Game of Thrones 2-10: Valar Morghulis

(No, this is not a change of format.  My randomizer has just served me alternating RahXephon and Game of Thrones episodes for the past four weeks.  Believe me, I'm as baffled as you are.)

"Valar Morghulis" is basically the structural opposite of the previous episode of Game of Thrones, "Blackwater".  That episode narrowed down the scope of the series to one event and location and greatly benefited from it, producing the best episode of the series thus far (although one that was still affected by some of the show's other flaws).  What's more it was a distinct episode of television, separate from what came before and what came after but still in continuity with them.  It was a sign that this show could be, if not brilliant, at least moving.

But in the finale things revert to form.  As I mentioned many moons ago, a season of Game of Thrones often feels like a ten-hour movie chopped up into one-hour chunks for the convenience of broadcasting, which kind of goes against the whole point of serialized TV.  Part of this is the ever-expanding scope of the series: as the characters scatter to the four winds, we have to follow every one of them, resulting in more and more plotlines.  This is an extended episode, but even so it feels like it's in a desperate rush to touch base with every plotline just to set it up for a cliffhanger going into Season 3.  Jason Mittel counts 12 main stories in this episode, which is off the charts as far as TV episodes go.

It's tempting to compare this expanding universe to that of The Wire, which was constantly adding new layers to its portrayal of Baltimore.  But the major difference in my mind (besides sheer quality) is that The Wire envisioned all of these as part of a complex societal machine.  In Game of Thrones the various stories are certainly connected, although some of the more far-flung adventures -- like Jon Snow's travels beyond the Wall or Danerys's troubles in Qarth -- are rather isolated.  Still, there's the implicit promise that even those will pay off in time.

It's hard to know really where to begin, then.  Giving a fair amount of consideration to each plot would make this post a lot longer than I have the time or effort for, and to scale back and try to cram everything in would more or less reduce the post to recap.  Perhaps this is why episodic bloggers, already a breed given over to recap and thumbs-up/thumbs-down evaluation, love Game of Thrones so much.  It may not give you the best stories or characters on TV, but it certainly gives you the most. (But this is probably just me being bitter.)  This may explain why, even more than usual, I'm going to ignore big parts of the episode and focus on the implications of just a couple of events.  It's not like it's an unified whole in itself, after all.

In particular two one-off scenes highlight the economy of sexual violence in Game of Thrones, as well as the economy of just plain violence.  In an early scene we have Joffrey swapping out his fiancee Sansa for a more politically prudent model in that of Margery Tyrell, the kind of deal that is brokered very carefully behind closed doors (although this is never explicitly shown) but has to be performed before the court so it appears spontaneous and cinematic at the same time.

(It's hard to make out in this reduced image, but that's the happy couple in the background, dwarfed by the ceremony surrounding them.)

The idea of romantic marriage, which didn't really exist in actual medieval times, appears to be an ideal in Game of Thrones, if a seldom-reached one.  Margery and Joffrey make shows of confessing their improbable love for each other, even though it's an obviously political marriage, and Robb marries Talisa in a small and politically impractical ceremony because he swears he's in love.  It's hard to say whether or not this is a conscious change from the actual beliefs of medieval Europe or simply a misunderstanding of them.

This marriage frees up Sansa, who was previously one of the many recipients of Joffrey's sexual violence.  His violence is obviously supposed to mark him as a villain, but the show also seems to take pleasure in displaying it cinematically, even when it doesn't seem to really add anything to the story or the character (the peak being the scene where he makes a pair of hookers beat himself).  Sansa suffered this violence quietly, always pledging her love for Joffrey, and it was hard to tell whether she actually believed what she was saying or not.  Sophie Turner deserves a lot of credit for her acting this season, and the broad smile when her engagement is broken, finally showing her true feelings, is the most joyous moment of the episode and maybe the series thus far.

But of course, this is Game of Thrones, so her happiness lasts a matter of seconds.  She is immediately offered protection by Littlefinger, an offer that is hard to refuse but nevertheless has sinister undertones -- not least because Littlefinger owns a whorehouse, and has just been given a big spooky castle.  Sansa is a near-constant  subject to sexual violence, or what Sady Doyle bitingly refers to as the game of "Who's Molesting Sansa Stark?"  In part this is because of how determined she is to traditional gender roles, which makes her vulnerable to the power of men above her as well as the rage of white male authors

On the other side of the equation we have Brienne, who embodies non-femininity.  Her sole scene begins with Jaime light-heartedly threatening her with gang rape.  They then came across three girls executed for "laying with lions" or prostituting themselves to the wrong side of the war -- a harsh enforcement of the restrictions on female sexuality.  They are set upon by the three men who killed the women, who promptly laugh at Brienne and imply that they raped one of the women.  Despite being on the "good" side of the war, fighting for the Starks, this establishes them as worthy of the violence which Brienne shortly visits upon them.

I've mentioned this before, but it's still a troubling idea that the series presents.  In the world of Game of Thrones, sexual violence is a currency and a tactic, and certainly commonplace.  It appears in both subtle forms (arranged marriages for political ends) and blatant ones (rape by random soldiers).  But the series suggests that violating traditional femininity, or simply being powerful and strong-willed enough by Danaerys, is a way of protection against this culture of rape.  Such acts certainly have the capability of subverting the patriarchal ideology that justifies such sexual violence.  But they also put the onus of this violence on the women -- after all, if they were all as cool and strong as Brienne, they wouldn't be in trouble all the time.  And queer or otherwise gender-non-performing women in the real world certainly have no special resistance against rape and violence -- if anything, they're more frequently targeted for it.

Sansa and Brienne may be the most obvious targets, but the threat of sexual violence seems to hover constantly over every young female character, whether it be a momentary obstacle to be cut down (as Brienne does to the implied-rapists) or a long-term danger that proves harder to escape (as with Sansa's many engagements).  Certainly this is part of Game of Thrones' intended commentary on gender roles in its society, and our (possibly just historical) society by implication.  But it's hard not to wonder if the narrative isn't also using sexual violence as a kind of currency, providing at once vicarious thrills and the exhibition of simplistic justice.

One final, aesthetic note.  In my first Game of Thrones post I mentioned that it used different colour schemes to differentiate between its far-flung locations.  It still does that to an extent -- the barren whiteness of the North -- but overwhelmingly the mise en scene is dominated by black and orange.

(See also the above King's Landing pictures.)

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this shift -- possibly it's just a change from day to night, with the torchlight providing the orange glow.  But it seems symbolic of a greater tension within the series.  As the scope expands and expands, the range of possibilities in Game of Thrones becomes smaller and smaller.

Next week: "I came to fight, you know, I wanted to get bloody, have fun..."

Game of Thrones 2-08: The Prince of Winterfell

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Episodist, a testament to the determination in my madness.  Hopefully I've got the hang of this by now.  A big thanks to all of the readers, who (judging from my stats) mostly stumbled here looking for "Archer Pam porn" or "incest in Suburgatory" but maybe stayed for a moment before backing out and looking for something that would actually satisfy their carnal cravings.  Speaking of weird sexual stuff, here's Game of Thrones.

The central metaphor of Game of Thrones is right in the title: it's all a game, a view of politics as a strategic struggle that can (and has) been rendered into a boardgame.  This means that the series takes a gamer's perspective: it is not a question of morality, but rather of competence.  The characters that can succeed strategically are glorified: they get all the best lines, have things turn out their way, and win every argument.  The characters that fail are verbally (and sometimes physically) beat up at least once an episode.  Game of Thrones is not really morally nuanced, as its fans argue, it just has a morality that runs parallel to the one we usually think of.  It's the morality of competition: the central sin is weakness and stupidity, which the whipping-horse characters of Game of Thrones are constantly accused of.  This is why the series is almost entirely unconcerned about the mass of people that live in this fantasy world.  They aren't nobility, so they've already lost the game.

The biggest example of this in this episode is Theon, the titular false prince.  He's captured the central castle of the Stark family, but is unable to get respect even from the young children he captures, who are incredibly nonplussed and easily escape.  Later in this episode, his sister stops by to spell out for him and the audience why he's being dumb and will be unable to hold the castle.  The whole conversation has the air of somebody writing a political screed disguised as a dialogue: his sister is hyper-rational and sympathetic at the same time, taking Theon's beliefs apart piece by piece, while he responds with only increasingly emotional blurts.  It's a strawman dissection, but the strawman isn't really a political position, but a strategic one.

Joffrey, the young king, is another example of those pilloried characters.  He's basically a sociopathic, cartoonishly evil ruler, but this is not enough to earn the series' condemnation.  Instead, as Tyrion (often an authorial voice) argues in a previous episode, he's mad and an idiot.  We only have one scene of his in this episode, where he proposes leading the charge himself, which confirms his vainglorious nature that goes against the show's belief in realpolitik and dirty, effective strategizing.  Joffrey accrues negative personality traits like an evil Katamari, all of which stem from his strategic ineptness, which began (the series suggests) with executing Ned Stark and starting this whole messy war.

Finally, we have Catelyn Stark, who in this episode lets her camp's prize prisoner, Jaime Lannister, go free in exchange for the possibilities of seeing her captured daughters again.  Her son Robb upbraids her for her sentimentality bordering on treason and takes her prisoner.  (You could probably do an interesting Freudian reading of this whole scenario, but it would be a bit of a stretch).  True to form, Cat isn't given much verbal ammunition to defend herself for this strategic blunder, and comes off as an idiot for not being willing to sacrifice her daughters for strategic value.  We don't even see the release, a scene that would require us to enter her perspective at least a bit.

But daughters are so often sacrifices in the Game of Thrones universe that it's hard not to feel a bit for Catelyn, and I don't think the series is entirely unsympathetic to her either.  In an earlier episode Tyrion married off Cersei's daughter for her own safekeeping as well as a good bit of strategic advantage, and last season Catelyn had no issue with promising the absent Arya (along with Robb) to the disturbing Frey family in exchange for a momentary advantage.  Even if the girls' lives are not literally consumed, their lifetimes are used as fodder for political gain through marraige.  Seemingly every female character (except the masculine Brienne and Arya, whose lack of interest in girly things makes them immune from such degradations) uses sex to get their way, usually on behalf of some male power.  Catelyn's act is an ineffectual, desperate rebellion against the patriarchy of the world, a patriarchy which Game of Thrones does not hide despite its distaste for all things feminine (besides breasts).

An interesting point of comparison is Robb's love affair with the nurse Talisa, which conflicts with that whole marraige-for-a-bridge thing again.  This is strategic foolishness, but once again the show views it as more acceptable, and it receives far less condemnation than Catelyn's plot to rescue her daughter.  (Although that may just be because nobody knows about it).  The whole thing is played as a standard romance plotline, with the earlier marraige as the genre-required obstacle between the lovers, and their sex scene in this episode is shot as a victory, not a mistake.  This relies on the generally assumed supremacy of not just male desire over female desire, but of romantic love over familial love.

I should stop to add a sidebar here.  To a certain extent Game of Thrones is consciously critiquing value judgements like this, and it's highly critical of the restrictions of its patriarchal setting.  But that's not incompatible with believing in a more modern kind of patriarchy, in which girls are cool as long as they play with the boy toys, and the sexual objectification of women is a mark of seriousness and sophistication.  Its would-be feminist critique is estranged from the world we live in, and it seems unlikely to do anything but make the viewer remark about how bad things were back then.  On the other hand, its patriarchal pleasures are immediately accessible to us.  This may be imparting too much intention to the text -- certainly you can make a feminist reading of it (as I've tried to do in the paragraphs above).  But if there is a feminist voice within Game of Thrones, it's a voice that's always displaced and counteracted.

(Even if we do take its feminist argument seriously, it has to be noted that it's the most mainstream, priviledged, and liberal type of feminism, more concerned with the self-expression of a white nobleman's daughter than the brutal lives of the prostitutes the camera lingers over.  But that's a rant for another time).

Speaking of Arya, her adventures are interesting mainly for existing in a significantly different genre than the rest of the series.  Of course, most of the show's scattered plotlines are somewhat generically different, offering up a basketful of different pleasures for its broad viewership.  We have Danaerys's orientalist fantasy, Jon's survival horror story, the main war narrative, and all of it occasionally giving way to sporadic bouts of romantic comedy or softcore porn.  But Arya seems to be existing in a children's adventure story, albeit a particularly dark one, which operates according to different rules than the rest of the broader narrative.  Abigail Nussbaum has suggested that Martin's novels follow a lot of YA conventions, and this seems like the most obvious example.

Take her bargain with mysterious pronoun-adverse criminal Jaquin, in which he offers to kill three people in exchange for her freeing him from a burning cage.  This is a grimdark riff on the classical genie story, a story that abides by the logic of fairy tales: if you do a good thing, magic will reward you.  In the rest of the series, doing a good thing is likely to get you killed, and have Tyrion show up and wag a finger at you for your idealism.  Arya uses her first two deaths on local bullies rather than the big bads of the series, another sign that she seems to be existing in her own dimension with child-sized stakes.  The scene when she escapes Harrenhall with her friends[1] (a hunky love interest and a chubby comic relief right out of central casting) seems like a gang of misfits sneaking out of the house with her friends, although the hanging body does put a bit of a damper on things.

There's a strange contrast between these adventures, which are not light-hearted but certainly seem more innocent than the generally cold perspective of the rest of the series, and that of the setting in which they take place.  Harrenhall is a supposedly invincible castle that was burnt to a husk, and its presence suggests the ultimate doom of all the mythology that the kings and lords wrap themselves around.  What appears to be mythical -- an invicible castle -- is vulnerable to the mortal.  Its hollowness represents the hollowness of power, even the brutal, fly-by-night power of the Lannister army camp.  In the opening credits, it isn't even animated, a formal death.

So the question remains -- is the brutal realpolitik that the series professes to believe in, its gamers' view of the world, the fire that burns away the pretensions of nobility?  Or is it (and this would be more interesting) another facade, another invincible palace, tha is as doomed as Harrenhall?  I doubt the series will ever answer this in a way that satisfies me, and a completely coherent thematic answer would be too pat anyway.  But in the meantime I'll be sitting here, waiting for more idols to go on the fire.

Next week: "Perhaps a good woman will become a better friend for him than a good person."

[1] And that's another thing.  What other Game of Thrones character can refer to someone unironically and unreservedly as their friend?

Game of Thrones 1-03: Lord Snow

Thus far Game of Thrones is less of a TV show and more of a show that just happens to air on TV. The concepts I've been fumbling towards in the past few weeks, things like series space and genre fusion, hardly seem to apply to this series. Whereas even serial dramas typically establish a kind of status quo to tell stories within, Game of Thrones is constant motion, telling one big story without stopping for breath. It seems like not a television series but rather a 10-hour movie split up into manageable chunks. In this regard it's very reminiscent of Rome, which for all its virtues had enough rapid-fire plot twists and scenery changes that in the end you just wanted to throw up your hands and beg for a filler episode where Vorenus and Pullo go to the beach or something.

So “Lord Snow” starts with Ned Stark arriving in King's Landing, being promptly whisked into a meeting of the governing council, and finding out that the kingdom's finances are basically in the shitter and it's going to get worse with King Robert's demand to hold a tournament. In a way this is a big scene: the past two episodes were mainly about getting Ned here, and now he finds out that the problems are much deeper than he thought. It would seem more naturally to be an episode-ending cliffhanger, not an opener, especially when the two conflicts it introduces – the kingdom's debt and the upcoming tournament – both go unmentioned throughout the rest of the episode. “Lord Snow” touches a lot of plots and characters the same way: we have one scene with Joffrey, one with Sansa, a couple with Arya, one scene back at Winterfell, and so on and so forth. Some of these scenes are worthwhile while others are just versions on “Hey, just as a reminder this thing is still happening.” It's acceptable, though somewhat questionable, to space plotlines far apart in a movie or novel, but watching a story unfold one scene a week is kind of excruciating.

“Lord Snow”, however, does more closely resemble a typical episode of television than its two predecessors. (Yes, I am terribly behind on this series. I watched the first couple episodes a couple months ago, but only had TV-time for one new show, and I decided The Killing looked more promising. Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm catching up on Game of Thrones now because, well, the only real alternative is watching another season of True Blood, and I'm not falling for that one again.) It has three major plotlines, one in each of its three settings, which advance the plot without creating a completely new status quo. It's the type of quiet episode dramas secretely thrive on, where everything calms down a bit and we have a chance to start getting comfortable with these people.

The world of Game of Thrones is split into three seperate spheres, two of which are related and one of which seems far away and connected through only the different past. The series reserves specific colour palettes for each setting: dark blues and whites for the north and The Wall, fiery reds and yellows for the Dothraki desert, and regal gold and ruddy brown for the urban world of King's Landing. It's a simple visual device, but very effective, and for better or worse makes it seem as though the plotlines are taking place in different worlds.

(I also appreciate the set design, which really recognizes that it's the Middle Ages and everything is basically pretty shitty. It's not so much true in the royal palace, but go back and look at the Stark's castle, which is really quite crude – and they're the lords of the place!)

The King's Landing plotline concerns Catelyn's ill-advised information-gathering mission and how it is quickly derailed by an old suitor with schemes of his own. Of all the stories here this one is the most blatantly setting up pieces for later episodes. Most importantly we (and the Starks) learn that the dagger that was used to attack their youngest child Bran belongs to Tyrion Lannister.

In contrast to the hey-this-person-exists scenes this is good serialization: we spend a significant amount of time with these characters and get a definite advance in the plot. It also introduces Littlefinger, one of the few characters that lives up to Martin's reputation for complexity. Littlefinger is a schemer, inherently untrustworthy and always with a secret up his sleeve, but he's also kind of pitiful. Being threatened in the same manner by both halves of the Stark couple makes him look sympathetic and misunderstood, and his genuine (albeit unrequited) love for Catelyn in a society where women are married off for convenience is a burning, resentful passion at the centre of his character. He owns a whorehouse, but is still hung up on a childhood flame and devoted to her, like the sap that always follows the cheerleader around doing her homework (say, does that count as Vocational Irony?) He stands out in contrast to the “I know everything” superhumanity of his co-schemer Varys, who is admittedly helped out a lot by a genuinely creepy performance by Harry Lloyd.

The benefits of televization (that's totally a word. It's perfectly cromulent) are most apparent in the Wall plotline. When I was reading Game of Thrones (which I only got about halfway through before putting down in disgust) I groaned every time Jon Snow and Tyrion would show up. They were such blatant author favourite characters: Jon with his angst and Oh So Special qualities, and Tyrion with his one-liners and bad boy attitude. I felt as though Martin was really trying his hardest to make me love Tyrion, which seems to have worked on many but just made my contrarian soul irritated. It didn't help that Martin felt compelled to drop a pithy line about being a bastard or dwarf every page whenever one of them was in the vicinity. So a plotline centring around Jon and Tyrion was doubly groan-inducing.

But for some reason the Wall plot in “Lord Snow”, important enough to even give the episode its title, didn't bother me nearly as much. It's not just that I don't have to slog through Martin's prose: visually seeing Jon tossing his fellow recruits around makes him look like more of a bully and less of a man who's just better than everyone else, which both makes him less of a Mary Sue and makes the other recruits' angry reaction seem more justified and less like shallow envy. Jon's arc in “Lord Snow” then becomes not a condescending step down to the “little people”, but a lesson against flaunting his priveledge, even unconciously.

And then we have Tyrion, who still suffers from the “Look, isn't he a badass?” factor – look at the scene in which he walks into a room where Jon is being cornered by his fellow recruits and tells everyone off in a glorified fashion. But it helps that Peter Dinklage actually has the charm that Martin tried so hard to impart to the character. And in the later dialogue scene between him and Lord Mormont he manages to get in some good lines but still comes off as a flippant observer unappreciative of the men who keep him safe.

We usually talk about “adaptation decay”, but I think Game of Thrones is an example of the opposite. Martin's book, despite a basically interesting core plot, is so laden down with pet characters and bad prose that I couldn't finish its admittedly huge length. But a TV series is naturally a group production, and suffers less from one man's love for his own creation. In addition, the economy required for a ten-episode season means cutting out a lot of the repetitive angst from Jon and Arya*. There's also the fact that a visual media like television allows a more direct experience than a novel, and can be more immediately wowing. So while I'm pretty contemptuous of Martin's novels, I'm so far reservedly enjoying the TV show.

The third area of the show and the one most disconnected from the rest is the adventures of deposed royalty Viserys and Danaerys in the Mongol-esque society of the Dothraki. This is one area of the adaptation that has proved most problematic: in a visual medium it's inevitably more obvious that the “savage” culture just happens to be the one made up of the show's only non-white characters.** This is only made more exploitative by the overt sexualizing of the “savage prince white princess” storyline. Some of the shots look like the cover of a sleazy “erotic fantasy” novel. As if that weren't enough, Emilia Clarke's dead-eyed stare and last episode's subplot which rolled into lesbian contortions with her handmaid as a way of teaching her how to properly please her husband is enough to make you think that you turned on the wrong pay cable station.

However, one thing David Beinoff, D. B. Weiss and the rest of the adapters have done well is to juxtapose the Dothraki storyline with that of the Seven Kingdoms. When the out-and-out selling and rape of Danaerys is juxtaposed with the negotiations over Joffrey and Sansa's engagement, it invites the observation that although Sansa's marriage is less outwardly brutal than Danaerys's, neither has any concern for the women involved. (As we find out in “Lord Snow”, Joffrey isn't too fond of the marriage either, but at least he'll get to be king.)

In addition to learning she's pregnant, in this episode Danaerys is confronted with her violent brother Viserys, and just as he's about to abuse her she finds the Dothraki warriors interceding. (Viserys basically belies the series ad copy that “in Game of Thrones nobody is all good or all bad”, which is in itself less of a point of praise and more of a basic prerequisite for interesting characterization.) The abused Dany suddenly finds that, as the Khalisi, she has gained the power to escape her brother's abuse. Of course, this comes at the cost of bowing down (ifyouknowwhatimeannudgenudgewinkwink) to another patriarch in Khal Drogo.

If there's a paralell to the main storyline here it doesn't involve Sansa (who's barely in this episode) but rather the new ruling class of the Seven Kingdoms. There's a series-original scene that involves a drunken King Robert berating a servant (who is apparently a far-flung member of the Lannister clan) and then commiserating with Jaime about their past in the war that gained them the throne. Like Danaerys, they have both thrown off one tyrant (in both cases a mad Targaeryn) but in exchange for their powers have gained new masters. Robert is constrained by his debtors and the duties of his positions, while Jaime is forced to serve under a man who abuses his family and fucks the sister that he's in love with. Ned is in a similar position, having fought long against the Targaeryns only to establish a kingdom infested with the Lannisters he despises. The fact that this scene is immediately followed by the Viserys/Dany confrontation establishes what is really Game of Thrones' first interesting idea: that servitude to some form of power is basically inescapable, and by overthrowing one master you may gain much, but will inevitably have to serve a new one. It's a pessimistic and maybe conservative message, but one that is hard to argue against given the histories of both Westeros and Earth.

“Lord Snow” is written by series creators Beinoff & Weiss, as the past two episodes have also been. As adapters it's up to these two to be more workmen and less creators, and they rise to the challenge admirably. (You can see this in the first episode not scripted by them, 1-04, which is noticably clunkier.) David Beinoff is a crime novelist as well as a screenwriter for genre pictures like Troy and, uh, Wolverine: Origins. Game of Thrones is a series that draws on both of these genres, transplanting the gritty scheming of crime novels to a high fantasy environment. This is at least the reputation of Martin's novels, and the grimy surroundings of the TV series make it fact. The fact that the early plot is driven by what is essentially a murder mystery just further emphasizes this. D. B. Weiss brings the nerd cred, being the author of a video game tribute novel Lucky Wander Boy and various sci-fi and fantasy projects. The episode's director is Brian Kirk, who's worked on a lot of very different shows. Among those credits are historical dramas like The Tudors and Boardwalk Empire. To the extent there's a clear directorial style to this episode, it stems from this genre – the camera frequently stops to take in the carefully rendered scenery and costumes. Game of Thrones is technically not a historical show, stemming from no history of our world, but often acts like it – especially what John Perich has described as the “Blood, Tits, and Scowling” subgenre. As in Steins;Gate two weeks ago, the staff reflects the unique mix of genres involves in this show – high fantasy, crime, nerd pandering, and historical epic.

“Lord Snow” is not a monumental episode of television, but because of that it moves Game of Thrones in the right direction. Of all the episodes of the series I've seen so far, this is the one that feels more like a well-constructed episode of television, that moves the story forward while being a satisfying product in its own right. Game of Thrones still has a lot of work to do – for starters, someone needs to send all actors (not just the ones on the show, but actors in general) a memo about how being in a fantasy epic doesn't mean you have to speak in a quasi-British accent and chew scenery relentlessly. Of course, the dialogue they're given, full of bold pronouncements and self-satisfied quips, doesn't help matters much. As some critics have noted, the Dothraki sequences are the weak link here, the only case of the series simplifying the novel. But “Lord Snow” is a move towards what this series promised it would be: a complex political drama with nuanced statements about power and society. It is becoming an adaptation that elevates instead of merely translates.

*I'm not going into a lot of focus on Arya, who had the only other real storyline in “Lord Snow”, concerning Ned discovering her sword and getting her fencing lessons. The struggles of a tomboy against a patriarchal society has been done to death and neither Martin nor Beinoff and Weiss bring anything new to it. Worse, the foil to Arya is usually not society but her girlier sister Sansa, which reduces the whole thing to a “swordfighting is cool, weddings drool” re-phrasing of macho values.

**Franchise partisans defend stuff like this by claiming that it's only reproducing what the historical medieval period was like. Ignoring the fact that in the Middle Ages it was actually the white Europeans who were the backwards culture, there's no reason why this would have to be transplanted onto a fantasy world at all. Personally, if I was in charge of the Game of Thrones adaptation – well, first I would do everything I could to change it into a Perdido Street Station TV series, but if that didn't work then I'd cast all or at least some of the Seven Kingdoms characters as black. Pissing off fanboys would be a nice side benefit of this.

Next Week: A careful examination of a cultural relic from the ancient year of 2004, specifically an episode of The Shield.