The third season of Game of Thrones has finally reached its end, and today we finish our appointed task of 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 vs. book recap of the episode "Mhysa":
Arya: What remains of the Stark army is put to the sword, ending the Northern rebellion. And then they do the very worst thing of all: Cut off Robb's head, replace it with Grey Wind's, and march his corpse around in front of Arya. Even the Hound is taken aback at how messed up that is, and rides away quickly holding a Frey banner. Later on, they pass a small camp of five soldiers, and Arya hears them mocking her mother's death—and one man describing in excruciating detail how he mounted Grey Wind's head on her brother. She walks over and offers him a coin to let her stand by the fire, and when he reaches to grab it, stabs him over and over in the neck. The Hound takes down the rest, and tells her to just let him know the next time she wants to do some murdering, okay? Aw, they're murderfriends now! She also took the knife from him, so clearly killing him isn't at the top of her list anymore—if it is at all. There's a bit of a Lone Wolf and Cub vibe going on here, and I like it. She takes back the coin and says, “Valar Morghulis.” In the books: The show actually manages to be a bit more gruesome than the books. Arya never sees GreyRobb, nor does any point-of-view character; we simply hear the story of it told by others. Nor does she encounter or kill any of the men from the Red Wedding, although it is a deeply satisfying invention.
Tyrion: Sansa and Tyrion seem to be having an actual pleasant day in the garden, until Tyrion gets summoned to the Small Council to learn the great news that his wife's mother and brother are dead! Joffrey wants to serve Robb's head to Sansa at his wedding day, but Tyrion says she isn't his to torment anymore. He begs to differ and they trade threats until Tywin steps in. Joffrey then unwisely decides to insult his grandfather, which ends in—no joke—Joffrey getting sent to bed without supper while he yells “I'm not tired!” It is the best. Less amusing: When Tywin gives a long speech about family loyalty that ends with his secret wish that he had killed Tyrion as a baby. In the books: Largely the same, although the relationship between Sansa and Tyrion is much colder, Tywin's younger brother Ser Kevan was also part of the small council, and Tywin doesn't discuss his former dreams of infanticide.
Jon: Ygritte finds Jon after his betrayal, and prepares to shoot him with an arrow. He points out, rightly, that she always knew who he was, and says he loves her, but that has to go home. He adds that she won't hurt him, although she looks like she's going to burst into tears, he's wrong on that count. She shoots him in the shoulder, and twice more in the leg as he rides away. And either she's a terrible shot—which we know isn't true after the deer hunt—or she wasn't really trying to kill him. In the books: She never tracks him down after his escape, though Jon took an arrow in the leg as he fled the first time and believed it might have been hers.
Theon: We finally learn the identity of Theon's tormentor: Ramsay Bolton, who is eating a delicious sausage in front of the recently castrated Theon for maximum creep. Theon begs to die, but Ramsay decides to give him a new name instead: Reek. They have a bit of a Kunta Kinte moment as Theon tries to hold on to the last thread of himself, but it quickly slips away. Hello, Reek. Meanwhile, Theon's father and sister receive “Theon's favorite toy” in a box, prompting Justin Timberlake parody videos everywhere, and demands that the Ironborn leave the North unless they want more pieces of Theon. His dad is willing to leave him to the tender mercies of Ramsay, but Yara isn't—and sets out with a ship of 50 warriors to save him. In the books: It's uncertain whether he's castrated in the books, and while some of his skin is sent to the Starks at the Red Wedding, nothing is sent to the Greyjoys—nor does his sister come back to save him.
Bran: After settling in at the Nightfort, Bran tells Jojen and Meera the legend of the Rat Cook, which explains how anyone who harms a guest under their roof will be cursed. They run into Sam and Gilly, who are headed south, and after recognizing Bran give him the dragonglass weapons and show them the way through the Wall. When Sam and Gilly return to the Night's Watch, Maester Aemon tells him to ready all the crows to fly with the news about the White Walkers. In the books: The legend of the Rat Cook comes up later, during Ramsay's wedding, when Wyman Manderly brings three pies to Ramsay's wedding right after three Freys go missing, and then ask the Bard to sing the Rat King song while the Freys and Boltons eat the pies. There are some... theories about what might be inside.
Davos: Gendry is sitting in the dungeon after a good ol' penis leeching, so Davos goes to have a visit and talk about how their working class backgrounds and how craaaazy highborns are. Davos asks why he trusted Melisandre before, and Gendry replies with a succinct description of the Red Lady: “big words, no clothes.” Can that be the new motto of the entire show? When Stannis learns that Robb Stark died after the leech-magic, he decides that maybe killing Gendry is a good idea after all! But Davos decides to set his new bro free instead, and an exasperated Stannis finally sentences Davos to death—until they read the scroll from the Night's Watch about the coming of the White Walkers. Suddenly Melisandre tells Stannis they're going to need Davos, and that the real war lies North, at the Wall. In the books: Gendry wasn't the intended sacrifice, but rather another highborn bastard, Edric Storm. The letter from the Night's Watch speaks of a Wildling invasion, not the White Walkers.
Jaime: The Kingslayer finally returns to King's Landing, and finds himself nothing but an unremarkable cripple on its streets. When he goes to Cersei—and c'mon, you couldn't have showered and changed first?—she's so shocked that all she can do is gasp. In the books: Jaime didn't make it back until after Joffrey's wedding, and ended up having sex with Cersei next to Joffrey's body. Yup.
Daenerys: The siege of Yunkai is over, and when the people pour out of the city, Dany tells them that she can't give them their freedom–they each need to take it for themselves, or something. They call her “mhysa,” or mother, and she goes among the people to have an awesome crowdsurfing experience at what must have been the very best slave-liberation concert ever. In the books: Very similar, though Daenerys rode her horse among the people rather being carried by them.
—Laura
Today, in our final recap, I'd like to talk numbers. There sure has been a lot of math this season, specifically deathmath. "Explain to me why it is more noble to kill ten thousand men in battle than a dozen at dinner," said Tywin to Tyrion after his son raised an eyebrow at the Red Wedding. There's a bit of A-bomb morality in the calculus behind the Red Wedding: that the number of people potentially saved by ending a war quickly justifies the means, however horrific or immoral.
Stannis makes a similar point about sacrificing his nephew Gendry: "What is the life of one bastard boy against a kingdom?" Davos says everything, and Stannis says nothing, so I guess it depends on how you count. When Lord Karstark kills the two Lannister boys and Robb insists that Karstark should be executed, Talisa wisely points out that boys will keep dying for as long as the war continues, and he can't win without the Karstark soldiers. Later, when the soldiers abandon him, he admits that she was right. (No, Robb. Math was right.)
When Dany's advisors tell her not to sack Yunkai, she says she has 200,000 reasons to do it anyway: the number of slaves in the city. And when Jaime confronts Qyburn about his experiments on living men, the former master compares the number of dead men to the lives of saved by his new knowledge. Of course, Jaime has a deathmath problem of his own that he's been puzzling out for a while now: the way he saved a half million people in King's Landing by killing one (1) Mad King Aerys, and still somehow ended up the villain. And if we're viewing it dispassionately—just by the numbers—then Ned Stark definitely should have allowed Robert to kill Cersei and her children, and Robb should have pardoned Lord Karstark.
Unfortunately, sometimes the problems and even the numbers in deathmath aren't clear-cut, particularly since some people count more than others. That's why Yara is willing to risks 50 men to save her idiot brother, why Arya is willing to attack five grown men twice her size with a dagger to avenge her brother, and why Lord Tywin didn't drown one (1) dwarf in the sea when he was born, even though he really, really wanted to.
"The House that puts family first will always defeat the house that puts the whims and wishes of its sons and daughters first," Tywin tells Tyrion. "A good man does everything in his power to better his family's position, regardless of his own selfish desires." If the Starks are to be considered any sort of lesson, it would seem that perhaps even morality can be its own form of selfishness. Or maybe just a failure to truly do the math.
—Laura
Those moral/practical decisions set up a lot of how this season played out, and you can already see the finale starting to put the pieces in place for Season 4. There's adorable little murderer Arya, for example, getting her first taste of revenge and ominously whispering "Valar Morghulis"; Davos setting Gendry free, then talking himself back into Stannis' good graces; Shae chucking aside Varys' bag o' diamonds; Jon going south, despite, you know, Ygritte, and Bran going north, despite every bit of common sense he doesn't have.
But the character the show wants me to be most excited about is Daenerys, which... nope. That's not to say Dany hasn't been cool this season—hell, up until the Red Wedding stole her thunder, her dragons roasting Astapor was this season's best moment. But Dany's liberation of Yunkai couldn't top her Astapor BBQ, and they're going to have to invent a lot of stuff that isn't in the books to keep her busy for the next few seasons. Not to mention that Dany's scene at the conclusion of the episode felt... problematic.
Dany's more or less a direct rebuke to the overwhelming sexism of the major societies in Westeros and Essos; when we first met her, she was under the thumb of her creepy brother, Viserys, and, like most women in Westeros, perceived as being valuable only in that she could be married off. But thanks to her drive, cunning, and flying velociraptors, she quickly rose to a position where she can powerfully, awesomely give the finger to anyone who underestimates her, from Viserys, to her duplicitous suitor Xara Xhoan Daxos, to the gleefully misogynistic slave trader Mero. In Essos, Dany's an anomaly in terms of her gender and her ambition—but also her color. Which is where the problematic part comes in.
During Game of Thrones' first season, the show faced criticism that it was racially... not super sensitive when it came to portraying the Dothraki, who were largely treated as Klingons noble savages. (We'll set aside that over in Westeros, the game of thrones is a bunch of white people who're scared of other white people, and all of them are really scared of the White Walkers.) Now, Dany has become a straight-up conqueror—an outsider who swoops in with her dragons and eunuchs to show other societies how they're doing things wrong. Which is where things start to feel a little dodgy: The final shots of this season were supposed to be rousing, but they felt weird. There was Dany, seriously the Whitest Woman Ever, crowd-surfing on a bunch of heretofore unseen and uncharacterized brown people, all of whom had been enslaved and helpless before she showed up? And they're lovingly calling her "Mother"?
—Erik
Yes, this is problematic. The optics on this scene are really bad, which I can see you have noticed, because you have eyes. Problem one is that there aren't very many people of color people on this show to begin with, and problem two is that when there are, they tend to be acting out "tribal" stereotypes and/or cast in the role of slaves. And this final scene featured largest crowd of brown faces we've ever seen, lifting the world's blondest woman up as their messiah and praising her for saving them from bondage. It's like George W. Bush's secret fantasy of how he thought the invasion of Iraq would go for him (including the blond wig).
If you've never heard of the White Savior phenomenon in media, wherein a fictional white outsider appears to heroically save fictional people of color from problems they can't solve on their own, there's more information here. Or you can just take a screenshot at any point in the last minute of the show, since it's pretty much textbook. And that's another problem, while we're counting problems: I feel like I've seen this trope so many times before that it feels emotionally flat and boring, especially in comparison to her astonishingly badass siege of Astapor.
But hey, enough about that: Let's talk Season 4, and our predictions for what lies ahead in... oh god, spring 2014?
—Laura
Joffrey.... In the past three seasons, Game of Thrones has saved their really big events: Ned's death, the Battle of the Blackwater, and the Red Wedding—for the ninth episode of the season. So... my guess is that Joffrey will play a key role in season four's ninth episode. I'll also guess that, just as there were videos documenting unsuspecting viewers' reactions to the Red Wedding, there'll be some excellent footage of people watching that episode. There will also be cheering. And high-fiving. And hugging. Joyous celebrations shall dominate the globe; nine months after this episode's airdate, doctors will notice a huge spike in the birth rate.
The Hand of the King. As we've seen with Jon Arryn, Ned Stark, and Tyrion Lannister, that snazzy Hand of the King badge everybody wants so damn much basically has an expiration date engraved into its back. I'm looking forward to seeing the current Hand take a seat.
The Wildlings vs. Castle Black. I've said before that if Game of Thrones was just called Everything That Happens at Castle Black and the Wall and Everywhere In and Around the North, I'd be a happy viewer. But near the end of A Storm of Swords, the Wildlings finally get around to attacking Castle Black... and things don't go well for my beloved Jon or my even-more-beloved Ygritte. Some people (babies) couldn't bear to watch the Red Wedding, but this is going to be the scene I'll be watching alone. (No, Laura, not because I'm going to cry. My allergies are just going to be really bad that day.)
Brandor. Think about it: If you were a little boy with body-snatching powers who was sick of getting wheelbarrowed around in a Bran-mobile all day, wouldn't you take every chance you got to possess the body of a lumbering giant? I'm hoping whenever we see Bran next season, he'll be in Hodor's body. And having a blast! Pretending to be all grown up and stuff! It should be just like Big. Except maybe with more piano! They have light-up floor pianos in Westeros, right? If they don't, some maester should get on that, pronto. Maybe that one who's still being a douche to Tyrion? That guy is up to nothing right now. Dude! Make Brandor a light-up floor piano! Do something useful with your life!
—Erik
Arya and her Super Murderfriends. Yes, we all loved Jaqen, but now it seems like Arya has a NEW murder friend: the Hound. He's saved her life several times now–not to mention her sister's life–and helped her kill those random Frey asshats, so it seems like Arya may be coming around to the idea that the Hound was right, and really isn't the worst guy after all. So will he remain on her hit list? If not, and they part ways more amicably before she leaves for Braavos, it could lend credence to the fan theory that he's secretly alive in the Saltpans as a reformed man. I never thought I'd say it, but at this point I'd be rather sad to see him go. Of course, if Jaqen ended up being her assassin mentor among the Faceless Men, all would be forgiven.
Lady Stoneheart. I'll be the first to admit it: I was wrong. I thought this season was going to end with Thoros and Beric stumbling upon Catelyn's body in the river by the Twins, resurrecting her, and show us the hideous visage of Lady Stoneheart before fading to black. I maintain that this would have been a better ending than Dany's Racially Questionable Crowdsurfing Adventure, but either way, we're going to have to wait another season for the righteous vengeance of Zombie Catelyn.
A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. They told us A Storm of Swords was going to be split between seasons three and four, but as I'm sure you know, I've been following along rather closely with the novel and it looks like we're actually about two-thirds of the way through. So either we're going to get a very rich season of apocryphal scenes between non-POV characters like Joffrey, Margaery, Varys, and Littlefinger, an extended Asha vs. Ramsay war, or the show is going to start threading in plotlines from the two later (and largely concurrent) books. Dealing with those two literary leviathans is going to be a job and a half, so I'd be surprised if we didn't see more creative reorganization that blurs the lines between the books.
Sansa. They've done a great job of revealing the true Tootsie Roll center of dickishness inside Littlefinger on the show, including leaving Sansa behind when he took off for the Eyrie. But unless we're going to see a radical and unlikely departure from the book, he'll be back for the Purple Wedding—and ready to give her another chance to run away with him. Personally, I think Sophie Turner is going to look fantastic as a brunette.
Or we could just believe George R.R. Martin when he tells us what's coming up.
—Laura
Wired's Game of Thrones season three recaps, by Laura Hudson and Erik Henriksen:
Episode 1 - Game of Thrones: Recapping the Return to WesterosEpisode 2 - Ladies Rule in This Week's Game of Thrones (Especially Diana Rigg)Episode 3 - This Week's Game of Thrones Deserves a HandEpisode 4 - The Ultimate Burn on This Week's Game of ThronesEpisode 5 - Everybody Screws Up on This Week's Game of ThronesEpisode 6 - There Are No Happy EndingsEpisode 7 - In Game of Thrones, the One True God Is DeathEpisode 8 - The Sacrificial Lamb Does Not See the Knife on Game of ThronesEpisode 9 - It's a Nice Day for a Red WeddingFollow Laura Hudson (@laura_hudson) and Erik Henriksen (@erik_henriksen) on Twitter.
