Following last week’s gamechanger
— the death of King Joffrey — this episode was a
quieter affair that focused on many of the characters scrambling for position.
That said, it still built to several harrowing scenes
in some of the far-flung plotlines, and a good old-fashioned orgy back home in
King’s Landing.
Let’s start in the capitol, where things picked up
immediately after Joffrey’s gruesome demise. Ser Dontos, the disgraced former knight turned fool, spirited Sansa away just in time, before Cersei
— now crazier than ever! — ordered the guards to shut
down the city and bring Sansa before her. Dontos dragged Sansa to a remote
shoreline and rowed her out to a waiting ship owned by Lord Baelish,
a.k.a. Littlefinger — or just Petyr,
as he prefers Sansa to call him. Littlefinger
quickly explained that the necklace Ser Dontos gave
her was in fact the hidden receptacle for the poison that killed Joffrey, and that Dontos had been
working for Littlefinger. Sansa
was confused by all of this, and then horrified when Littlefinger
gave Dontos his “payment” in the form of a half dozen
crossbow bolts that turned him into a human pincushion.
In the books, the Dontos/Sansa
relationship was much better established. She had started to trust him, and
look at him as her only real shot of getting out of King’s Landing
alive. She thought of them as a modern reincarnation of an old bard’s tale, Florian the Fool and the maiden Jonquil. So it was arguably
more of a shock to her when she discovered that Dontos
had been working for Littlefinger all along, for Littlefinger’s specific purposes. We’ll get more into that
next episode, I’m sure. In the meantime, the good news for Sansa
is that she’s out of King’s Landing for the first time since literally early
Season 1. The bad news is that everyone thinks she had a hand in regicide, and
the only person who knows otherwise is a master gameplayer.
Good luck, Sansa!
Actually, at least one other person knows that Sansa was an unwilling accomplice in Joffrey’s
death: Lady Olenna, the Queen of Thorns. That’s
because it was Olenna who actually poisoned the
little shit. The show did not make this explicit, but most viewers put it
together after scrutinizing the shots from last week’s episode. Olenna grabbed the purple “jewel” from Sansa’s
necklace while fidgeting with her hair and, at some point when everyone’s
attention was on Joffrey and Tyrion,
slipped it in his cup, or possibly the wine decanter. She has yet to reveal
this to her granddaughter Margaery, who is freaked
out by watching her second husband die in such a brutal manner, and is pissed
that she keeps marrying duds and has yet to become queen. Olenna
assured her that her position is better now than it would have been had she had
to live with a creep like Joffrey, and pointed out
that the Lannisters still need Highgarden’s
money and food as much as ever.
So cue Bachelor No. 3, because Joffrey’s
death means there’s a new king: Joffrey’s kid brother
Tommen, who has been recast and rapidly aged to, I’m
guessing, around 12. I believe Tommen in the books is
still very much a boy, not even a tween. (Did they
have tweens in medieval times? I guess 15 would have
been middle-aged then…) But in both portrayals he is sweet, considerate, and
timid — basically the opposite of his older brother. Lord Tywin
wasted no time explaining to Tommen that though he is
now king, the best thing he can do is shut up and basically let Tywin run the show. And Tywin did
all of that while literally standing over Joffrey’s
corpse and saying explicitly what a shitty king he was. Tommen
seemed to get the message, and by the way, Tywin
wants him to understand why he needs a wife, and what he will need to do with
her. Imagine having The Talk with your grandfather — your totally scary,
emotionally dead grandfather — and you can see how screwed poor Tommen is.
Speaking of screwed, Jaime and Cersei had a horrifying scene where Cersei
instructed Jaime to murder Tyrion (she is absolutely
convinced that Tyrion killed Joffrey),
and then recoiled in horror when Jaime tried to comfort her and touched her
with his fake hand. Jaime responded in the worst possible way by raping his
sister in the middle of a church, right next to the corpse of their dead child.
This was uncomfortable to watch and I suspect all of the audience’s sympathy
for Jaime was wiped out in an instant.
On the other side of the sex coin, we got an intimate moment
with the Red Viper (Oberyn Martell), his paramour Ellaria Sand, and at least three prostitutes, a mix of male
and female. They are really driving home the Dornish
Indiscriminate Sexy Time Hour, with Oberyn literally
telling the male whore that the point of life is to have as much sex as you can
before you’re too old for people to want to sleep with you. It is a lovely
worldview, and I am going to embrace it. Unfortunately, TywinLannister crashed the party, and he is the definition
of “boner killer” (again: poor Tommen). Tywin gave Oberyn a half-court
press about any role he could have had in killing Joffrey,
but mostly wanted to ask Oberyn to sit as one of the
three judges in Tyrion’s trial, and also to serve on Tommen’s Small Council. Oberyn
questioned why Tywin would trust a man who obviously
hates his guts — they discussed The Mountain’s role in Oberyn’s
sister’s death — and Tywin impressed us all by being
the first person to have a grasp on all of the various threats that are poised
to destroy Westeros at any given second (wildlings at
the Wall, Iron Islanders plundering the coast, Stannis
pursuing the throne, and oh yeah, Dany and DRAGONS!).
I have been suspecting that the show was going to take a very different route
with the Red Viper than the books, and this scene offered more evidence to that
effect. They’re really building Oberyn up nicely.
Tyrion, meanwhile, sat in his
cell, and was visited by his squire, Podrick Payne.
Pod gave him an update on the impending trial, and dropped a few nuggets:
nobody knows anything about Shay, Sansa bailed
(though Tyrion believes her to be innocent), Bronn is not allowed to see Tyrion,
and Tyrion knows that this is a frame job perpetrated
by someone who wanted him out of the way. The scene also allowed Tyrion to order Pod to leave King’s Landing before someone
could kill him for not testifying against Tyrion. I
hope that Pod listens, because I would prefer that the adorable sex machine not
end up with his head on a pike.
Further afield, The Hound and Arya
came upon a kindly farmer who offered them hospitality, and then lived to
regret it after The Hound screwed him over and stole his money. On Dragonstone, Stannis learned of Joffrey’s death and Davos had a
“Eureka!” moment while enjoying storytime with Shireen. At the Wall, Sam tried to take Gilly
and her baby to the whore enclave of Molestown, where
he assumed they would be safe should the Wildlings attack. Good luck with that,
because Ygritte and her south-of-the-Wall crew
slaughtered a town full of farmers and sent a child witness to report about it
to Castle Black. The Night’s Watch is, thankfully, not made up entirely of
morons, so they knew that the Wildlings were trying to draw them out into open
combat. Unfortunately their resolve crumbled when two of their brothers
returned from north of the Wall, where they had been held
captive by the Watchmen who mutinied at Craster’s
Keep. Jon Snow proved that he does know SOMETHING when he realized that
as soon as the Wildling army hits Craster’s, the
ex-Watchmen are going to tell them how poorly defended the Wall currently is.
This is a plot point that I don’t believe ever happened in the books, and I’m
curious why they’re complicating a fairly straightforward arc like this.
One place where I think the show is improving on the books
is Daenerys’ story arc. Around this point in the
novels Dany’s plot starts to get really repetitive
and, frankly, boring. But I loved the sequence this episode, with her army
finally reaching the gates of Mereen. After a one-one-one battle of champions outside the gate (New Daario did a fine job here, and sincerely I do not think
Original Recipe Daario could have pulled off that
scene convincingly), Dany gave an impassioned plea to
the slaves of Mereen and made her “assault.” That
consisted of catapulting barrels filled with broken slave collars over the city
walls, where they exploded all around the Mereenese
slaves. The episode ended bluntly, with one of the slaves picking up a broken
collar and turning to look at his petrified master. Well done, show. And Emilia
Clarke is so effing good in that role.
That said, the star of the episode
to me was Charles Dance as Tywin Lannister.
He’s a great actor, and had some juicy material this episode. As Tyrion put it, Tywin never fails
to capitalize on a family tragedy. And that is why we love and recoil from him.
But I do not want him to talk to me about sex. Let’s leave that to Oberyn Martell.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2014.
