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.
And for the first time ever, our Game of Thrones recap comes with a soundtrack, courtesy of emcee Adam WarRock who gave us an exclusive look at “The Rains of Castamere” (above), his latest track inspired by last night’s episode of the HBO medieval drama. WarRock, who previously released an entire mixtape of Game of Thrones-inspired hip hop songs, has made the song downloadable for free here. And now on to the TV versus book recap of “The Rains of Castamere,” easily the most shocking episode yet.
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.
Daenerys: To the great irritation of Ser Jorah, Daario Naharis continues to pique Dany’s interest with his good looks, smoldering glances, and ever-so-noble convictions about not sleeping with sex slaves. Daario says he knows about a back way into Yunkai, and suggests he, Jorah, and Grey Worm sneak in and open the gates for Dany’s army. Grey Worm, for some reason I cannot discern, decides that he is trustworthy, so the plan is go. They end up facing more resistance than expected after entering the city, which means a fight scene where we get to see the three warriors–and their distinct fighting styles–in action. Soon enough, a bloodied Jorah and Grey Worm return to the tent with the news that they have taken Yunkai. Jorah is ecstatic, although his joy fades heartbreakingly to jealousy when the first question out of Dany’s mouth is about Daario, who strolls up moments later unharmed. In the books: Slight tactical differences: there were two mercenary armies, and Daario’s Stormcrows joined the Unsullied to surround both the Yunkish slave army and the Second Sons mercenary group, who were drunk on the wine Daenerys gave them and unable to fight.
Samwell: As they continue their journey to the Wall, Sam tells Gilly the story of a secret passage to south he knows about thanks to his fancy book-learnin’. Gilly is astonished at Sam’s ability to glean such amazing knowledge from marks on paper, an incredible power that leads her to call him a “wizard.” This should probably make him feel pity for her tragically narrow life of incest and ignorance in the wilds of frozen north, but instead it just makes him feel good about himself, which I think is probably also worth pitying. In the books: After being attacked by wights, they were saved and lead back to the Wall by a mysterious cloaked figure known as Coldhands, not Sam’s knowledge of obscure books.
Bran & Jon: As Samwell heads south to the Wall, Bran heads north to it. After thunderstorms roll in, they end up crashing at a castle abandoned because of Wildling attacks–just as Jon and his new Wildling buddies head by, en route to (you guessed it) attack people. The sound of thunder freaks out Hodor, who starts screaming so loudly that he attracts the attention of Orell–until Bran wargs into Hodor’s mind and shuts him down. The Wildlings rob an old man who breeds horses for the Watch, and Orell decides that Jon needs to be the one to kill him, which, predictably, he cannot do. It’s easy to see Orell as a dick, but here’s the thing: He’s been 100% right since day one about Jon, who was in fact playing them and getting ready to betray them. Jon uses the ensuing fight to make a break for it with an assist from direwolves controlled by Bran, because apparently warging into things is like eating Pringles for him today. It’s the first time this episode when two Starks who haven’t seen each other since season one come tantalizingly close to a reunion, but of course it’s not the last. Ultimately Bran heads north with Jojen and Meera to explore his cool new abilities, while Osha takes Rickon south. In the books: Lots of things happening now that happened earlier: Osha took Rickon south after the sack of Winterfell, and Jon killed Orell before joining the Wildlings; the Orell-as-eagle attack on Jon took place later, but before they crossed the Wall. Also, the direwolves preemptively attacked the Wildlings before they actually tried to kill Jon, and Ygritte didn’t defend him in the battle–she may even have shot an arrow into his leg as he escaped.
Arya: In order to bring Arya to the wedding incognito, the Hound steals a wagon full of salt pork from a merchant headed in that direction–and intends to kill him, until Arya talks him out of it. The Hound subsequently decides to sit around eating pig’s feet for a while and mocking Arya’s anxiety rather than reuniting her with the family she’s been trying to find for years, so she decides to screw with him right back by calling out his kryptonite: his fear of fire and the traumatic childhood incident that caused it. When the Hound makes a nasty comment about her father’s death, Arya makes him a promise in return. “Someday,” she says quietly, “I’m going to put a sword through your eye and out the back of your skull.” The best part is that I believe her, and so does the Hound. In the books: Arya never confronts the Hound to save the merchant, nor does she see the death of Robb’s direwolf, Grey Wind. But the Hound’s comment that “there’s no point hiding behind that face” is another pointed (but appreciated) nod to her future role as an acolyte of the Faceless Men.
Robb: The King in the North continues to plan for an assault on Casterly Rock, the ancestral home of the Lannisters. He just needs one thing to make it happen: the forces of Lord Walder Frey, so they’re off to Edmure’s conciliatory wedding to one of the Frey daughters. Robb offers his apologies to the odious Lord Frey, who immediately tries to humiliate Talisa (and Robb) with crude sexual commments. The bride ends up being far prettier than expected, which pleases Edmure, but after a jovial bedding ceremony, things take a turn when someone shuts the doors to the hall and the musicians begin playing “The Rains of Castamere,” a song about the Lannisters and their boundless enthusiasm for destroying their enemies.
That’s when Lord Frey tells Robb that he has a wedding gift for his new queen, and a man behind Talisa pulls out a knife and stabs her over and over in the stomach. Suddenly more soldiers appear from above with crossbows, raining arrows on both Robb and Catelyn, while others massacre the remaining Stark men in the room. Arya watches them kill a captive Grey Wind outside the castle and tries to run inside to her family, but the Hound wisely knocks her out and carries her away before the Stark body count can get any higher. Talisa is already very dead, along with Robb’s unborn son, but an injured Robb seems to be doing marginally better as he cradles her body. Catelyn takes Lord Frey’s wife hostage, swearing she’ll kill her unless he lets Robb go, but Frey just laughs that he’ll find another wife. Lord Bolton says the Lannisters send their regards, and stabs his young king in the chest, ending it. Catelyn screams, cuts the Frey woman’s throat, and stands there for a long moment with dead eyes until someone steps up behind her and cuts open her throat in return. Cue the credits, a long, long silence, and me walking to the kitchen for a strong drink.
In the books: Talisa doesn’t die because she doesn’t exist; Robb married Jeyne Westerling, the daughter of a Lannister bannerman, but she does not attend the wedding. (Sadly, this also kills my previous theory that Talisa’s pregnancy might indicate a more important future role for Jeyne.) Catelyn initially notes that the musicians at the wedding are awful, which we later learn is because many of them were actually soldiers. Also, Robb’s ultimate murderer–who is implied but not stated to be Lord Bolton–says that Jaime Lannister specifically sends his regards, echoing Jaime’s off-hand comment to Bolton when leaving Harrenhal. The Blackfish wasn’t at the wedding (but conveniently escapes the massacre on the show thanks to a call of nature), and Catelyn threatens (and kills) Frey’s mentally handicapped son Jinglebell rather than his wife. She also shreds her own face with her nails in grief before her death; without those wounds, Lady Stoneheart may look a little bit different later when she comes looking for vengeance.
—Laura
Last season, we saw Winterfell burn. The season before that, we saw Ned die. In case you hadn’t noticed, Game of Thrones is a story about how your life won’t live up to your expectations, about how bad guys don’t pull their punches, and about how those who dare to dream are the ones with the biggest targets on their foreheads. It’s in Game of Thrones‘ key moments–like Ned’s death, like the Red Wedding–that the series’ vicious and unsentimental pragmatism shines through with brutal, bloody clarity: This isn’t a story that’s going to end like its characters want it to. And it isn’t a story that’s going to end like the books’ readers or the show’s viewers want it to, either.
I actually know a few people who, angry and disheartened, stopped reading the books after the Red Wedding happened in A Storm of Swords. (I also know somebody who wisely noted that the Red Wedding chapter probably coincided with George R.R. Martin throwing up his hands and being all, “Whoops! Silly me! I’ve got waaaaay too many characters!”)
And if the internet is any indication, some people will have the same reaction to this episode. My favorite pasttime last night was reading @RedWeddingTears, which retweeted viewers’ anguished tweets (“I’ve never cried so hard. I hate Game of Thrones right now. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover from this”), and Gamer of Thrones, which highlighted some of the most furious comments left on Game of Thrones‘ Facebook wall (“THAT EPISODE JUST KILLED THE SERIES!!!!!!!IM DONE!”) It’s worth noting, though, that viewers had similar reactions to Ned’s death, when some fans vowed “to never watch the program again.” —Erik
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I mean, I get it. I know the Red Wedding backwards and forwards–as well as its real-life historical inspiration, the Black Dinner–and I still felt gutted as I watched the silent credits roll. (And frankly, if they decide to actually show us Grey Wind’s head sewn on to Robb’s body next episode, I might need to tap out for a while myself.) Regardless, it’s a testament to the power of the episode (and the limits of spoilers) that it affected me as profoundly as it did even though I knew exactly what to expect. This is a moment that book readers have been waiting for since the show began, and for better or worse it lived up to expectations–all the dread, all the agony. That dawning look of horror on Catelyn’s face when they close the doors to the banquet hall and the musicians start to play “The Rains of Castamere” is so chilling, especially because it’s exactly how you’re feeling too if you know the story.
The only true surprise for book readers was the death of Talisa, a creation of the show who somehow manages to make the Red Wedding even more painful than it was in the novel. Her brutal, sudden stabbing is shocking not only because it occurs moments after a tender exchange with Robb about naming their future child Eddard, but because the soldiers stab her–not accidentally, I think–in the stomach.
Robb and Talisa are the great love story of the show–its Cinderella/Sleeping Beauty romance–and their deaths are the ultimate undermining of the medieval fairy tale. It’s a beautiful and not entirely unfamiliar story, where a king meets a girl covered in mud on a battlefield and falls so in love with her that he’s willing to risk everything to make her his queen. Which makes a great fairy tale tagline, but instead of happily ever after, Game of Thrones gives us with the ugly, unromantic reality: that risking everything for emotional, politically foolish reasons (read: love) in the middle of a brutal war is unlikely to end with animated birds hanging ribbons around the nursery of your future baby. You’re probably just going to die, and so are all the people who loved and trusted you.
The true emotional core of the show–the one that gets well and truly gutted in this episode–has always been the idyllic family portrait of the Starks we glimpsed briefly back the first episode, before everything fractured and scattered and went to hell. Since Ned left for Kings Landing, every one of the Starks have been trying to find their way back to the way things used to be: Ned was going to take the throne back from the Lannisters and right their wrongs, but he got beheaded; Sansa was going to marry Loras and finally get her dashing knight, but she got pawned off onto Tyrion; Arya was finally going to reunite with her family after years of searching, and arrived just in time for their massacre; Robb was ready to take Casterly Rock and get vengeance, but instead he got the Red Wedding. Winterfell is burned, and there is no going home.
Image: HBO/Helen Sloan
Remember when one of Robb’s bannermen told him the war was lost the moment he married Talisa? It was. Talisa imagines a little scenario during the wedding: the alternate universe where she’d gone back to Volantis, and Robb was the one eating blackberries from a pretty Frey girl’s fingers. That would have been the smart move, the responsible move, the right one for a king to make for his family and his subjects. And if he’d made that choice, Robb would likely be marching west to Casterly Rock to take the Lannister stronghold, instead of lying dead on the floor along with his wife, mother, and the hopes of the northern rebellion.
At least When Ned died, you could imagine, narratively, that it happened for a reason: so that Robb could avenge him. When Robb dies, however, that’s the real knife twist, because you realize that he won’t, that he’s not the hero either, and that none of it “meant” anything. You see the same grim, hollow realization on Cat’s face the moment she gives up. The question isn’t, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” The question is, “Why wouldn’t they?”
In a recent EW interview, George R. R. Martin said, “People read books for different reasons. Some read for comfort. And some of my former readers have said their life is hard, their mother is sick, their dog died, and they read fiction to escape. They don’t want to get hit in the mouth with something horrible. And you read that certain kind of fiction where the guy will always get the girl and the good guys win and it reaffirms to you that life is fair. We all want that at times. There’s a certain vicarious release to that. So I’m not dismissive of people who want that. But that’s not the kind of fiction I write, in most cases.”
Hey, if you want fantasy, go read Anne McCaffrey. I hear her books have dragons too.
—Laura
Yeah. All the characters–well, all the Starks–are basically Charlie Browns who are really excited to kick that football that Lucy’s got all set up for them. Which means all of of us readers and viewers are Charlie Browns, too. George R.R. Martin is a really good Lucy.
The biggest moment of this episode for me was that moment you just mentioned, Laura, where you see Cat die before she really dies. It doesn’t happen when her throat is cut, but rather the instant right before. The instant she realizes Robb is dead, so is the Catelyn we know; the thing that’s left standing there, slack-faced, is an empty, defeated shell. It’s a powerful moment, even though Cat hasn’t had much to do this season; her character, more than any other, has suffered in comparison to the books, where we learn a great deal more through her internal monologues.
But this is the episode where Cat tried to restore that sense of normalcy, that sense of what life was like for the Starks before King Robert showed up at Winterfell and ruined everything for everyone. Yeah, her dumbass son didn’t do what she told him to, but there she is anyway: giving it a shot, trying to like Talisa, trying to believe this super-dour wedding will make everything right again for her family. And right up until she realizes that Bolton’s wearing chainmail under his clothes, she does believe it. “Look at us Starks!” Cat’s thinking. “We’re gonna kick the hell out of that football!”
The question, as suggested by the many distraught fans on social media last night, becomes how much anguish you can put your characters–and your viewers–through before they give up. (Like, really give up, not just leave melodramatic statements on Facebook walls.) But I think just as fans ended up sticking with Game of Thrones after Ned’s death, they’ll stick around now: In an era of Kardashians, any story that can unleash this much power and surprise is a story that’s rare and remarkable. Even though we know Game of Thrones will eventually break our hearts, we keep coming back for more.
If this were any other week, Laura, you and I would be ranting and raving and squabbling and high-fiving about all the other big things that happened in this episode, from Bran going all Geordi LaForge, to Jon bailing on Ygritte (YOU FOOL), to Daenerys getting all swoony over Legolas, to Arya scaring the hell out of the Hound. Those threads were utterly, completely overwhelmed by the Red Wedding this week, but next week (and next season) they won’t be, and each of those plots has enough narrative drive to make viewers hope that things might work out differently for those people than they did for Robb, Cat, and Talisa. So they’ll be back, and we’ll be back, even though we should know better—and even though the Starks should sure as hell know better.
Like I said: George R.R. Martin is a really good Lucy. See you guys next week.
—Erik
Follow Laura (@laura_hudson) and Erik (@erik_henriksen) on Twitter.
