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'Game of Thrones,' Season 1, Episode 4 Recap
by Maureen Ryan, posted May 8th 2011 10:00PM
['Game of Thrones' - 'Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things']Undoubtedly those who have stuck with 'Game of Thrones' have favorite story lines at this point. Generally speaking there are four threads at the moment: the Wall, King's Landing, the Dothraki and finally the doings at Winterfell (and along the Kingsroad).
For me, an entire hour at the Wall would be time well spent.
There's good reason the Wall story line has been so successful: It's an able and well-acted rendition of a story that has been told many times in many different mediums. It's the tale of a crop of raw recruits, most of them orphaned or abandoned, being transformed into not just a fighting force but an ad hoc family.
Of course there's a crusty old salt giving them a hard time. Of course they find their only respite from their loneliness and fear in each other. We'd feel cheated if the story didn't contain those old standbys.What's happening at the Wall is what's happened in a million war movies and in hundreds of stories of young people in search of themselves or on a quest of some kind. Jon and his friends are (like the protagonists in 'Lord of the Rings') taking us through group version of the Hero's Journey. This story has such resonance because, when it's done with reasonable facility and energy, we identify with the hero or heroes, whether they're hobbits, Colonial Marines or Hogwarts students. The characters in these stories face great danger and some of them wonder if they're up to the task at hand, but at least they have each other.
Maybe I'm really enjoying the Wall scenes because that rough, self-contained world is the setting for that kind of familiar, satisfying bildungsroman. Then again, maybe I'm enjoying those scenes because they're exceptionally well acted and written. John Bradley is a great addition as Samwell Tarley, and I continue to be very impressed with Kit Harington's quietly charismatic performance as Jon. The affinity I had for his story in the books is only deepened by being able to see the formidable, unforgiving world in which he finds himself.
Having said all that, those scenes may be working well for me because they're mercifully free of the exposition-heavy dialogue that sometimes afflicts the rest of the series. We know what's going on at the Wall and who the main players are, we don't have to have it explained to us repeatedly.
Given that we know the shape and direction of this story, these scenes can focus more deeply on the characters, whether it's Ser Alliser Thorne terrifying his recruits or Jon and Sam becoming firm friends. Sam's story about being expelled from his own family after his own father threatened to murder him was heartbreaking, as was Jon's silent reaction. The look on his face said he felt every bit as abandoned as Sam did.
Though he's very good at conveying Jon's inner struggles even when he's silent, Harington proved his adeptness with more dialogue-heavy scenes when he and his new friend were cleaning the common room. In telling the story of how he couldn't quite seal the deal with Roz the prostitute, Jon showed how heavily his status as a bastard weighed on him all his life. It was terrific stuff and it made me invest in these characters deeply, which is the whole point of this story. As I said, it made me wish we'd spent the entire hour at the Wall.The story lines set in the Dothraki world were moderately effective as well, although some of the exposition about the Targaryens' dragon-taming history and about the past of Daenerys' retainer, Jorah Mormont, was a bit clunkily shoehorned in.
Still, Emilia Clarke continues to be effective in the scenes that depict her realizing just what a liability her lunatic brother is. I first saw the scene in which she admitted to Mormont that she had no faith in Viserys in January, in the clip reel HBO showed to the media, and that's the scene that made me excited about seeing what Clarke would do with this challenging role. So far she's proven she's very much up to the task of making Daenerys a compelling part of this world.
I found the King's Landing scenes more problematic, especially the ones that were full of exposition and explanations. One of the things hindering the momentum of this series is the endless scenes of people talking about things that happened in the past, things that could be happening in the present and things that might happen in the future. Especially in King's Landing, there's a lot of telling, not enough showing.
The advantage of filmed entertainment is that characters can reveal themselves by doing things, but long stretches of these early episodes feature characters telling each other what they've done or might do. While I intellectually understand the reasons for that -- we need to be familiarized with people and relationships quickly -- it gets tiresome at times, and I just wish the season had had more episodes in which to do these complex situations and people justice. (Sidebar: I'll reiterate my fear that, if HBO and the producers attempt to do season 2 in 10 episodes, which is their apparent intent, even more depth and complexity will have to be jettisoned in favor of incident and plot. That would be a real shame, because thematic ambiguity and the richness of the characters and their relationships are what set George R.R. Martin's 'Song of Ice and Fire' books apart.)
Again, it's not that I mind the fact that the show has to introduce people and relationships, but we're four episodes in, and there's still a whole lot of set up going on, and some of the exposition is clumsily inserted. For instance, all that stuff about the Greyjoys came more or less out of nowhere; it was quite obvious that this was the "let's set up the Greyjoys' history" episode.
One thing the show does a lot is try to disguise the exposition in a scene, but it doesn't always do it well. Take Sansa's impromptu history lesson: That was like trying to disguise a pregnancy with a baby-doll T-shirt. The light covering doesn't for a minute disguise what's really going on. If we knew these characters more deeply, it might not matter, but they are, in many cases, still somewhat unknown to us, so when the dialogue is dry and functional, the show loses the fluidity and momentum it has in other scenes.If there's one scene that exemplifies what I'm talking about, it's the conversation between Littlefinger and Sansa at the tournament. Here's one character we don't know well talking to another character we don't know well talking about a third character we barely know at all.
We didn't see any payoff to that scene, we don't know the full effect it had on Sansa or why Littlefinger chose to tell a girl he barely knows the grisly tale behind the Hound's scars. The episode quickly moved on, rather inexplicably. The show either needed to go more deeply into that interaction and those characters, or find a different way to get us that information.
I was not left pondering tantalizing new clues and intriguing knowledge; the Sansa-Littlefinger scene left me thinking, "What was the point of that, exactly?" It didn't shed meaningful light on any of those characters, though it may partially explain the Hound's less-than-perky demeanor. The scene was simply inserted because the writers wanted us to have that knowledge. We've never seen Sansa and Littlefinger interact before, and we may never see them interact again. This is the kind of information that is much, much more compellingly conveyed in the books, where it has all the context and character depth it needs to make the information about the Hound resonant and interesting.
When 'Game of Thrones' tries to have it both ways, or, more accurately, goes only halfway -- giving us incidents from the novel but without stopping to give us full and rich contexts for those incidents -- that's when the show is at its weakest. There was a similarly unsatisfying feeling after the scene between Ned Stark and Cersei. We know these two don't like each other, and we had that confirmed in that scene, but, well, so what? I suppose we have to wait for what comes next, but the scene just sort of petered out without offering us compelling new information about their relationship or clues about where they go from there.This is what happens when the narrative is not more aggressively shaped and molded to fit into the television format. Books function differently than television does, and as I said in my overall review, each episode of 'GoT' has to be narratively satisfying on its own, it can't just faithfully render one-tenth of an 807-page story. I think the TV show is most successful when it focuses on fewer characters at a time, but right now we've got the potpourri approach, which works some weeks better than others.
Still, generally speaking, this episode had some good scenes and moments, and it was generally OK, but it did significantly disappoint me in one respect.
The tournament, which was lovingly described for pages and pages in the books, was underwhelming on screen. The crowd wasn't big enough, the setting wasn't impressive enough, the action wasn't all that exciting and it just didn't feel like enough of an Big Event. I'd been looking forward to this set piece, which is a key sequence in the novel. This was one of those cases in which what transpired on the scene left a lot to be desired, compared to the world George R.R. Martin conjured on the page.
Hail of bullets (or arrows):
• For an in-depth interview with Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys, go here.
• We got our first glimpse at Hodor, who, in this version of the story, is much older than I'd pictured him to be. Never mind, I don't think age is really a factor when it comes to this role. I look forward to seeing how he fits in with the rest of the Stark family and its retainers.• Any scene involving Ned Stark and Arya is just golden, in my humble opinion.
• While Michelle Fairley was excellent in the arrest-of-Tyrion scene at the inn, the direction of that moment left something to be desired. Call me crazy, but if she could see the sigils or house crests of the men around her in the inn, then shouldn't we have seen them as well?
• I think Rory McCann has tremendous presence as the Hound, which is a good thing, given how little the character speaks.
Here are a few housekeeping notes. Please keep in mind that every commenter will be held to the standards set forth below.
• Some background on how I'm writing these weekly reviews of the show. I'm writing this review without having seen the other two that HBO sent to the media. I didn't want to be ahead of you, the viewer, and I didn't want to have to try to forget what I've seen in subsequent episodes when I sat down to write weekly reviews.
So, over the last few weeks, my procedure was this: After I watched an episode twice, I wrote my review of that episode, then I went on to the next one. So at this point, you and I have both seen four episodes of 'Game of Thrones.' (I wrote my non-spoilery overall review of the show after watching all six episodes that HBO sent, and if the tone of that review strikes you as somewhat different from what you read here, remember that review contains my assessment of the show based on half a dozen episodes, not just four.)
• On this site, we observe the Lurkers Rule: The environment here should be so accepting, so calm and so non-screechy that the most timid lurker should feel it's safe to express his or her opinion. If you have a problem with any comment on this site, hit the "report this comment" button or email me at maureen.ryan@teamaol.com.
• If you express yourself in a hostile, repetitive or unpleasant fashion, or if your starting point is that 'Game of Thrones' is not something that should be subjected to thoughtful, rational discussions of its positive and negative aspects, this is not the site for you. If you can't be civil and respect other commenters, your comments will be deleted.
• Please, please don't mention any spoilers about what happens in subsequent episodes. No talking about what happens in the books beyond the story lines we saw here.
• If you're new to the world of 'Game of Thrones,' do check out the fan sites Westeros, Winter is Coming and Tower of the Hand. They've got active message boards and a ton of interviews and intel, and if you want to get deeper into this world, you can't go wrong with those sites. HBO's got an extensive Viewer's Guide here. And of course, if you want to check out our features and interviews with the 'GoT' brain trust, including Martin and executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, we've got loads of stories here.
'Game of Thrones' airs 9PM ET Sundays on HBO.
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