Hast thou tried Head and Shoulders?
Winter is coming.
Remember that saying? Sure, it's floating on all those (now a bit sad looking) Stark banners, but it's also a big, honking, important theme behind the whole series. Enough so that I sometimes think naming the television series Game of Thrones after the first of the novels is a bit of a mistake. It puts the emphasis squarely on all the maneuvering to plant a posterior on that ugly iron chair, and that's certainly entertaining. Only ... it's a sideshow.
The Big $%@*&!ng Deal has always been up in the North, where strange white zombies have been roaming about since the first minutes of episode one. And even if they weren't ... winter is coming. Everyone knows it's coming. Everyone knows it's going to be bad. Like ten years of night and more snow than fell on New England this year bad. Only instead of filling the cellars with potatoes and putting aside N to the 10th cords of firewood, people are busily trampling fields, going stabby stabby, and burning down forests (and houses).
So when winter finally stops coming and just IS, things are going to be bleak. And we got a hint of that this week. Head below the fold for all the action.
Game of Thrones spent a significant amount of time in the North this week, where everyone has a chilly dusting of snow on their scalps and the world is getting reduced to a palette of black, gray, colder gray, and white. With some very cold blue-white for color. This is the first time in a long time the series has reminded us that it's getting cold out there. Winter may not quite be here, but summer is definitely over.
Jon Snow, still settling into his role as Lord Commander, is taking a big risk by riding off to meet with the Wildlings. The people he's going to see want to kill him. The Night's Watch he's leaving behind isn't too fond of the Wildling's or Jon. But Eddard's eldest (err ... maybe) realizes he's caught between a rock and cold place. They need to fight with the Wildlings instead of against them if anyone is going to survive what's ahead.
With Jon off to the North North, Sam is left to tend to the ailing Maester Aemon. In a departure from the books, the kindest of old dragons dies at Castle Black, and Sam delivers a moving eulogy—right before Ser Alliser delivers a threatening reminder that Sam's friends are thinning out. Sure enough, the next thing we see is Gilly getting harassed by a couple of watchmen intent on rape, rape, rapity rape. Because ... of course. Note that while Gilly takes some rough treatment in the books, this scene isn't there, but in GOT the TV show, it seems that every motivation boils down to the same thing.
Look, after last week I'm not going to dwell on this too long, but if rape or potential rape is the only way you can think of to invest a scene with tension, or find to threaten a female character or challenge a male character, well then... Step. Away. From. The. Bloody. Keyboard. Let someone who has a language composed of more than one motivation take a shot. Thank you.
I do like Sam climbing back to his feet and shakily challenging his enemies before Ghost sweeps in to conveniently save the day. And then, sexy time ... which doesn't really make a lot of sense for either of them. Quota, I suppose.
Speaking of last week, down at Winterfell, Sansa is still being battered and literally bruised by the sadistic asshole, Ramsay. Last week, someone asked me how I would have handled the Ramsay/Sansa scene differently, and I didn't have a good answer. This week I do. I would have left it out. This week we can see the effect on Sansa, we can see the pain and desperation she's facing, and we can see the conflict put on Theon/Reek when Sansa turns to him for help. None of that required an actual rape scene.
Asked to help Sansa, Theon takes the signal candle and heads ... straight to Ramsay, where he spills the details of Sansa's escape attempt and gets the old lady who had offered to help Sansa made into the latest example of the Bolton family hobby. (I just noticed this week that the little model of Winterfell now has a flayed man on it. How sad is that?)
Meanwhile, Brienne waits out in the snow. She looks wrathful, powerful, very cold ... and totally wasted. Does it really take a candle in the window to convince her that it's time to come running?
Wedged in between Winterfell and the Wall is the army of Stannis Baratheon. Encouraged by visions promising victory, Stannis has marched his force across the snowy hills, only to be trapped by a blizzard that's killing off the horses and running off the mercenaries. Stannis can't stay where he is, but he can't really move. However, the Red Priestess has an out: a little more king's blood to assure a victory. Presumably Stannis's own corpuscles were de-magicated in the creation of that scary shadow baby, so Melisandre wants to tap the only other royal veins available—little princess Shireen. And she makes it clear that it's going to take more than a few leeches to produce the amounts of red stuff necessary. Stannis is going to have to choose between his daughter and his dreams ... though there's enough vagueness in Melisandre's visions that the remaining Baratheon brother might just lose both.
Warming up a bit, we head south to King's Landing. There Tommen finds that it's not always good to be king. Not if being king doesn't come with the ability to extract your comely queen from the clutches of the populist uprising/sackcloth inquisition known as the Sparrows. Cersei makes a show of trying to get Queen Margaery freed, but naturally this is really an excuse to gloat about how Cersei has turned the tables on the young queen.
However, Cersei isn't the only one scheming in the Red Keep this week. Not only is Littlefinger back in town, he's joined by Margaery's grammy, the awesome Diana Rigg as Catherine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine as Lady Olenna aka The Queen of Thorns. Together the two find one of the many skeletons piled up in Cersei's closet, cousin Lancel Lannister, who helped murder King Robert on Cersei's orders (and also engaged in the Lannister family sport of having sex with relatives). Cersei finds that her journey to the Sept isn't quite as satisfying as expected.
When every royal in King's Landing is in a dungeon, does Littlefinger win by default? Stay turned.
The primary threat to extract Cersei from her cell would be Jaime, but he's in still warmer climes trying to bring home young Myrcella from Dorne. Confronting his niece/daughter, Jaime gets a rude reminder of how long the young girl has been left on her own. "This is my home," said Myrcella. Her desire to see King's Landing or Casterly Rock is somewhat less than zero, and as she painfully reminds her father before departing "you don't know me."
Both the scene with Jaime and the scene with Cersei left me thinking: "wait a sec, don't the Lannisters have something called a ... a ... Big Powerful Army?" How is that the queen can get pushed around in the capitol and the royal uncle has to sneak into a supposed allied state to grab confusingly related child? I realize that without Tywin to run the place, the scary factor in Lannister-land dropped significantly. But at this point, the whole family should just decamp King's Landing. They're not running anything anyway.
Down the hall from Jaime, his travelling companion Bronn demonstrates a pretty fair singing voice while languishing in prison. From the cell across the hall, one of the Sand Snake trio tempts the sellsword by flashing her boobies to speed up his heart and kick some poison into overdrive. Only after Bronn declares her the most beautiful woman he's seen does she toss him some antidote and rearrange her conveniently easy to remove fightin' silks. It's a silly scene. And if you're expecting me to bemoan the sexploitation of this interlude, please take a chair in the corner to wait. I'm a man, dammit. I am not immune.
Finally, over the sea we have ... well, a mess, that's what we have. In a plotline so rushed it becomes six shades of ridiculous we finally push some never met before main characters together. First we have Daario pretty much backtracking on every piece of advice he's given in the season, from who to marry to who to trust. Next we have the fighting pits, which were reopened specifically on the promise that it would be only freedmen fighting by choice, but instead we don't even comment on the fact that what we're getting is a parade of slave fighters being butchered. Meanwhile, there's a short series of rushed and unbelievable events hustling Jorah and Tyrion into Dorne by transporter. Then Daenerys happens to drop in on their specific fighting pit at the same time as the folks in charge have completely forgotten to provide any guards that might stop one of the slaves from taking up a weapon and rushing up into the pit whenever they want.
I understand that it was important that we get these two in front of Dany, and sure, I, like most of the Western Hemisphere and two-thirds of the East, would not want this to take anything like the time it's taken in the books. But still ... this was a low-budget Gladiator parody complete with the most ineffective slavers and disorganized games imaginable. If this is the best Meereen can do, it's a wonder they weren't conquered by the Lollipop Guild. We can only hope that, now that the traveling is over, the actually conversation gets a bit more thought.