“Sons of the Harpy”
May 3, 2015
As noted last week, my reviews of Game of Thrones have shifted to The A.V. Club, but I will continue to link them here for regular readers. Warning: These are reviews intended for book readers, so if you want to know absolutely no small details about the story as told in the books, you may want to steer clear.
Game of Thrones – “Sons of the Harpy” [The A.V. Club]
This exposition is fairly unnecessary to book readers—although the reduced number of Sand Snakes means that it’s good to know which ones the writers chose to keep, ultimately any fan who watched the video revealing the new cast members this season understood who was who. However, there is another significant thread of exposition in “Sons Of The Harpy” that is one of the rare cases where its presence is just as valuable to readers as it is to non-readers. At three very conscious moments in the episode, viewers are given pieces of history that flesh out characters the show has largely elided to this point, but which are crucial to a prominent fan theory. For non-readers, it’s exposition that one can presume will become relevant as the season and series progress; for readers, it’s potentially confirmation of…
Cultural Learnings 
“Are you ashamed of me, Father?” Whereupon Stannis reveals far more of his carefully-concealed humanity than we’ve ever seen previously, confessing that the doll he once bought for her was probably the means and mechanism that led to her disfigurement and almost-inevitable death from grayscale.
It’s an episode that bristles with ellipses and middle fingers struggling to aim themselves at Littlefinger.