes the argument that Ros is actually one of the characters who has gone through the greatest transformation in the series, beginning as a lowly prostitute in the North before eventually running Littlefinger’s brothel by the time the third season begins.

It presents her story as one of movement, of her choice to make a better life for herself by moving to the big city and abandoning the life she left behind. The scene is one of the first to make this narrative explicit, allowing Ros to speak for herself regarding her connection to the North, her relationship with Littlefinger, and her sense of self-identity. While I’m not sure the focus on Littlefinger would allow the scene to pass the Bechdel Test, there’s still something meaningful about two of the series’ prostitutes being allowed to have a conversation with each other in which they demonstrate clear agency.

It made me realize that the problem with Ros’ character to this point is that she hasn’t had agency. I never felt like Ros’ journey to King’s Landing was actually her own, but rather the writers seeking to create continuity. Her departure from King’s Landing was a piece of Theon’s story and her arrival was a piece of Littlefinger’s, and she was never truly given a story of her own as to why she took that journey, or how that journey went, or what her life was really like before or after. The retroactive characterization here seeks to highlight agency the show itself wasn’t willing to highlight, a progressive move that does nothing to change what was a regressive characterization in earlier seasons. As much as Ros’ elevation out of the position of random titillation—she appears fully clothed in all of her appearances in the first four episodes—is progressive, it lacks the meaning it would have had if they had actually committed to telling Ros’ story and not just using Ros to tell someone else’s.

It’s a similar problem that the show has with the episode’s big climax, the reveal of Ser Barristan Selmy across the Narrow Sea rescuing Dany from an attack in Astapor. Admittedly, the series is inheriting a very literary reveal: Arstan Whitebeard is a character introduced in the books who exists in the story for an extended period before being revealed as a transformed Barristan Selmy, something the show couldn’t do given that we as an audience would recognize him long before either Dany or Jorah (who in the books was not so quick to identify him). Perhaps knowing this could never be pulled off, they instead craft a simpler reveal in which it’s intended to be shocking that the man we last saw being dismissed from Joffrey’s Kingsguard for the Hound has turned up in a different storyline entirely.

But why? We haven’t been following Selmy’s story, and his characterization was never exactly complex when he was in King’s Landing, and so the moment lacks any real impact. And while one could argue that they’re leaving room for the “Why” of it all, I’ll warn you now that there’s no real explanation next week, at least not to the degree that I had expected. Perhaps it’s to the show’s credit that they’re treating Selmy not unlike they treated Ros (albeit without the resulting problematic gender dynamics), but in both cases it’s created a character that feels writerly in its function within the series’ broader narrative.

This is perhaps unavoidable when you have this many characters. I just found it interesting that the climax was pitched as something thrilling and exciting when I don’t feel I’ve been given a real reason to consider Selmy’s reappearance particularly exciting. It’s a reminder, though, that the somewhat unsatisfying teases we get of Jon’s arrival to Mance Rayder’s camp or Robb’s campaign South are about avoiding that kind of deflating climax. By checking in with those storylines, the series builds the seriality necessary for major conclusions to land with their full effectiveness, for moments like “Blackwater” to resonate. It means that individual glimpses in episodes like “Valar Dohaeris” may prove unsatisfying, but there’s always the sense that it’s a means to an end (or, rather, a means to another parceled out climax to be bundled back up, but we’ll confront that as the season moves forward).

Cultural Observations

• I enjoyed seeing Bronn and Salladhor Saan put up as two similar characters beholden to no power but coin in their pockets. Whereas other characters are in search of a home (Sansa wanting to go North, Tyrion wanting what is rightfully is, Davos wanting to return to Dragonstone), they both emphasize that they are nomads.
• As far as changes from the books go, I’m interested in how Tyrion’s frustration with Tywin getting the credit for the Blackwater victory shifts when Tyrion wasn’t responsible for the chain (which, for non-book readers, trapped Stannis’ fleet in the Blackwater in the book, further ensuring victory).
• I loved a number of stylistic choices here, especially shooting from Tyrion’s point-of-view through the peephole as Cersei waited outside, and the highlighting of Davos’ shortened fingers as he stared into the sun; some evocative work from director Dan Minahan (who returns after sitting out the second season) all around.
• Ciarán Hinds is well-cast as Mance Rayder: while I’m actually with those who imagined the character as younger, it’s more about presence than appearance, and I thought this was a solid introduction (albeit a brief one).
• The real star of Jon’s scene was the first appearance of a Giant, which was nicely imagined—a nice introduction to the particular brand of “fantasy” operating among the Wildlings.
• Lena Headey is often asked to do a lot of nuanced work sketching out Cersei’s character within political situations, but her brief reaction to Joffrey calling her old was particularly effective.
• Without actively delivering any spoilers, there was a line here that really felt as though it was meant as a direct reference to the final chapter of the most recent book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance With Dragons. I’ll let readers make of that what they will and non-readers live in speculation, but I’ll be curious if the former think I’m nuts for reading it that way.

Today, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries ended its 100-episode run, bringing to a close Hank Green and Bernie Su’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Having seen positive impressions of the series on Twitter, I included the first episode in my screening of webseries for my Intro to Television class, which of course meant watching it myself before assigning it. Watching the first episode turned into the first twenty, and then the next twenty, and then I was caught up in time for the last half-dozen or so episodes that have been released this month.

I consider the show to be a tremendous accomplishment, and I am sad to see it go: while I will admit that I would have found only 6-10 minutes of the show each week to be somewhat frustrating, and believe that my binge viewing highlighted many of the show’s achievements, I also missed the opportunity to “live” The Lizzie Bennet Diaries with other viewers. As someone who writes episodic television reviews, I believe in the value of discourse in shaping how we experience texts; as I’ve been following members of the creative team on Tumblr, or the official show Twitter account, and talking with other viewers on my Twitter feed about the most recent episodes, I can’t help but wish I’d have been able to spend the last fifty weeks within that space.

Perhaps it’s fitting, though. It calls attention to one of the primary takeaways from the Lizzie Bennet experience, which is the degree to which engagement is a sliding scale within an online space. Some people followed the canonical Twitter accounts, Facebook updates, and spinoff webseries that coincided with the 100 episodes of the main series; other people followed some of the transmedia components; other people simply watched the main videos—as I mostly did for my own viewing, at least initially—and let the rest be the rest. This isn’t revelatory, nor unexpected: the show’s writers/producers have been upfront that they’re creating a story they know will be consumed in different ways by different people. It nonetheless bears repeating, however, as the show reaches its conclusion: as viewers say goodbye to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, what precisely they’re saying goodbye to may vary depending on their individual experience, to a degree that one doesn’t see with a normal television series (or a “normal” webseries, for that matter, although suggesting there’s a “normal” for a form so comparatively new and experimental may be misguided).

Which brings me to “The End,” the final episode of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries story, and a decision that the creative team has suggested came early on: despite the fact that Pride and Prejudice is centered around the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and William Darcy, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries ends on Lizzie, her sister Lydia, and her best friend Charlotte.

Writer Jay Bushman, asked on Tumblr when they decided that Darcy’s swan song would be Episode 99, “Future Talk,” responded that

“since we spent the first 59 episodes on her relationships with people other than Darcy, it would feel pretty lousy if the show ended with her only focused on him without any recognition of all the other people in her life who are so important — and all the other relationships that make our version of this story different than all the others.”

It’s a compelling argument, and I did a literal—yes, actually literal—fist pump when I finished “Future Talk” and saw from the preview for “The End” that Darcy was absent. It reflects conversations I’ve had about how the show’s characterization of Lydia was its biggest accomplishment, and its most substantial “addition” to the Pride and Prejudice story as far as adaptation goes. I had skipped Lydia’s videos on my first viewing of the series, but was told by fellow academic Kathryn VanArendonk to go back and discover what I had missed, and I was immensely glad I did. Lydia’s story is heartbreaking, and powerful, and demonstrates the power of transmedia as a storytelling tool better than any other part of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.

And I’m afraid that, despite her presence in “The End,” that Lydia will not endure as the legacy of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries in the way I desire.

Note that I’m not suggesting it is some sort of great injustice for Lydia to be marginalized: as I noted, everyone has their own context for how they consumed and received The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and I would not create a hierarchy of my engagement over theirs. However, at the same time, I had a moment of frustration when I saw the—admittedly not final—box art for the Lizzie Bennet DVD that is a part of the production’s highly successful Kickstarter campaign. It features Ashley Clements as Lizzie Bennet, obviously, but second billing goes to Daniel Vincent Gordh, who also appears on the cover as William Darcy. While the back of the DVD features Lizzie, her sisters, and her best friend Charlotte, the front of the DVD eschews the series’ stated focus on Lizzie’s broader interpersonal relationships in favor of the dominant romantic relationship in the story.

It’s possible that this is a contractual issue, which I understand. I also want to emphasize that I like Gordh in the role, and hold no ill-will toward him. I also understand the logic that drives decisions like this one (even if the box art changes, someone decided to create a mockup structured accordingly). The “Dizzie” videos have been among the most watched and rewatched, the anticipation of when Darcy would appear (and what he would be like) percolating within fan discussion for over half the show’s life. The longer Darcy went unseen, the more important the character became within fan discourse, and once he appeared his subsequent reappearances became “special episodes” by nature of their exclusivity. In preparing for Darcy’s final episode, I went and found—and rewatched, I’m only human—a YouTube playlist of all of Darcy’s appearances, meaning that someone has created the ability to experience “The Dizzie Bennet Diaries” isolated from the larger narrative. It makes sense, given both this buildup and the fact that Lizzie and Darcy’s relationship has been so central to the source material’s larger cultural footprint, that their relationship would be a central point of promotion for the series, just as it’s a central part of fan cultures: you see a lot more GIF sets or fan art for a romantic relationship than you do for a non-romantic one, and that goes for The Lizzie Bennet Diaries as it would with any other series.

And yet it still strikes me as underselling the show’s appeal, in that I don’t want the nuance of Lizzie’s relationships with Lydia, Jane, and Charlotte to be marginalized within how people experience the series in the future. I don’t want to oversell how much a DVD box cover—which could just as easily change between now and then—or an unofficial YouTube playlist or a non-exhaustive survey of Tumblr feeds play a role in the series’ legacy; in the end, they’re small parts of a larger web of textuality that will be mediated more by audiences than by artifacts. However, as the series comes to a close, I can’t help but feel that Lydia’s story should be the one that everyone is talking about; as much as I was emotionally invested in Lizzie and Darcy’s inevitable pairing (I spent a good twenty minutes filtering through Tumblr tags last night, to speak to previously mentioned humanity), it was the surprise of Lydia that best captures what makes The Lizzie Bennet Diaries distinctive.

This is primarily because Lydia’s story is a distinctively transmedia one, whereas Darcy’s story—while tied to the transmedia environment through a Twitter feed that was, for a time, the character’s only self-representation—is a more traditional narrative, albeit told in absentia. What I found so compelling about Lydia’s story is that I almost entirely missed it the first time through: with only so much time, I just powered through the playlist of Lizzie’s videos and never thought to click on Lydia’s videos appearing simultaneously. Whereas those watching from the beginning would always be in need of more content and likely at least test out the extension narratives (which also include Maria Lu’s videos from Collins and Collins and Gigi’s Domino videos), I had Lizzie’s videos to consume my attention, and so when Lydia’s situation was revealed in Episode 84, “Ugh,” it was as much of a surprise to me as it was to Lizzie (except that I’ve read Pride and Prejudice, of course, but my memory of the novel is not such that I could have pinpointed the full details of the plot to remember Lydia’s transgression).

What’s so brilliant about that moment to me is that it’s incredibly meaningful for both those who have been following along with Lydia’s story and those who have remained ignorant to it. For those who have been following along, it’s the point at which the storylines converge, and where Lydia’s self-destructive yet also self-fulfilling relationship with George Wickham returns to the main narrative with tragic consequences. However, for those who aren’t following Lydia’s story, Lizzie’s shock is also our shock, and more importantly Lizzie’s guilt at not paying more attention becomes our guilt at not clicking on those prompts to watch Lydia’s latest video that appear at the end of each Lizzie Bennet episode. For the latter, a moment when Lizzie promotes a policy of “non-interference” just as Lydia begins her relationship with George gains new meaning in retrospect; for the former, that moment held some of that meaning already, knowing how her choice to disconnect from her family could keep her from reaching out to Lydia and revealing Wickham’s true character.

It was the moment when The Lizzie Bennet Diaries shifted from an addictive narrative to a meaningful one for me. This is not to say that there wasn’t meaning before, but watching Lydia’s videos was—to use one of the series’ favorite words—illuminating in a way that great transmedia can be. They are a parallel narrative more than a secondary one, shorter in length on average than Lizzie’s videos but often equal in terms of insight.

There’s a brief moment in her fifth video, “Babysitting” (Above), where she talks about her sympathy for a youngest child she’s babysitting for, and it captures a vulnerability that her appearances in Lizzie’s videos to that point really couldn’t capture, and one that Lizzie and Charlotte—who edit those videos—might not even be capable of capturing even if it were on display. The Dizzie kiss might have been the most talked about, and Jane and Bing’s kiss might have been the first kiss to take place during the main videos, but it was Lydia’s kiss with George Wickham that was the series’ first, and its meaning outstrips that of its less tragiromantic brethren.

It is generally acknowledged—word choice!—that the production’s choice to expand Lydia’s character is its most definitive statement as an adaptation, and so I’m not necessarily saying that we’ll just forget about Lydia when we speak of the series in the future. However, at the same time, it’s going to be the Dizzie videos that end up with the most hits on YouTube, and it’s going to be Dizzie that gets the most animated GIFs, and it may well end up being Dizzie on the cover of the DVD. I suppose my only hope is that, since the latter is the one in control of then production, I’d hope that a more holistic representation of the series’ appeal becomes the primary representation of the series when I pull the DVD off my shelf in the future.

I expect this to be somewhat often, although I may end up continuing to use the HD YouTube videos instead. Having gone through the series so quickly, I’m finding there’s things I’ve missed entirely, narrative moments that I had frankly forgotten had taken place. Like any adaptation, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries has been built around a core of problem solving, of figuring out how to tell a particular story within a particular set of parameters determined by the nature of the production. The vlogging conceit is a brilliant way of shaping this story, but it also creates countless challenges of how you justify certain things appearing on camera, and how you need to have people talk while sitting side-by-side on some kind of bench in a way that human beings do not generally do; in addition, more generally, there’s the question of how a story predicated on an early 19^th century notion of courtship and marriage can be translated into the 21^st century.

The solutions to these problems worked not just because they were well thought out, but also because they were inventive and clever (particularly in the latter case, where Lizzie’s refusal of Darcy’s “proposal” to work at Pemberley was a great inflection on their relationship). The show never actually found a sure-fire logic for why people would subject themselves to the videos, but they included enough moments of self-justification to allow the viewers to accept the show’s logic and suspend their own disbelief. The side-by-side conversations became a bit awkward at points, but they also offered some of the most effective uses of space (like Gigi forcing Darcy and Lizzie to talk to one another at Pemberley), which meant you took the bad—I thought Lizzie’s final confrontation with Caroline made no sense from a staging perspective—with the good.

Perhaps the larger reasons I resist a Dizzie-centric reading of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries—beyond the fact that I would like to stop typing the word Dizzie at some point in the future—is that I don’t think it captures everything the show did so well. While its success—I was right there invested with everyone else—is certainly a testament to the series’ broader accomplishments, I continue to believe Lizzie’s journey is bigger than Darcy. I went back and watched the first episode last night, having not watched it since I marathoned the early episodes, and I was reminded that it wasn’t Jane who walked through the door at the end of the video, despite her greater prominent to the “plot” of the story. It was Lydia, obnoxious and overbearing and seeming like a comic sidekick and little else.

And yet her story would not be a comic one; in fact, to categorize the series as a comedy—despite the comic beat the series ends on—would do a disservice to how they rendered the story dramatically (and was, unfortunately, a generic distinction that the Streamy awards forced on the series). Her presence was allowed to evolve, and grow; while Lydia plays an important role in her sister’s conclusion, I want to see more of what happens to her character, how she moves forward with her life in light of what has taken place. Lizzie says in the final video that she is glad she made the videos, and yet we never know what Lydia thinks about the same question. While I can understand why some would want to see the series continue to spend more time with a blissful Lizzie and Darcy, it’s Lydia’s story that holds uncertainty, and complication, and complexity. While reunited with her sister, she never truly got her happy ending; while transformed from an “energetic” problem child to an energetic adult—the “What” callback now a bittersweet glimpse of a past identity—she never got to explore what that means for her future.

This is less a criticism of the series and more a testament to how well Lydia’s arc was constructed, the lack of closure meaningful and perhaps even purposeful. We want to see more of her story but the videos weren’t designed to do this, and the character wouldn’t exactly start her own webseries given what she’s gone through having already done so. It’s a conclusion that encapsulates everything the videos have done, and everything the videos couldn’t do, in a way that Darcy and Lizzie’s story—with its happy ending and clear future—isn’t able to. It’s not an inherently GIF-able moment, but that doesn’t mean it can’t resonate in different, less animated ways. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries may have been novel for its transmedia extensions and its intense fan cultures, but it’s impressive for the way those elements fed into more personal connections with the material; for me, that connection was with Lydia, and I remain hopeful this isn’t forgotten as the show becomes an archive as opposed to a living entity in the months and years to come.

Review: Game of Thrones Season Three

March 25th, 2013

At the conclusion of watching the third season premiere of HBO’s Game of Thrones, I realized something: despite the fact that I had enjoyed the premiere a great deal, it hadn’t featured a single scene with one of my favorite characters.

Of course, this is not a new problem for the series, what with its intense narrative fragmentation: Jason Mittell’s analysis of the series’ “scenic rhythms” spoke to this at the end of last season, wondering whether this helped explain his different responses to the first season (which he binged on) and the second season (which he watched weekly).

I’ll leave it to Jason to actually break down the number of scenes/foci in the second season premiere, but it’s safe to say the show remains committed to telling a sprawling collection of stories in season three. What’s different, though, is that there is no longer—or rather not yet—a central conflict that anchors the narrative in the way that Ned Stark’s plight in King’s Landing or the War of the Five Kings offered in previous seasons (even though the latter is still ongoing, albeit with fewer kings). While the kingdom ostensibly remains at war, the events that open the season place everyone in a sort of holding pattern, leaving each story to create its own purpose and momentum.

These two challenges—an increasingly fragmented narrative and a lack of a clear overarching story arc—are not insurmountable; in fact, I found neither to be particularly concerning, and found the first four episodes of the season to be a most welcome return to Westeros. However, the circumstances under which I viewed these episodes mitigated these factors in ways that not all viewers will have access to. As someone who has read the books, I know where these narratives are heading, and can therefore read purpose and momentum in ways that those ignorant to those futures may not. And as someone who is lucky enough to receive advance screeners for the series, I had the luxury of popping in the second episode when I discovered one of my favorite characters doesn’t appear in the first one, something that those watching weekly won’t have.

What I’m suggesting, I suppose, is that Game of Thrones has evolved in such a way that I’m unsure if my experience with the show’s third season can be successfully mapped into a more generalized “review.” I thought every storyline was well executed, I enjoyed every episode, and I was left wanting more, but I also left wondering how much those responses were shaped by the context in which the episodes were viewed, and if we’re reaching the point where reaction to the series will be divided more starkly among devoted viewers and more casual audiences.

One of the most interesting characters in the third season, for me, is Theon Greyjoy. This is because the series is largely creating its own material, adapting parts of the books that were never told in any detail (since Theon wasn’t a “point of view” character at this point in the books). The show has been expanding beyond George R.R. Martin’s narrative at numerous points throughout the first three seasons, but this is a case where the writers made a clearly articulated change: in the series’ world, Theon’s story is important enough that we need to see what happened after his takeover of Winterfell, despite the fact that not showing his storyline during this season would have been consistent with the source material. It’s an interesting exercise in adaptation, as I know where the story theoretically ends up but am curious how Benioff and Weiss intend to connect the dots. Through four episodes, I’m enjoying their take on the storyline, doing some nice work in both introducing new characters and continuing to explore Theon’s identity as a boy of the Iron Islands whose claims to adulthood are tied to the Stark family, Winterfell, and the atrocities he committed there.

However, I’m not convinced that people who haven’t read the books will find the storyline interesting. As much as I would hope Alfie Allen’s solid work in season two would have captured people’s attention, the fact is the first season’s narrative framing around the Stark family has privileged certain narratives over others. “Do we really need to see Theon when we could be seeing more with Arya, or with Jon, or with Bran,” people could say. I’m sure the writers have an answer to this question, and so do I for that matter, but the answer doesn’t come within four episodes. In fact, there are very few answers in four episodes, and those who haven’t read the books might be waiting a long time for answers in some cases.

This is obviously predicated on some speculation regarding where viewers might stand on certain storylines: it’s very possible many viewers who haven’t read the books will still enjoy seeing what’s up with Theon. However, it speaks to a larger distinction between satisfaction and satiation that will be put to the test during the show’s third season. At any given moment, Game of Thrones is a very satisfying series dramatically, with lots of rich, well-drawn scenes featuring characters we’ve become attached to and new characters that continue to demonstrate the skill of the show’s casting department. There are big, exciting moments in these opening episodes, and the fourth hour ends on what is one of the most satisfying sequences in the show’s three seasons. However, that big climax comes at the cost of intriguing but ultimately thin glimpses of that story in the previous three episodes, slivers of narrative that are enjoyable but lacking in the substance necessary to leave an episode feeling like you’ve seen something, well, substantial. You might leave an episode having enjoyed every storyline, but still feel as though you haven’t been sated.

This is also not new, of course: as I discussed in my analysis of the “Influencer Box” campaign promoting the third season, one of the reasons “Blackwater” stood out last season was the way it narrowed focus, excising most of the storylines to focus exclusively on the Battle of the Blackwater. Perhaps it’s that episode’s shadow that makes the beginning of the third season feel more fragmented: now that we know what the show can do when it tells a contained story within the context of an episode, the piecemeal storytelling becomes less effective. Or, perhaps the problem is that the story is at a point where there isn’t a clear driving force behind the current crop of storylines. Numerous characters are journeying to nowhere in particular, in search of vague and often cryptic destinations; other characters are basically taking a pit stop, assessing their situation before eventually making a move…two or three episodes from now.

What’s frustrating about making this critique is that I actually like a lot of what this accomplishes. The King’s Landing storyline has basically reverted back to “everyday politics” following last season’s chaos, but that means more time to flesh out Natalie Dormer’s Margaery and her betrothal to Joffrey, and the introduction of Diane Rigg’s Lady Oleanna (who steals every scene she’s in). It allows Tyrion’s relationship with his family in the wake of his near-death experience on the Blackwater to simmer rather than boil, which allows him to also enjoy some less severe scenes with Bronn and Podrick. King’s Landing remains the show’s most fleshed out location, and the epicenter for the largest collection of characters, and like in past seasons I’m enjoying seeing the interpersonal dimensions of politics play out on screen.

However, I say this as someone who knows how those interpersonal dimensions play out. As much as I couldn’t point to a single storyline from the third season and suggest that it is poorly executed, pointing to a single storyline doesn’t ultimately point to very much, content-wise. I like where all the storylines are going, but given that I know the ultimate destination it’s hard to know how much that’s coloring my satisfaction. I also don’t know how differently this will play out if I was only watching an episode a week. On the one hand, I think it will make some reveals more satisfying, the post-air conversation taking the conclusions to the third and fourth episodes and turning them into watercooler moments. On the other hand, however, it could also make the slivers of storytelling we get for other characters that much more unsatisfying, and raise further questions about whether the show’s narrative has become fragmented to the point of stretching the bounds of weekly, episodic, serial television.

Ultimately, Game of Thrones remains a highly compelling drama series, as its cast and crew continue to do strong work in bringing George R.R. Martin’s world to life. There are some stunning location shots in the first four episodes, reminding us that the world of Westeros plays an important role in simultaneously grounding the show in its various locales and giving it the epic scale of fantasy. And as someone who has read the books, I continue to be impressed with the way the writers are reimagining the story in confident yet careful ways, their changes evident without necessarily seeming out of place. This is still very much the same show it was last season, and for that matter the season before, when it comes to general execution.

The problem is simply that there’s more of it, as there was last year. The more stories the show has, the more the adaptation bends under the stress of juggling a dozen storylines, something the show will face with each subsequent season even if we factor in the fact that multiple characters could be killed off by season’s end. While I would personally argue the storylines that open the third season are more compelling on average than those that began the second season, featuring combinations of characters—like Jaime and Brienne, an early season highlight—that offer more dynamism on average, I don’t know if someone who is invested in the “narrative” of the series more than in the process of its adaptation will find as much to enjoy within these opening episodes.

I realize this is somewhat strange criticism—“Someone else might not like it as much as I did”—but I think it speaks to the tension inherent within the adaptation as a whole. The fact is that George R.R. Martin did not write a linear narrative, and it only becomes more sprawling as the books progress. Benioff and Weiss are telling their own story, breaking off of the “Book per Season” adaptation and often crafting storylines that are similar to yet different from Martin’s original, but the third season already shows that there’s only so much streamlining you can do while maintaining the sense of scale Martin put on the page. It is a compliment to the show that I was left wanting more from nearly every storyline following the first four episodes, as it suggests that I enjoyed what was there, but there’s a limit to how long that will function as a compliment. The catharsis I felt upon the conclusion of the fourth episode reminded me of how strong the show can be, but it also threw into stark relief how much that climax had been withheld while spending time laying building blocks elsewhere, and how differently I might have felt if three weeks had elapsed instead of three days.

As a book reader, and as someone who has enjoyed the show to this point, everything I’ve seen of Game of Thrones’ third season suggests it will continue to be one of the strongest dramas on television. But I would feel uncomfortable taking this evaluation outside of the context of my specific experience; with each passing season Game of Thrones becomes a more complicated text to take in as a viewer, and from this point forward I can’t help but feel that each season will be a test of patience and commitment, albeit an exciting and attractive one.

Cultural Observations

• My goal is to do weekly reviews for as long as I have screeners, and time permitting afterwards—I don’t know how realistic that will be, if I’m being honest, but we’re going to try. I’ll have my review of the premiere up on Sunday.

A Box of Influence: Game of Thrones and Cultural Capital

March 22nd, 2013

Two years ago, HBO shipped a collection of critics, celebrities, and cultural observers a box designed to introduce them to the world of Westeros. The box, which I wrote about in detail here, served as a sensory journey into what was at that point a new televisual universe, one HBO hoped would become a centerpiece of their brand identity. By sending the box out to “opinion leaders,” the hope was that they would share their experiences with the intricately crafted artifact with their readers or followers, setting the tone for a series sold in part on its lavish production design and attention to detail.

This month, HBO shipped a collection of celebrities a box designed to initiate them into the world of Westeros. However, the Westeros of 2013 is different than the Westeros of 2011. If the “Scent Box” of 2011 was designed as an artifact of the fictional Westeros, the various personalized “Influencer” boxes being sent to people like Mindy Kaling, Anna Kendrick, Bruno Mars, Jaime King, Patton Oswalt, Stephen Colbert, and Conan O’Brien are artifacts of the pop cultural Westeros. If the 2011 campaign was designed to establish the authenticity of Game of Thrones’ fictional world, the 2013 campaign seeks to reaffirm Game of Thrones’ status as a cultural phenomenon as its third season premiere beckons.

While the first campaign was largely heralded as a sign of HBO’s commitment to the series’ mythology and helped associate the show with quality discourses valuable to a premium cable channel, the latter campaign has been met with some criticism (although not by the celebrities themselves, most of whom have not been shy about performing their fannish [and NSFW] response to the delivery). To paraphrase sections of my Twitter feed in the past few weeks, HBO is effectively spending thousands of dollars to send rich celebrities personalized gifts to promote a show that is already wildly successful and likely to run for many seasons, all while smaller shows like Enlightened are canceled due to a lack of viewers (and, tied to this concern, a lack of promotional support). In addition, picking up on a discourse that was not uncommon during the initial campaign, some fans simply wonder why “celebrity” fandom is more valued than their own: one fan at WinterIsComing.net wrote “This is really unfair. Why do celebs get this sent to them? We’re the fans. The real fans.”

However, the “Influencer Box” reflects broader shifts in how television success is measured: even since 2011, the perceived value of Twitter and other forms of social media has dramatically increased, even if the industry as a whole remains uncertain as to how to monetize that value. HBO’s decision to turn Game of Thrones loose into the world of celebrity self-disclosure reflects their belief that the best strategy to draw new subscribers is not just to promote the show itself (which they continue to do), but rather the idea of the show as a social media event. While the Influencer Box features the first two seasons on Blu-Ray, ostensibly encouraging those who receive or read about the box to watch the series, it also includes “exclusive extras which the owner can use on their social media sites to show off their fandom,” which HBO is now extending out to the “real fans” through a collection of site-specific giveaways on sites like WinterIsComing.net or Slashfilm. While reminding viewers about the third season premiere is the stated goal of the box— as demonstrated by the “scroll” that accompanies the box urging celebrities to promote the March 31^st return date—the larger goal is informing the world that Game of Thrones is bigger than just a television show.

While one could argue that the show is already successful enough that this gesture to celebrities is unnecessary, I would argue it fits with the television industry’s general approach to social media, which is driven by the aforementioned sense of uncertainty. HBO and every other television channel or network continue to pump resources into this area because they don’t yet understand how sustainable social media can be for long-term growth. HBO knows Game of Thrones has a huge presence in social media, and knows this has value, but the perceived ephemerality of social media chatter—which changes minute to minute—means that another show could replace it at a moment’s notice. If HBO sees its social media presence as a lucrative space for drawing new subscribers, it also probably doesn’t have enough data to know at what point that presence can become self-sustaining, which results in campaigns that register as unnecessary but could theoretically be what keeps Game of Thrones on the “throne,” so to speak.

To this point, I’ve suggested that this marketing effort is speaking less to the text itself and more to the fandom surrounding it, which BBC News recently outlined as the most powerful evidence of the show’s wide-ranging success. However, in watching the first four episodes of the third season (which I’ll “review” closer to their airdate, and hope to cover week-to-week time permitting), I’m wondering if it’s not so much that there is no relationship between HBO’s promotional strategy and the show itself, and more that the promotional strategy reflects an inherent challenge of any serialized drama. The fact of the matter is that Game of Thrones is not a show where “big” things happen on a consistent basis: much of the early part of each season is spent putting pieces into place, introducing (more) new characters, and telling bits and pieces of stories that may eventually reach a thrilling climax but will take a while to get there. This is true of any serialized drama (including AMC’s The Walking Dead, another show built around social media engagement), but it’s especially true with Game of Thrones’ highly fragmented narrative. Sometimes episodes feature only a single scene based in one location; in other episodes, entire locations are ignored and yet the attention of the episode is still split roughly seven different ways.

It’s an arrangement that demands a degree of devotion from its viewers, in that more casual audiences might not have the patience to sit through a season premiere in which their favorite character doesn’t even appear, or wait for a resolution to a storyline they care about as it’s dragged out over the course of four episodes. Game of Thrones’ cultural appeal has been in its execution—pun unintended but not unwelcome—of big moments in its narrative, but its ongoing appeal depends on people being willing to wait for those moments, which will not appear in each and every episode. “Blackwater” may have been the second season’s greatest triumph, but it was also an episode that in its tight focus on a single location diverged from how every other episode of the show was structured. By encouraging intense engagement with the text on social media, it allows for shows like Game of Thrones to sustain a strong presence within those spaces even for episodes that fail to deliver the watercooler moments that would otherwise activate that discussion.

To be clear, I am not arguing that the first episodes of the third season are unexciting, because the show remains one of the most compelling on television. However, I find it compelling because I am decidedly devoted: having read the books, and written thousands of words about the first two seasons, and accidentally popularized an increasingly ubiquitous phrase, I have committed myself to the world of Westeros in ways that more casual viewers have not. It’s a commitment that many will make not through writing long reviews but rather through tweeting, whether with friends or with cast members or with critics, and one that could make each week’s episode—regardless of its number of beheadings—an event.

The Influencer Box was not simply designed to promote the process of watching Game of Thrones, but rather to promote the idea of engaging with Game of Thrones as though it were a part of your life. The customization of the boxes allowed celebrities like Anna Kendrick to place themselves into the series’ lineages—Kendrick’s sigil is a slanket—and gave them access to a level of fandom that HBO wants fans to emulate (even if they can’t get a customized box of their own, although see the edit below for how HBO hopes this will be facilitated). The fictional war that broke out between Kendrick and Patton Oswalt is the kind of performative fandom HBO wants to encourage. A recent online campaign, “My Watch Begins,” saw HBO urging viewers to record their own version of the Night’s Watch Oath, which would then be collected together as a united voice professing their devotion less to the cause of the Night’s Watch—I presume many of them intend to break at least a few parts of that Oath—and more to Game of Thrones as a cultural entity.

Edit: As with the Scent Box campaign, HBO has gone and added an additional element that speaks to part of my analysis in the days following my writing about it. The “Join the Realm” website allows fans to create their own sigils, which mirrors the sigil creation that Kendrick’s social media chatter inspired, allowing viewers to place themselves within the show more readily (you can see mine to the right). It still doesn’t exactly match up with the customized boxes and the “influencer” logic, but it gives fans the tools to act on their creative impulses within a branded space, which is what the Influencer Boxes were designed to do within a specific celebrity niche.

Of course, there’s no way of clearly measuring Game of Thrones as a cultural entity. Although Wired somewhat satirically outlined a number of ways we could measure television success in an age when the Nielsen ratings are proving more and more at odds with how people experience television, the fact is that even HBO won’t have a clear sense of how much a collection of personalized wooden boxes impacted their viewership or subscription numbers, and they likely won’t reveal such information even if they obtain it. But as companies like Trendrr begin to quantify social media use surrounding specific shows, and as actors throw out “Most Tweeted About Show” as a sign of success, the pressure to at least appear to be responding to those metrics is evident. And while Game of Thrones has had a strong Twitter presence since before the show premiered, and communities like WinterIsComing.net have helped cultivate Twitter as a productive space for fan activity (which the show’s creators commented on during a recent Q&A), the standards for what constitutes engagement are increasing as social media becomes less an added value and more an institutional requirement. The Influencer Box is HBO’s way of reflecting this change in how television shows use social media, going above basic interaction by using celebrity fandom to broadcast the popularity of their show to millions of potential subscribers.

It also reflects how Twitter has become reconceptualized as a mass audience space. Between 2011 and 2013, the cultural impression of Twitter has shifted from a space where niche Internet users—and thus niche television audiences—congregated to a space where millions of casual viewers can be theoretically transformed into devoted fans. Whether or not this is actually true is a different question entirely (although see recent reports regarding the correlation between Twitter discussion and actual viewership), but the different messages of the two “Box” campaigns discussed here suggests two different conceptions of social media. Whereas the “Scent Box”—and the food trucks and other elements tied to it—distinguished Game of Thrones through a close attention to detail, the Influencer Box distinguishes through the bombast of celebrity; while we could simply say that HBO is looking to escalate its campaigns to continue momentum, the escalation could also reflect the fact that Twitter is—in the eyes of television networks, at least— no longer perceived as a space where nuanced distinction can be as easily or effectively communicated.

As with most considerations of social media, we’re left with more questions than answers. I’d be interested to know if any celebrities who received the boxes chose not to tweet about them (which I know happened with the Scent Box). I’d also be interested to know if any boxes were sent to celebrities who hadn’t expressed their appreciation for the show, in an attempt to get them hooked. But above all else, I’m simply curious how HBO and other channels/networks will continue to evolve their social media strategies as the target of “engagement” continues to move. Although the Maester’s Path campaign reflected a desire to create a distinctive transmedia experience, the Influencer Box has introduced a mass media aesthetic to the principles of social media engagement; whether it has the desired effect will be something to watch, even if we still aren’t exactly sure where we’re supposed to be looking.