Read the previous entry in this series here.
Read the next entry in this series here.
1.10 “Fire and Blood”
Read the next entry in this series here.
1.10 “Fire and Blood”
Written by David
Benioff & D.B. Weiss
Directed by Alan
Taylor
Commentary by David
Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alan Taylor
About half of this episode focuses on the aftermath of Ned’s
death and how various factions are handling it. The other half is about
Daenerys dealing with the aftermath of her choices regarding Khal Drogo’s life
and Mirri Maz Duur. In both cases, though, much of the action rests on younger
people ignoring the advice of cooler heads.
The entire incident was instigated by a young person
ignoring the advice of his council, after all—Joffrey was not supposed to
execute Ned. Nobody’s plans included that—not Cersei’s, not Tywin’s, not Petyr
or Varys’, and definitely not Ned’s. When Kevan suggests that—in light of Jaime’s
capture and both Renly and Stannis claiming the throne—the Lannisters sue for
peace, Tyrion points out that Joffrey ruined any chance of peace by killing
Ned. Tywin agrees, saying that if Ned were still alive, they could have used
him to broker peace, maybe ransom back Jaime. Joffrey killing Ned ruined
everything, and now the realm is in chaos.
Joffrey continues to be a complete twerp by hauling Sansa
out to the walls where they’ve stuck everyone’s head on spikes and forcing her
to look at Ned’s and Mordane’s. This is where Sansa’s tempering begins; her
inner strength is evident even here when her face is all blotchy and her eyes
are dead. She back-talks Joffrey, which makes him angry, and he says that
Cersei has taught him that a king should never hit his lady. So instead he has
Ser Meryn do it for him (I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the lesson). With her lip
split and bleeding, Sansa notices that Joffrey stands over a pretty deep drop
to the ground below and manages three or four purposeful steps toward him
before Sandor stops her and cleans her lip for her. So Joffrey has learned
nothing from anything that happened, and has no idea what mistreating Sansa
(and the realm) is going to lead to. He thinks being king makes him
all-powerful and untouchable because he’s young and a spoiled brat.
Jon is also ignoring advice—Aemon’s “love is the death of
duty” advice from last episode. He mounts up, intending to ride South to help
Robb, and only his new brothers chasing him down (and Sam getting knocked off
his horse by a tree branch) stops him from becoming a deserter. Instead, Lord
Commander Mormont convinces him that he needs to help fight a bigger, more
important war—the one between the White Walkers, the Wildlings, and the rest of
the kingdom. The last shot of Jon in this season has him heading north, beyond
the Wall, with a couple of hundred Nights Watch, on the Great Ranging.
Dany’s failure to listen to wiser heads happened last
episode, and now we have the aftermath: Drogo is essentially comatose, the khalasar has scattered, and Dany’s son
Rhaego is dead. Instead of running away with Jorah, or at least not enlisting
the help of a maegi whose entire clan
was killed or enslaved, Dany completely wrecked the khalasar and all her hopes for the future. One could even argue
that not listening to Jorah led to Drogo’s illness in the first place, since
Drogo and Mago wouldn’t have fought over Dany if she hadn’t insisted on
claiming all the women. Dany learns a strong lesson here, too, that helps to
undercut the Great White Savior thing she’s started to have—Mirri asks what,
exactly, Dany thinks she saved, since Mirri’s clan is dead or enslaved, her
temple is burned, and Mirri herself was raped three times before Dany ever got
to her. Dany insists that she saved Mirri’s life,
but Mirri has an object lesson to hand of what life is worth if that’s all
there is. Drogo is technically alive.
So what? Dany fully expected Mirri to help her in good conscience and to the
best of her abilities—to save the man who was the cause of all of Mirri’s
recent suffering—because Dany rescued her.
The Stark camp is probably the only place where there aren’t cooler, wiser heads. Or at least,
not many. Catelyn finds Robb ruining his sword on a tree and calms him down,
replying to his vow that he’s going to “kill them all” with a reminder that
Sansa and Arya are still in the Lannisters’ custody, but as soon as they get
them back, “then we will kill them all.” At their war council that night, Jonos
Bracken urges Robb to join up with Renly and swear fealty to him, combine the
strength of their armies and sack King’s Landing. Robb makes the same mistake
Ned did by insisting that Renly isn’t the king because he’s the younger
brother. Technically, that’s true; tactically, Renly is a much better choice
than Stannis, who hasn’t shown his face yet. His refusal to consider joining
Renly leaves an opening for Greatjon Umber to declare that he doesn’t want any southern kings: “It was the dragons
we bowed to, and now the dragons are dead. There sits the only king I mean to
bend my knee to. The King in the North!” Everyone else quickly falls in line,
and the schism in the kingdom grows bigger; now it’s not just about who gets to
be king and who killed whose father, but a full-blown Brexit war of
secession.
Even Tyrion’s rejecting a reasonable and wise order from his
father: he plans to take Shae to court with him. This is stupid for a number of
reasons. First of all, just as a matter of social etiquette, court is no place
for a prostitute. Also, he seems to be forgetting that she’s paid to hang out
with him; it seems he’s interpreting her temper tantrum at being left behind as
honest fondness for him and not as a paid companion seeing the biggest mark she’s
ever had about to slip through her fingers. Finally, he’s defying his father.
He already shared the story of what happened with Tysha; why in the world would he think this would end any
better? He’s not just defying his father, he’s defying the most powerful man in
the kingdoms, the man whose punishment of a rebel sworn bannerman was so
thorough that it destroyed the entire house and inspired “The Rains of
Castamere,” which has become the Lannister theme song. Of all the bad ideas
that happen in this episode, this is the epitome of bad ideas.
Speaking of bad ideas, let’s take a brief detour (before we
get to the good part of this episode) to talk about sexposition. Again. This
episode has two scenes of it, one pretty brief and one longer one. The first
one—Cersei getting the news that Jaime has been taken captive while Lancel
wanders naked around her room—is understandable. A lot of this episode is
people getting news of things—Ned’s death, Jaime’s capture—and of course we
should see Cersei getting this note. It also helps to establish that Cersei isn’t
exactly faithful to Jaime and has a bad habit of sleeping with family. This
becomes important in the books (I don’t recall just how important it is to the
series), so I’ll allow it. The second one, however, falls right in line with
many of Benioff & Weiss’ other sexposition scenes in that it tells us
nothing we don’t know and does nothing but take up space and show us Ros’ naked
body. (I think we’ve seen Esme Bianco dressed all of twice in the entire
season.) What the scene does do is imply that there’s more to Maester Pycelle
than a doddering old man, which, if I recall correctly, was on Julian Glover’s
insistence that he not play “just” a doddering old man. And sure, book-Pycelle
is a bit more than a doddering old man—he’s an informant for the Lannisters. So
what? They couldn’t have given the audience that impression without Pycelle
yammering about nothing in particular for five minutes while Ros cleans herself
up from their tryst? Not to mention that this scene brings the action of the
episode—the season finale—to a
screeching halt. In the commentary, Benioff and Weiss claim that including this
scene was either “ballsy” or “folly,” and I’m gonna go with “folly.”
If there’s one thing this episode did right, it was the end.
This was the big payoff—the moment all book readers had been waiting for. Daenerys
constructs Drogo’s funeral pyre, ties Mirri Maz Duur to it, has the dragon eggs
placed on it, and lights the whole shebang. Dany doesn’t know much about magic,
but she has a vague sense that this is the recipe needed to do something big,
something important, and she walks into the fire in order to be part of it. And
when everybody wakes up the next morning, she’s sitting in the ashes, naked,
three teeny dragons clinging to her. The show has done a lot of work to set
this up as a Big Deal, since dragons were the Targaryen’s shock troops, the
whole reason the Valyrians had as much power as they did in the first place,
and they’ve all been dead for centuries. Dany’s claim to the Iron Throne looked
completely hopeless not ten minutes ago, but now she has dragons (and a brand
new, I Am the Blood of the Dragon attitude).
So there we have it. A
Game of Thrones, in full color and action, covered pretty well in the space
of about ten hours. I have my quibbles with it (obviously), both as an adaptation
and its own narrative, but season one did a really good job with the source
material.
RIP: Drogo, Mirri Maz Duur, Rhaego
Next week: We take a break to visit with family, but season
two starts the week after.
Images from screencapped.net
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