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The third season of Game of Thrones is here, and we’re chronicling the TV adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s world of Westeros—and how it differs from the books—in a series of letters between Wired writers (and Game of Thrones fanatics) Laura Hudson and Erik Henriksen.
__WARNING: The following includes spoilers for A Song of Ice and Fire Books 3-5 which have been redacted for your convenience with black bars. You can toggle spoilers on at your own risk by clicking the button to the left or highlighting. IF YOU CAN SEE THIS SENTENCE, YOU WILL BE ABLE TO SEE THE SPOILERS.__First, a TV versus book recap of the episode “Second Sons”:
Arya: Seeing the Hound asleep, Arya holds a large rock over his skull and considers bashing it in. He wakes just in time to give her a choice: she can take her shot, but he'll break both her hands if she can’t finish the job. She wisely demurs, and learns that he’s not taking her back to King’s Landing, but rather to the Twins, where he plans to ransom her to her mother and brother at her uncle Edmund's wedding. Wow, it definitely seems like it’s all going to work out!
In the books: Almost exactly the same.
Melisandre: Stannis finally meets his bastard nephew Gendry, whom Melisandre sends off to get bathed and dressed. And human sacrificed to the Red God! She leaves out that last part in front of Gendry, but Stannis is still so uncomfortable with the idea that he goes down to the dungeons and releases Davos, who wisely realizes that Stannis wants to be talked out of it. Stannis has seen the power of the Red God and knows it's real, but unlike Beric and Thoros, he's still not sure how much of himself he wants to give to the fire. He still has another god, after all: his self-righteous and totally intractable sense of honor. He's always been a creepier, meaner Ned Stark that way. So instead of murdering Gendry, Melisandre ends up having sex with him as a ploy to tie him up, and then drains blood out of his private parts with leeches while Stannis and Davos watch, because that’s not weird for anyone. I imagine some guards could have just held him down instead, but then we wouldn’t have gotten to see her boobs, so she did it this way because boobs. Stannis names the leeches after the three "usurpers"–Joffrey, Robb and Balon Greyjoy–and throws them on a brazier.
In the books: Gendry doesn't come to Dragonstone; rather, Stannis took another bastard, Edric Storm, from Storm's End before the Battle of the Blackwater. Although Stannis does release Davos from the dungeon, Melisandre's actually the one who saves Davos after another advisor tries to have him executed. Stannis doesn't own up his or Melisandre's part in Renly's death, still weakly claiming that they only "saw" it in the flames. And rather than Melisandre inexplicably having sex with Robert's bastard, a maester leeched him in a way that required no intercourse because that makes a thousand times more sense. Note that immediately after Stannis kills the "Joffrey" leech, the show cuts to Joffrey drinking wine at a wedding in a foreshadowing of his death.
Daenerys: After the Yunkai master refused to surrender their city, Dany tries to buy out their mercenaries, the Second Sons. She meets with three of their leaders: Captains Mero and Prendahl na Ghezn, and a lieutenant, the handsome Daario Naharis. Prendahl is truly a dick – imagine Titus Pullo from Rome, but way meaner – and manages to turn the negotiations into a long series of rape threats. Back at camp, the captains decide that one of them should slip into Dany's camp and assassinate her, and despite saying he'd rather fight for beauty than gold, Daario draws the Braavosi coin (i.e. the short straw) and gets assigned the task. “Valar morghulis,” he says, and soon he has snuck into Dany's tent with his blade drawn (while she just happens to be naked in a bath, of course). But he's not there to kill her: rather, he tosses the heads of his captains on her floor and tells her she has the swords of the Second Sons – and his heart.
In the books: There are two mercenary companies, the Second Sons and the Stormcrows, which get conflated for the show. Mero leads the Second Sons, and doesn't die till later in an attempt on Dany's life. (The wine she gives him is also part of a ploy to get his men drunk and then ambush them in the night, which succeeds.) Daario leads a different company called the Stormcrows with Prendahl na Ghezn and another man named Sallor, and indeed brings Dany their heads–and their mercenaries. (Side note: Their heads get roasted and eaten by her dragons.)
King’s Landing: It's Sansa and Tyrion's wedding day, and before the ceremony he tells her he'll try to make her has happy as he can, which he realizes he is still not very happy at all. At least she's not the only one who's miserable at the wedding: Margaery tries to pull the "let’s be sisters!" bit with Cersei and it doesn’t go as well as it did with Sansa, in the sense that it ends with Cersei threatening to kill her. Joffrey steals the step-stool from the altar so that everyone will laugh when Tyrion can't reach Sansa, while Shae stands off to the side looking sad and Loras gets a brief taste of the misery to come by trying to talk with Cersei. Oh, and Joffrey threatens to rape Sansa after she's married because it apparently doesn't matter which Lannister knocks her up. In the end, Tyrion gets crazy drunk and calls off the humiliating "bedding ceremony" by threatening to castrate Joffrey. In another act of rebellious decency, he decides that he can't consummate his marriage to the saddest 14-year-old ever (despite the direct orders of his father), choosing instead to recite a line from the oath of the celibate Night's Watch and pass out on a couch.
In the books: Sansa isn't told about the wedding until the morning it happens, when Cersei and Joffrey inform her. She's slightly less pliant about it, refusing to compliment Tyrion or kneel down for him at the altar. There was no step-stool, so Dontos–the drunken knight Sansa saved from Joffrey last season–has to kneel down so Tyrion can stand on his back. Also, Tyrion isn't nearly so drunk as he seems; he humiliates himself to spare Sansa by giving Joffrey another target, not unlike the way Sansa spared Dontos from execution by convincing Joffrey to make him a jester. Also, since the wedding takes place from Sansa's point of view, we don't see any conversations between Cersei, Loras, Olenna, or Margaery.
Samwell: After seeking shelter in a hut, Sam teaches Gilly how first and last names work as she brainstorms what to call the baby. They're interrupted by a reenactment of Hitchcock's The Birds, as countless CGI ravens line the branches of a tree outside the shelter squawking with the dulcet tones of a thousand vuvuzelas. Suddenly the birds go silent, and Sam sees it: a White Walker moving towards them through the snowy woods, there to reclaim the child Craster owed them. Despite his oft-established cowardice, Sam holds up sword against the Walker–who shatters the blade with a touch and tosses him aside like a doll. Finally, Sam pulls out the obsidian spear he found at the Fist and stabs the Walker in the back... causing his foe to shatter into a thousand shards of ice.
In the books: Sam does have an encounter with a White Walker who dissolves away at the touch of his dragonglass blade, but it happens after the battle at the Fist and before they get to Craster's Keep. He also encounters a wight (a reanimated human corpse, different from a White Walker) while protecting Gilly and her baby, but the dragonglass breaks on the wight's armor and he has to kill it with fire.
—Laura
Here's a sentence that's fun to write (and, it turns out, to shout): LET'S TALK ABOUT THAT PENIS LEECH!
Nice work, Game of Thrones, for somehow finding yet another way to gross everybody out! Especially since I suspect there wasn't any particular need to affix that particular leech in that particular spot on Gendry–unless penis blood has more magical properties than regular blood? (Look, I'm not a wizard. I don't know the rules.) Plus, this scene contained what might be my favorite Davos scene ever. Not because of anything he said, but because of the look on his face when he saw the kinky stuff his beloved Stannis has been getting into. "Seriously?" Davos' face says as he stands there, watching a good ol' penis leeching. "Seriously, guys? I'm down in the dungeons for like three episodes–bettering myself, learning to read, for the gods' sake–and then you bring me up here to show me how you turned Dragonstone's guest suite into Westeros' creepiest sex club? GAAAHHH. Let me back in the dungeons!"
Regarding the episode's intentional comedy: Laura, you mentioned that Tyrion is legitimately drunk on the show but only pretending to be drunk in the books, which hits on something that's always bugged me a bit: TV Tyrion is far more loveable than Book Tyrion. Don't get me wrong, Book Tyrion is still really likeable, and there's a reason he's a lot of people's favorite. But he's also a lot creepier, a whole lot physically uglier, and a great deal more conniving. The difference between the two Tyrions is embodied pretty well in this moment, since there's a big difference between pretending to be drunk and actually being drunk.
The show opts for the latter, which makes Tyrion into more of a victim of circumstances, not unlike Sansa. Plus, it's funnier! (Peter Dinklage was fantastic in this episode, trumped only by Lena Headey, I think.) But as fun as Drunk Tyrion is, it does make me a little sad to see Tyrion getting played instead of playing everyone else. For the most part, Game of Thrones' showrunners have made exceedingly smart changes to the books, but the subtle shading of Tyrion being both likable and kind of weird and gross is something I wish they hadn't lost.
Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss recently did a great interview with Elvis Mitchell—the complete recording is available here—and it's must-listening for Game of Thrones fans. Benioff and Weiss discuss their decisions to put certain actors together based on wanting to see them play off each other, which is why they focused so much on Arya and Tywin kickin' it last season. This particular episode of the show felt like a whole hour of that, and while it didn't feature certain characters–including Jon, Bran, Jaime, Brienne, Theon, Catelyn and Robb–it spent serious time with the other characters and really let them talk to each other.
We got a great dialogue between Stannis and Davos, and a fantastic scene with a hesitant Gendry being pretty sure he's being tricked by Melisandre (but wanting to get laid anyway). Most importantly, we spent time at Tyrion and Sansa's wedding, which featured a slew of incredibly entertaining interactions like Joffrey and Tyrion. Tyrion and Sansa. Tyrion and Tywin. Tyrion and wine! Cersei and... well, I'm gonna leave Cersei to you, Laura. I really want to hear what you have to say about Cersei in this episode.
—Erik
____Yes, the wedding is truly a kaleidoscope of human misery. (But isn't the entire show, really?) Part of the strength–and at times, weakness–of the series is the diversity of perspectives it offers, something I find particularly interesting when it comes to its female characters. Cersei, as always, is one of the most complex examples, and her straight up death threat to Margaery is a crystallization of all the insecurity, jealousy and self-loathing she feels about being a woman.
The roles that women are permitted to play in Westerosi society are painfully narrow, but the show's female characters respond to those limitations in very different ways: Some, like Sansa, accept what is expected of them because they see no other choice or can't imagine one; some, like Ygritte, Arya, Shae and Brienne, look at the expectations and say bullshit—a proposition that can prove very dangerous; others, like Cersei, do something a little more complicated where they internalize the ideas they're taught about what women should be, but still feel resentful and repressed by them. This attitude can lead to women actually perpetuating the power structures that made them miserable in the first place, competing viciously with other women for whatever limited power is available, or lashing out at women simply because they're the most vulnerable targets. Cersei–who says over and over in the books that she should have been born a man–does all of the above.
Although being female (and notably, growing up without a mother) means that Cersei's life has largely been controlled by men, she still has a great deal of power compared to average people, and doesn't hesitate to abuse it. Just to take stock: as a child she ordered a guard to beat a maid who stole jewelry so badly the girl lost an eye; in the books it's implied that she murdered her childhood friend Melara to prevent her from talking about an unpleasant prophecy. She pointedly ignores Joffrey's abuse and humiliation of Sansa, and in the books she has Alayaya (one of the prostitutes that inspired Ros) arrested and whipped to upset Tyrion, and even demanded that Robert chop off Arya's hand for hitting Joffrey. Later, she gives both Senelle and Falyse Stokesworth to Qyburn for his torture/murder experiments, and becomes so consumed by her desire to destroy Margaery that she ultimate tries to frame her for treason. See a pattern? Yeah, it's that Cersei tends to hurt other women. (Even the pet direwolf she had killed out of spite was named Lady!)
There's a quote in Feast for Crows, from Cersei's point-of-view:
And there's some internalized sexism if I've ever seen it. All the people she names who demeaned her, mocked her, and controlled her were men, so the person she wants to punish for it is... a woman. And she never harms other women more than by the way she raises Joffrey, explicitly teaching him that when he sits on the throne he can do what he likes to whomever he likes and that "the truth will be what you make it." The influence of mothers over sons is something that Margaery recognizes very well, and something she intends to do quite differently, as she told Sansa last week: “My son will be King. Sons learn from their mothers. I plan to teach mine a great deal."
And when Cersei inevitably loses control of Joffrey—to the point that he plunges the realm into civil war on a whim and incites riots among the common people with his cruelty—who does she blame for it? The one woman who has helped her son regain the love of the people, and perhaps the only one capable of tempering his sociopathy: Margaery.
If anything, Cersei seems like a cautionary tale for Sansa: this is who you could become if you allow your bitterness to consume you. And after the Red Wedding, she may have another: her own mother, Lady Stoneheart.
–Laura
Speaking of Cersei's wacky gender attitudes, did you check out what she was wearing at the wedding? As a guy who pretty much only wears jeans and t-shirts with Millenium Falcons on them, I was pretty proud of myself for picking up on this: Cersei's dress looked like a Ross Dress for Less knockoff of Margaery's dresses. That like tube-like collar thing that Margaery has on some of her dresses? Cersei's rocking it this time! For the first time I can remember, Cersei's dressing like Margaery, a woman whom the Queen Regent once cattily referred to as dressing like "a harlot."
Likewise, it's worth pointing out that Littlefinger recently remarked on how Sansa's started wearing her hair like Margaery's. But while that's kind of cute, in a little-girl-emulating-her-big-sister kind of way, Cersei biting Margaery's style is the opposite of cute—desperate—and it says a couple of things: 1) Margaery is gaining more power in the court, and thus affecting the style of those in King's Landing, and 2) Cersei is either consciously or subconsciously trying to copy Margaery, at least in some regards. (Knowing Cersei's strangle-happy feelings toward Margaery, I'm guessing it's subconscious.)
Cersei knows power is slipping away from her, and she knows this is at least partly due to her aging; with her brother/lover Jaime still far away from King's Landing, and her proposed fiance an avowed "sword-swallower," Cersei's got to be feeling alone and increasingly powerless. In the past, she's been able to use sex as a tool to get what she wants. Now she's been eclipsed by someone who knows how to use that tool better, and no one is more keenly aware it than she is.
—Erik
____Yes, Margaery has become the Jackie O/Kate Middleton of King's Landing, and while her influence on the fashion of the court seems like a petty detail, it's not. When Littlefinger noticed that Sansa had started wearing her hair like Margaery, it meant something to him because it signified influence. Imitation is a way of saying I want what you have, a grasping at the hem of someone's robe. People might be looking at her with admiration or jealousy, but either way everyone is looking at her to show them what's next because she's what's next.
Earlier this season, Cersei wore a dress that was almost armored–covered in metalwork– at a dinner where she made some not-so-subtle jabs about Margaery's revealing, airy clothes. We see that contrast again at the wedding, where Margaery's plunging neckline bares her chest, while Cersei wears a necklace akin to a breastplate. It's an apt metaphor: Margaery prefers to win over her rivals by winning their hearts, while Cersei would rather pull them out of their chests.
And while we're talking aesthetics, we need to mention the most dramatic visual departure from the book that I've seen yet, Daario Naharis. In the novels, Daario is described as a flamboyant Tyroshi who dresses completely in yellow and has his hair dyed blue–except for a bright yellow mustache–including his bright blue beard, which is sculpted into some sort of three-pronged face topiary. Basically, he's an anime character. In the show, on the other hand, I'm pleased to say he looks like this. We've spoken before about how eroticism isn't George R. R. Martin's strong suit, and I think designing a potential Romeo who shares several visual characteristics with Sonic the Hedgehog may be further proof of this notion.
—Laura
UGH, DAARIO. Don't even get me started on how boring that dude is. Here's how lame Daario is: Even though he looks like Legolas, he still isn't the smoothest guy in this episode. That honor goes, shockingly, to young Samwell Tarly, who not only manages to finally get more than a few confused mumbles out of Gilly, but charmingly, earnestly sweet-talks her such that I'm pretty sure he'd have gotten lucky if he hadn't been cock-blocked by that White Walker. Thanks for nothing, White Walker!
(And for what it's worth? Sam's obsidian spearhead that can kill ice monsters? Way cooler than Daario's dumb knife with a naked chick for the hilt. Not sure if this is common knowledge, but knives like that are basically the mudflap girls of Westeros. Tacky, Daario. Just tacky.)
—Erik
Follow Laura (@laura_hudson) and Erik (@erik_henriksen) on Twitter.
